Pathways of Desire

The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men

Héctor Carrillo

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226517872
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

With Pathways of Desire, Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greatersexualautonomy andsexualfreedom in the United States.The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc ofthese men'smigration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, andtheir sexual and romantic relationships with American men.These men'sdiverse and fascinatingstoriesdemonstrate the intertwiningofsexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration.Further, Carrillo shows thatsexual globalizationmust be regarded as a bidirectional, albeit uneven, process of exchange between countriesin the global north and the global south.With this approach, Carrillo challengesthe view that gay men from countries like Mexico would logically want to migrate to a "more sexually enlightened" country like the United States—a partial and limited understanding, giventhe dynamic character of sexuality incountries such as Mexico, whicharebecoming more accepting ofsexual diversity. Pathways of Desire alsoprovides ahelpfulanalyticalframeworkfor thesimultaneous considerationofstructuralandcultural factorsin social scientific studies of sexuality. Carrillo explainsthepatterns ofcross-cultural interaction thatsexual migrationgeneratesand—at themost practicallevel—showshowthe intricacies of cross-cultural sexual and romantic relationsmay affectthe sexualhealth andHIVriskoftransnational immigrant populations.

ONE

Conceptualizing Sexual Migration

Around the time that I was beginning to conceive of the present study, I came across a newspaper article in the SF Weekly, a free newspaper in San Francisco.1 In the article, “You Can’t Be Gay—You’re Latino: A Gay Latino Identity Struggles to Emerge, Somewhere between the Macho Mission and Caucasian Castro,” reporter Joel P. Engardio sought to highlight what he saw as an inherent incompatibility between gay and Latino identities even in sexually liberal American cities such as San Francisco. Engardio interviewed Mexican and other Latin American gay and lesbian immigrants who had moved to San Francisco—immigrants who, he argued, had migrated to the United States because it was impossible for them to adopt gay identities in their home countries. Upon their arrival, they soon realized that even in San Francisco, their Latina/o and gay identities were somewhat incompatible.

Engardio’s account of a young man called Miguel caught my attention. Miguel told the reporter that he had migrated to San Francisco from Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, because “in Mexico, gay doesn’t exist.” More specifically, he maintained that being a man with same-sex desires in Mexico implied behaving “in a way that seems stereotypically gay. In that case, he says, you may exist, but ‘you’re not considered a person.’” Miguel imagined that the only options available in Mexico for a gay man were to become overtly effeminate and endure discrimination, or else hide and live a double life under constant fear of being discovered. Engardio argued that Mexico’s staunch conservatism explained why Miguel and others like him were unable to adopt gay identities in their home country: “In his conservative Mexican hometown, the Catholic Church has such a strong hold on the common culture it is difficult to find a drugstore that sells condoms. Homosexuality is not even open for discussion.” As a result, “when Miguel became convinced he could never be happy in Mexico, he emigrated to San Francisco. It was the gay mecca, he was told, the place where he would be accepted, as is.”

The finality of this straightforward explanation for Miguel’s transnational relocation surprised me, especially because it so easily accepted the notion that it would be impossible for anyone to be openly gay in Mexico. Given this presumption, it would be logical for a man such as Miguel—as for any other gay Mexican man, for that matter—to leave. But absent in this simple explanation for Miguel’s sexual migration was any recognition of the profound sociocultural transformations I had witnessed and analyzed as part of the research on sexuality that I had conducted in Guadalajara—Miguel’s hometown—around the time that Miguel was coming of age. Ironically, at the time this article appeared, I was in the middle of writing my book The Night Is Young, where I discuss just how much things were changing in Guadalajara in relation to sexuality. For one thing, gay and lesbian sexualities and lives had grown increasingly visible, to the point where Guadalajara was sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mexico.

To be sure, that city was known for being conservative and intensely Catholic—along the lines described by Engardio—as well as the cradle of many quintessential and heteronormative Mexican traditions. So Guadalajara, as I describe in my book, was a complicated and contradictory place. But gay and lesbian people—particularly gay men—had become ubiquitously visible there and were crafting lives that resembled gay culture in many world cities, even if local expressions of that culture were not completely identical. One simple illustration of the growing visibility of gay culture in Guadalajara at the time was the inclusion of gay bars and dance clubs, along with HIV/AIDS community–based groups, in the weekly entertainment supplement of a prominent mainstream local newspaper. As I wrote in my book, “By 1995, anyone could easily access information about the location and characteristics of the gay clubs in the section called ‘De ambiente’ [a label that referred to the gay milieu in slightly veiled, coded fashion],” and by 1999 the gay bars and clubs “appeared under the rubric ‘Fuera del closet’ (Out of the closet).”2 Had Miguel consulted this supplement—which in Guadalajara was equivalent to the “Time Out” entertainment guides in other world cities—he could have learned about his hometown’s many options to explore a gay identity. And he would have been able to see the many ways in which gay men expressed themselves—he did not have to behave in any particular prescribed ways in order to be gay.

