Commemoration and Queer Migration

Books can mark an important point in history, bring to life a grand idea, or in some cases, commemorate a life. Some books accomplish all three, and the posthumous publication of Lionel Cantú Jr.'s dissertation and other writings is just such a book. Cantú was an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until his unexpected death in 2002. His dissertation adviser, Nancy A. Naples, and his friend, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, have for several years been compiling Cantú's writings, and grieving, and one result is The Sexuality of Migration.

Cantú's book reads like a commemorative text as it starts and ends with the loving words of those who knew and worked with him. It also reads as a historical document, marking queer immigration politics in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, almost entirely before 9/11. Nevertheless, it also reads as a prescient and significant precursor to much of the now vibrant queer/migration scholarship advanced by such scholars as Eithne Luibhéid, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Martin F. Manalansan IV. This delightful intertextuality is one of the many treasures found in this densely packed book. Here, I point to only two of the most important reasons to read The Sexuality of Migration.

Cantú develops a "queer political economy of migration" (21) designed to confront directly the heteronormative assumptions of immigration scholarship. As the editors note, his theoretical approach conjoins feminist standpoint epistemology, queer theory, and a political economic approach (7); however, he also builds on theories of intersectionality, borderlands, and kinship. Additionally, the analysis situates U.S. and Mexican laws pertaining to sodomy, marriage, and asylum, and political economic histories of Mexico, within border relations between the two countries. Within this complex theoretical context, based primarily on field and interview data collected with Mexican men who have sex with men in both Guadalajara and Southern California, Cantú carefully demonstrates how sexuality must be integrated into understandings of migration. Many of the men who chose to migrate to the United States did so in large part because of factors relating to sexuality. Some men, for example, met U.S. gay tourists who visited Mexico and built connections that allowed for future migration (102). Other men idealized the United States as a place where they could be openly gay, and so they chose to migrate in search of this perceived freedom. Others experienced oppression in Mexico because of sexual orientation and identity and thus sought political asylum on that basis in the United States. A reprinted version of an essay originally published in this journal, "De Ambiente: Queer Tourism and Shifting Sexualities," demonstrates how sexuality affects migrations by showing how Western queer and gay tourists in Mexico open possibilities for transnational sexualities at the same time that tourists often rely on colonial logics of desiring the other.¹ As it becomes increasingly clear that sexuality affects the migrations of queer men, Cantú points to how sexuality thus influences the migrations of all migrants, though this fact often goes unspoken in immigration scholarship.

For his second crucial contribution to queer/migration studies, Cantú challenges those limiting cultural approaches that feature Latinos'/as' gender and sexuality in static and stereotypical terms, by evidencing instead the variations in sexual identity, practice, and reasons for migrating. For instance, though cultural research on Latin America has often depicted male homosexual sex in terms of "activo/pasivo," where only the man who takes the feminine/passive sexual role of being penetrated is subject to discrimination (79), Cantú's interviews show that this model does not reflect the experiences of many men who have sex with men in Mexico. The many shifting identities that Mexican men who have sex with men adopt reveal a complex system of sexuality. Also, part of the book's project is to locate normative gender and sexuality within the traditional family, yet interviewees also suggest that...