We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies. Dispatched from the UK in 4 business days When will my order arrive? Stephen Kinzer. Jorge I. Merilee S. Victor Bulmer-Thomas.
James E. Earl E. Nora Glickman. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. Vania Markarian. Peter Lambert. Eduardo Posada-Carbo. Asuncion Lavrin. Walter Little. Bestselling Series. Harry Potter. Popular Features. New Releases. Free delivery worldwide. Description This book analyzes the development of female prostitution in the Pacific port of Puntarenas, Costa Rica during the advanced stage of the coffee exporting economy , at the height of the consolidation of the liberal state.
Hayes argues that prostitution in the port differed from that of the coffee producing highlands due to differential economic, social, and political development. In the periphery of Puntarenas, the development of prostitution reflected a less stigmatized view of sexual commerce than that of the highlands, where prostitution, although legal, threatened the tenets of liberal nationalism based on racial homogeneity and family values.
Women of the highlands were encouraged to reproduce the nation's "more European" stock of workers and to ensure the legal transference of property through legal church marriages - both part of a design to stabilize the coffee exporting project.
By contrast, prostitutes and other working women of Puntarenas, many immigrants from the "less European" populations of neighboring regions and most in concubinage, were freer to do what the law prescribed - register as prostitutes in legitimate trade. Such regional disparities reveal weaknesses in traditional explanations of Costa Rican exceptionalism, which have rested on the premise of cultural homogeneity and have reflected the realities of only one region of the country.