However, unlike the thousands of gay men and lesbians who regularly attended gay venues in Guadalajara, Miguel did not find his way to the city’s gay culture and community. Instead, he concluded that it was impossible to be gay there (or, for that matter, anywhere in Mexico). Why had he been unable to adopt a gay identity in his hometown? Why had he felt that he needed to leave Mexico altogether, and become a sexual migrant in the process, in order to be gay?

If we go back to Máximo’s story from the introduction, it contains some clues that may provide some initial answers to these questions. Máximo had a gay life and a circle of gay friends who gathered regularly in his house in Hermosillo, but he was incapable of confronting the pressures emanating from his immediate heteronormative social and familial circles. His anxiety seemed partly connected to his fear that his relatives and coworkers might learn of his homosexuality. Thus, Máximo not only felt impelled to pretend that he was straight within his everyday work and family life but also had to carefully manage and control who knew his sexual orientation—he had to make sure that this information stayed within his gay circles. He was burdened by both the vulnerabilities of leading a double life and the enormous amounts of energy required to sustain it. And the pressure had become so great that he thought the only way to alleviate it was to leave Hermosillo and start anew somewhere else, away from his relatives and other people who had long known him as a straight man.

Note that Máximo, unlike Miguel, did not blame his city or his country for his own inability to be openly gay there. But like Miguel, he credited his new life in the United States with giving him the possibility of finally achieving an integrated and fully open gay life and identity. And, as we will see, many other Mexican participants in the present study did believe that by migrating to the United States they had achieved a kind of sexual freedom they felt would have been hard for them to acquire in their home country, especially while living near their families and longtime friends and acquaintances, who knew them as “regular,” straight men.

For instance, Raimundo (born 1967), who like Máximo grew up in Hermosillo, said that he migrated to San Diego “for personal reasons; wanting my life as a gay man to be more open and more relaxed.” Similarly, Melchor (born 1972), who originally had been from the northern state of Chihuahua but grew up in the border city of Tijuana, said that he “wanted a change” because in Tijuana he felt “very stereotyped” within his immediate straight social circles. He “felt tired and lonely (although I had my friends),” and most important, he had been aware since early on about his “sexual tendencies,” leading him to realize he would never fully fit in the straight life he was leading. As he put it:

I felt I would find more respect here [in San Diego], because in Tijuana I had to hide my sexual preference for years, in school, with my friends. . . . When my friends saw a homosexual, they would say, “Let’s beat him up.” And I thought, “If they just knew that they have one standing here right next to them!”

Finally, Crispín (born 1980), who had grown up in Mexico City, mentioned that he stayed in the United States in part because his family in Mexico “did not really accept me as I am.” However, he had never actually told them that he was gay.

Notably, these men emphasized their personal situations within their immediate social circles as the circumstances they felt most immediately would prevent them from achieving sexual freedom. And their assessments of their personal situations told them they would be better off leaving for a new location where no one knew them and starting a new gay life. Máximo had considered going to Mexico City or other Mexican cities, but the first option that the other men thought of was moving to the United States. Closely analyzing why many of these men could not imagine crafting an openly gay life for themselves within Mexico—especially given that other gays and lesbians did just that, as the social conditions surrounding homosexuality were rapidly shifting in their home country—and why they assessed that sexual freedom would be readily available to them only in the United States, is a central goal of this book.

Transnational Migration and Sexuality

Beginning around the mid-1990s, a number of scholars became interested in the connections between transnational migration and sexuality (particularly gay or queer sexualities).3 As Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton note in the introduction to their edited collection Queer Diasporas, “Translocation itself, movement itself, now enter the picture as theoretically significant factors in the discussion of sexuality.” The term translocation in this statement refers to the back-and-forth relationship between the local and the global in sexual identity work, as well as the actual transportation of those identities across geographic space. Implied in this dual definition of translocation—in terms of both embodied identities and geography—is the notion that “when a practitioner of ‘homosexual acts,’ or a body that carries any of many queering marks moves between officially designated spaces—nation, region, metropole, neighborhood, or even culture, gender, religion, disease—intricate realignments of identity, politics, and desire take place.”4

