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 –3–

woman, prostitution, and modernity in

fin-de-siècle mexico
◆◆◆

At the center, both the false and the true one, of houses of assignation
and zones of tolerance are the prostitutes, as much indispensable as they
are belittled, human beings at the disposal of pleasure and scandal in
the abstract, which is also persecution as a real fact.

—Carlos Monsiváis, Introduction to Ava Vargas,

La casa de citas (my translation)

T
he phenomenon of the whore and female prostitutes during the
early years of the twentieth century in Mexico intersects with two
features central to the project of modernity: the systematic orga-
nization of business and the generalized exploitation of women. Prosti-
tution and the generalized exploitation of women stretch back to times
immemorial, but there can be little doubt that the social outburst of mo-
dernity could hardly exclude, as in everything, these two universal phe-
nomena. If prostitution depended on the overdetermined eroticization
of the female body, the culture of modernity—modernism, in a word—
provided the cultural practices to stimulate this excess valorization. If it
is undeniable that modernity included a mythification of woman, in the
interests of producing a specific patriarchal social model, that involved en-
shrining icons of sacred matrimony and sacrosanct maternity, the simple
truth is that what is more fascinating are the women who, in Dijkstra’s apt
phrase, were “idols of perversity.”1
As a consequence, no matter how much one might, today, construct
a defense of prostitution as body-based employment like any other and

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 – ava vargas: woman, prostitution, and modernity –

assert that female—and male—prostitutes are engaged in “sex work,” it

would be difficult to find in the imaginary of the early twentieth century
any other interpretation of prostitution than as the perversion of the divine
role of woman and a dire assault on the integrity of the family. It matters
little that the masterminds of the hegemonic imaginary, which included
high functionaries of the state, leaders of the Church, and magnates of
industry and commerce, were the principal clients of the whorehouses,
which, after all, were organized to satisfy the needs of these very men.
Although there existed alongside the organized system of prostitution
forms of prostitution that serviced the needs of lowlife clients, whether
in the zones of tolerance or in outlying streets, prostitution that served
the interests of the ruling class had all of the characteristics of the most
refined elegance of the mansions of sin, which were not very different
from the petits palaces of the great families. Although, as the saying of the
famous paradigmatic grand New York madam Polly Adler went, “A house
is not a home.”
The images collected by Ava Vargas in 1991 in the dossier La casa de
citas en el barrio galante (House of assignation in the red-light district)
date, in her estimation, from sometime between 1900 and 1920 (Vargas
xv).2 These are photos that were taken in stereoscopic format and thus
to be viewed in the corresponding apparatus that was customarily to be
found in the homes of the well-to-do as part of the material trove of cul-
ture, along with the piano, the violin, and the phonograph. That is to say,
we are to understand that the photos whose discovery Vargas describes
(she came upon them thanks to the filmmaker and antiquarian Raúl
Kamffer, who found them in 1975 in one of his “prowls” among markets
and fairs in search of forgotten material) were part of some artistic project
in which women were posed and photographed, so to speak, for posterity.
It is reasonable that such types of images would have circulated in a clan-
destine market that allowed “refined” gentlemen (including undoubtedly
other women with a taste for feminine nudes) to treasure in their hearts
recollections of their transit through the world of brothels or, absent such
experiences, the dream of having done so.
These images are parallel to the so-called French postcards that ful-
filled the same function of erotic entertainment, and such stereoscopic
photos constituted a cultural production industry that came out of the
new technologies of the period that included, in this case, photography.
If it is true that photography, from the earliest time of its origins, served
to immortalize the mighty and to record majestically in time sober bour-
geois families, while at the same time being the basis for the postcard

