Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York

The Women: In Transit

17 The Women: In Transit Clara Clara is one of the eighteen women in her extended family who migrated to New York from the countryside of Bahia in northeast Brazil. Clara’s mother, a dentist, has always encouraged her to have a career of her own. Clara, now thirty-two years old, grew up in a middle-class family that identified itself with the markers of modernity, expressed in consumer power, investment in education, and foreign travel. When she was thirteen years old, her parents got divorced, and she moved with her mother and her sister to the capital, Salvador, and spent much time in a smaller city where her grandfather was the mayor. For her fifteenth birthday, her mother sent her to Disney World for a holiday. After high school she went to a private law school, financed by her parents. As she puts it, she lived the normal life of a university student, going to parties, dating, and traveling around with her friends. Clara graduated from law school in 1995, passed the bar exam, and started working as an assistant lawyer for a private company. Still, she could not afford to live on her own, and her mother continued supporting her financially. After Clara had spent two years struggling with her financial instability and lack of career prospects, her aunt Gina, who had lived in New York for two years with her daughter, arrived in Bahia for a visit. Gina worked as an erotic dancer. Seeing Clara’s difficulties in making ends meet, Gina suggested she come to New York and stay with her. Upon her arrival, Clara—and Nadja, a lawyer friend who came with her—immediately started dancing, following the path and advice of her aunt and three cousins who were also dancers. She describes her first year of dancing as “fun.” She loved the fast flow of money, the ability to 18 Transnational Desires buy new clothes and accessories, to pay her bills, and to rent an apartment on her own. She also loved the party scene. Through the years I have known her, Clara has changed her life quite dramatically. She started going out with an older Greek man and then became pregnant by a white American man who didn’t want the child. She moved in with the Greek, who made it his mission to help her with the baby and with her life. He helped her pay for a marriage to an African American to gain legal status in the United States. Then she got together with the father of her daughter, and the Greek became her daughter’s godfather. In order to meet her and her daughter’s expenses and supplement the household’s budget, Clara continued to dance. Although she was ambivalent about the role of housewife, that was what she became after a while. Barbara I met Barbara on the same night that I met Clara, and through the years she has become one of my closest friends in New York. Barbara is thirty-seven years old and was born in the same city as Clara. It was actually through contact with the other women in Clara’s extended family that Barbara came to live and work in New York. She is from a lowermiddle -class family but married the son of a local doctor, thus ascending to a comfortable upper-middle-class life. She had a child from that marriage, which lasted fourteen years. With financial support from her husband, she opened a restaurant but eventually had to close it down in 1999 when Brazil’s economy took a turn for the worse. That coincided with the dismantling of her marriage. She stayed in the same city, tried to open up another business, and got involved with a man from Clara’s family. Neither the relationship nor the business worked out and, after working at a few low-paying secretarial jobs, Barbara decided that it was time to try something different. Her chances of getting a visa to the United States were not good, but she decided to try anyway, and it was with surprise that she succeeded and saw a radical change in her life working out. Although born in a city with no more than thirty thousand inhabitants in Bahia, Barbara says she always considered herself a “cos- The Women: In Transit 19 mopolitan.” She knew what was happening in the world, kept up...