and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar

118 Marie Piquemal, the “Colonial Madam”:

Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar

Caroline Séquin

This article reconstructs the life of Marie Piquemal, a French woman turned colonial madam, to explore the world of white prostitution in colonial Dakar, Senegal, in the first half of the twentieth century. White brothel prostitution required the migration of white French women from the metropole to supply these institutions. By providing white

French men with sexual access to white sex workers, brothel keepers like Piquemal helped to curb the development of interracial intimacy at a time when sexual-conjugal unions across the color line were becoming increasingly controversial. This article thus argues that brothel keepers played a key role in reifying racial boundaries upon which colonial rule rested, especially within an empire that claimed to be race blind. Although

French authorities were aware of the migration of French women for sexual labor between metropole and colony, they condoned this process in an effort to maintain the racial status quo.

On May 4, 1938, Marie Piquemal, a forty-six-year-old French woman, disembarked in Dakar after sailing on the Banfora from Marseille. Traveling by her side were four French women aged twenty-five to thirty who were venturing to Dakar for the first time.1 In contrast to the younger women, Piquemal had been living on and off in what had been the capital of French West Africa since 1902, where she owned and ran multiple houses of prostitution. The purpose of her recent trip to France had been to supply La Poularde, an upscale house of prostitution, with white women to cater to the growing population of white French men serving in the colonial capital as colonial administrators, merchants, small-time traders, and various other professions. Although no colonial policy set restrictions on who could patronize brothels, Piquemal ensured the exclusion of African men from her business, regardless of their status as French citizens or colonial subjects.2 In doing so, she erected an informal “color bar,” providing white Frenchmen stationed overseas with exclusive access to white women at a time of increased stigma toward interracial sexual and conjugal unions.

This article traces the story of Marie Piquemal, a French prostitute turned “colonial madam” who capitalized on the commercialization of white women’s bodies in colonial Dakar. It reveals the key role that brothel

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 118–141.

keepers played in the hardening of racial boundaries in the French Empire. White brothel prostitution served to alleviate French anxieties about the outcome of interracial intimacy—that is, the emergence of a mixed-race population, the métis, who could make claims to French citizenship—by providing a supervised locus where French men could satisfy their purported sexual needs without risking taking on the responsibility of fatherhood.3 Despite the growing stigma around interracial intimacy, France’s adherence to republican universalism precluded colonial authorities from banning interracial marriage or concubinage.4 Piquemal, by contrast, informally enforced a ban of nonwhite clients in her business—and did so brazenly, to the knowledge of local authorities. This tacit racial policy at once allowed Piquemal to maximize her profits by selling the illusion of French exclusivity in an increasingly racially segregated colonial port city, while simultaneously participating in the very production of whiteness in colonial Dakar. The making of racial boundaries in the French colonial context thus occurred through the labor of individuals like Piquemal and the white women she hired to sell sex.

Following in the footsteps of Ann Laura Stoler’s magisterial study, which demonstrates how “sexuality was instrumental to the governing strategies of racialized colonial states,” historians have investigated how the control of prostitution has served to manage colonial and racial relations.5 Their analyses have focused mainly on the role of colonial authorities, the police, and medical experts in devising and enforcing prostitution policies that sought to contain venereal disease and control women’s sexuality. Peripheral to these studies, however, is the role brothel keepers played in providing access to commercial sex and, moreover, how their role led to their indirect participation in the construction of racial boundaries.6 By emphasizing how brothel keepers like Piquemal cooperated with various local authorities to promote a racial agenda that went beyond the stipulations of colonial policy, this article demonstrates how racial boundaries were enacted “from below” and in everyday sexual practices.

Previous studies have emphasized how white sex workers in colonial settings threatened to undermine the notions of white superiority upon which the colonial order rested.7 Historians have paid little attention, however, to the key distinction between white clandestine sex workers, whose visible presence stained notions of colonial prestige, and white brothel sex workers, whose containment away from the colonized gaze made their labor not only tolerable but necessary to the French colonial project. Instead of emphasizing how poor whites who did not squarely embody privilege or power threatened to undermine notions of white superiority, this article illuminates the role of “white subalterns,” especially white sex workers, in solidifying whiteness within an empire that claimed to be color-blind.8

White-only brothels in colonial Dakar were no panacea for the assertion of white colonial dominance, given the persistently low number of European women who could address the demand for commercial sex with white sex workers. Consequently, Piquemal and her counterparts relied on the migration of women from the metropole to the colony to staff their businesses. Unlike in the British Empire, where many of the white sex workers were from other European countries, in colonial Dakar the majority of the white women who sold sex were French.9 This difference, I suggest, stems from the fact that the brothel keepers and procurers who facilitated the migration of women for sexual labor could more easily evade the various international conventions established in the first half of the twentieth century that repressed the so-called traffic in women when it involved French women.10 The colonial clauses adopted by France, which prevented the application of these early twentieth-century conventions to the French colonies, meant that intermediaries like Piquemal could leverage their connections with brothel keepers in the metropole to orchestrate the migration of French women to Dakar’s brothels. The relative ease of travel between metropole and colony for French sex workers betrays how the French imperial nation-state, amid mounting national and international pressure to repress sex trafficking, sought to present itself as an active participant in the fight against “white slavery” even while it maintained a system of regulated prostitution in its colonies that hinged upon the emigration, whether free or coerced, of French women for sexual labor.

Although Piquemal left few traces in her own voice, her life trajectory can nonetheless be reconstructed piecemeal from various archival records scattered across France and Senegal, owing to the “culture of suspicion” that permeated the policies and practices of the colonial state in interwar Dakar.11 The Service de la Sûreté Générale [Central Security and General Information Service] in Dakar produced daily intelligence briefs describing Piquemal’s activity and movement in and out of the colony, while police commissioners in Bordeaux similarly documented her travels back and forth between metropole and colony. Her name appears again in records held at the French National Archives, as she came into contact with suspected sex traffickers under investigation by the Contrôle Général du Service des Recherches Judiciaires (Department of General Security, Service of Judiciary Searches) a service in charge of criminal law offenses, including sex trafficking. From 1921 to 1939, colonial governors collected additional information regarding prostitution and sex trafficking in the colony under their administration, which was then compiled into annual reports sent to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children (CTW). I use these documents to uncover both Marie Piquemal’s involvement in colonial Dakar’s sex industry and the experiences of the French women

who engaged in “migratory prostitution” between metropole and colony in the interwar period.12

Becoming a Colonial Madam

Marie Piquemal, a French woman born on August 26, 1892, on the outskirts of Bordeaux, opened and ran the first of five white-only brothels that existed in Dakar in the interwar period.13 Her path to becoming a colonial madam, however, remains blurred. We know next to nothing about Marie Piquemal’s youth, as archival records documenting the lives of those involved in the sex trade typically remain silent about aspects that do not directly pertain to their bout in commercial sex. All we know is that sometime in her early twenties she moved to Casablanca, shortly after Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912. There, she worked in a brothel, well before the city became home to an expansive red-light district in Bousbir that would become a prime tourist destination for European men from the 1930s onward.14

The circumstances of Piquemal’s journey to Casablanca remain similarly obscure. It is unclear whether she—like the many women she would later hire—was already involved in the sex trade prior to leaving the metropole and planned to pursue her activity on the other side of the Mediterranean or turned to prostitution only once she was living in Morocco. Piquemal’s colonial migration unfolded against the backdrop of international anxieties about the so-called white slave trade. From the late nineteenth century onward, large-scale changes resulting from industrialization, urbanization, and rapid technological advances had made traveling across long distances easier, faster, and more affordable. However, the international mobility of white women, especially those who traveled alone or in suspicious company, raised concerns about their potential traffic across borders for sexual purposes. The proliferation of tales about white women being forcibly sold into prostitution abroad or in the colonies encapsulated broader fears about national regeneration at a time of European imperial expansion. As the “mothers of the race,” white women carried the cultural and biological burdens of reproducing the nation; at the same time, their potential sexual missteps represented—as eugenicists of the time put it—a threat to the reproduction of a “healthy racial stock.”15

Piquemal’s journey, however, should not be read as a story of forced migration for sexual labor. Emigration at the time was a tempting option for countless Europeans in search of better lives. From 1815 to 1939, an estimated fifty-five million people left Europe, some never to return.16 Although few historians have portrayed France as a land of emigration during this time period, hundreds of thousands of French women and men

opted to try their luck overseas.17 The Paris region and the southwest of France, where Piquemal spent her youth, witnessed the highest number of departures, with 120,932 French people leaving from the port of Bordeaux alone from 1865 to 1920.18 Prime destinations included Argentina and the United States.19 By contrast, fewer French citizens settled in the French Empire. Even fewer French women did so, despite a discursive shift in colonial rhetoric that transformed the commonly held vision of the empire as a “no-woman’s land” into a “woman’s haven” at the turn of the twentieth century.20 Although Piquemal’s emigration was not unusual, her destination was, especially given her gender.

In 1915, Piquemal resettled in Dakar. First established as a French colonial possession in 1857, Dakar became one of the Four Communes in 1887. It is possible that she selected this destination after witnessing other French citizens move there. Beginning in the nineteenth century, poor rural dwellers from the southwest of France had opted to go to Senegal after their initial exodus to a major proximate urban center such as Bordeaux failed to yield the expected economic outcomes.21 Commercial ties had linked the two regions since the early nineteenth century, with Bordeaux entrepreneurs leading the peanut and gum production in Senegambia.22 With Dakar’s new designation as the capital of French West Africa in 1902, the city underwent major urban growth, soon becoming a political, commercial, and military hub that attracted colonial administrators, entrepreneurs, and other colonists in droves.23 From approximately 8,700 inhabitants in 1902, its population tripled over the following five years, continuing to grow exponentially in the following decades to reach 100,000 by 1938.24 Dakar’s nomination in 1920 as one of the top four ports serving as French naval bases outside metropolitan France further boosted population growth.25 Perhaps Piquemal was inspired by her peers’ search for wealth in the colony. As the few available memoirs written by former sex workers illustrate, the women selling sex routinely resorted to both domestic and international mobility to increase their earnings, to improve their work conditions within the sex industry, and, sometimes, to travel the world.26

Shortly after her arrival in Dakar, Piquemal began to manage an unofficial maison de rendez-vous [“meeting place”], the Maxim Bar, which catered to men seeking young women who sold sex.27 At the time of her arrival in Dakar in the second decade of the twentieth century, there were no state-licensed brothels in the city, despite the existence of decrees that had tolerated brothels since Dakar became one of the Four Communes. In this context, a man seeking to pay for sex was left with clandestine sex workers, whether they practiced in their homes, in the streets, or in informal houses of prostitution. The Maxim Bar was one such establishment, but there were others as well. Rumor had it that the female artists who performed at the

Bijou-Concert, a music hall run by a Madame Pilato, routinely engaged in prostitution to compensate for meager wages.28 Piquemal’s move from selling sex to supervising other women providing sexual services was a step up, perhaps aided by her imperial mobility.

Although there were no pimps per se in colonial Dakar, men were often involved in the colonial sex trade as sex procurers.29 Jules Guillem, a French man born in colonial Algeria in 1889, was involved in recruiting “artists” for Pilato. Before moving to Dakar in 1918, Guillem had fought for France in the Great War. In July 1916 he had been declared unfit for military service after an incident that cost him his left hand. Guillem’s transition from war veteran to sex trafficker was not so uncommon. When veterans found themselves in search of a regular income in the aftermath of the war, some became involved in the sex industry, a milieu with which they may have become familiar first as clients during furloughs and then as pimps or sex procurers.30 As was the case with Guillem, the budding sex industry provided the procurer with a means of subsistence in the colony.

Dakar’s brothels were typically owned by French couples; the woman would serve as the madam while also helping her partner recruit new employees. This was true for Piquemal and Guillem, who had first met in Casablanca before their paths crossed again in Dakar, where they quickly became partners both professionally and personally. They combined their savings and their knowledge of Dakar’s nascent sex industry to open the city’s first licensed brothel sometime between 1915 and 1918.31 They were followed in the 1920s by other brothels, all owned by couples from the metropole, some of whom were already involved in the sex industry back in France. For example, Yvonne-Marie Le Dilassert bought and ran the brothel Au Clou, located at 22 rue Raffenel, from 1921 onward. Her lover, Louis Perriot, a former French army pilot who was freed of his military duty in 1922, helped her recruit women from the metropole to work in the colonial brothel. After a violent altercation with a client that culminated with Perriot firing gunshots, he was subsequently accused of attempted murder before charges were eventually dropped.32 Following this incident, Le Dilassert decided to sell her business, which Piquemal and Guillem bought in 1924. The couple, who had temporarily returned to the metropole after selling their first brothel in Dakar several years earlier, used this opportunity to reenter Dakar’s sex industry.33 Brothel owners and keepers in Dakar presented a similar profile: they were all French men or women who engaged in frequent travel between metropole and colony. These subjects in particular would come to benefit from the hardening of racial boundaries in colonial Dakar.