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 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography –

that was exchanged as part of the ritual of formal visits and contained the
image of the person visiting, it is important to remember that photogra-
phy also lent itself from the time of its invention to giving a new image-
based dimension to anecdotal accounts of sexual practices: pornography
now had another extremely potent vehicle for its divulgation. In the realm
of feminine prostitution as much as in that of homoerotic pursuits, two
exemplars of high modernity, photography served to provide a priceless
aide-mémoire (see Waugh; Mavor; Köhler).
When one opens Vargas’s dossier, it is hardly possible to be surprised
at the array of naked or seminaked women. We can, today, hardly expect
to discover corporal novelties, largely because the widespread publication
of images of women’s bodies from time immemorial has achieved such
ubiquity that one hardly pays attention anymore, since there is so little
new to see. Aside from contortionist erotic poses of the body or unheard
of manipulative practices, women’s bodies, although always a source of
delight, no longer surprise. Only the grotesque stance of a Joel-Peter Wit-
kin could be capable of providing surprising images of the female body.
It goes without saying that the plastic optics of photography allows us
a constantly renewed gaze at all material phenomena, and, hence, the
possibilities for framing are innumerable. By the same token, although
no one any longer is astonished at the photographic exploitation of the
feminine body in the contemporary world, there is a certain frisson that
derives from the realization that our most respectable great-grandfathers
had the same interests and that, more than likely, one of the women por-
trayed here might just possibly be one’s own great-grandmother . . .
But such mitigating circumstances aside, the greatest enchantment
and astonishment that arise from the photographs in the Vargas dos-
sier do not have to do with the bodies of the women as such, but with
their setting in the interior and exterior spaces of the turn-of-the-century
Mexico of a hundred years ago.3 There is a really remarkable disconnect
in these images we have the privilege of seeing all together (by contrast
with the original spectators, who certainly must have seen them in small
installments owing to the nature of their commercial or semicommercial
distribution). Such a disconnect has to do with one of the most formi-
dable characteristics of Latin American modernism: the attempt to meld
cultural motifs of a profoundly classical origin (with certain derivations to
be found in Western Europe) with the harsh landscape realities of Latin
America that had little to do with the origins of such motifs. If it is true
that literature could transcend such contradictions by placing its texts out-
side of Latin America or simply ignoring its geophysical parameters, the

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 Figure 3.1. A prostitute as
part of formal room décor.

Figure 3.2. A prostitute as a

table centerpiece.

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 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography –

photographs often could not go beyond their immediate physical world.

Of course, there is a modernist current that achieved something like
a precarious and even satisfactory amalgamation if the landscape was
not too hostile. This is what we find in the most ultra-urban versions,
where the built environment can effectively mask the New World re-
alities of the background. One thinks of the achievements of the Belle
Époque in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro or the private chambers of the
Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, as described in remarkable detail
by fellow-Colombian Fernando Vallejo in his biographic novel Chapolas
negras (Black butterflies; 1995).
But this is not the case with the photographs presented by Vargas. On
the one hand, we have faithful re-creations of the luxury of the Mexican
oligarchy/upper bourgeoisie. These are the palaces—or petits palaces—
that are imitations of models seen in Paris and London, where the im-
perious display of luxury items creates something like a fantasy cabinet
in which the body is inserted in poses that oblige it to adjust to the static
dimensions of the setting. For example, in figure 3.1, the binarism of the
objects and the boundaries of décor are reduplicated in the feminine body,
whose two arms, two hands, two legs, two breasts, and two eyes are rein-
forced, in turn, by the stereoscopic contemplation the client receives from
the photograph. The sexual odalisque is perfectly framed by the tapestry
that extends outward toward the viewer as though inviting him (I used the
masculine form, since the masculinist gaze is supposedly to be privileged
here) to enter into the realm of the photograph and to enjoy through/
with his own body what the tableau has to offer. This image is timid in
its provocation, but it matches many others in which the women spread
themselves open before the spectator, and always with their bodies and
corresponding anatomical details being framed by the setting of luxury.
In another image, the naked body of the woman lies spread out on a
serving table. One supposes that this is a bedroom because of the pres-
ence of the chamber pot below and to the back of the table. Whatever the
room’s function is, it is replete with objects of décor that could fill an ex-
tensive, detailed list. Suffice it to point out the modern detail of the lamp
to the right, between the two picture windows, which, although neoclassic
in design, comes with an electric cord and tulips holding lightbulbs. What
is, however, particularly notable about this photographic montage is how
the woman, who is objectified, serves as one more detail of the décor. Her
languid pose turns her into a table centerpiece, although the way in which
she extends from one end of the table to the other makes one think that
she is perhaps more of a table runner, especially in the way her hands

