With El dinero no es todo: Compra y venta de sexo en la Argentina del siglo XX, Patricio Simonetto intervenes in the robust historiography of prostitution in Argentina and Latin America, a field pioneered by Donna Guy's book and enriched, in recent years, by the work of Tiffany Sippial, Katherine Bliss, Paulo Drinot, and Mir Yarfitz, among others. Simonetto writes a social history focused on Buenos Aires province; his attention to various cities, small towns, and rural areas is an unusual outlook in a field that has concentrated on sex work in specific urban areas. Although the title promises an analysis that encompasses the twentieth century, the book is primarily focused on the first half of the century; three out of the six chapters include the 1960s and brief references to the 1970s as part of the broader periods of analysis.From 1875, under reglamentarismo, the Argentine state licensed brothels and registered prostitutes, which provided a source of revenue and political power for the local governments in charge of medical and sanitary surveillance as well as permits and licenses in exchange for fees. In 1936, the national law of antivenereal prophylaxis abolished legalized prostitution, prohibited brothels, and criminalized pimping. The law did not bar individual prostitutes, but a paradigm of regulation was replaced by one of punishment, and power shifted substantially to the local police who enforced local codes of misdemeanor (códigos de faltas).While most Argentine historiography has focused on the years of legalized prostitution, Simonetto is interested in the period that began with the 1936 law, when homes, workplaces, and public spaces replaced brothels and prostitution became highly mobile. Women, the author argues, followed the paths of seasonal rural workers and truck drivers and moved frequently to avoid the local police after a first detention.The book is organized thematically, with overlapping time periods: chapter 1 delineates the social profile of pimps in the 1920s and 1930s, and chapter 2 focuses on the military groups that lobbied in the 1940s for the opening of “licensed brothels” near barracks—a lobbying that came to fruition with these brothels' legalization in 1947, under President Juan Domingo Perón. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the experiences of prostitutes primarily from the 1930s to the 1960s, while chapter 5 is devoted to working-class sex buyers between 1936 and 1960. Finally, chapter 6 explores the tensions among prostitutes, the police, and clients, mostly in rural areas, in the 1960s and 1970s.Simonetto reconstructs this history with a variety of migratory, medical, and legal documents; media reports; censuses; and letters. Yet, it is his work with court cases and police and prison records that produces the most vivid and original reconstruction of practices and experiences. Without downplaying the oppressive and coercive mechanisms of patriarchy and capitalism, Simonetto refrains from narratives of passive victimization and shows women as active and multifaceted agents. In contrast to common turn-of-the-century narratives, most women who worked as prostitutes in Argentina had done so in Europe before migrating. In fact, many enlisted the help of a comisionista who made arrangements with pimps in Argentina and assisted the women with travel preparations, especially after restrictions against single women were put in place. Simonetto additionally demonstrates how women used prostitution not only as a means of economic survival (for money, food, shelter, and gifts) or to complement income from other occupations but also to negotiate or escape oppressive living arrangements, violent partners, and exploitative families. This further deepened patterns of mobility. He debunks common historical myths with archival records from the Olmos prison that show that most prostitutes were Argentine rather than foreign-born, were literate and single, and were healthy rather than transmitters of sexual diseases because they knew how to avoid being infected—knowledge that the police interpreted as evidence of “nontraditional” femininity (p. 152).Sex buyers were called by the police as witnesses against prostitutes (and, to a lesser extent, against pimps). Simonetto uses their testimonies in police records to make a compelling historical argument about working-class clients: buying sex was a group experience that required planning, the allocation of resources, time, and sometimes travel, and it was a central aspect of working-class sociability and leisure, comparable to horse races, drinking, and card games. As such, it was an essential component in the construction of working-class masculinity. While the military generals and colonels who lobbied for the opening of brothels in the 1940s framed legal prostitution as a “necessary ‘evil’” connected to the preservation of a healthy male body and as an antidote to homosexuality and masturbation, the workers employed narratives of intense, irresistible “physiological needs” (pp. 66, 73, 78, 180). In their statements, these men profoundly objectified women, “naturalized” the buying of sex, and reaffirmed social and medical ideas of an uncontrollable working-class male libido (p. 163).With the exception of a few brief references for the 1960s and 1970s, Simonetto does not explore male or transgender sex workers or give a historical or methodological explanation for this silence. Something similar happens with the pimps, who mostly disappear from the analysis after the first chapter. These omissions do not, however, diminish the significant insights of El dinero no es todo and its many contributions to the history of sexuality in Latin America.