White-Only Brothels and Racial Segregation in Colonial Dakar

The opening of Piquemal and Guillem’s maison de tolérance [licensed brothel] coincided with the informal establishment of racial segregation in colonial Dakar. With the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Dakar in 1914, French authorities forced the displacement of large groups of Africans to the Médina, the African quarter.34 The very tip of the peninsula where Dakar sits became the European quarter, also known as the Plateau. This area accommodated the majority of the European population of Senegal.35 With its French-style boulevards, elegant architecture, sanitation system, and electricity, the Plateau epitomized France’s supposed modernity and superior civilization and therefore helped to consolidate colonial power. Colonial authorities, however, vehemently dismissed claims that residential segregation and sanitary measures effectively resulted in racial segregation. They insisted that in Dakar “it was not a racial segregation between two kinds of people, but segregation between two kinds of residential forms.”36 Nevertheless, the policies resulted in de facto racial segregation.37

By the 1930s, the informal project of racial segregation was cemented in the Plateau. After a stroll through the Plateau, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer noted in 1935 that “the color bar is extraordinarily strong in Dakar. . . . The visitor who only spends a few hours at Dakar might reasonably wonder whether he was in Africa at all.”38 Except for the few “boys” and porters, no Africans were to be seen in the Plateau’s cafés, restaurants, and hotels.39 The Plateau had become the place where the white Europeans lived, even though their number never exceeded 10 percent of the overall population in Dakar.40 The other brothels that appeared in the early 1920s were similarly nested on two adjacent streets on the periphery of the Plateau, rue Blanchot and rue Raffenel. Their location, within walking distance of the Governor General’s Palace, various hotels, the police station, the harbor, and military warehouses, hinted at the targeted clientele.

Just like other spaces of sociability in the Plateau, licensed brothels were white-only institutions. The women who sold sex in the Plateau’s brothels, as well as their clients, were all considered Europeans, a code word for “white.” Continuing his description of Dakar, the anthropologist Gorer claimed, “The brothels are naturally stocked with and controlled by French women, and the casual whores in the dance halls are white.”41 In a 1923 annual report submitted to the CTW, French colonial authorities acknowledged the presence of European prostitutes in Dakar as a matter of fact, listing “39 French, 2 Portuguese, 1 Italian, 1 Romanian, and 4 Spanish,”42 for a total of fortyseven registered sex workers. Barring a few foreigners, the large majority of brothel sex workers were French.

With almost exclusively French personnel, brothels in the Plateau were reserved for European patrons even though local prostitution policies did not include language overtly excluding African patrons. Brothel keepers nevertheless painstakingly and openly enforced racial barriers, even under the watchful eyes of the republican colonial administration. In 1938 a French woman named Suzanne Méroux requested permission to open a brothel in Saint-Louis du Sénégal, a few hundred miles north of Dakar. As the governor general of French West Africa approved her business, he noted in a confidential letter that “this brothel would be, like those in Dakar, forbidden to indigènes [“natives”].”43 White-only brothels sold the illusion of white exclusivity to French clients.44

Ann Laura Stoler has emphasized that the very sight in the colonies of white women with “low morals” compromised the notions of colonial respectability and moral superiority supposedly incarnated by white women.45 Yet, white prostitution, when properly contained within the confines of a brothel discreetly tucked away in the French quarter, could also help to buttress colonial and racial hierarchies. Unlike clandestine prostitution, brothel prostitution concealed the presence of white women of “low morals” from the colonial population. In addition to local decrees banning women deemed prostitutes from booking a hotel room or renting a furnished room, as well as from patronizing bars, brothel keepers monitored their employees, preventing them from exiting their establishment.46 By contrast, Louis Charles Léonce Ponzio, a top colonial official in the Service de la Sûreté Générale, noted that African clandestine prostitution “escapes all control, administrative or medical.”47 Such a discrepancy suggested that race informed local authorities’ approach to regulating prostitution. When prostitution regulation operated successfully, it enabled a level of control over white colonial sexuality.

European sex workers helped to strengthen racial and colonial boundaries by providing an alternative sexual outlet to the increasingly stigmatized interracial sexual-conjugal unions that had been a staple of colonial life until the turn of the twentieth century. Unions between European men and African women, known as mariages à la mode du pays, had a long history in coastal Senegal, dating from the early Portuguese exploration of the region in the fifteenth century.48 Historians have described these unions, which were sanctioned by neither the Catholic Church nor French civil law, as mutually beneficial for the partners involved. While French men enjoyed the “comforts of home” through these unions, the elite merchant women, known as the signares, involved with European men could realize significant economic benefits through their role as commercial intermediaries and cultural brokers.49 Similarly, the mixed-race children born out of these relationships, the métis, gained political and economic power through at

least the mid-nineteenth century, when the end of the slave trade negatively impacted their community.50 As the French consolidated colonial rule in the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, French attitudes towards temporary unions between French men and African or métis women gradually began to shift.51 By the turn of the twentieth century, Dr. Louis Joseph Barot’s view that “for those who lack the moral strength necessary to endure two years of absolute continence, only one line of conduct is possible: a temporary union with a well-chosen native woman” had become the exception rather than the norm.52 As rigid racial boundaries became increasingly important to asserting French colonial rule, mixed unions shifted from appearing inconsequential to being regarded as controversial and, indeed, threatening on both sides of the colonial divide.53

Despite the growing stigma toward interracial unions, French laws could not ban interracial marriage or concubinage, since France’s adherence to postrevolutionary republican universalism translated into the impossibility of using race as a legal category. As the 1921 annual report from the Ministry of the Colonies to the CTW put it, “The French administration’s respect toward local customs does not allow it to intervene in indigenous marriages or mixed unions; forbidding the latter to Europeans is out of the question, given that our laws do not tolerate differentiations based on color or race.”54 The French insistence on race blindness thus precluded laws that overtly curtailed racial mixing, which existed in the United States and parts of the British Empire, where anti-miscegenation policies were part and parcel of the national project of white supremacy and racial purity in each country.55 However, French officials could promote other forms of sexual and conjugal unions that would deter Frenchmen from mingling with African women. Commercial sex with white women was one of them.

White brothel prostitution presented several benefits to colonial administrators cautious about upholding colonial hierarchies within the broader paradigm of universal republicanism. It not only turned white French men away from sexual-conjugal relationships with African or métis women but also helped to quench French men’s putative sexual needs while keeping them away from sexual practices perceived as even more deleterious, such as masturbation and homosexuality.56 Sexual continence for French men ran counter to prevailing discourses about masculinity and virility. Medical experts alleged that any healthy man had “innate” sexual needs that prostitution would help “canalize.” For one doctor, “Without a doubt, it would be better to be chaste, but chastity is like peace, we always talk about it, and we don’t often keep it.”57 Another colonial doctor asked ironically, “Are the colonial troops chaste? It may be a good title for a novel, but this question is too ridiculous to even think about it seriously.”58 To be sure, white endogamy stood as the ideal avenue for French men to satisfy their

sexual and emotional needs. But in the context of colonial Dakar, the number of white French women remained too low throughout the first half of the twentieth century to guarantee each male colonist a white wife. Among the 2,550 Europeans who lived in the “imperial city” in 1907, only four hundred were women.59 Thus, for every one French woman, there were six French men in Dakar. By the early 1940s, there were 17,500 French people living in Dakar, but only 2,000 were women.60 White-only brothels thus provided a place where French men could have sex with white women, despite the uneven gender ratio among the French population in colonial Dakar.

Sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Guillem and Piquemal split up. It seems that Piquemal took over the various establishments they ran together, while Guillem left Dakar for a few years before eventually returning in 1931 to manage a music hall and continue in the traffic in women—two industries that, in France, had been intimately connected since at least the eighteenth century.61 Later, Piquemal temporarily left the colony to resettle near her family in Bordeaux, where she became involved in the wine business. It was while in Bordeaux that Piquemal met and fell in love with Henri Cadilhac, a French man ten years younger from Montpellier, in southern France, who had experience in the service industry and the military. After marrying in 1934, Cadilhac and Piquemal moved to Dakar in 1936.62 By the late 1930s, they owned at least two restaurants, a bar, and a brothel called Lily Cernay, all located in the Plateau. Piquemal and Cadilhac’s ability to move in and out of the sex industry hints at the way individuals involved in the sex trade, whether brothel keepers or sex procurers, often complemented their activity in the sex industry with other trades. In other words, Piquemal and Cadilhac were not marginal actors isolated from their communities, but instead fully immersed in a milieu that recognized their professional identities.

Piquemal’s rise from French sex-worker in Casablanca to colonial madam in Dakar offers a rare example of a woman who achieved economic autonomy through colonial migration, and more specifically, through her involvement in the colonial sex trade. Despite the legal marginality of whiteonly brothels, Piquemal capitalized on increasingly rigid racial boundaries in colonial Dakar to maximize her profit. By ensuring Frenchmen’s access to sexual encounters with white sex workers in the heart of the French quarter, she advanced the colonial project of white dominance, whether intentionally or inadvertently. A close analysis of white-only brothels thus illuminates how the management of prostitution, conducted by both local authorities and brothel keepers themselves, was key to the making of whiteness in a so-called color-blind French imperial context.

Colonial Migration for Sexual Labor

Piquemal’s enterprise hinged upon the sexual labor of other white women. But just as there were not enough white women to serve as wives to the various French colonists in Dakar, staffing white-only brothels with European women remained a challenge. To palliate this need, Piquemal orchestrated the migration of white women from the metropole in the interwar period despite the proliferation of international conventions against the traffic in women across national borders. While such an activity was profitable for Piquemal, the women involved rarely achieved a markedly better socioeconomic standing through their role in colonial sexual labor. Imperial mobility entailed the risk of losing the little savings and belongings one had, in addition to being away from one’s support network of friends and family, for the chance to profit. Although the women who worked in colonial brothels contributed to the colonial project, colonial migration typically held disappointing outcomes for the women whose sexual labor helped to reaffirm racial hierarchies.

Starting in the 1870s, social reformers had denounced the so-called white slave trade, which they linked to the prevalence of regulationist regimes. Their mobilization spearheaded several international conferences, first in Geneva in 1877, then in London in 1899, and finally in Paris in 1902. Delegates from a dozen countries participated, eventually producing the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, which was ratified by all twelve.63 This agreement established special bureaus dedicated to the collection and exchange of information about the traffic in women. It also set up booths in ports and railway stations for advising and warning women and girls about the risks that traveling alone entailed. In 1910, the International Convention for the Repression of the White Slave Traffic, negotiated in Paris, made the traffic in underaged girls (eighteen or younger) and nonconsenting adult women a punishable offense. In the wake of the First World War, the newly created League of Nations took on the work initiated by those against sex traffickers, creating the Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children. The 1921, International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children raised the age of consent to twenty-one, while the 1933 treaty repressed the migration for sexual labor of any woman, whether or not she consented.

Despite French reformers’ active role in the elaboration of these international agreements, France either delayed adopting or only partially adopted these texts, betraying the key role that colonial prostitution played in the making of the imperial nation-state. France ratified the 1904 and 1910 conventions in 1912 but postponed their application to the French Empire until 1922. Most significantly, the later conventions would never be extended to overseas France; when France adopted the 1921 and 1933 treaties, in 1926

and 1947, respectively, it did so under the condition that a colonial clause exempt France’s colonies from the scope of the conventions. As a result, only the forced migration of adult women was repressible in the colonial context, meaning that those who willingly moved to imperial spaces to sell sex did not fall under the purview of the 1904 and 1910 conventions. The limited legal apparatus in place to repress the traffic in women in the colonial context suggests French officials’ tacit recognition that regulationism in the colonies relied on the emigration of French women for sexual labor.

Port commissioners and police officers charged with reporting potential cases of white slavery repeatedly claimed that most of the women who ended up in one of Dakar’s brothels had willingly moved to Dakar to sell sex. Often, the fact that a woman had engaged in prostitution prior to her arrival served as evidence that she was migrating for sexual labor on her own volition. Among the fifty-five cases of women suspected of moving to Dakar to sell sex that I have identified in the archives, thirty-one fell into this category. Consider, for example, the cases of Marguerite M., twentyfive, and Gabrielle M., twenty-two. The two French women were stopped and questioned in the Atlantic port of Bordeaux on January 17, 1932. The port commissioner suspected that they were planning to join one of Dakar’s brothels. He reported that Gabrielle had already worked in a metropolitan brothel. As for Marguerite, she “was over the age of majority and her desire to go and prostitute herself was evident.”64 The two women’s assumed willingness to migrate to Dakar to sell sex precluded French authorities from launching an investigation into sex trafficking.

French authorities reported that prior connections and hearsay persuaded some women to try their luck overseas. When a port commissioner interrogated Eugénie L. and Anne D., both aged twenty-six, as they embarked on the steamship Asie in Bordeaux in November 1932, they confessed their intention to join a brothel located at 19 rue Raffenel in Dakar. At the time of their interview, they had just finished working in a brothel in Angoulême. By continuing in the sex trade in the colony, they hoped, on the basis of one of the two women’s past experience, to increase their gains in a colonial brothel.65 In a similar case, Henriette and Germaine C. set sail on the Asie on July 19, 1933. The two sisters had worked in a brothel in Paris for about a year before transferring to the same brothel where Eugénie L. and Anne D. had worked in Angoulême. They planned to continue their activity overseas, where “having learned from friends practicing the same job that in Dakar, where the latter had gone, one could make more money than in France, they found a way . . . to also reach the port city.”66 Over and again, port commissioners heard the same story of economic opportunity overseas. From 1932 to 1935 alone, twelve women suspected of moving to Dakar to pursue sexual labor reiterated similar motives.67

Although women described the allure of financial gain as a primary motive for selling sex in Dakar, such an idealist vision often remained just that. First, while steamship travel gradually became more affordable to the average French person, it remained expensive. In 1932 the cost of a oneway journey to Dakar was 1,560 francs, or the equivalent of two and a half months’ salary for an unskilled worker.68 Second, each passenger had to pay a 2,500-franc security deposit to the shipping company, which would cover repatriation costs should their stay in the colony go wrong—another cost that sex procurers initially took upon themselves.69 Third, the brothel keeper was to be reimbursed for living expenses during their stay in Dakar, such as personal products, food, and clothing, usually with interest. Together, these various costs made it challenging for a woman working in a brothel to make any profits from her labor. Even if these women did choose to move to Dakar to sell sex, their experiences once there often fell short of their initial expectations of relatively easy financial gains.

