Sex, Work, and Return Migration from the Americas to France

This paper contributes to recent work on return migration through the lens of the early twentieth-century debate on the “traffic in women.” It examines working-class women’s requests for repatriation, correspondence between overseas consulates and migrants’ families, and the role of shipping companies and expatriate benevolent societies in facilitating the return to France. The Consulate was the primary intermediary through which repatriation was facilitated or denied: impoverished migrants pled their case to consular officials, concerned family members wrote to inquire about missing daughters and nieces, and fundraising efforts were coordinated to provide for the migrant’s journey home. Repatriation requests appear in French Consular records as cases of trafficking because the labor these women performed in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or New York was indeed sex work, or because it was associated with prostitution, as with cabaret performers and other artists. An analysis of these migrants’ stories – along with consular, police, and community commentary on the dossiers – reveals the nebulous border between licit and illicit labor, and between sex work and other forms of intimate labor.

If deportation provides one critical perspective on the development of migration control in the modern era, repatriation – or the voluntary return to one’s country of origin – differently elucidates ideas about freedom of movement, migrant “illegality,” and the rights and protections afforded by nationality and citizenship status. In cases of alleged trafficking, requests for repatriation moreover reveal the overlapping frames of legal and gendered constructions of vulnerability, evidenced in appeals to female victimhood and demands for familial and state protection of young women and girls. All of this served to concretize the distinction between deserving migrants, worthy of state protection, and those whose mobility was considered irredeemably illicit.