Female Prostitution in Guatemala City and the Transnational Surveillance of Venereal Diseases, 1880s-1950s
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Herrera, Alex
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 17, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Amy Greenberg, Program Head/Chair
Alicia Decker, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Cathleen Cahill, Outside Field Member
Christopher Heaney, Major Field Member
Martha Few, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Judith Sierra-Rivera, Outside Unit & Minor Member - Keywords:
- Guatemala
Latin American History
Women's Studies
History of Medicine
History of Public Health
Guatemala City - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the seventy-year fight against the spread of prostitution and venereal diseases in Guatemala City from the 1880s to the 1950s. Guatemala’s concerns about prostitution and venereal diseases were part of larger international concerns about migration, racial mixing, and how diseases affected the success of colonial and imperial nation-building in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While geographically located in Guatemala, this dissertation explores how the migration of people and thoughts shaped ideas about female bodies, sexuality, labor, constructions of race, and scientific racial difference. I argue that Guatemala has always been a location for creating and disseminating medical knowledge. Guatemalan medical elites constructed their own understandings of venereal disease pathology through local research and involvement in the international medical community. Using a feminist lens, I analyze seemingly formulaic documents such as prostitute registration books, criminal codes, medical and public health reports, hospital documents, newspaper articles, and period-specific medical research for the experiences of sex workers working in Guatemala City and the thoughts and beliefs of the city, government, and medical officials who targeted sex workers to stop the spread of venereal disease. This research demonstrates that Indigenous and mixed-race women have historically constituted a significant population of women selling sex in Guatemala City. Ultimately, the Guatemalan state’s dedication to surveilling Indigenous and mixed-race women’s bodies constructed them as “viable” test subjects for non-consensual, unethical medical research on venereal diseases during the Guatemalan syphilis experiments (1946-1948).