“For the Brunettes the Price to Be Paid Would Be Paid”: Discourses about Trafficking, Mexican Dancers, and Cabarets in the Panama Canal Zone during the 1940s

This presentation explores a story that appeared in various Mexican newspapers and magazines from 1940 to 1943: alleged traffickers of women were transporting Mexican professional dancers to the Panama Canal Zone, not only for work in cabaret shows but also to offer sexual services to U.S. marines and soldiers. This case reveals how mid-century Mexicans understood trafficking through intertwined notions of ethnicity, nationalism, and gender. I show how the lingering concept of “white slavery,” which traditionally referenced the migration and sexual exploitation of European women, combined with the national discourse of mestizaje, or racial mixing. According to mestizaje, the blending of indigenous and European racial inheritance gave rise to the nationalistic myth of a “bronze race,” which envisioned “real” Mexican women with olive (or bronze) skin, black hair, and brown eyes. Especially after the Revolution of 1910, when ideas about a unified Mexican identity gained ideological importance, both the Mexican government and the press addressed prostitution and alleged trafficking in women through the lens of both mestizaje and white slavery.

Because the Mexican press equated trafficking with “white slavery,” it mocked reports that Mexican women had been forced into prostitution. Instead, the press highlighted how US soldiers desired women with particular ethnic traits, like black hair and olive skin, and thus demand augmented this traditional migratory pattern between Mexico and the Panama Canal Zone. Newspapers also pointed to the fact that the Mexican government had issued women’s work permits legally, and to the ambiguous respectability of women who worked in cabarets. In sum, the press questioned whether these cases entailed “forced” prostitution, denying the possibility that white slavery could affect swarthy women.