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 – ava vargas: woman, prostitution, and modernity –

and feet hang beyond the edge of the table as the ends of a runner might
do. One cannot help but take in the phallic features that are part of the
excess of the worked detail of the table that puts the naked woman on
decorative exhibition.
While almost half of the images in La casa de citas place woman in
this sort of fantasy box that is the interior décor of the architecture of
modernity, the other half concern a surprising dislocation of décor,
whereby the female nude is thrust into the hostile landscape of the cen-
tral Mexican mesa. Bernardo de Balbuena could take pride, in his La
grandeza mexicana (Mexican greatness; 1604), that this Valle de Anáhuac
was another Tempe:

Al fin, aqueste humano paraíso

tan celebrado en la elocuencia griega, [. . .]
es el valle de Tempe, en cuya vega
se cree que sin morir nació el verano
y que otro ni le iguala ni le llega. (cap. VI, est. 16)4

Balbuena could be certain that none of his readers in the Spanish court
possessed reliable photographs that might contradict him. Nevertheless,
the shock is nothing short of jarring when the anonymous photographer
or photographers come up with the brilliant idea of taking the women
from the sporting dens outside to place them in the Mexican countryside
(the place where many of the women in the photographs, one can well
surmise, had come from, as in the case of Santa, the namesake country
maiden forced by rape to become an urban prostitute in Federico Gam-
boa’s 1903 novel). Although in many cases the women are simply ar-
ranged in poses with the landscape in the background, in other cases one
takes note of the attempt to create an artistic composition that echoes the
ones already described in terms of the metaphor of the fantasy box. For
example, there is a series of four photographs in which the two women
(always the same ones) are posed amidst the rushing waters of a rapids.
They are aquatic nymphs, Mexican Nereids whose beauty interacts with
the elements of nature. Although the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris
are often represented as inhabitants of the deep and turbulent oceanic
waters (as in the case of the acclaimed masterpiece of sculpture by the Ar-
gentine Lola Mora), there are also many images of them as delicate fairies
who splash around in serene pools of waters and streamlets.
In the case of the Mexican nymphs, we see them sitting on top of enor-
mous rocks, some larger than they are, and in one case they are semisub-

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 Figure 3.3. Prostitutes
posing as water nymphs.

Figure 3.4. Prostitutes

posing as water nymphs.

Foster_5636.indb 44 7/7/14 12:31 PM

 Figure 3.5. Prostitutes
posing as forest sprites.

Figure 3.6. A moment

of homosociality among
prostitutes.

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 – argentine, mexican, and guatemalan photography –

merged in the powerful currents of the rapids. In one of the four images,
the attempt to achieve a classic tableau is apparent.
Despite all the efforts to direct the gaze of the viewer of this photogra-
phy toward the paradigmatic models the women represent in contexts of
the elegance to which high modernity aspired or against a Mexican land-
scape that is to be a remaking of Balbuena’s new Tempe (yet the images
of the women posed against the backdrop of majestic agave plants are
in particular almost truculent), there is a fundamental characteristic that
prevails above all else. It is the way in which the body placed on view is,
once and for all, the body of a Mexican woman. Even if in the most high-
ly priced brothels of Latin America the little French girls were the most
highly prized object of attention for their delicacy, refinement, and erotic
savoir, not all of the clients could aspire to such heights, and local flesh
is what prevails, even in the most refined of sporting dens, with all the
dimensions imposed by the ethnic origin, diet, lifestyle, circumstances of
personal and collective health, and the personal story of each woman in
terms of the trajectory that ended for her in barrio galante.5 Each viewer
will measure and appreciate in his own way the bodies of the women who
gaze back at us across a century in Vargas’s dossier, but in one photograph
after another, these are bodies of women who are Mexican, regardless of
the international privilege that the interior and exterior settings pretend to
model. In this sense, one of the most eloquent photographs has to do with
two women snuggling together on a bed, comfortable in their relationship
of friendship and intimacy, with or without the lesbian dimension to be
found in the back rooms of the women’s world of the whorehouses. The
Mexicanness of the two, and especially of the one on the left, is what most
gives the touch of authenticity to these long-lost images.

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