This chapter considers the context in which Lima’s barrio rojo or red-light district was established in 1928. The decision by Lima’s prefect to establish a red-light district in La Victoria, a peripheral part of Lima (geographically and socially), was a response to growing pressure from Lima’s citizens who, particularly in the 1920s, complained of the danger that the proximity and visibility of prostitutes, both clandestine and registered, represented to decency and morality. Such complaints reveal a growing anxiety over the moral contagion that could result from the proximity of prostitutes, an anxiety that reflected broader fears about transgressive female behavior.