A Queer Sense of Love and Obligation at the US-Mexico Border

In Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border Sarah Luna takes readers into the intimate relationships weaved in la Zona, a prostitution zone in Reynosa, Mexico. Luna captures the complex relationships among subjects rarely brought together in an ethnography, namely, sex workers and their clients, missionaries, drug dealers, and government officials, among others. More specifically, Luna's account focuses on how the differences created by the border impact her interlocutors’ dreams of migration as well as the intimate relationships between Mexican sex workers and US evangelical missionaries. Missionaries, as Luna details, cross borders in a neocolonial attempt to find God through saving the poor and the sinners, while Mexican sex workers move hoping to escape poverty, or at times are coerced by families and pimps. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork and archival work in 2009, Love in the Drug War examines migrant lives in a moment when the US-Mexico border was in crisis, hit by drug violence, militarization, the global economic crisis, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic.Luna's methodology is daring and innovative. She uses love and obligation as a framework for examining the insights generated by her interlocutors, for whom love and obligation are deeply intertwined. “Obligations to other humans and sometimes deities,” Luna writes, “entangle humans in relationships of interdependency that are enabling and disabling, burdensome and desirable, coercive and supportive, sometimes simultaneously” (29). Luna develops a view of love and obligation that she describes as “distinctly nonsovereign, an alternative to the idea that human beings are sovereign—that they are in control of their own destinies as self-contained, autonomous units enacting their wills” (29). It is an argument for recognizing radical interdependency.Luna's reading of these relationships of love and obligation is decidedly queer, as she examines “relations in groups of three or more to develop [her] analysis of the intimacies of the Borderlands” (13). Using the polyamorous concept of the triad, Luna considers multiple triads, including the wife-husband-sex worker, the Reynosa residents-US citizens-internal migrants, and the sex worker-missionary-God, the last of which is at the center of Luna's analysis. As she suggests, the triad is not meant to substitute for dyads (e.g., good/bad, heroes/victims, object/agents) but instead to reveal greater complexities that are rarely captured at the Borderlands, through which Luna pushes toward a queer reading of borders and love. It is precisely these theoretical and ethnographic innovations that make Love in the Drug War an essential read for scholars in anthropology, religious studies, queer and feminist studies, and Latin American studies. At once a highly approachable and rigorously theoretical text, it will animate exciting conversations across undergraduate and graduate classes alike.In chapter 1, Luna examines the gendered moral economies of drug and sex work. While most people who lived in Reynosa had family members involved with los narcos, sex and drug work remained morally suspicious. Both of these industries catered to US demand, and their conditions were largely sustained by the inequalities at the border. This work was perceived as “easy money,” although sex workers often contested this cliché. While drug work was perceived as sexy, powerful, and cool, women grappled with the whore stigma, something more pronounced for dark-skinned migrants from southern Mexico. Luna's ethnography highlights how inequalities produced at the border are exacerbated for the most underprivileged. Nonetheless, no Reynosa's resident escaped terror, which circulated through rumors on narco violence, and produced a form of intimacy between all inhabitants (see chap. 2).In chapter 3, Luna discusses how sex workers often felt a sense of obligation as mothers, daughters, wives and sisters. Fulfilling these obligations ensured a certain degree of respectability, particularly when they claimed to be working as prostitutes to support their families. Drug-users remained low in the moral economy because they were perceived as selfish and unable to fulfill their obligation to their families (chap. 4). Sex workers constantly evaluated one another on the basis of their capacity to fulfill their maternal responsibilities. Similarly, sex workers felt a sense of obligation towards their pimps, who often became their sex partners, boyfriends, and even the father of their children. These relationships of obligation were often marked by coercion and violence as well as love and care.Chapters 5 and 6 take us into the relationship between the missionaries, sex workers, and God. As Luna highlights, New Monastics missionaries used romantic and sexual idioms to refer to this triadic relationship although it was purely platonic. Some missionaries imagined a celibate future with sex workers, which Luna characterizes as a queer departure, “because [missionaries] imagined futures of living with and loving sex workers instead of future husbands” (151). Nonetheless, Luna does not portray the relationship between missionaries and sex workers as a queer utopia. In fact, both parties were concerned they were being used by the other. Although they described their mission as being rooted in unconditional love, missionaries hoped that their actions ultimately would lead to sex workers loving God and leaving prostitution. It is these tensions that Luna so beautifully illustrates and analyzes, leaving readers with new visions for love, friendship, and kinship at the border

Criminology · Ethnography · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV · Obligation · Political science · Poverty · Queer · Sex work · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Medicine · Sex work and related issues