Even as some women openly rejected assumptions that prior involvement in the metropolitan sex trade necessarily marked them as potential colonial sex workers, authorities by and large did not take action against those accused of sex trafficking, revealing, once again, the reluctance of French authorities to act against migratory prostitution between the metropole and the colonies. For example, in 1938, Mireille R., a French prostitute, accused Piquemal of deception: the young woman claimed that she had been offered a job as a waitress in Dakar only to find herself in one of Piquemal’s colonial brothels. Piquemal, though, avoided any prosecution despite her long and well-known history in facilitating the migration of French women to the colony for the purpose of selling sex. The misadventure of Mirelle R., which I reconstruct below, illuminates the police’s disbelief that sex workers could be deceived. For the women who did not easily fit into the trope of the innocent, virgin white slave victim, sympathetic ears were hard to come by.

Like most women selling sex in Bordeaux, Mireille R., twenty-one, lived in Mériadeck, a working-class neighborhood notorious for its nightlife, brothels, and crime.70 The brothel where she worked, located on 57 bis rue Saint Sernin, was owned by the infamous Corsican sex and drug trafficker Barthélémy Guérini, also known in the business as “Mémé” or “La Terreur.” As a registered sex-worker, Mireille first experienced the invasive medical visit provided by the Service de Prophylaxie des Maladies Vénériennes (Prophylaxis Service for Venereal Diseases) a few days after New Year’s Day 1937. The eight examinations she underwent in the following months kept her from any mandatory stay at the Saint-Jean Hospital, where the women affected with syphilis or gonorrhea were confined for treatment.71 Although Mireille was spared the dreaded lock hospitals, life may have been fairly monotonous, between clients’ visits, monthly medical checkups, and a lot of waiting and sitting in between.72

After a year and a few months of this routine, Mireille likely felt ready for a change. When Marie Piquemal and Mireille crossed paths in the spring of 1938, during one of Piquemal’s regular visits to Bordeaux, Mireille decided to try her luck. Piquemal promised her 5,000 francs to work as a waitress (entraîneuse) in Dakar. How could Mireille say no to such an appealing offer? She finally had a chance to escape life in a brothel, make more money, and discover a new part of the world. Such opportunities rarely presented themselves, she must have thought, particularly because the rules regulating women’s exits from a brothel were strict and required the approval of the brothel keeper.73 Consequently, meeting individuals other than clients and ultimately leaving the sex-work industry proved particularly challenging. Piquemal embodied Mireille’s chance to exit the world of prostitution and start anew, or so it seemed.

Mireille was one of the four women mentioned above who, on May 4, 1938, disembarked from the Banfora to set foot on the African continent. Mireille and the three other French women—Marie J., Gabrielle A., and Georgette B.—had all been registered as sex workers in Bordeaux and Marseille. Piquemal had supervised the trip, ensuring that the four women on board the steamship did not draw unsolicited attention and made it safely to Dakar. Even though they were accustomed to close oversight, the lack of autonomy experienced by the four women certainly tamed their excitement about overseas travel.74

Mireille’s enthusiasm quickly faded upon reaching La Poularde, her ultimate destination. This was not the typical bar she had expected to work in but a maison de rendez-vous not so different from what she had just left behind in Bordeaux. To her dismay, she and her three travel companions were swiftly registered in the city’s police records as filles publiquesh [public women].75 In the colonial city as in Bordeaux, the police recorded her identity and the address of the brothel where she worked and issued a card that she had to present on the occasion of her mandatory sanitary visits with the local physician, a Mr. Sibenaler. Since her last medical visit in Bordeaux had shown her to be clear of any venereal diseases, Mireille could now officially figure in Dakar’s police registers. She would once again be subjected to restrictions she knew all too well. Her presence in public spaces would be closely monitored and restricted. Soliciting passersby was strictly forbidden, as were standing in the streets, forming groups, and patronizing bars, theaters, music halls, and cinemas. Local decrees also prohibited the renting out of hotel rooms for the purpose of selling sex. She was allowed to work only in her room at the brothel, so long as the louvered shutters concealed from curious bystanders all profane activities taking place inside. If Mireille had imagined a brighter future in the tropics, her hopes no doubt quickly vanished.

Life in a colonial brothel was not any easier than life in a brothel in the metropole; in fact, it was quite the opposite. The atmosphere within La Poularde was tense. Within a few weeks, Mireille got into a physical fight with Gabrielle A., one of her companions on the Banfora. Henri Cadilhac, Piquemal’s husband, was just as short tempered; annoyed by the women’s unruly behavior, he struck them both in the face to put an end to the altercation. After this incident, Mireille became adamant about returning to the metropole. Her demands certainly did not please Cadilhac and Piquemal, given their financial investment in the young woman. “For ten years I have spent money on people like you and you can do nothing against me,” Cadilhac spit out. “You owe me money, you won’t leave.”76 Without the brothel keeper’s consent, her chances of leaving the brothel were extremely dim.77

Escaping life in a brothel was even more difficult for Mireille, given her quickly rising popularity among the European men allowed to patronize the Plateau’s brothels. With eleven “passes” performed in the span of three weeks, she was at the time, according to a local intelligence report, “the woman the most in vogue”—a modest performance that nonetheless contrasted with her counterparts’ complete lack of activity.78 In the years leading up to 1938, business had been so slow that Marie Piquemal had considered selling two of her insolvent businesses and trying her luck in the town of Kaolack, in southern Senegal.79 This gloomy economic reality did not play in Mireille’s favor.

But this assessment did not take into account the connections Mireille had made in both the metropole and Dakar. After a mere three weeks at Piquemal and Cadilhac’s brothel, Mireille and another brothel inmate, Marie J., eventually succeeded in negotiating their departure, likely thanks to Guérini, the dreaded sex trafficker mentioned earlier.80 On May 30, 1938, the two hopped on the Kerguelen, a steamship that connected South America, West Africa, and France. They boarded with “no money or luggage” for the ten-day long journey that awaited them. They planned to settle in Paris and Marseille, where they hoped to start life from scratch—yet again. Mireille’s medical reports, however, imply that she failed to reach Paris. A gynecological exam she underwent in Bordeaux in mid-June 1938, shortly after she set foot in the port city, suggests that she at least temporarily went back to selling sex. Three additional medical visits, from 1938, 1939, and 1941, indicate that she continued to work as a prostitute at 57 bis rue Saint-Sernin for several years, though their lack of regularity suggests that she may have done so only sporadically.81

Upon her return from Dakar in May 1938, Mireille reported to the agent who stopped her in Bordeaux that she had been deceived into selling sex under horrendous conditions in the colony. The way she framed her story strongly echoed the trope of the white slave victim—perhaps a

strategy she purposely used to gain the sympathy of French authorities.82 Although Mireille indicted Piquemal, and not Antoine Mur, the man the police thought was behind Mireille’s unfortunate experience, Piquemal never faced prosecution. Following Mireille’s testimony, the police commissioner in Bordeaux concluded that Piquemal was unknown to the Préfecture de police (the main police services at the national and departmental level), even though she had by then been involved for the past two decades in brothel keeping in Dakar and in migratory prostitution.83 Piquemal’s gender perhaps made her an unlikely sex trafficker in the eyes of the police investigators, though it is just as likely that authorities simply dismissed the incident as inconsequential.

In general, women working in colonial brothels could hardly rely on authorities to help them escape situations in which they faced unfair or harsh treatments. Brothel keepers were sometimes in collusion with physicians and the police to discipline and control unruly women. In a letter to the district attorney (procureur de la République), the special commissioner in Angoulême reported that after some young women found out they had been deceived into accepting less favorable work conditions in Dakar’s brothels, one of them discreetly inquired about ways to return to the metropole. “She was not surprised to learn that [the women] who requested repatriation would immediately be sent to the hospital for 41 days.”84 Brothel keepers cooperated with medical authorities to lock up rebellious women in hospitals. Doctors in charge of their sanitary control “never observe anything abnormal unless for rare exceptions. Most of the time they do not bother visiting and simply ask the brothel keeper if everything goes well. If not, they find the smallest spot, sometimes invisible in the microscope but which they guess” to be a contagion, in order to justify holding a brothel prostitute for an extended duration.85 The police suspected similar connivance between Piquemal, Cadilhac, and the doctor charged with medically inspecting the couple’s registered women.86 When two brothel prostitutes, Marie J. and Fhima E., got into a fight, Cadilhac “threatened Marie J. with being sent to the hospital for eight days if she did not keep quiet,” a sentence that no registered woman would take lightly.87 Brothel keepers and medical and police authorities worked together, rather than against each other, to keep white brothel prostitutes in their place, thus limiting the negative impact these women’s unruly behavior could have on notions of colonial prestige and on brothel keepers’ profit.

Unlike Piquemal, who at once benefited from and strengthened the unwritten racial hierarchies in Dakar through her role as the owner and keeper of white-only brothels, white French women who migrated for sexual labor rarely met with a happy ending. As white women who represented notions of white prestige and as sex workers who then subverted such notions, those

who worked for Piquemal discovered that their positions were liminal and that they were subject to additional surveillance once in the colony. At the same time, authorities on both sides of the Atlantic consistently dismissed French women’s involvement in migratory prostitution as voluntary, thus allowing intermediaries like Piquemal to seamlessly proceed with their activity—especially since the international conventions of the 1920s and 1930s, which repressed sex trafficking, only served to condemn the forced migration of women for sexual labor. Although French sex workers helped to advance the colonial project of white dominance in interwar Dakar, they did not directly benefit from belonging to the racially dominant group of white Europeans.

Conclusion

Piquemal and Cadilhac’s involvement in the sex trade came to an abrupt halt after the Law of April 13, 1946, which banned brothels in France and was extended to include French West Africa on the eve of 1947. The closing of Dakar’s tolerated brothels effectively put an end to the migratory prostitution of French women to the colony. For years, Cadilhac and Piquemal energetically challenged the law, but to no avail. The demise of their business perhaps put a strain on their relationship, as the two filed for divorce in February 1950. From then on, Piquemal vanishes from the archive.

Piquemal’s white-only brothels in interwar Dakar were not simply the result of tacit racial segregation in the colonies. Rather, Piquemal’s work actively helped to establish and strengthen racial boundaries in the colonial city. In enabling white French men to fulfill their purported sexual needs within the confine of her brothels and without “crossing the color line,” Piquemal contributed, whether intentionally or not, to the making of Dakar’s white enclave.88 Although informal, the racial politics of commercial sex in Dakar had similar effects to those of the racially exclusionary policies that elsewhere affirmed the desire to police race more openly. As with the miscegenation laws in the United States or the sexual panics around the Black Peril in Southern Rhodesia, the informal racial politics that undergirded commercial sex in colonial Dakar “provided the foundations for the larger racial project of white supremacy and white purity.”89

Piquemal’s success as a madam came at the expense of other white women who shared her mobile aspirations. Like Mireille, the metropolitan women who moved to Dakar to sell sex hoped to increase their earnings, only to find that the grass was not any greener in the colony. The reports produced by local police officials as well as French authorities stationed in metropolitan and colonial harbors to detect cases of “white slavery” provide a valuable—although mediated—insights into these women’s motivations

for pursuing sexual labor overseas. However, France’s half-hearted adoption of the various international conventions repressing the traffic in women and children, as well as their limited application to the French Empire, often limited the scope of French authorities’ intervention, thereby enabling individuals like Marie Piquemal to thrive on the commercialization of white women’s bodies in interwar Dakar.

Notes

Cyril Olivier’s help was crucial in locating the documents about Marie Piquemal in the Archives Départementales de la Gironde. I also thank Leora Auslander, Elisa Camiscioli, Philippa Hetherington, Julia Laite, Jaime Wadowiec, the anonymous reviewers for this article, as well as the participants in the Transnational Approaches to Modern European History Workshop at the University of Chicago for their astute observations and advice, which helped me improve this article. 1Renseignements, n.d., 14MIOM3071, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM). 2On the special status of African men and women in the Four Communes of Senegal, see Mamadou Diouf, “The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Originaires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth Century Globalization Project,” Development & Change 29, no. 4 (Oct. 1998): 671–696. 3Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 4Traite des Femmes et des Enfants: Réponse au questionnaire de la Société des Nations pour l’ensemble des possessions et territoires français administrés par le Ministère des Colonies, 1921, 4M11836, Archives Départementales de la Martinique. On France’s color-blindness, some early scholarship includes Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader, eds., Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). 5Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 307. See also Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). A sample of the scholarship on prostitution in the British and French colonial contexts includes Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Diseases in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Caroline Séquin, “The Moving Contours of Colonial Prostitution (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1940–1947),” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 50, no. 2 (Nov. 2019): 19–36; Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures,” American

Ethnologist 639, no. 4 (Nov. 1989): 634–660; Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962) (Paris: Payot, 2003); and Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatisation and Regulation: Prostitution in Colonial Northern Vietnam,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 12, no. 51 (Aug. 2010): 573–87; Christina Firpo, Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 6Biographies of brothel keepers have been written mostly in the context of the United States. See, for example, Emily Landau, Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Maryann Wall, Madame Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014); and Penny Petersen, Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Alain Corbin devotes a few pages to brothel keepers’ sociological profile in Les filles de noce : Misère sexuelle et prostitution (19e et 20e siècles) (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978), 99–108. For other contexts, see Elizabeth Sinn, “Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 87–111; Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 7Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 61.

