Anne Hayes’s work offers us an interesting look at prostitution in the periphery of Costa Rica. She focuses on the port Puntarenas during the years 1880 to 1930 as a way to explore questions of liberalism, development, reformism, labor, gender, and Costa Rican “exceptionalism.” Hayes argues persuasively that the liberal state did not target prostitutes for moral reform in the periphery as they did in the central plateau and the capital of San José. Hayes is able to question the centrality of “la buena sociedad cafetelera” (the good coffee society — the upper class who derived their income from coffee), in the development of Costa Rican liberalism. Hayes’s focus on the periphery allows us to see the contradictions, especially regarding labor, in the liberal model.
Hayes’s study argues that because of Puntarenas’s location and economic importance to the government, prostitution became labeled as work rather than deviance. The government relied...
