James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homesexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Univ of Chicago, 1999).
Annotation: This is a holistic account of the rise of a homosexuality identity in Brazil and official attempts to define and contain male homosexuality in Brazil.
Peter M. Beattie, “Conflicting penile codes: modern masculinity and sodomy in the Brazilian military, 1860-1916,” in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. by Donna Guy and Daniel Balderson, (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 65-85.
Annotation: Looks at attitudes toward sodomy in the military. As part of German-influenced reform, the army sought to make itself an honorable place “unencumbered with innuendos of deviance.” Homosexual relations, if a sin, were not a state or army problem so long as they remained private and consensual, but demanded intervention if they involved force or public displays.
Susan K. Besse, “Crimes of passion: the campaign against wife-killing in Brazil, 1910-1940”, Journal of Social History 22:4, (Summer 1989); 653-666.
Annotation: Argues that middle-class reformers’ desire to impose modern, hygienic standards of sex and family life and to legitimate hierarchical nuclear family lay behind campaign to punish wife-killers. Analysis is qualitative rather than quantitative. [Matthews, below, has a chapter on wife-killing, I believe]
Eileen J. Findlay, “Decency and Democracy: The Politics of Prostitution in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1890-1900” Feminist Studies 23:3 (1997); 471-99.
Annotation: Clever argument draws parallels between advances of political democracy and repression of notions of gender and class equality. The regulation of prostitution, author contends, served the interests of the Partido Liberal Autonomista de Puerto Rico by bringing together feminists and urban male workers in a not entirely coherent, yet binding, discourse of decency and morality. The Ponce campaign to control “scandalous women” went hand-in-hand with political schemes to shape the “great Puerto Rican family.”
David McCreery, “This Life of Misery and Shame”: Female Prostitution in Guatamala, 1880-1920,” Journal of Latin American Studies 18:2 (1986); 333-53.
Annotation: Documents increase in prostitution in Guatemala City concomitant with expansion of agroexport-based economy. State institutionalized and regulated prostitution beginning in 1880s.
Martin Nesvig, “The Lure of the Perverse: Moral Negotiation of Pederasty in Porfirian Mexico,” Mexican Studies 16:1 (2000); 1-37.
Annotation: This article examines the dynamic relationship between a criminologist, Carlos Roumagnac, and the inmates that he interviewed in the large Mexico City prison, Belem, in the first decade of the twentieth century. In particular the piece delves into the way that pederasty, or male homosexuality, was discussed in these interviews, revealing the ways in which Mexican men understood homosexuality as morally unseemly but acceptable if left unspoken. The article concludes with some suggestions about the difficulties encompassed in the history of (homo)-sexuality.
Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, “Tales of Two Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,” The Americas 55:3 (1999): 391-424.
Annotation: Looks at a famous murder case in Mexico at same time as that of Guerrero, the accused María Villa was a prostitute. She is studied by Roumagnac in the Belem penitentiary, and he shows much more interest in her sexuality than he did with Guerrero.
Kristin Ruggiero, “Passion, Perversity, and the Pace of Justice in Argentina at the Turn of the Century,” in Crime and Punishment in LAtin America Gilbert Joseph, Ricardo Salvatore, and Carlos Aguirre, eds. (Duke Univeristy Press: 2020): 211-232.
Annotation: This chapter explores how “passion” was understood as a medical condition, which in turn made it an extenuating circumastance in criminal casesin late-nineteenth century Argentina. Ruggiero explores this in practice and the law.
Michael Matthews, Sex and Love in Portifian Mexico City: A Social History of working-class Courtship (Univ of Florida, 2025).
Annotation: Matthews argues that lower-class individuals had more liberated sexual lives than their wealthier counterparts, influenced by the city’s growth and cultural changes. In this book, Matthews examines how Mexico City’s expanding infrastructure, increasing factory work, and new leisure and entertainment activities shaped courtship and sexual practices. He delves into the world of tenement buildings and street life to reconstruct days defined by love and desire, romance and rape, seduction and sex work, and promises kept and broken.
Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prosition, Family, and Nation in Argnetina (Univ of Nebraska, 1991).
Víctor M Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein, eds., Masculinty and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, (Univ. of New Mexico, 2012).
Chapters include the following titles.