8Harald Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious: Race, Class, and “White Subalternity” in Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 9Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious. 10The historical scholarship on the phenomenon of “white slavery” is expansive. Key works include Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Elisa Camiscioli, “Coercion and Choice: The ‘Traffic in Women’ between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 483–507; Jean-Michel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des blanches: Enquête sur la fabrication d’un fléau (Paris: La Découverte, 2009); Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Philippa Hetherington, Victims of the Social Temperament: Prostitution, Migration, and the Traffic in Women from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, 1885–1935 (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014); Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); Stephanie Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Kate Marsh, “‘La Nouvelle Activité des Trafiquants de Femmes’: France, Le Havre and the Politics of Trafficking, 1919–1939,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 1 (Feb. 2017): 23–48; Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ruth Rosen, “White Slavery: Myth or Reality?,” in The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 112–135; Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 117–195; Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

11Kathleen Keller, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 4. 12I use the term migratory prostitution as a more neutral way to refer to the migration of women for sexual labor, since the terms white slavery and traffic in women imply a level of coercion. Saheed Aderinto, “Sex Across the Border: Researching Transnational Prostitution in Colonial Nigeria,” in The Third Wave of Historical Scholarship on Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Ayodeji Olukoju, ed. Aderinto and Paul Osifodunrin (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 76–94; 80–81. 13Etat civil Marie Madeleine Piquemal, 4E18288, Archives Départementales de la Gironde (ADG). 14Commissaire Central to the Mayor of Dakar, Aug. 9, 1925, 14 MIOM 3025, ANOM. On Bousbir, see Jean-François Staszak, “Planning Prostitution in Colonial Morocco: Bousbir, Casablanca’s Quartier Réservé,” in (Sub)Urban Sexscapes: Geographies and Regulation of the Sex Industry, ed. P. Maginn and C. Steinmetz (London: Routledge, 2014); Taraud, La prostitution coloniale. 15Cecily Devereux, “‘The Maiden Tribute’ and the Rise of the White Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The Making of an Imperial Construct,” Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–23; 14. 16Donna R. Gabaccia, Dirk Hoerder, and Adam Walaszek, “Emigration and Nation Building during the Mass Migrations from Europe,” in Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, ed. Nancy L. Green and François Weil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 63–90; 63. 17Exceptions include Francois Weil, “The French State and Transoceanic Emigration,” in Green and Weil, Citizenship and Those Who Leave, 114–131; and J. P. Daughton, “When Argentina Was ‘French’: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Epoque Buenos Aires,” in “Metropole and Colony,” special issue, Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 831–864. 18Philippe Roudié, “Long-Distance Emigration from the Port of Bordeaux, 1865–1920,” Journal of Historical Geography 11, no. 3 (1985): 268–279; 277. 19François Weil, “French Migration to the Americas in the 19th and 20th Centuries as a Historical Problem,” Studi Emigrazione 123 (Sept. 1996): 443–460. 20Marie-Paule Ha, French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16. See also Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 21Rita Cruise O’Brien, White Society in Black Africa: The French of Senegal (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 56.

22Hilary Jones, The Métis of Sénégal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 23Voyage d’enquête de la commission de l’A.O.F. [Afrique Occidental Française]: Port de commerce de Dakar, 1937, Commission Guernut/13, ANOM.

24Raymond Betts, “Dakar: Ville Impériale (1857–1960),” in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, vol. 2, ed. R. J. Ross Gerard Telkamp (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 193–206; 196. 25Note sur la défense des côtes coloniales, Mar. 4, 1934, GR/7N/4193/10, Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes. 26Marthe Hucbourg Watts, The Men in my Life (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960); Marie-Thérèse Cointre, Vie d’une prostituée (Geneva: Gonthier, 1964). 27Commissaire Central to the Mayor of Dakar, Dakar, Aug. 9, 1925, 14 MIOM 3025, ANOM.

28Edmond Fortier to the Governor General in AOF [Afrique Occidentale Française], Dakar, Nov. 17, 1924, 1F99, Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS). 29This is also true for other colonial cities, such as Nairobi. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 30Julia Laite, “Traffickers and Pimps in the Era of White Slavery,” Past & Present 237, no. 1 (Nov. 2017): 251–252 ; Sylvain Pattieu, “Souteneurs noirs à Marseille, 1918–1921: Contribution à l’histoire de la minorité noire en France,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 64, no.6 (Nov.–Dec. 2009): 1361–1386. 31Archival records provide conflicting information regarding the opening of the first brothel in Dakar, dating it 1915, 1916, or 1918. 32Individual report on Louis Perriot, Dakar, June 15, 1923, F/7/14862, Archives Nationales de France (AN). 33Commissaire Central to the Mayor of Dakar, Dakar, Aug. 9, 1925, 14 MIOM 3025, ANOM.

34Myron Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002). 35Betts, “Dakar,” 199.

36Liora Bigon, French Colonial Dakar: The Morphogenesis of an African Regional Capital (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 10. 37On residential segregation and urban planning in colonial Dakar, see Liora Bigon, A History of Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850–1930) (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009); O’Brien, White Society in Black Africa; David Nelson, “The Construction of French-Dominated Colonial Dakar, 1857–1940,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 225–255. 38Geoffrey Gorer, Africa Dances: A Book About West African Negroes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935), 73–74. 39Gorer, Africa Dances, 73.

40Betts, “Dakar,” 199.

41Gorer, Africa Dances, 74. 421923 Annual Report by the Governor General of French West Africa to CTW, 2K1, ANS. 43Lettre confidentielle du Gouverneur Général de l’AOF to Directeur du Cabinet, Dakar, June 27, 1938, 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM. 44In the British imperial context, clients, rather than prostitutes, tended to be racially segregated. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics. 45Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 61.

46Arrêté relatif à la surveillance de la prostitution, Jan. 3, 1926, n°14 bis, Journal officiel du Sénégal et dépendances, BIB AOM/50127/1926, ANOM. 47Louis Charles Léonce Ponzio to Gouverneur Général de l’AOF, Dakar, Nov. 17, 1936, Commission Guernut/51, ANOM. 48George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003). 49The phrase comforts of home comes from Luise White, Comforts of Home. 50Hilary Jones, “From Mariage à la Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 27–48; 30. 51White, Children of the French Empire; see esp. chap. 1. 52Dr. Louis Joseph Barot, Guide pratique de l’européen dans l’Afrique occidentale à l’usage des militaires, fonctionnaires, commerçants, colons & touristes (Paris: Flammarion, 1902), 328, italics in the original. 53Jones, Métis of Sénégal. On changing attitudes toward interracial intimacy in French West Africa, see Emily Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable”; and Owen White, “Conquest and Cohabitation: French Men’s Relations with West African Women in the 1890s and 1900s,” in The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, vol. 2, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 177–201. In French Equatorial Africa, see Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “‘A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man’: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 56–82. 54Ministère des Colonies, Traite des Femmes et des Enfants : Réponses au questionnaire de la Société des Nations pour l’ensemble des possessions et territoires français administrés, 1921, 1AFFPOL/3444, ANOM.

55On the laws forbidding interracial marriages in the United States, the book of reference is Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On Southern Rhodesia, see McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). On the management of interracial intimacy in other parts of the British Empire, see, for example, Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). 56Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003). 57Dr. Le Pileur, Indications sur la prostitution vulgivague à Paris depuis le début de la guerre (Paris: Tancrède, 1918), 15, quoted in Michelle K. Rhoades, “Renegotiating French Masculinity: Medicine and Venereal Disease during the Great War,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 293–327; 293. 58B. Joyeux, “Projet de lutte anti-vénérienne à Hanoi,” Bulletin de la Société Médico-Chirurgicale de l’Indochine June (1934), 904, in Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatisation and Regulation,” 580. 59Betts, “Dakar,” 199.

601941 Annual Medical Report, 2G41/7, ANS, and 14 MIOM 1835, ANOM. 61Renseignements, Dakar, May 30, 1938, 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM. 62Renseignements, Dakar, n.d., 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM. Piquemal adopted her husband’s last name following their marriage in 1934. For the sake of consistency, I use her maiden name throughout this article. 63Marsh, “‘La Nouvelle Activité des Trafiquants de Femmes,’” 27. 64Commissaire divisionnaire de Police Spéciale to Préfet de la Gironde, Bordeaux, Feb. 5, 1932, 4M340, ADG. 65Commissaire divisionnaire de Police Spéciale to Préfet de la Gironde, Bordeaux, Nov. 28, 1932, 4M340, ADG. 66Commissaire divisionnaire de Police Spéciale to Préfet de la Gironde, Bordeaux, July 21, 1933, 4M340, ADG. 67This number is based on reports available in 4M340, ADG. 68Un comité pour la lutte contre la prostitution réglementée to le Chef Adjoint du Cabinet de la Préfecture, Bordeaux, Oct. 27, 1932, 4M340, ADG. 69Inspecteur de Police mobile Dejean to Commissaire Divisionnaire in Bordeaux, Feb. 22, 1935, 4M88, Archives Départementales de la Charente. 70Léon Bosredon, Péril vénérien et prostitution (medical thesis, Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou, 1906), 60. I have chosen not to divulge Mireille’s last name in order to maintain her anonymity as a potential sex-trafficking victim.

71Fiche médicale Mireille R., 619 AW, ADG. 72For a description of brothel prostitutes’ daily lives, see Laure Adler, La vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 (Paris: Hachette, 1990). 73Germaine Aziz has powerfully described in her memoirs the mechanisms by which women found themselves unable to leave prostitution. Germaine Aziz, Les chambres closes: Histoire d’une prostituée juive d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 1980; Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2007 Citation refers to Nouveau Monde edition.). 74Administrateur de Ière classe to Directeur de la Sûreté Générale, Dakar, May 14, 1938, F/7/14862, AN. 75Administrateur de Ière classe to Directeur de la Sûreté Générale, Dakar, May 14, 1938, F/7/14862, AN. 76Renseignements, Dakar, n.d., 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM. 77Article 18 of the local decree of 3 January 1926 required brothel keepers to accompany the women leaving their business to the police to officially declare their departure and the reason behind it. 78Renseignements, Dakar, n.d., 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM.

79Renseignements, Dakar, Sept. 3, 1938, 14 MIOM 3074, ANOM. 80Renseignements, Dakar, May 30, 1938, 14 MIOM 3071, ANOM. 81Fiche médicale, Mireille R., 619AW, ADG. 82Elisa Camiscioli discusses this strategy in Camiscioli, “Coercion and Choice.” 83Commissaire central to Inspecteur Général Chargé des Services de Police Criminelle, June 27, 1938, Bordeaux, F/7/14862, AN. 84Commissaire Spécial de Police to Procureur de la République à Angoulême, Angoulême, Oct. 8, 1932, F/7/14862, AN. 85Commissaire Spécial de Police to Procureur de la République à Angoulême, Angoulême, Oct. 8, 1932, F/7/14862, AN. 86Renseignements, Dakar, May 17, 1938, 14MIOM3071, ANOM. 87Renseignements, Dakar, n.d., 14MIOM3071, ANOM. 88I borrow this phrase from Ray, Crossing the Color Line. The original phrase color lines comes from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: McClurg, 1907). 89Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 14.

142 “White Slavery” and Cabarets:

Mexican Artists in Panama in the 1940s

Pamela J. Fuentes

This article examines a story that appeared in various Mexican newspapers and magazines from 1940 to 1943: Mexican dancers were being taken to the Panama Canal Zone not only to work in cabaret shows but also to offer sexual services to US military men. Using this case study, this article shows that discourses of “trafficking” were as much about the transnational entertainment industry as they were about the sex industry. Policy makers, who viewed with suspicion venues that employed women and offered alcohol, music, and variety performances, often attempted to regulate the social and sexual interactions that happened inside, particularly when they attracted people from different social classes, races, and ethnicities. These regulations would also define which women were victims and which ones were responsible for their own situation.

On July 9, 1940, Ignacio D. Silva and Manuel Hernández Velarde, two diplomats who worked for the Mexican legation in Panama, visited the cabaret Alamo, following the instructions of their boss.1 Alamo had caught the attention of Mexican authorities after announcing the debut of a small group of Mexican artists under the direction of Eva Pérez Caro. In their report, the diplomats expressed their disgust at what they had observed at Alamo. They were struck by the cabaret’s class, its clientele, and its location at the edge of the red-light district, and they compared it to cabarets of the lowest category in the most impoverished neighborhoods in Mexico. The patrons, they wrote, “are soldiers and sailors of the US Army, that is, customers from the lowest type.” They were also shocked at the show itself: eight dancers “moved in vulgar ways” while wearing traditional costumes in the colors of the Mexican flag. They remarked on the “embarrassing spectacle, night after night; in one of the numbers a part of the Mexican national anthem is played in a disrespectful way.” They noted that the main reason for having the troupe on the cabaret premises was not to present this “pseudo-artistic spectacle” but to force cabaret members to earn money soliciting drinks for a percentage of their sales. For the diplomats this constituted “scandalous white slavery, because none of the dancers can leave if the client does not pay the ‘fee’ assigned by the cabaret owner.” They talked to one of the “exploited women deceived by Mrs. Pérez Caro,” and while it is not clear exactly what she said or how much was the two men’s interpretation, the report mentions that when the

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 142–167.

dancers were hired, they didn’t know what kind of place it was or the nature of the job: “They are exploited as if they were public women [prostitutes] when most of them are members of the National Association of Mexican Actors.” In their concluding remarks, the diplomats argued that the show was “causing serious damage to the reputation and good name of Mexico, irrespective of the harm to the Mexican women, members of the group we have talked about.”2

This case was investigated for about seven weeks by the offices of the Mexican legation in Panama. The documents reveal that some weeks after the cabaret visit, one dancer, Pía Navarro Garnica, asked for protection and was sent home by ship. Authorities in Mexico had directed diplomatic representatives in Panama to extend the protection provided by international conventions to their “fellow countrywoman” and to try, “by all means possible, to stop the abuses that are damaging Mexico’s name and reputation.”3 There is no indication that the other dancers asked for or were offered protection, but at the express request of the legation, the group stopped featuring the national anthem in their show.4 The documents do not mention anything more related to this case, filed under the heading “white slavery,” except a telegram and a response dated three years later, in 1943.

