“The Worse Element”

Abstract

This article offers an example of how the convergence of discourses on “white slavery” and social hygiene led to the disproportionate criminalization, displacement, and detention of Black sex workers by authorities in early twentieth-century San Diego. The city’s large military presence, proximity to the US-Mexico border, and interracial sociality (between white, immigrant, and nonwhite communities) led to the regulation of its interracial sex tourism industry. As the city prepared for its first major military project, the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, public health officials demolished tenement housing for plumbing violations and followed with the compulsory quarantining of sex workers, couched in concerns about venereal disease. The sexual policing of Black sex workers by local, state, and military authorities was underpinned by discourses that imagined Black women as risks to public health and white women’s virtue in the US-Mexico border town.