Lugares de mal vivir : Una historia cultural de los prostíbulos de Buenos Aires (1875-1936)

Abstract

The object of study of this book is the Buenos Aires brothel which, during the period of tolerance that runs from 1875 to 1936, was dispersed, changed, and reconfigured several times. The purpose is to explain how and why that brothel, as one of the most emblematic spaces of the marginal universe of the city, paradoxically occupied a central place in the culture of those years. Urban growth, the development and widening of streets and squares, have practically erased all traces of the buildings and spaces that, in general, made up the brothel environment of Buenos Aires before reaching the first half of the 20th century. What remain are the stories, the chronicles. We have some sources that recover many voices, but almost never that of the prostituted woman. It is those stories that speak of the misery of a city and its society, of its power and of its night, that this book seeks to explore. It is something of that fragmented and diffuse universe that these pages attempt to reconstruct.