It is not clear how the scandal broke out in newspapers and weekly magazines, but several of the names, social actors, and dynamics detailed by the Mexican legation appeared in print media in 1942 and 1943. Pérez Caro, US military men, and cabaret spectacles were often named in the accounts of the Mexican press. As the story developed, interpretations about what this case represented varied. In contrast to the fewer than twenty pages filed by the Mexican authorities, newspapers produced several stories discussing who was responsible for the alleged sexual exploitation or the reasons behind the demand for Mexican women. The stories were mostly written in a sensationalist tone, constantly expressing outrage about the authorities’ lack of action. However, more than once journalists agreed with the official interpretation or doubted that “white slavery” was taking place in Panama.

Discourses of “trafficking” were as much about the transnational entertainment industry as they were about the sex industry. Theaters, cabarets, and dance halls were under observation by moral reformers. Unlike brothels, whose clear purpose was to sell sexual services and which had been part of cities for decades or even centuries, new forms of commercial entertainment caught the attention of moral reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, when electricity, changes in labor shifts, and technology made urban nightlife available to mixed-gender audiences on an unprecedented scale.5 Moralists viewed with suspicion venues that employed women and offered alcohol, music, and variety performances, and they often attempted to regulate the social and sexual interactions that took place

inside, particularly when they attracted people from different social classes, races, and ethnicities. As we will see, discourses about trafficking, sexual exploitation, and cabarets differed from those involving brothels because of labor, moral, and migration frameworks aimed at regulating the work of female artists.6 These notions were complicated by specific geographical and political contexts in which cabaret services intertwined with nationalistic or colonial projects that benefited from entertainment circuits, whether to promote a political project, as in the Mexican case, or to protect US soldiers from venereal disease.

“The Worst Class of Workers”

The diplomats’ description of the relation between the dancers and the cabaret owner as “scandalous white slavery” reflected transnational discourses about trafficking in women and children, consolidated by the League of Nations in the 1920s. The discourses and reports published by the League’s Special Body of Experts influenced migration and prostitution legislation worldwide and led to the abolition of regulated brothels in the 1930s and 1940s, since they were considered the main trigger for trafficking. Countries that did not enact policies to curb prostitution or had no state or local legislation against pimping and procuring, or lacked strict immigration laws—including measures to deport and ban the entry of foreign traffickers and prostitutes—were considered ideal “for introduction of foreign women into the business of prostitution.”7 Mexico included some of these changes in its 1908 migration law, but it wasn’t until 1940, that the government officially abolished federal legislation regulating prostitution. Brothels, perceived as exploitation centers by government officers, were the main target, and women, whether managers or owners, predominantly Mexican, were arrested and sentenced, while pimps—whether Mexican or foreign—were largely ignored.8

For their part, cabarets could elude attempts at regulation on the grounds of particular understandings of respectability, including the social class of their clientele or the fact that sexual intercourse did not occur on their premises. However, cabarets were constantly under suspicion in Mexican cities and worldwide. According to the 1927 Report of the Special Body of Experts, trafficking was primarily understood as “the direct or indirect procuration and transportation of women and girls for the sexual gratification of one or more other persons.”9 Scholars such as Donna Guy, Liat Kozma, and Nicole Keusch have already studied how the League of Nations’s definition of trafficking led to a strict monitoring of women’s migration during the interwar period, targeting women traveling alone as prostitutes or potential trafficking victims regardless of their actual oc-

cupation, while countries and cities receiving great numbers of European immigrants, such as Buenos Aires, were considered immoral environments in which innocent victims would be corrupted.10

In the report, women migrating with offers of employment were considered potential victims. Seasonal workers, domestic servants, and even a modiste are cited as examples of women who had been deceived by traffickers with seemingly genuine job offers. However, artists and entertainers were believed “to run a special risk” because of the huge demand for cabaret shows all over Europe and in Central and South America.11 The constant migration of troupes was considered to be one of the factors that paved the way for trafficking, in addition to the places in which artists performed, including cabarets and music halls. The report briefly noted that some entertainment companies worked under proper management, but it mostly focused on the “undesirable” nature of the venues in which the cut from alcohol sales constituted a large portion of the artists’ earnings: besides performing on the stage, they danced with patrons and encouraged the sale of drinks. According to the Special Body of Experts, this atmosphere, combined with the low wages women received, made it “difficult, unless there is careful supervision, for the girls employed to avoid a life of prostitution.”12

The Mexican diplomats also did not report that explicit selling of sex or sexual acts actually took place in cabarets. This does not mean that artists did not supplement their earnings this way or that they were not financially or sexually exploited; however, it may reveal how cabaret owners understood concepts like trafficking. In its quest to prove that trafficking networks operated all over the world, the League of Nations sent a handful of undercover agents to several countries from 1924 to 1926. One agent, Paul Kinsie, visited Kelly’s Cabaret in Panama City, introducing himself as a theatrical agent. In a conversation with the owner, Mr. Kelly explained what trafficking entailed for him. He spoke of the precautions he took to avoid jail and some details about the work of artists in his cabaret: all women had contracts for three or six months that included living upstairs in a hotel, but they were not allowed to bring men into their rooms or to leave the premises before closing time. When Kinsie asked about these rules, Kelly replied: “Hell man! They all lay! (Practice prostitution). I would not want them if they didn’t. The only thing is I don’t let them leave until we close, and then if they are dated they can take them upstairs. We have to take that precaution, otherwise it would mean White Slavery.”13

Kelly also suggested that “real artists” would not work in his cabaret, because they must be willing to drink with patrons, for which they would be paid a percentage of the price of each drink their companions bought. Ideas about cabaret artists were related to what Cristiana Schettini has called the three “morally ambiguous identities” that women in entertainment markets

simultaneously embodied at the time: artist, contract worker, and prostitute.14 Unlike women working in brothels, female cabaret performers signed contracts, which in theory should have provided some rights. However, as Marion Pluskota has explained, intermediaries such as agents, managers, or cabaret owners seemed to be the ones who benefited most when artists performed or sold sex. This was true in the case of the Mexican artists in Panama, who had to pay a fee to leave the premises, whether to have sex with a patron or for any other reason. Ending their shift early meant fewer alcohol sales, thus less revenue for the cabaret, which affected women more since they lost their percentage plus the fee owed to the owner.15

Because they signed contracts, the work of cabaret entertainers was legally legitimate. Regulations that attempted to control working conditions in cabarets during the first half of the twentieth century were based on notions of respectability that involved spaces, services, which jobs were performed and by whom. Cabarets offered restaurant services, variety shows, and a dance floor. Unlike in regulated brothels, in which men sought the company of women officially labeled by the government as prostitutes, in cabarets the interaction between male patrons and women, who could be waiters, entertainers, sellers of drinks, dances, or sex, was mediated by the fees paid for dancing and alcohol consumption.16 Cabarets provided space for different kinds of jobs, like cook, waiter, ticket seller, security guard, or manager; even among artists, there were musicians, dancers, chorus girls, comedians, and magicians. However, the jobs performed by women were more closely scrutinized. In Mexico City, for instance, in the 1930s, the government enacted laws mandating that women could work as waitresses during the day but should be replaced by men in the evening.17

Some cabarets could claim to be respectable because they allowed women as patrons—particularly first-class cabarets, in which male company was mandatory for admission.18 Cabarets also offered “a more subtle approach to sex trade than brothels,” because they offered a flexible schedule for women wanting to supplement their income from their day job as waiters by selling dances or sex. In Mexico City during those years, some feminist groups and state institutions attempted to unionize cabaret workers and get them to sign collective contracts, which could offer better protection against employer abuse, but workers resisted because, according to Katherine Bliss, they feared that unionization would brand them all as prostitutes by association, tying them to a “shameful industry,” when several did not see themselves as such, nor did they desire to stay in their jobs permanently.19 Cabaret workers were in a difficult position, because fighting for better working conditions would mean opposing owners and inviting their retributions; further, feminist groups and the state regarded them as being in need of moral rehabilitation. The declaration of one cabaret

worker to the press during these debates illustrates these struggles: “Not everybody can be what they want to be and, as regard to us, we are workers, the worst class of workers.”20

Paradoxically, the recognition of entertainers as professional workers would weaken their chances of being recognized as victims of trafficking by the Mexican state, because that would mean accusing state actors—or actors with close ties to the state—as complicit, particularly in a moment when the Mexican government was solidifying its international image by signing international agreements, like those ending regulated brothels, or sponsoring international tours, through which Mexican symbols and ideas of nationhood were exported. The migration circuits created by the entertainment industry were explored by the League of Nations in the 1920s only when they involved the movement of European women inside that continent or from there to the Americas. Particularly, certain Latin American countries were considered in the 1927 report as unsafe destinations or central nodes of international trafficking networks.

Donna Guy’s pioneering reflections on the region’s place in trafficking debates highlighted that only countries receiving large numbers of European migrants (Argentina, Uruguay, or Brazil) received the attention of the Special Body of Experts, “while countries like Guatemala, whose bordellos were filled with [Indigenous] women were not studied.”21 She also has pointed out the connection of prostitution to debates about family, nation, and popular culture in regards to local meanings of the global trafficking rhetoric.22 Drawing on her analysis, the next sections of this article explore a migration circuit ignored by the League of Nations report: one between two Latin American countries, in which non-European women were at the core. To do this, we will look at the close relationship between cabaret spectacles and cultural expressions of the Mexican state and what trafficking meant in this context.

Mexican Dances

In the report of their visit to the cabaret Alamo, the Mexican diplomats expressed the same outrage at the possible harm women might be enduring as they did toward the possible damage to the good name and reputation of the country because the troupe used national symbols in a discreditable way, inside an undesirable venue. During the interwar years, ideas of prostitution and migration were tied to notions of nationhood and national culture, and governments of countries sending and receiving women working in the sex and entertainment industries considered any departure from conventional sexual norms as a general failing of their countries and culture.23 The diplomats described the artistic director of the troupe, Eva Pérez Caro,

as a well-known woman, “firstly for her work on the stage and lately as the manager of a house of prostitution.”24 To date, sources have not provided any evidence that she ever worked in a brothel, but there is a trail pertaining to her work in cabarets and government-sponsored cultural activities that shows the close connection between cultural and cabaret performances.

During the 1930s, the revolutionary administrations wanted to show the world that the time of social unrest of the revolution’s armed phase had passed and Mexico was ready to participate in the international arena. The country strengthened its ties to international organizations not only by joining the League of Nations in 1931, but also by signing agreements and showing a willingness to collaborate to combat international crime, for example, by ending regulated prostitution in the capital.25 Postrevolutionary governments also sought to extend diplomatic ties by actively promoting images and representations that eventually would be internationally recognized as representative of the country. Landscapes, traditional costumes, songs, and dances were all part of the repertoire of folkloric images that from late in the second decade of the twentieth century were actively promoted by the government at international fairs, on postcards, and in tourist guides, the cinema, and magazines. The revolutionary process, connected as it was with academic and popular culture, resulted in an official appropriation of the artistic expressions of rural and underprivileged groups as the state adapted and endorsed them as symbols of Mexican authenticity.26

Among these national images, one woman, the china poblana, stands out. In the nineteenth century, key intellectuals, both Mexican and foreign, described her as a free woman who lived comfortably thanks to a husband or lover. The origins or details of why she is called china poblana, or how her outfit came to be, have been lost. However, writers’ descriptions of her body and her personality helped assemble a stereotype of an attractive, sexually available young woman with a distinctive way of dressing.27 She was often depicted as someone who could not go unnoticed, owing to her “slim, rounded, and well-defined silhouette,” “feverish eyes,” and “small feet.” Commonly known as gracious dancers, particularly of rhythms known as jarabes, the chinas poblanas’ attractiveness often contrasted with their perceived loose morals and social class. For instance, the German traveler Lucien Biert described their way of walking as “queen-like even when they are the most vulgar women,” while the Mexican Manuel Payno characterized them as poorly educated. Frances Calderón de la Barca mentioned in her letters that Mexican elites tried to discourage her from wearing a china poblana dress because it was worn by women of lower classes and dubious reputation.28 The alluring outfit included a blouse embroidered in silk and beads, a shawl, silk shoes, a petticoat, and a sequin-embroidered skirt that sparkled with every movement.

