Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US Border by Sarah Luna (review)

Both sex workers and missionaries have long struggled to have their labor recognized as such. Sarah Luna’s terrifically engaging and accessibly written ethnography Love in The Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico–US Border makes clear just how much labor—emotional and physical—goes into both forms of work. At first glance, readers might assume that both sets of workers are at odds with one another, since missionaries so often strive to end sex workers’ labor. But what sets this monograph apart from books that explore efforts to “rescue” or “save” sex workers is Luna’s persuasive portrait of the mutual respect, obligation, and friendship between the women missionaries and sex workers. Their respective labor and their relationships unfold against the backdrop of a “narcoeconomy” in Reynosa. Both groups of workers navigate this environment of ever-increasing violence while pursuing their “intimate, economic and moral projects” (3).

The book draws on a year of field and archival research in Reynosa with sex workers and missionaries who had migrated there. To round out her archival research, Luna interviewed men between the ages of 65 and 90 who were members of the “Historical Society of Reynosa” and the “Veteran’s Club of Reynosa.” She also makes good use of handwritten memoirs by two sex workers, as well as blogs maintained by missionaries. The book opens with two excerpts that lay out why these women came to la zona, a prostitution zone composed of several city blocks and enclosed by cement walls in Reynosa, part of the state of Tamaulipas. Lucía, a former sex worker, “came to earn more money,” while Stacy, an American missionary, “never felt so invited into a genuine relationship with Jesus as I do here.” This closeness to Jesus, in part, grows out of Stacy’s closeness with the women working in the bars of la zona.

Love in the Drug War is organized into three parts. The first, “Drug Work and Sex Work in Reynosa,” is comprised of two chapters. One covers the gendered moral economies of both selling drugs and selling sex, while the other explores the currency of rumors of violence in a locale where premature death is expected for those engaging in drug work and sex work. In this context, Luna argues that shared rumors spread not only terror, but also intimacy.

Part II, “The Intimate and Economic Obligations of Sex Workers,” also contains two chapters. In the first, Luna explores how sex workers counter “the whore stigma” through their obligations to their children, clients, and colleagues. The latter chapter, meanwhile, centers on the suicide of the 16-year-old daughter of a former sex worker in order to explore the fault lines in sex workers’ solidarity. Drug-using sex workers are seen as making the lives of their family members worse instead of better; they are characterized as engaging in one vicio (sex work) in order to feed another (drug addiction). In contrast, non-drug-using sex workers establish themselves as respectable sex workers and good mothers.

Finally, Part III, “Missionary Projects in Boystown,” examines the intimate, economic, moral, and spiritual projects of the missionaries working in Reynosa. In one chapter, we learn that some missionaries and sex workers live in an intimate, triadic relationship with God. In the last chapter, Luna considers the effects of these interdependent and instrumental relationships, which include, at times, elements of coercion. The book’s conclusion offers insights into the main themes of the book: love and obligation, the whore stigma, and the figures of the “narco” as well as the racially marked migrant in the borderlands. Luna additionally discusses how the violence that accompanied increased militarization of the border led to la zona’s decline.

Through her “borderlands ethnography,” Luna offers a queer reading of both borders and love. She examines “border intimacies” by using the polyamorous concept of the...