UCLA

This dissertation explores the particularly prominent role of Jews in coercive sex trafficking, then called white slavery in Buenos Aires when it was considered to be the world capital. The project aims to de-exoticize the subject by comparing Jewish pimps and prostitutes to other immigrants, grounding them in the neighborhoods they lived in, exploring the concrete concerns of their opponents, and connecting the broader discourses around these issues to transnational conversations about migration, sexuality, and the significance of race, ethnicity, and nationhood - the establishment of the boundaries of whiteness - in the furor around white slavery. I introduce new evidence about the Zwi Migdal Society (also called the Varsovia Society), a powerful mutual aid and burial association of Jewish pimps based in the Argentine capital. Ostracized by the nascent Argentine Jewish community, the Zwi Migdal Society nonetheless developed the same communal structures as those found in conventional voluntary immigrant associations: a burial society, a synagogue, health benefits, and peer recognition. My archival discoveries underline the significance of this battle to the local Jewish community's centralization and the shifting international articulation of norms around morality, marriage, family, and labor, and develop a history that opens into larger issues of migration, identity, women's agency and transatlantic politics. Based on archival research in Buenos Aires, Geneva, New York, London, and Southampton, this project builds upon previous scholarship through new archival discoveries and close analysis of local and international press.