Some elements of the outfit have varied over time, but a defining feature has always been the Mexican flag’s colors: green, white, and red. This may have been one of the elements that facilitated the consolidation of the china poblana stereotype as representative of Mexican women in the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the construction of revolutionary nationalism, the images of the china poblana and the Mexican charro (traditional horseman) were highly visible and widely disseminated in the country and abroad. One of the ways of promoting these images was through musical and dance performances in diverse scenarios, from elementary schools to political events; in fact, Eva Pérez Caro played a central role in this process. By the time the scandal broke in the Mexican press, she was well known in the country’s cultural circles since she had danced professionally for more than twenty years. One of the highlights of her career was teaching the jarabe tapatío dance to Anna Pavlova.29 The Russian prima ballerina had a successful visit to Mexico in 1919, when, with the support of Mexican artists, including Pérez Caro, she presented the spectacle, Mexican Dances. In one of the numbers, she performed the jarabe tapatío dressed as a china poblana. From that moment on, the dance was one of the most well known Mexican traditional dances.30 Both Pavlova and Pérez Caro continued their separate careers, but the two popularized the tropes of revolutionary nationalism for audiences around the world. Pavlova included some of these pieces as part of her theater tours in London, New York, and Paris. Pérez Caro, along with her sisters, not only toured throughout South America, but also was part of numerous government-sponsored cultural projects that promoted “the most genuine expression of the popular soul” in events like the reception to honor diplomatic ties between Mexico and Colombia in 1934, or the New York World’s Fair in 1939.31

Historian Amelia Kiddle documented Pérez Caro’s career as a successful professional dancer in state-sponsored events. In her research, Kiddle tracked down photographs showing Pérez Caro posing “alone seemingly topless (with a carefully placed sombrero), and with her sisters, scantily clad.”32 During the 1930s, Pérez Caro’s spectacle was advertised as the main attraction in theaters and cabarets, along with supporting artists. According to the venues and audiences, she and other dancers modified their movements and outfits in order to make the performance more sensual, particularly at a time when cabaret spectacles in which women danced to rhythms from different parts of the world were in high demand. In the summer of 1934, the Mexican cabaret Karl’s Palace advertised the Pérez Caro sisters as the main stars of a spectacle that included a singer, a group of six dancers, and a comedian. The newspaper ad invited people to revel in “the most enticing Mexican and Spanish dances, Cuban rumbas, American, Hawaiian, and Oriental dances, in brief, an excess of joy!”33 Very likely, the

spectacle the diplomats witnessed in Panama contained erotic versions of the songs that were already recognized as traditionally Mexican, performed by women dressed as chinas poblanas who played the national anthem as another hallmark of authenticity. For the artists, national symbols were a tool that might get them more contracts in Mexico and abroad, while the authorities saw the suggestive use of symbols as tarnishing the country’s reputation. The diplomats also reported that back in Mexico, Pérez Caro had boasted that she would earn a lot of money in Panama because she would bring “cannon fodder . . . for the U.S. sailors,” whom, as mentioned above, the authorities considered “customers from the lowest type.”34 Panama as an attractive destination for spectacles like Pérez Caro’s and the role of the United States in creating sexual and entertainment markets for military personnel are worth exploring further.

The Road to Panama

Policymakers in the United States, like some of their European counterparts, viewed trafficking as a threat that needed to be neutralized by creating stricter migration laws, increasing border control, and banning brothels. However, in countries in which imperial powers had established army bases and colonial settlements, brothels and other forms of commercial sex were not only allowed but seen as necessary for the benefit of occupying armies. Leisure activities aimed at sailors and soldiers were central to the development of a profitable tourist industry that prompted a migration flow in the 1920s and 1930s. Joining the influx started by construction workers and military personnel employed during the construction of the Panama Canal at the turn of the century, people from different parts of the Americas traveled to work in the service and entertainment sectors, including in cabarets.35

Since the end of the nineteenth century, interest in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama as territorial possessions of the United States has been shaped by a narrative that equated whiteness with progress.The tourism boom was molded by other processes occurring in the United States during those decades that in Panama gave way to a social organization that would directly influence forms of entertainment, commercial sex, and ideas about trafficking. Two such major processes were Prohibition and racial segregation. With the US constitutional ban on the production, sale, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, people traveled abroad looking for an alcohol culture that was illegal at home. As a result, certain Latin American and Caribbean cities grew, as did their reputation as sinful places of moral corruption.36 In the case of Tijuana or Mexicali, located on the US-Mexican border, ethnic and racial divisions in tourist areas and red-

light districts informed discourses seeking to safeguard the morality of the United States by protecting the border, and with it, an idea of nation related to whiteness. In Panama, which was undergoing military occupation at the time, the racial structure inherited from Spanish colonialism was used as a point of departure in creating a sociocultural hierarchy modeled on the US segregationist model.37

The control of the Panama Canal by the United States created two distinct and autonomous jurisdictions: the Canal Zone and the Republic, whose authorities formulated often contradictory legislation having to do with leisure.38 However, both jurisdictions agreed that the sex and entertainment trades should be regulated, and both often expressed concern about the lack of medical inspection of cabaret workers. In the eyes of local and colonial authorities, entertainers escaped strict health checkups because they performed “under the appearance of respectable honesty.”39 According to Jeffrey Parker, US authorities feared that the colonial project would lead to the “racial degeneration of the ‘white’ race due to interracial sexual contact,” and they blamed local women, who they said were promiscuous, while ignoring the responsibility of soldiers. For their part, Panamanian authorities expressed concern that the occupation would create a sexual market that would be fulfilled by local women, and therefore they accepted the migration of foreign prostitutes.40

In 1947, the Panama Canal Department of the US Army finished a historical overview of the measures taken to control venereal disease and prostitution from 1916 to that year. In this document, military authorities placed the responsibility for venereal contagion among “white troops” on the tropical scenery, the temperament of the Latin American population, and local attitudes toward prostitution, revealing the understanding US authorities had about Latin American entertainers and their place in the sex trade.41 From their perspective, prostitutes, cabaret artists, and, in general, any women considered promiscuous carried venereal diseases and could potentially infect soldiers. Their “original assumption” was that women who sold sex were “100% infected or infectious,” while cabaret artists “in the majority of instances. . . . should be at least under suspicion.”42 When the document mentions “white slavery,” it is in regard to the large migration of women who worked in Panama’s sex and entertainment industries, in particular, the “rotation of prostitutes from one Latin American country to another.” However, no one is accused of trafficking; instead, the expressions “white slavery” and “human cargo smuggling” are used to describe the migration of women considered prostitutes, particularly those of Latin American origin. In the case of women who supplied “the demand of Americans, both civilian and military,” the study uses a passive voice to mention that “white prostitutes have been largely imported,” but it does not clarify

who introduced them to Panama or where exactly they came from.43 It only explains that after the Second World War, most women migrants were from Latin America because travel restrictions during wartime facilitated arrivals from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and other neighboring countries.

According to US health officers, soldiers, particularly young ones, were unprepared to deal with their sexual desires because they found themselves in a glamorous atmosphere surrounded by exoticism and tropical landscapes, which they had only seen in movies. In Panama, they had easy access to sex, whether paid or for free, with blue-eyed, fair-skinned women, “living counterparts of their own movie heroes,” who charged “undreamed-of sums for their favor,” or local women raised in an environment that authorities considered more liberal than that in the United States. In general, Latin American prostitutes were considered “tempestuous,” and Latin Americans as unafraid of venereal disease and prostitution.44 In the United States and other parts of the Americas, popular culture played a central role in shaping contradictory ideas of exoticism. Cinema and literature portrayed alluring sexual experiences that could only take place overseas; at the same time, the possibility of having those experiences was a constant reminder of the dangers of the recently “tamed” “tropics.” Therefore, exoticism for white consumption affected the different forms of sexual and erotic services offered in Panama. Cabaret owners profited from creating spaces where their clientele could enjoy “exotic” spectacles in a specially created atmosphere. The respectability or success of the establishments often required offering their clientele variety shows with transnational attributes, featuring women from different backgrounds who could pass as exotic but also as “white.”45 By the mid-1930s and 1940s this demand was fulfilled by women, erotically singing and dancing to “native” rhythms, such as tango, rumba, or “oriental” dances, in cabarets and nightclubs frequented by tourists, soldiers, and sailors.46 The ads for these vaudeville-like shows overtly referred to the national origin, physical characteristics, and ethnic features of their “artists and señoritas,” who had performed all over the Americas, from Los Angeles to Lima, Peru.47

When the Mexican troupe arrived in Panama, they were following a path forged by the United States that had been known by entertainers like Eva Pérez Caro since the second decade of the century. The construction of the canal benefited cities like San Diego, located on the West Coast, which took pride in being the first port of call for ships traveling north after crossing the Panama Canal. The intense naval and industrial activity encouraged business groups to celebrate the completion of the project with the San Diego-Panama-California Exposition in 1915–1916. As part of the exposition’s activities, Tijuana started a Mexican festival, the Feria Típica Mexicana, which offered leisure activities banned in California, prompting

the development of a vast tourist industry across the border.48 In the interview with the owner of Kelly’s Cabaret, mentioned above, Kelly said that he hired young singers and chorus girls through an agency in New York City.49 Many years later, when remembering the popular cabaret he had owned during the 1940s in Mexico City, José Moselo mentioned that artists and women who encouraged patrons to drink had worked in Panama and ended up in Mexico City after residing in Tampico, a city with a large transient population of Mexican and US men attracted by oil fields.50

As a result of these exchanges, a robust cabaret industry flourished in several Latin American and Caribbean cities; often, the borders of respectability were determined by the social status of the clientele, the location of the venue, or the shows offered. In Panama, those considered to be the most respectable opened their doors to Canal Zone officials, foreign diplomats, members of the local elite, tourists, and US military authorities, while less respectable venues were visited by US Army personnel of lesser ranks. Alamo, the cabaret visited by the Mexican diplomats, belonged to the second category.51 Nicole Keusch has explained that globally the status of women in sex markets is defined by markers such as their clientele, age, or appearance “but also by their actual or presumed origin.”52 The way their physical features were perceived created hierarchies used by authorities to stratify the maps of red-light and entertainment districts; in Panama, high-end cabarets privileged “North American performers,” while non-elite cabarets hired entertainers from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Isthmus.53 When the Mexican press covered the migration and possible exploitation of Mexican artists, several stories centered on the national origin and traits of these women, as well as on the causes prompting the demand for their services, blaming these mainly on the perceived taste of US soldiers and sailors, whose race is not discussed in the articles, as they predominantly focused on their nationality.

White Slavery, Brown Skin

Stories related to cabaret artists in Panama and the dangers of forced prostitution appeared in Mexico City’s newspapers and magazines intermittently from 1940 to 1943. At the time, the press reported on prostitutionrelated topics more than before because of the recent repeal of regulated prostitution and well-publicized closures of brothels.54 Under headlines like “Recruited Young Women Go Through an Ordeal in Hands of Iniquitous Exploiters in Panama,” “Trafficking in ‘Artists’ in Panama. The Ministry of Interior Will Investigate,” and “The Business of Hiring ‘Artists’ is Growing,” the press described transnational trafficking in the entertainment industry in an ambivalent way. Although the Mexican press, greatly controlled by the

government at the time, was in an uproar when first reporting on this case, print media presented their analysis of exploitation and “white slavery” from three different angles: the perceived unlikeliness of “white” slavery affecting women with olive skin and black hair; the doubt about the possibility of entertainers being forced into prostitution, since they were already prone to moral corruption; and the legality of the work permits and visas artists could obtain as a result of being unionized.

In explaining the causes for the presence of Mexican dancers in the Canal Zone, stories highlighted that cabaret managers preferred women with a “latino aspect” to women whose appearance was “purely North American,” because the latter would not get the attention nor the money of soldiers and marines.55 Newspapers pointed out that soldiers’ familiarity with women back home—implicitly understood as white—made them less interested in the same when abroad, which prompted a high demand for exotic-looking women, who would be handsomely paid.56 One story, for instance, claimed that women with fair hair had to dye it black in order to be hired because agents were not interested in “blondies,” only “brown-skinned women.”57 According to media, that small but important change in looks would be enough to sell the fantasy. Even when journalists referred repeatedly to women as morenas or prietas (brown- or dark-skinned), the “authentic” Mexican woman represented in mass media or tourist memorabilia had light brown or olive skin. This construction is not accidental. Mestizaje, that is, the racial myth that all Mexicans, as a result of the Conquest, had Indigenous and Spanish blood in equal shares, dominated intellectual, cultural, and governmental discourses after the revolution. This ideology sought to promote unity and erased a vast complexity of racial and ethnic heritage. The embodiment of this idea would be a person with black hair and dark eyes representing Indigenous ancestry and light brown skin representing the fusion of European and Indigenous heritage. In the case of women, long braided hair would be characteristic.58 Mestizaje, along with the colonial past, would pave the way for the pervasive influence of colorism in Mexican society, that is, the preference for lighter skin color, understood as “a form of symbolic capital” able to affect or determine people’s life opportunities.59 In the case of entertainers, this symbolic capital would allow them to be considered for jobs with prefabricated standards of beauty, intended to promote nationalistic representations of Mexicans in the country and abroad.

