Abstract
The Mexico-US borderlands are principally, and popularly, conceptualised through the lens of violence; they evoke imagery of US border patrol agents’ vicious hyper-militarised tactics to deter and orchestrate the disappearance and deaths of Mexican migrants 1 and of intense cartel conflict related to drug and human trafficking. Anthropologist Sarah Luna contends with this deeply ingrained imaginary through centring on the ostensible antithesis of violence: love and intimacy.
Love in the Drug War is embedded within the cement-walled compound of the regulated prostitution zone, la zona, colloquially referred to as Boystown by Americans, in the border-city of Reynosa, Mexico. But to think of it as an enclosed, bounded entity would be erroneous, for its walls are porous. With varying degrees of difficulty, two of the three ‘protagonists’ – sex-workers from rural Mexico, on the one hand, and American missionaries, on the other – move through la zona’s walls and coexist. We discover that these two protagonists, in addition to another, are partly entangled in a three-way relationship, and the nature of this polyamorous configuration inspires and forms the core of Luna’s research enquiry. The presence of the third protagonist, God, also extends far beyond the walls of la zona, and the relationship between sex workers, missionaries and God is kept for the final part of the book.
Luna devotes twelve months in 2008–2009 to ethnographic fieldwork in this unique ecosystem, teeming with the lives of our three leading characters as well as pimps, drug workers and the everyday inhabitants of la zona. As part of her anthropological approach, Luna, whose mixed Mexican-American and White heritage allow her to roam with sex workers and missionaries with relative ease, develops close relationships with both parties and engages in their quotidian activities, which are partially intertwined with one another. Across the different social spaces of la zona, including the sex workers and missionaries’ homes, the streets and the sex workers’ places of work, Luna shares intimate moments with the sex workers and missionaries, preparing meals, celebrating birthdays and weddings, attending funerals, and spending idle time chatting, musing and joking. The conversations and observations born out of these encounters inform Luna’s rich and vibrant ethnographic reading of la zona and of the triadic relationship, as do other textual elements such as newspaper-clippings, missionaries’ online blogs, sex workers’ memoirs and rumours.
In part one, Luna describes how narco-violence infuses the landscape of Reynosa and shapes the contours of life within it. Luna alludes to the work of Achille Mbembe in depicting how the drug organisations primarily articulate their authority through necropower – the power to dictate who must die and who may live – rendering Reynosa a deathworld: a form of ‘social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead’. 2 Sex workers were conscious of their ‘living-dead’ status, which is particularly heightened owing to their occupation and gender, as they continually imagined their premature physical deaths and their burial in ‘potter’s fields’. Through Luna’s own corporeal reaction to the dialectics of fear and intimacy induced by narco-violence, the reader can palpably sense the affective landscape of terror in Reynosa, testament to her evocative writing.
Narco-violence is far from sex workers’ only obstacle. We learn that the walls of la zona exist to contain ‘vice’ linked to sex work, reflecting the parameters placed on the sex-workers’ bodies, geographies and lives. The Virgin/Whore dichotomy is a concept which pervades Mexico, and in the realm of sex work, this manifests as the duality of the respectable mother and the disreputable prostitute. Luna makes a conscious effort to attend to the agency of sex workers in their fight against their devaluation and figurative deaths, and thus shows the wide variety of discursive strategies sex workers employ in their repertoire of resistance. As follows, Luna illuminates how sex workers emphasise their caregiving role to clients, as well as their protector role to society through engaging with the notion of necessary evil, which conceives of sex work as an absorbent of the sexual desires of deviant men who would otherwise sexually assault women.
Luna pays particular attention to the conceptual framework of obligar (to obligate) to illustrate how sex workers are entangled in a web of obligations – to their children, to their clients, to their pimps, to missionaries and to drug organisations – that encompass a spectrum of sentiment, from coercion through to love. In order to justify their occupation and distance themselves from the vice associated with it, sex workers couch their work in the language of maternal obligation: that sex work provides a way for women to fulfil their (financial) responsibility to their children. However, this approach entraps women in a catch-22 – though sex work facilitates the provision of material care to their children, it is believed to negate the possibility of provision of ‘moral’ care. Wholly aware of this dilemma, sex workers navigate la doble vida (a double life) which involves the spatial and psychological division between sex work and the home. Through obligar, Luna conveys the inherent tensions of embodying the position of the sex worker, as they must balance the load of conflictual ties.
A theme which threads through Luna’s writing concerns the influence of the Mexico-US border in shaping the relationship between sex workers and missionaries. Luna historicises the borderlands and implicates missionaries’ centuries-long involvement, presenting it as a site of violent, racialised and colonial conflict, which serves to contextualise the missionaries’ project in the present day. The missionaries in la zona, ‘Team Boystown’, are associated with the New Monasticism movement and are predominantly White middle-class suburbanites. They flee the megachurches of their childhood to seek a more genuine relationship with Jesus by spending time with those he dedicated himself to – the poor and the forgotten. As Jesus befriended prostitutes, the missionaries are naturally drawn to sex workers, and given that New Monasticism believes in the commitment to racialised and classed others, the mexicanidad (Mexicanness) of the sex workers can only be assumed to be an enticing factor.
Luna argues that the relationship between sex workers and missionaries reproduces perceptions of the power asymmetry shaped by the Mexico-US border. For instance, sex workers endlessly iterate rumours, the most potent of which had the following premise: that missionaries, who often invested time in pregnant and sometimes drug-using sex workers, intended to purchase or adopt their babies. Luna illustrates how these rumours reflect sex workers’ anxieties concerning the perceived lower value of Mexican bodies – particularly those of poor, drug-using, sex workers – in comparison to American bodies. Nevertheless, the reader is left curious as to how the missionary/sex worker encounter challenges the Mexico-US binary, and this is an area that could be more fully developed.
The final part of the tripartite-structured book, and for me, the most compelling, hones in on the love triad between sex workers, missionaries and God, and we finally get to explore the intricacies of this set-up in greater detail. Luna outlines how, beyond the missionaries’ primary purpose of becoming closer to God through connection with sex workers, the missionaries possess an ulterior motive of sorts, as they wish for sex workers to develop a relationship with God which they hope will precipitate a major shift in their future trajectories. Whilst sex workers sensed their instrumentalisation in a grander project to which they had not consented, missionaries feared sex workers’ interest in them stemmed from their ability to provide the workers with material goods, creating a relationship fraught with complications and periodic hostility. In spite of the ever-present threat of conflict, intimate bonds evolve between sex workers, missionaries and God, with the relationship characterised by interdependency as both sex workers and missionaries often saw involvement with one another as a means through which to reach God. Luna’s most original contribution is her invitation to conceive of the triadic relationship through the lens of queerness, which opens the possibility for Luna to consider the polyamorous dynamics and sexualities of the relationship in delicate ways.
Love in the Drug War is a wonderfully written and highly original ethnography that fluidly spans a wide range of conceptual fields (violence, migration, sex work, theology and queer studies, to name but a few) making it an attractive read for a large audience. Luna is defiant in her rejection of binaries and assumptions, and instead chooses the more long-winded and harder route which involves unpicking the messy, complicated and complex relationships and subjectivities in la zona. Whilst defiant, Luna is at once sensitive and cautious, and it is this two-pronged approach that ultimately proves to be the most revelatory as it develops a nuanced depiction of the Mexico-US borderlands. Love in the Drug War is a beautiful anthropological work, and it is Luna’s attentiveness to the everyday details of life in la zona that immerses the reader. Upon turning the final page of the book, the reader is left with this: that from the cracks and crevices of an area defined by its negatives, love and intimacy, however complex, can grow and coexist with violence.