Female Prostitution in Costa Rica: Historical Perspectives, 1880–1930

Abstract

Anne Hayes’s work offers us an interesting look at prostitution in the periphery of Costa Rica. She focuses on the port Puntarenas during the years 1880 to 1930 as a way to explore questions of liberalism, development, reformism, labor, gender, and Costa Rican “exceptionalism.” Hayes argues persuasively that the liberal state did not target prostitutes for moral reform in the periphery as they did in the central plateau and the capital of San José. Hayes is able to question the centrality of “la buena sociedad cafetelera” (the good coffee society — the upper class who derived their income from coffee), in the development of Costa Rican liberalism. Hayes’s focus on the periphery allows us to see the contradictions, especially regarding labor, in the liberal model.Hayes’s study argues that because of Puntarenas’s location and economic importance to the government, prostitution became labeled as work rather than deviance. The government relied on the port for income and was reluctant to interfere in the daily activities of residents. Because the government derived so much income from the sale of alcohol in the port due to the state liquor monopoly, it was leery of policing consumption and “vices,” such as prostitution, that arose from the sale and consumption of alcohol. The passage of the Vagrancy Law of 1887 allowed the government to arrest “notorious loiterers or frequenters of bars and gambling establishments” (p. 157). The 1894 Ley de Profalaxis Venérea legalized prostitution and exempted prostitutes from the Vagrancy Law. Thus, according to Hayes, many women who were out of work told authorities that they were prostitutes in order to avoid incarceration. Prostitution therefore became defined as work, rather than vice or deviance, in the periphery. Puntarenas’s distance from the capital and its centrality to the Costa Rican economy allowed for competing discourses on vice, deviance, and women’s work, challenging the standard historical narrative of Costa Rican development.Hayes writes well and her book is well organized. She uses a broad array of predominantly government sources including censuses, government reports (memorias), and the Judicial Section of the Costa Rican National Archive, paying particular attention to the injurias, that is, complaints regarding insults intending to harm the reputation of another. She also looks at records from church archives as well as national and local newspapers.Hayes’s work makes an important contribution to our understandings of gender, prostitution, and labor. Her study could be strengthened, however, by greater engagement with the extant literature on gender, prostitution, labor, and liberalism in Latin America. It would be interesting to see how Costa Rica fits into the larger trends happening elsewhere in Latin America during the same time period. Greater use, perhaps, of the injuria records may have allowed her to mine for the voices of the prostitutes themselves and may have made for livelier reading. As it is, she only uses those records briefly in chapter five of the text. Nevertheless, this is a solid study that should be of interest to many scholars of Costa Rica and of gender in Latin America.