At the time of the press coverage, skin color had at least two contradictory interpretations. It was an attribute that made the dancers vulnerable to the sexual demands of foreign sailors and soldiers, but it also made them “authentically” Mexican. As such, they deserved empathy and justice. It was also a feature that cast doubt on the veracity of the alleged trafficking claims. A satiric weekly column signed by Carlos Denegri gave readers the

address of the Panamanian consulate and claimed that Eva Pérez Caro “has been associated to the ‘white slavery of brown-skinned women’ to Panama. You do whatever you want to. I am going to 18 Liverpool because, it is said, almost every day beautiful young women get together in that splendid building, direct competitor of certain hotel on Juarez Avenue.”60 This piece did not intend to defend Pérez Caro or to portray the dancers as victims. The often tongue-in-cheek column uses irony and double entendre: Denegri begins by subtly informing readers that located in the same building as the Panamanian consulate were apartments for rent “in case you have a lady you are fond of.” The diplomatic office in which, according to the column, all those beautiful ladies got together would be the headquarters of Eva Pérez Caro and, therefore, an immoral place to bring any woman the reader cared about. In Denegri’s setup, Pérez Caro would not even need to leave the building to hire women to work in Panama, because Panama would literally be next door and the women would come to her on their own. The column even claims that the consulate was a “direct competitor” of what probably was the Regis Hotel, whose lobby and cabaret were known as places of solicitation for foreign women selling sex.61 In the context of satire, the author used the expression “white slavery of brown-skinned women” as an oxymoron: given the color of their skin, they could not be victims of white slavery.62

The contradiction of white slavery affecting brown-skinned women is clearer in a sarcastic fictional story published by a different author in 1943. This little piece belongs to a group of very short stories that used mockery to describe incidents that supposedly happened at police stations. The author uses names clearly invented, such as Guadalupe Navajas (Guadalupe Knives) or Bernabé Pistache (Bernabé Pistachio), and portrays absurd situations with humoristic intent. In one such story, the cabaret worker Martha Sifones (Martha Siphons), tired of being forced to give all her earnings to a pimp named Agustín Cebolla (Agustín Onion), accuses him of “white slave trade.” When the two fictional characters appear before the judge, Agustín asks for a water bucket and a soap bar to wash Martha’s face. After her makeup was removed, Agustín “proved that the fine lady was very darkskinned, therefore, no white slavery can be committed against her.” At the end of the story, the pimp is freed, and his friends prepare a taco feast to celebrate both “his success and wits.”63

By the time of the coverage, the term “white slavery” had been largely replaced by “traffic in women and children.” In 1921, the League of Nations had made the change with the intention of eliminating the racial connotation.64 However, in 1926, federal officials in Mexico from the Departments of Health, Immigration, and Foreign Affairs, still assumed that white slavery involved European women forced into prostitution. Since their records

did not show many foreign women selling sexual services, and since they assumed that women registered in the system of regulated prostitution by their own free will, officers denied the existence of traffic in the country.65 Government projects did not openly encourage migration into Mexico, contrary to practices in countries such as Argentina, thus since Mexico did not receive as many European immigrants as other places in Latin America, local authorities did not consider “white slavery” to have taken place at the time. Two decades later, print media constantly referred to trafficking and prostitution as trata de blancas and to pimps, madams, and procurers as tratantes de blancas. These Spanish terms, that directly translate as “white slavery” and “traders of white women,” appear in a wide range of sources, from sensationalistic stories to official documents and declarations, and they often imply a degree of deceit and coercion to induce a woman to sell sexual services. Trata de blancas could indicate the transnational or local movement of women across countries and states, but it was also used to describe situations in which women stayed in their hometowns. The term stuck, and even nowadays it is common to hear trata de blancas used in colloquial or official language, interchangeably with tráfico de mujeres (traffic in women), to refer to forced prostitution of local or foreign women, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

In the Panama case, deception was discussed in the press with reference not only to the respectability of the artists and their profession but also to the fact that they traveled with legitimate contracts, as well as with visas and travel permits issued by the Mexican government. In its quest to elucidate whether women were actually being exploited and by whom, the press focused attention on paperwork and migration procedures.

The Passports are Correct

When reporting about Alamo cabaret, the diplomats shared their alarm at having seen the members of the troupe, who also belonged to the National Association of Mexican Actors, drinking with clients and leaving the premises only after their companions had paid a fee.66 In their remarks they sought to emphasize a distinction between two types of women who sometimes shared working spaces but did not belong to the same moral category: prostitutes and cabaret performers. The latter, even while receiving more consideration, were still not deemed respectable, because they were considered prone to corruption. The follow-up investigation of the case, as well as the press coverage, proved the capriciousness of authorities and the public with respect to whom they considered victims of trafficking and exploitation. For instance, officials from the Mexican legation in Panama considered it “shameful” that Pía Navarro Garnica, the woman who asked

for protection, had been hired as a dancer and was obliged to act in a way completely unrelated to her profession.67 However, when the entertainers were summoned for an interrogation, the government officials concluded that “whether because of Ms. Perez Caro’s presence . . . or because with time cabaretistas get used to coexistence with the lowest social elements in the place where they perform, most of them seemed to agree with staying in Panama.” The dancers did not deny that they drank with patrons; in fact, they said that they had accepted such impositions from cabaret owners.68 With suspicion, the authorities accepted the women’s declarations as evidence of their own volition, instead of looking into exploitative work conditions or into possible coercion by the director. At the time, the authorities limited their intervention to ensuring Navarro Garnica’s return to Mexico and to investigating migratory documents, particularly a suspicious passport, that turned out to be legitimate.69

In their quest for those responsible for the alleged traffic, print media questioned who was behind the contracts, work permits, and the issuance of passports that allowed women to leave the country. This inquiry lasted just a few weeks, however, before the media directed readers’ attention to elusive foreign characters. The newspaper La Prensa affirmed that contracts like the one for the nightclub Refugio, in Panama City, had a clause that read, “The company will not obligate the artist to socialize with patrons. If she does, it would be by her own free will.” According to the story, the document was endorsed by both the Consulate of Panama in Mexico and the Theater Federation. On top of that, the newspaper continued, the chief of police had issued “a charter of good conduct and morality” to the artists to help get their passports. The contact between the cabaret owner and the entertainers was the Agencia Teatral Panamericana, a theatrical booking agency that had close connections with renowned artists belonging to the National Association of Mexican Actors.70

The burden of responsibility was also put on the artists themselves: some days later, the same newspaper, La Prensa, published a long story in which a foreign couple—the Colombian Ernesto Tanco and his wife, Antonieta Lorca, “the Andalusian doll”—were identified as the main culprits. According to La Prensa, Tanco and Lorca wanted to hire a group of artists for three dollars per day. However, Jorge Mondragón, secretarygeneral of the National Federation of Actors in 1941, “disagreed” with the payment because union bylaws stipulated that unionized artists working abroad should have a daily salary of five dollars. The couple managed to deceptively persuade the women, making them “confront” the secretarygeneral and demand fast approval of their contract. Under such pressure, he consented, “provided that the furious infantry signed a letter stating they were in conformity with the payment.”71 The story ends by reporting

that Eva Pérez Caro had visited the paper’s offices in order to make three clarifications: first, she had a troupe called “Show Eva Pérez Caro,” which had toured the main cities of the continent; second, at great sacrifice she had maintained her show and had never thought to use it to conceal “the white slave trade”; and last, while it was true that she and her troupe had been invited to perform in Panama, she had “categorically” rejected the proposal. “In a few words,” the last paragraph reads, “she is quite apart from what has been published and the alleged accusations.”72

The statement, of course, contrasted with evidence the authorities had gathered just a year earlier. Nonetheless, Pérez Caro was not accused of trafficking, and her career seems not to have been severely affected. Even when some articles like Denegri’s questioned her morals, she continued performing at state-sponsored events, and in 1957, she received a medal for artistic merit from the National Association of Mexican Actors.73 In that same ceremony, the famous actor Mario Moreno (a.k.a. Cantinflas) received an award, and while his name had been mentioned in connection with the trafficking accusations, he was quickly cleared by the press. Moreno was secretary-general of the National Federation of Actors from 1942 to 1944, and his brother was the chief manager of the agency in charge of hiring women; therefore, the two brothers and Pérez Caro were the link between cabaret owners in Panama and the Mexican government. Their names, however, only appeared in the press a few times. For instance, a very short report stated that Moreno had slapped the director of the magazine Diversiones for accusing his union of sending young back-up singers to Panama.74 In the same month, a popular weekly magazine, Detectives, stated that Pérez Caro and Moreno’s brother had nothing to do with the “disgusting white slave trade” that sent entertainers as “gifts” to sailors and soldiers stationed in Panama.75 This lack of accountability may be related to the close connections both Pérez Caro and Mario Moreno had with the state. During his film career, Moreno had his own political aspirations and worked with people at the highest levels of government.76 The acquittal of these characters by the press, as well as the authorities’ failure to investigate them, reveals potential corruption but also conceptions of who was an “ideal” victim of trafficking.

As mentioned above, lead singers, back-up singers, actors, and dancers all worked in cabarets that were regarded as either respectable or places of vice. In Mexico, these places—before and after the end of regulated prostitution—were not subject to the same regulations as brothels.77 Prostitutes also worked in cabarets, drinking and offering sexual services to patrons, and 1940s cinema portrayed cabarets as places of both corruption and redemption for women with a pure heart. However, cabarets could survive and even prosper after the end of regulated prostitution because, unlike brothels, whose main business was selling sex, they offered several varieties

of entertainment. Because of the moral ambiguity of vaudeville shows, some women tried to establish a moral hierarchy in their workplace, their profession, and their attitude toward the audience that would demonstrate the difference between prostitutes and entertainers. The US-born artist Yolanda Montes, artistically known as “Tongolele,” became a superstar dancing in Mexican movies, theaters, and cabarets. In an interview, she remembered her debut in Mexico as something she had experienced with “horror” because it was in a “dark cabaret, ugly, with prostitutes and the like . . . I was used to working with big audiences, in theater.” Men definitely desired her, but she asserted her agency: “From a very young age, I knew what I wanted to do, and most importantly, nobody would force me to do anything I did not want to do.”78 The agency of cabaret workers was indirectly questioned in the press when journalists wondered who had the power and means to stop artists from traveling to cabarets where they could be forced to work as prostitutes for the pleasure of foreign men. The pressure was on the federal government and its perceived ability to stop, if not the exploitation, at least the migration of women to Panama.

The press reported on women traveling using tourist visas, therefore without union protection, probably a requirement to discourage women from migrating or to show that the government was taking some action: it was reported that authorities demanded to see women’s contracts as well as making some other requirements, including a round-trip ticket securing their way home.79 Stories highlighted strict new measures, such as the detention of Mexican artists at migration stations in Panama for not having proper documentation80 or the government denying permits to leave Mexico.81 The pressure for an official response grew to the point that a representative of the secretary of foreign relations had to issue a public declaration to the press. According to the statement, the ministry had no responsibility regarding illegal practices like the “white slave trade,” because it had not issued documents under disreputable conditions. On the contrary, denying passports to women who met all the requirements would constitute a grave liability. It clarified that maintaining strict control over entertainers hired to work in the Canal Zone, as some had suggested, was not part of the ministry’s functions. In the event of breach of contract or abuses in the workplace, entertainers must directly ask for the intervention of the union and labor authorities, because the secretary was not bound to proceed with his own motions against these infringements. The representative closed his remarks by assuring his audience that at the time the ministry had no records of any formal complaint.82

With these statements, authorities used the identity of entertainers as workers to place responsibility for labor conditions on the workers themselves. Thus, unionized cabaret artists should not be denied travel

documents, but once abroad, if they were victims of forced prostitution, the government would extend protection upon a specific request. From this perspective, artists were to blame for the kind of job they chose to perform, and their contracts would constitute an implied acceptance of their workplace environment; the only victims worthy of protection would be those who managed to contact the authorities about leaving the country. Therefore, staying at the cabaret was seen as a sign of the woman’s own volition, not exploitation.

