Abstract
Sarah Luna’s new book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border, is a compelling resource for understanding the construction and negotiation of moral, economic, material, and spiritual value in the context of the drug war on the Mexico-US border. Luna delineates the interdependencies between two groups of migrants in Reynosa, a city on the Mexican side of the Mexico-Texas border: sex workers who migrate internally from other areas of Mexico for economic opportunity and Christian missionaries who migrate from the United States to forge relationships with these sex workers. She puts these two “migration projects” into conversation with one another through her theory of obligar, understanding how love and obligation are inextricably bound for both sex workers and missionaries. In doing so, she provides a rich example of how structural inequalities shape relations of intimacy and value-making in the borderlands.
Love in the Drug War is methodologically robust, drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 57 in-depth interviews, archival research from the city’s municipal archives, and textual analysis of missionaries’ blog posts and sex workers’ handwritten memoirs. Throughout the book’s chapters, Luna threads these methods together, showing the interdependency of sex work, drug work, and missionary work in Reynosa. First, the book describes what Luna refers to as the “gendered moral economy” of sex work and work in the illicit drug market in Reynosa, wherein drug workers and sex workers are differently valued due to the gendered meanings attached to their work, yet both are seen as earning “easy money,” catering to American “vices” despite the difficulty and risk that accompanies such work (p. 63). Second, Luna traces the intimacy formed through rumors of drug violence, showing how the spreading of rumors depends upon an “intimacy of trust” that solidifies and maintains social bonds in the community (p. 75). Third, the author draws on the term “whore stigma” to describe the racialized, gendered, and classed value assigned to women who are perceived as sex workers that justify their dehumanization. Sex workers manage this stigma by framing their work in relation to their obligations to family and colleagues. Fourth, the book sheds light on the experiences of sex workers who are not otherwise regarded with social value, particularly sex workers who experience drug addiction. These sex workers are thus assumed to be participating in sex work to fulfill their bodily desires rather than taking care of familial obligations, for example. Fifth, Luna describes the love and intimacy created between missionaries, sex workers, and God, describing missionaries’ desires to grow relationships that take the place of those with clients in sex workers’ lives. Sixth, the book shows the difficulties and conflict often present in the relationships between missionaries and sex workers, as both groups mutually fear taking advantage of the other. Luna notes, however, that these fears shed light on the interdependency of these two groups, as each gains material, emotional, and spiritual value from the other (p. 193).
In addition to being beautifully written and methodologically rigorous, Love in the Drug War offers substantial theoretical and empirical contributions. Luna’s research builds on the literature on violence at the Mexico-US border. Throughout the book, Luna demonstrates that the increased militarization of the border is dangerous to both Mexicans and Americans, particularly those who are racially and economically marginalized. However, the book broadens this literature by focusing on love, rather than exclusively on violence, in the borderlands. Through evoking her theory of obligar, Luna demonstrates how love and intimacy emerge between various groups in the context of the structural inequality and violence in Reynosa, as well as how sex workers and missionaries construct value through love and a sense of obligation. Luna’s conceptualization of love and obligation also adds to the literature on sexual agency, troubling static, binary conceptions of individuals as either wholly sexually agentic or sexually passive. This is especially pertinent in research on sex work, wherein sex workers are often conceptualized as victims without agency or as agentic, autonomous subjects whose decisions are uninfluenced by constraints and coercion. Luna complicates these notions, arguing for a framework of “nonsovereign love and obligation” which makes room for the complex realities of sex workers’ lives and the structural inequalities that create the backdrop for their sexual decision-making and their relationships with family members, colleagues, and missionaries. By doing so, Luna sheds light on how “forms of love and intimacy exist alongside forms of coercion” within these relationships (p. 22).
Key to the book’s rejection of binaries is Luna’s use of triadic analysis in Love in the Drug War. Throughout the book, Luna analyzes relationships in groups of three using the polyamorous concept of the triad (a relationship configuration wherein three relationships are all connected, with one relationship necessarily impacting the dynamics of the other two). By doing so, she demonstrates the interconnectedness of intimacies in the borderlands and the ways in which relationships in Reynosa mediate one another. The triadic relationships discussed throughout the book include wives, husbands, and sex workers; sex workers, their children, and other groups such as pimps and other sex workers; and, most central to the book, the relationship between sex workers, missionaries, and God. In the latter triad, missionaries have an intimate relationship with God and seek to forge intimate relationships with sex workers with the hopes of strengthening sex workers’ relationship with God (p. 147). Thus, the triadic analytic framework provides the reader with a deeper analysis of the complexity of relationships in Reynosa, understanding how these relationships are co-constitutive, continually shaping one another.
Love in the Drug War is an engaging and necessary read for anyone interested in love, sexuality, and the borderlands. The author’s contributions span scholarly fields and are of importance to scholars who study gender, race, and sexuality, migration and Latin America, work and labor, and religion. Furthermore, the book would be a useful contribution to graduate and undergraduate theory classes, providing a case for the application of queer theory to empirical research. Last, the book is of relevance to anyone doing work in the borderlands, as it demonstrates the importance of attending to love in the context of violence and inequality.