Impure Migration

the long version

"Historians are fascinated by the ways migrants build and use networks to facilitate migration across the Atlantic. However, scholars have only recently interrogated prostitution and sex work as a means to migrate. This book addresses this gap, investigating the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jewish people displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries. Complicating this picture, men and women from the mainstream Argentinian Jewish community furiously resisted association with sex workers, actively distancing themselves from "tmeim" (impure) pimps and prostitutes. Mirroring international anti-prostitution rhetoric, these activists worked to disrupt or end the trade in Buenos Aires. Ultimately, the actions, strategies, and institutions of both prostitutes and anti-prostitution activists fundamentally shaped the international and the Argentine Jewish community in the early twentieth century. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality"--