Female Prostitution in Costa Rica: Historical Perspectives, 1880-1930 (Latin American Studies)

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Description

This book analyzes the development of female prostitution Within the Pacific port of Puntarenas, Costa Rica all the way through the advanced stage of the coffee exporting economy (1880-1930), at the height of the consolidation of the liberal state. Hayes argues that prostitution Within the port differed from that of the coffee producing highlands as a result of differential economic, social, and political development. Within the periphery of Puntarenas, the development of prostitution reflected a less stigmatized view of sexual commerce than that of the highlands, where prostitution, despite the fact that legal, threatened the tenets of liberal nationalism according to racial homogeneity and circle of relatives values. Women of the highlands were encouraged to reproduce the nation’s “more European” stock of workers and to verify the legal transference of property through legal church marriages – both a part of a design to stabilize the coffee exporting project. By contrast, prostitutes and other working women of Puntarenas, many immigrants from the “less European” populations of neighboring regions and most in concubinage, were freer to do what the law prescribed – register as prostitutes in legitimate trade. Such regional disparities reveal weaknesses in traditional explanations of Costa Rican exceptionalism, which have rested at the premise of cultural homogeneity and have reflected the realities of only one region of the country. The book advances an alternative explanation for the development of the nation’s more democratic institutions, situating Costa Rican exceptionalism Within the nation’s free labor system, of which the labor prostitute in Puntarenas provides an example.

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