Jose Pais: Whores and mothers in Bragança

A rich and sensitive sociological analysis of the intersections of sex and money, in the contexts of traditional family expectations and the conflicting desire for freedom in a rapidly changing world. Mothers on both sides of the conflict; male bonding and male secrecy. 

In 2003 the cover of Time magazine featured a story about a small town in Portugal, population 30,000, where a group of local women calling themselves the Mothers of Braganca were demanding, through petitions to the police, the church and in the media, the expulsion of the estimated 300 Brazilian prostitutes working there. The article led to an exodus of the Brazilian women, mostly to nearby towns in Spain, and the prosecution of a number of brothel owners. In short, an ideal story for tabloid newspapers, with a 'happy ending' for the self-styled 'Mothers', instead of the clients.

Jose Machado Pais is Research Coordinator at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, author of over 40 books, awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Social Sciences in 2003. He was fascinated by the story and spent two years investigating, talking to the sex-workers, the mothers, the clients and the club-owners.

His analysis was published in April as a book Enredos Sexuais, Tradi,iio e Mudan,a (Sexual networks, Tradition and Change,) by Imprensa de Ciencias Sociais, Lisbon, and it provides a rare opportunity to understand prostitution in its social and historical context, instead of through the lens of pre-conceived morality. In his conclusions he says "Life is a woven cloth in which the threads of cultural legacies are crossed by those of life opportunities and personal discoveries". The case of the sex workers and the Maes de Braganca thus becomes a means to study how change impacts on tradition in the field of sexuality, always a place of struggle between the personal and the social, where the social is both inside and outside of the living players.

And the same is true of the parallel economic discourse, where sex, satisfaction, self-expression are traded for the money that can support one family, but at the expense of another. It is impossible in a short article to do justice to this rich and humane work of sociology, which speaks about sexual relations in a much wider context than one small town in Portugal, and it seemed better to ask the author to respond to some questions. English-speaking readers can consult his 2011 article "Mothers, whores and spells: Tradition and change in Portuguese sexuality", which was published in the journal Ethnography, vol. XXII, number 4: 445-465.

This interview was published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on 17 October 2016 and re-published here:

https://theprisma.co.uk/2024/04/01/jose-pais-prostitutes-and-mothers-in-braganca/