Prostitución, honor y cambio cultural en la provincia de San José de Costa Rica

This work of social history seen from below is about women with stigmatized social identity who, along with other marginalized people and criminals, have usually been forgotten by traditional historiography. The theoretically and methodologically solid study of the province of San José between 1860 and 1949 is based on primary sources from newspapers and archives and a broad knowledge of literature produced in Europe and the United States that analyzes prostitution. This book, by Juan José Marín Hernández, received the Costa Rican Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría for history in 2007.Marin’s work does not entail moral or feminist dogmas. This allows the reader to understand the social phenomenon of prostitution from the perspective of social control. Starting from social control conceived as a social and cultural fact, it is possible to understand the mechanisms through which socially dominant groups establish basic control devices over prostitution as a social practice and over the social actors that are directly or indirectly related to it, such as the prostitutes and their clients, members of their communities, as well as medical doctors, lawyers, and police officers.Social control is not only a process imposed from above. The responses of popular groups are also important in this analysis, which mainly focuses on the relevance of their experiences and the cumulative cultural background that is valued in the light of everyday life and the thoughts of the community. The responses of popular groups in the end make up a collection of informal social-control mechanisms that cannot be ignored by dominant groups in their projects aimed at civilizing and changing the culture of popular groups. In consequence, the work deeply studies the function of the communities during projects intended to be imposed from above.The work goes far beyond those positions that see prostitution as pathology, a deviation, or a result of social anomalies. It also improves on approaches that blame prostitution on financial issues, more specifically on poverty, in order to attach importance to spaces and sociability networks, the family circle, job options for women, and ethnic and class jurisdiction, among other factors. Marín’s work evidences the plurality in the world of prostitution, where the different ways to represent prostitutes in a social environment affect the treatment they receive, with censorship and tolerance as the extreme limits.Content analysis, the case study, and prosopography are the main methodological supports of this research divided into six clearly delimited chapters. In the first chapter, the reader will find a contextualization of the changing economic, cultural, and social environments in San José during the period of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the analysis of penal codes, which, according to the author, have great influence on control systems and social justice. The third chapter focuses on informal mechanisms of social control and their dynamic relationship with the formal ones discussed in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 looks more deeply into the aforementioned relationship, emphasizing the connection between formal and informal social control, with the aim of clarifying the different symbolic aspects developed around prostitution. Chapter 5 centers on everyday life, evidencing the interest in valuing the impact of the different discourses on prostitution, on the prostitutes’ lives, and their adopted resistance strategies. The last chapter, more than a section of general conclusions, is an interesting proposal with regard to the structuring of social control in the space and time considered in this analysis.In summary, Marín’s work is an invitation to continue to research this topic from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, not only in the regional Costa Rican environment but in all Central America. This study on prostitution and socially marginalized groups should not be disdained by any professional in history who wishes to contribute to the construction of an improved society

Art · Geography · Honor · Humanities · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · Sex work and related issues

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