In 1943, US authorities in the Canal Zone pressured Panamanian officials to make changes to prophylactic measures that had long exempted foreign cabaret artists from gynecological check-ups.83 Mexican authorities were informed that in the light of the “alarming” increase in venereal diseases, all women working in cabarets must undergo medical examinations. The head of the Mexican legation in Panama reported that a large percentage of women had refused to accept the new measures, arguing that they compromised the reputation of both married women and “señoritas.”84 This defense, while brief, is based on powerful constructs about respectability, as the artists were using “señoritas” with a specific connotation. In Mexico, the word is used to describe women who are both single and virgins, so that a gynecological inspection would be unnecessary and shameful. A similar logic worked for those who sought to defend their reputation as married women. Marriage, a legal union, vouched for the women’s proper behavior, because it was understood that men mainly married women worthy of respect, who could potentially mother their children. The cabaret artist Yolanda Montes, “Tongolele,” for instance, remembered that people reacted positively to her becoming a mother in 1950: “It was exceptional. They adored me more than before, I was purified, divine as a “señora” [married woman]. Childbirth took away from me a certain ‘diabolic’ halo.”85

A few days after receiving notification of the concerns of Mexican cabaret workers in Panama, the secretary of foreign relations sent back an unyielding response: “If, as is to be supposed, prophylactic measures are going to be . . . applied without distinction, you should intervene only in those cases of honorable Mexicans who prefer to quit their job or to leave the country.”86 In light of the new measures, the government decided not to intervene in foreign policies, defining with this decision who would be worthy of protection: women who in order to safeguard their reputation would rather stop working as entertainers for cabaret spectacles, or who would decide to return home. Ignoring the possibility of coercion or exploitative work relations, the Mexican government assumed that the one who stayed did so willingly. The entertainers were not complaining of trafficking, but the new measures directly affected their working conditions, and it seems that neither their union nor the authorities got involved. This decision contrasts

with the aggressive campaign authorities were conducting against brothels at the time. In Mexico as in Panama, cabaret workers, as artists, were not subject to the system of regulated prostitution and thus were not required to undergo weekly health inspections. With the new measures in Panama, cabaret workers there would be subject to compulsory examinations that the Mexican federal government had recently revoked for women who sold sex in their home country, and would be labeled as prostitutes. The Panama story gradually disappeared from the press, and names of alleged traffickers, foreign and local, were no longer mentioned.87

Conclusions

The case of the Mexican dancers reveals specific interactions between local and transnational processes in which the interpretations of trafficking—or white slavery, as it was widely referred to in Mexico—differed. Discourses about trafficking in women prompted the closure of brothels in several cities in the name of combating sexual exploitation, but ignored exploitation in other forms. Even when cabaret artists could have faced abuses in their workplaces, Mexican authorities did not consider artists in Panama to be victims of trafficking, because as unionized workers they traveled with proper documentation, so there was no illegal action to prosecute. The press, for its part, also questioned whether brown-skinned women could be victims of “white slavery.” In journalistic articles, entertainers often embodied contradictory identities: ambitious or naive, olive-skinned authentic Mexicans in need of protection from the sexual appetites of US military men, or improbable victims of the “white slave trade” because of their skin color. The word artist often was written in quotation marks to emphasize that their performances were not serious artistic ones and that their job probably was not even a profession. These ambiguous cultural conceptions of cabaret entertainers as potential sex workers shaped the stand authorities took in this regard: staying in Panama would ultimately be an individual decision and therefore would not call for state intervention. The voices of the dancers in Panama are the missing link in this story, as they appeared only twice in official documents: once when officials interviewed Pérez Caro’s troupe in 1940, and again when they reported new measures affecting them. Nor are their voices found in the press. None of the sources used for this article make clear how these women would define exploitation. The only time cabaret workers asked for diplomatic intervention against gynecological examinations, officials were unable to define a strategy to protect them as workers in another country. Their identity as hired workers in a profession at the edge of morality made them unlikely victims of trafficking in the eyes of the government authorities, who decided

not to intervene when a foreign administration enacted rules to perform examinations on the bodies of Mexican women. While those rules would establish a system of regulated prostitution involving migrants, it would not be considered a source of trafficking by US authorities, but a necessary measure for the protection of their troops. Cabaret entertainers navigated working conditions, changing legislation, and borders. Their bodies were at the core of multiple debates, and even when their opinions were not asked for or recorded, their experiences were central for the construction of ideas about trafficking in the first half of the twentieth century.

Notes

1At the time, Mexico did not have an embassy in Panama. The group of officials who represented the country worked in a legation, which is a representative of lower rank than an embassy. 2Ignacio D. Silva and Manuel Hernández Velarde, “Carta al Ministro,” 1940, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City (hereafter AHGESRE), III/591.3(66.13)/12529. 3Ernesto Hidalgo, “Carta al Ministro,” 1940, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529. 4“Se han Presentado a la Legación de México,” 1940, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

5Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 6Discourses of trafficking and the transnational entertainment industry remain to be studied. Two well-documented articles are Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America,” in “Mediating Labour: Worldwide Labour Intermediation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” ed. Ulbe Bosma, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Aditya Sarkar, special issue, International Review of Social History 52 (2002): 129–160; 137; and Paul Knepper, “The ‘White Slave Trade’ and the Musk Affair in 1930’s Malta,” Journal of Contemporary History, 44, no. 2 (2009): 205–220.

7League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children, Part I (Geneva, 1927), 29.

8Pamela J. Fuentes, “The Oldest Professions in Revolutionary Times: Madames, Pimps, and Prostitution in Mexico City, 1920–1952” (PhD diss., York University, 2015).

9League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, 9.

10Donna Guy, White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress in Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Guy, Sex and Gender in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family,

and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Liat Kozma, “Women’s Migration for Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East and North Africa,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 93–113; Nicole Keusch, “Migration and Prostitution,” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s, ed. Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma Van Voss, and Elise Van Nederveen Meerkerk (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 707–729.

11League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, 19–20.

12League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, 20

13Paul Kinsie, Trafficking in Women 1924–1926: The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations, ed. Jean-Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodríguez García, and Paul Servais, 2 vols. (Geneva: United Nations, 2017), 1:100–101.

14Schetinni, “South American Tours,” 137.

15Marion Pluskota, “We Use Our Bodies to Work Hard, So We Need to Get Legitimate Workers’ Rights,” in Rodríguez García, Heerma Van Voss, and Van Nederveen Meerkerk, Selling Sex in the City, 622.

16Carlos Medina Caracheo, “El Club de Medianoche Waikikí: Un cabaret de época en la Ciudad de México, 1935–1954” (masters thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010), 25; Sophia Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable: The Social and Cultural History of Cabarets in Mexico City (1920–1965)” (PhD diss., York University, 2010), 66.

17Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable,” 72. 18Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable,” 51. 19Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable,” 54; Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 200. 20Medina Caracheo, “El Club de Medianoche Waikikí,” 39.

21Guy, White Slavery and Mothers, 23.

22Guy, “Sex and Gender.” 23Keusch, “Migration and Prostitution,” 711. 24Silva and Hernández Velarde, “Carta al Ministro,” 1940, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

25On the League of Nations and international crime, see Paul Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

26Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares y estereotipos nacionales y estereotipos culturales en México (Mexico City, Mexico: CIESAS, 2007), 268.

27María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La china mexicana, mejor conocida como china poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 125–129.

28Vázquez Mantecón, “La china mexicana,” 135; Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares, 136–137. 29Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares, 287; Amelia Kiddle, “Cabaretistas and Indias Bonitas: Gender and Representations of Mexico in the Americas during the Cárdenas Era,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 2 (2010): 263–291; 277. 30Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares, 138. 31“Tratará de extender Colombia el espíritu de la Revolución Mexicana,” El Nacional, July 13, 1934, sec. 1, p. 2; Kiddle, “Cabaretistas and Indias Bonitas,” 277–279, Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares, 268–269. 32Kiddle, “Cabaretistas and Indias Bonitas,” 277.

33El Porvenir, July 28, 1934, 8. 34Silva and Hernández Velarde, “Carta al Ministro,” AHGESRE, 1940, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

35Blake C. Scott, “Tourism in the History of U.S. Relations,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1. See also Scott, “From Disease to Desire: The Rise of Tourism in the Panama Canal,” Environmental History 21, no. 1 (2016): 67–74. 36Eric M. Schantz, “Behind the Noir Border,” in Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters, ed. Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 131–160; Vincent Cabeza de Baca and Juan Cabeza de Baca, “The ‘Shame Suicides’ and Tijuana,” in On the Border: Society and Culture between the U.S. and Mexico, ed. Andrew Grant Wood (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 145–176. 37Jeffrey Parker, “Empire’s Angst: The Politics of Race, Migration, and Sex Work in Panama, 1903–1945” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2013), 34. 38Jeffrey Parker, “Sex Work on the Isthmus of Panama,” in Kinsie, Trafficking in Women, 1924–1926, 2: 166–167.

39José Guillermo Lewis, “Informe de Panamá,” Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana 7, no. 1 (1928): 217–219; 217.

40Parker, “Sex Work on the Isthmus of Panama,” 167.

41United States Army, Caribbean Defense Command, Panama Canal Department, Historical Section, Control of Venereal Disease and Prostitution (1947), microfilm, Library of Congress. I am grateful to Donna Guy for access to this source and also to Jessica Pliley for facilitating this communication. 42United States Army, Control of Venereal Disease and Prostitution, 9, 36.

43United States Army, Control of Venereal Disease and Prostitution, 13. 44United States Army, Control of Venereal Disease and Prostitution, 13, 38. 45Parker, “Empire’s Angst,”194. 46Parker, “Empire’s Angst ,”194–195. 47Parker, “Empire’s Angst,” 193–196. 48Marco Antonio Samaniego López, Los gobiernos civiles en Baja California, 1920–1923: Un estudio sobre la relación entre los poderes local y federal (Mexicali, Mexico: Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, 1998), 55.

49Kinsie, Trafficking in Women 1924–1926, 1:100.

50Medina Caracheo, “El Club de Medianoche Waikikí,” 35, 51.

51Parker, “Sex Work on the Isthmus of Panama,” 169.

52Keusch, “Migration and Prostitution,” 724. 53Parker, “Sex Work on the Isthmus of Panama,” 169.

54For a detailed account of this process, see Bliss, Compromised Positions; and Fuentes, “Oldest Professions in Revolutionary Times.” 55“La policía investiga el caso de los contratos de artistas para Panamá,” La Prensa, July 28, 1942, 25. 56“Salen mujeres para Panamá pero van sin garantías,” Novedades, August 3, 1942, 11; Luis del Oro, “La escandalosa trata de blancas que salen para Panamá que vienen siendo víctimas nuestras vice tiples y hasta nuestras falenas profesionales,” Detectives, no. 533 (16 November 1942): 3, 16; 16; “La Trata de ‘Artistas’ en Panamá,” 12 May 1943, Colección Recortes, Biblioteca Lerdo, Mexico City. 57“Las muchachas que van enganchadas a Panamá pasan horrible calvario a manos de inicuos explotadores,” La Prensa, 30 July 1942, 3. 58On hair and nationalism, see Anne Rubenstein, “The War on Las Pelonas: Modern Women and Their Enemies, Mexico City, 1924,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Gabriela Cano, and Mary Kay Vaughan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): 57–80. 59Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners,” Gender and Society 22, no. 3 (2008): 281–302; 281-282.

60Denegri, “Zig-Zag,” Jueves de Excelsior, November 12, 1942, 8. 61Mexico City, D.F., Mexico, Dec. 5–10, 1924, Traffic in Women and Children, Open Market-Houses of Prostitution, League of Nations Archives, Geneva, Dossier S171, Box S177, File: Mexico.

62Denegri, “Zig-Zag,” Jueves de Excelsior, November 19, 1942, 8. 63Pepe M. de la V, “La culpa fue mía,” Jueves de Excelsior, June 1, 1943, 14. 64Magaly Rodríguez García, “La Société des Nations face à la Traite des Femmes et au Travail Sexuel à l’échelle mondiale,” Le Mouvement Social 241 (October–December 2002): 109–129; 109.

65Kinsie, Trafficking in Women 1924–1926, 1: 461–468.

66Silva and Hernández Velarde, “Carta al Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores,” AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

67Alfonso de Rosenzweig Díaz, “Carta al Ministro,” July 11, 1940, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

68“Carta al Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, Asunto: Trata de Blancas,” July 23, 1940, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529. 69“Se Han Presentado a la Legación,” 22 July 1940; Manuel Tello to head of the Consular Department, 31 July 1940; Mauel Tello, “Carta al Ministro,” 31 July 1940; Manuel R. Cortes, memorandum, August 8, 1940, all in AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

70“La policía investiga el caso de los contratos de artistas para Panamá,” 25. 71“Las muchachas que van enganchadas a Panamá,” 13, 2–13. 72“Las muchachas que van enganchadas a Panamá,” 13. 73Some examples of articles questioning Pérez Caro’s morality are “La artista Eva Pérez Caro es acusada por robo,” El Nacional, November 28, 1945, sec. 2, p. 4; V.V., “Film de la semana,” Mañana, September 10, 1949, 153; and Denegri, “Zig-Zag,” Jueves de Excelsior, November 12, 1942, 8. She performed, for instance, in an event to promote the presidential campaign of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, president of Mexico from 1952 to 1958. “La gran fiesta del pueblo mexicano en honor a su candidato a la presidencia de la República,” El Nacional, 28 June 1952, 3. Regarding the ceremony in which she received the medal, see “Fue recordado el IV aniversario de la muerte de Jorge Negrete,” El Nacional, December 6, 1957, 5. 74“Noticias cortas,” El Porvenir, November 27, 1942, 2.

75Del Oro, “La escandalosa trata de blancas,” 3.

76See Ilan Stavans, “The Riddle of Cantinflas,” Transition, no. 67 (1995): 22–46; and Jeffrey Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 77For a detailed account of cabarets in Mexico in the 1940s, see Koutsoyannis, “Immoral but Profitable.” 78Cristina Pacheco, Los dueños de la noche (Mexico City, Mexico: Plaza y Janes, 2001), 27, 29, 31.

79“Salen mujeres a Panamá,” 11.

80“Las artistas que fueron llevadas a Panamá están detenidas en inmigración,” La Prensa, August 24, 1942, 2, 20. 81“El escandaloso enganche de artistas para cabarets de Panamá continúa,” La Prensa, September 21, 1942, 2, 29; “No saldrán más artistas a Panamá,” El Informador, November 5, 1942, 6.

82“Son correctos los pasaportes que se han expedido,” Novedades, October 27, 1942, 7.

83Parker, “Empire’s Angst,” 145–235, 269.

84Telegrams “Complemento del mensaje que la oficina de Panamá transmitió mutilado el día 4 de junio de 1943,” 13 June 1943; and “Memorandum,” 16 June 1943, AHSRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

85Pacheco, Dueños de la noche, 31.

86“Para Cifrar,” June 17, 1943, AHGESRE, III/591.3(66.13)/12529.

87“Crece el negocio de contratar a las ‘artistas,’” June 9, 1943, Colección Recortes, Biblioteca Lerdo, Mexico City.