Sex Work and the City: The Social Geography of Health and Safety in Tijuana, Mexico

Preface

Preface I grew up in California near a town called Nevada City. Established in 1849, Nevada City was a prosperous gold mining town, one of many in California . As a young girl, I visited its historic buildings and Victorian houses and marveled at the luxurious hand-carved stairways and dark red carpets of its stagecoach hotel. Just a few doors from the hotel stood a grand three-story building now used as a restaurant. It was filled with fine antique furniture, velvet-papered walls, and finely wrought mirrored sconces. A long oak bar and a player piano stood prominently in the center of its large first floor. When a friend of the family took over the business, I gained access to the upper floors, which had sat unused and empty for many decades. It was a tenement house of sorts, and, as a young girl is wont to do, I wandered about dreamily, looking for bits of evidence of lives left behind. Only later was I told that it was a “whorehouse,” long since abandoned by the history of the town. I could only imagine what its residents’ lives had been like. Who were they, the women who had lived and worked here? why had they come to this frontier town so far from the bustling Eastern seaboard? had they found happiness here or misery? what became of them? Little did I know then that I would continue to ask similar questions about “working women” of the Californias. Having traveled all the way to the East Coast to pursue my doctorate, I returned to the West—to Tijuana, Mexico, a border town containing many of the same human elements left behind by the history of Nevada City, only on a much larger scale. This book is a product of those questions I asked as a girl in Nevada City and answered so many years later in Tijuana, a frontier town that is now the world’s most frequently visited border city. In thinking about a field project, I initially wrote a number of grant applications to study Mexican housewives, normative sexuality, and risk for HiV/ x Preface aiDs. Having completed a project in college on normative sexual practices among Catholic college students, I was eager to explore the topic further by studying how housewives manage sexual risk within relationships that, while understood on an ideological level to be risk-free, are the primary route of infection for women across the world. I soon realized that because of the paucity of epidemiological evidence needed to persuade funding organizations that this was a topic worthy of study, each application was rejected (the funding climate surrounding the study of normative sexuality has changed somewhat since I submitted those first applications in 1998). Nothing if not practical, and needing to obtain funding to support my dissertation research, I eventually modified my proposals. Although I ended up receiving a grant to study the sex workers upon which this book is based, and although I am confident that the project led to useful and interesting findings, I must begin with this small caveat. My experience in trying to get funding for this project reflects the general funding climate that surrounds public health research on HiV/aiDs and the continued reinforcement of prostitute sexuality as deviant, dangerous, and polluting. Funding organizations continue to be attracted to ideas about sexual deviance and the dangers it appears to represent. Ironically, the commodification of sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality, is anything but deviant, although its more obvious forms continue to be subject to public scrutiny and social control. While I will always be grateful for the financial support I received, it’s very important to me that my readers understand how we, as social scientists , become socialized to reproduce and reinforce the surveillance of socalled deviant sexualities, even when we begin with a very different agenda. Having decided to become at least somewhat compliant does not mean I failed to approach this study through a critical framework. First, although sexual health research in the era of HiV/aiDs tends to concentrate on female prostitution or male homosexuality or both, I sought to disrupt these stereotypes by including male, transgender, and female sex workers in my study and to focus on the gendered dimensions of sexual behavior within the industry. Work-related sexual behavior is also not conflated with assumptions of sexual orientation, and data on partnering practices were collected with a greater level of specificity than one might find in...