Queering Migration Studies

These kinds of concerns emerged in the work of scholars in the social sciences and humanities who had become interested in the transnational sexual migration of gay men and lesbians as part of a series of studies that were brought under the rubrics of queer migration and queer diaspora.5 As scholars began to raise important questions about both the place of sexuality in migration studies and the place of migration in sexuality studies, the effect was to link two bodies of work that had previously remained separate. For instance, in the introduction to an edited collection published in 2005, Eithne Luibhéid notes that “despite rich scholarship about the causes and consequences of international migration, there has been little consideration of how sexual arrangements, ideologies, and modes of regulation shape migration to and incorporation into the United States.”6 The articles in this collection seek to address how sexuality shapes migration processes; how “concerns about sexuality shape US immigration control strategies and constructions of citizenship”; how migration transforms “U.S. queer communities, cultures, and politics”; and how sexuality can be “a source of conflict within migrant communities, and between migrant and U.S. communities.”7 As these interrelated foci suggest, researchers studying the United States were examining the links between sexuality and transnational migration at the level of state policy and institutional formation—for instance, in terms of immigration policies that excluded homosexuals, or domestic policies that turned American gay and lesbian citizens into second-class citizens by denying them the right to sponsor their partners for US residency or naturalization. And they were also conducting on-the-ground analyses of the lives of gay and lesbian immigrants that examined the processes of these migrants’ incorporation into host societies.

This literature painted a picture of immigration as one of the policy arenas deeply shaped by state concerns about homosexuality, and it further suggested that absent consideration of those concerns, it is impossible to understand how the contemporary state in countries such as the United States came to take its current shape. This idea of a mutually constitutive relationship between homosexuality and state formation has been perhaps most compellingly argued by the historian Margot Canaday in her book The Straight State, which treats the domain of immigration control in the twentieth century as one of several important sites where the policing of sexuality has been linked to the expansion of state capacities.8 Other scholars have also considered specific immigration policies that regulated homosexual inclusion and mobility, including attempts to establish boundaries between “good” and “bad” sexual citizens,9 as well as the shifts in asylum policy generated by the emergence of the legal field of LGBT asylum beginning in the 1990s.10 Moreover, through attention to individual queer immigrants, the literature has generated helpful understandings of their motivations and processes of incorporation into their host societies (including into gay communities in countries such as the United States and Canada). It also has shown the importance of treating those immigrants “not simply as sexual subjects, but also as racialized, classed, gendered subjects of particular regions and nations that exist in various historic relationships to US hegemony.”11

Indeed, Lionel Cantú’s study with Mexican gay immigrants—which is the most direct precursor of the present study—began to examine how those men’s migration to Los Angeles is “influenced by sexuality,” and in turn how “sociostructural and migratory factors” shape their sexualities after migration.12 Cantú simultaneously aimed to account for the processes through which “Mexican gay immigrants adapt to, negotiate, and resist the constraints of their marginalization (in terms of their sexual orientation, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and legal status)” in the United States.13 And he challenged “the presumption that Latin American society and culture are more oppressive and therefore create greater stress for queer individuals.”14 In Pathways of Desire, I have adopted but also expanded this framework, particularly with a goal toward further developing and theorizing the concept of sexual migration.

Gaps That Remain

Overall, this significant body of scholarly work has paved the way for the analysis in the present book. However, the literature has also left some significant gaps in our understanding of sexual migration (and more specifically queer migration or queer diaspora)—gaps that my research seeks to address.

One such gap concerns the need to examine the wide range of lives and experiences both before and after migration, and to attend to the complete trajectory of migration. The pioneering empirical studies that examined the lives of queer immigrants have produced nuanced descriptions of their post-migration incorporation into gay communities,15 but those studies typically were not designed to systematically analyze immigrants’ lives pre-migration, the diversity of their lived experiences, or the social, political, and cultural sexuality-related changes taking place in their home countries.16 For instance, in Global Divas, Martin Manalansan provides background information about the cultural schemas of sexuality and gender to which his participants were previously exposed in the Philippines—including an indigenous schema based on bakla identities (a local Tagalog term that, according to Manalansan, signals “effeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics . . . and cross-dressing” among men), which contrasted with the global gay identities his participants encountered while in the Philippines or later in their diasporic setting in New York.17 He notes that some of his participants favored strategies of sexual silence that are consistent with the bakla identity, while others incorporated the strategy of coming out that is seen as prerequisite for being ...