UC Santa Cruz

Living Openly and Notoriously explores the intersection of federal immigration control and state efforts to control women’s sexuality in the United States. To interrogate, surveil, detain, and deport immigrant women for prostitution, officials at New York’s Ellis Island, San Francisco, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed new sexual policing techniques. Yet, this new federal apparatus proved ineffective to deport Asian, Mexican, and European immigrant women. Living Openly and Notoriously examines this disruption of sexual policing. I argue that immigrant women successfully evaded the federal apparatus by migrating covertly across municipal, state, and international borders, thus outpacing state and national officials’ efforts to detain and deport them. Although collaborations between local police authorities, the courts, and citizen activists expanded the federal government’s reach through what I call a coalitional state, these partnerships did not serve to control or protect immigrant women. By 1924, a comprehensive carceral system against certain sexual practices severely affected immigrant women’s lives, but it did not reduce incidence of prostitution. The Bureau of Immigration’s failed initiative to contain prostitution from 1852 to 1924 calls into question claims made today that international, national, and non-profit organizations can reduce sex commerce (or what others have conflated as “human trafficking”) to protect immigrant women.