Sex Tourism in Bahia

Ambiguous Entanglements

Erica Lorraine Williams

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780252079443, 9780252037931
• eBook ISBN: 9780252095191
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. She shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers.

CHAPTER ONE

Geographies of Blackness

Tourism and the Erotics of Black Culture in Salvador

Setting the Stage: Space and the Sexual Economies of Tourism

Site 1: Centro Histórico (Historic Center)

Walking toward Pelourinho from the bus stop, one passes by an area with fountains and several benches. At any hour of the day or night, dozens of women—black, white, mixed, young, old, thin, and overweight—always sit idly on the benches. Before delving into this research, I did not know who they were or why they were there. In the summer of 2005, I was taking an Afro-Brazilian dance class in Pelourinho twice a week at 6:30 p.m. On days when I was meeting Luana, a Bahian acquaintance, before the class to tutor her in English, I would wait for her on one of these benches, sitting quietly, observing, writing in my journal, or reading a book. One day, a man approached one of the women and engaged her in conversation. After a few moments, the woman laughed and walked past me, exclaiming, “He’s crazy! He wants me to take him back to my house when there are all these motels right here!” At that moment, I realized that one of the major plazas, Praça da Sé, was a significant point of street prostitution in Salvador. Later, when I began my work with the Association of Prostitutes of Bahia (Aprosba), I discovered that this area was the ponto (point) for many of the sex workers affiliated with the organization.

Site 2: The Orla (Coastline)

The beachfront neighborhoods along the coast are prime locations for various types of exchanges and interactions between tourists and locals. In particular, the Castelo Velho, an internet café, pousada (inexpensive hotel), and restaurant located across the street from the beach, had a steady flow of foreign tourists and locals who seemed to be seeking out the company of tourists. I saw Rodrigo, a young, dark-skinned black Bahian man, sitting at a table by himself or with foreign tourists nearly every time I went into or passed by the establishment. Once, when I passed by him on the street, he said to me in his heavily accented English, “It’s beautiful.” When he was sitting alone, he never ordered anything, but he always approached foreign tourists—male, female, single, or in groups. On one occasion, he spotted an older white foreign woman sitting alone and sat at the table next to her and asked if she was American. Her response gave him all the permission he needed to join her at her table. They began to converse haltingly in English. When she left, Rodrigo promptly went back to what seemed to be his post at the front corner table.

Shortly thereafter, two Scandinavian-looking women with platinum-blond hair and blue eyes entered, and he fixated his eyes on these women. Without hesitation, he said, “It’s beautiful. I wish to kiss you.” The women did not respond. Rodrigo left the café for a while, and when he returned, he approached two foreign men sitting at a table and asked, “Italianos?” “No,” they responded. He ventured a few more guesses before they revealed that they were from Argentina. Rodrigo smiled warmly, held out his hand to shake theirs, and joined them at their table. A few weeks later, I went into the internet café with a Canadian Latina acquaintance. Predictably, he attempted to speak to us in English. Having seen him do the same thing in multiple languages to other foreign tourists, I jokingly asked him in Portuguese, “Você aprendeu inglês só para paquerar?” (Did you learn English just to flirt?). His friend burst out laughing as he replied, “No,” with a sheepish grin.

It is unclear whether Rodrigo’s consistent and recurrent attempts to make connections with foreigners were motivated by a desire for sexual encounters or merely constituted an effort to expand his cosmopolitan network of friends and transnational connections. Nonetheless, his story alludes to an understanding of the sexual and cultural economies of tourism in Salvador as a diverse and complex social scene that encompasses a range of interactions, liaisons, and relationships. The fact that he could have approached these male and female foreign tourists with sex, flirtation, romantic relationships, hustling, or friendship in mind reflects the ambiguity that is central to the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador.¹

Caça-Gringas (Hunters of Foreign Women)

One night while walking from the movie theater to my rented apartment in Barra, I passed by two black men and one black woman walking down the street, speaking English. I could tell that the men were Bahian, though one of them said loudly in English to the others that he liked my hair, which was styled in a large Afro. When I turned around to say thank you, they seemed surprised that I spoke English. I walked and talked with them for a bit, and they invited me to accompany them to an outdoor bar. As it turned out, the black woman was an African American exchange student who was dating one of the Bahian men. I was surprised at how well the two Bahian men spoke English. Wilson, the one who liked my hair, was in his early twenties and dressed in American hip-hop style. He was very flirtatious and repeatedly asked me for my telephone number. Although I was not interested in him, I gave him my number because I thought he might be a research participant. To my surprise, he called me the next morning to make plans with me. When I told him that I was conducting research on sex tourism, he said in a very detached, impersonal way, “Oh, I know some guys who do that.”

I had a very strong inkling that Wilson was a caça-gringa (hunter of foreign women), also known as caçador (hunter) or pega-turista (tourist grabber). My intuition was confirmed after I found myself running into Wilson several times a week all over the tourist districts. One day I saw him in Pelourinho with a blond, foreign woman. The next day, I saw him in a beachfront neighborhood with an African American woman. He would avoid eye contact with me or look embarrassed, as if I had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. Roughly a month later, I ran into Wilson at a lanchonette (snack restaurant) before my evening dance class. He joined me over coffee and finally revealed the truth. He said he knew I was a gringa the first night we met: “I can smell gringas from far away.” He continued by explaining that he had complimented my hair so loudly in English so that he could prove to his companions that he was right in his supposition that I was American. On the one hand, I was astounded that something as simple as a compliment in English had been a part of his strategy to attract gringas. On the other hand, having seen so many of these types of encounters in Salvador, I was not surprised at all.

Keith, an African American tourist from Atlanta, seemed to be all too familiar with the work of caçadores: “I know a lot of Brazilian guys who all they do is look for tourists…. They look for American and European women. A lot of times they get with tourists to get clothes and money. In Pelourinho, I would see the same caça-gringas with a different girlfriend. They either teach dance, capoeira, or drumming. Their ploy is simple—they take the women to the beach because it’s free and they’ll see the women with little clothes. They’ll pick you up at the hostel and take you around. Next thing you know, you find yourself paying for them—their coffee, food, water, and bus. After a while you get tired of it, but you’re sucked in.”² Keith’s comment reveals the important role that Afro-Brazilian cultural production plays in the caça-gringas’ ability to entice and seduce foreigners by teaching them capoeira, dance, and drumming. Foreigners wonder whether the feelings that the caça-gringas express are real or authentic or whether they are merely a part of the hustle. In other words, these ambiguous encounters with black Bahian men produce confusion and anxiety among foreign tourists, who may be swept up in a whirlwind of emotion, cultural exploration, and erotic adventure.

Two important sites in Salvador’s touristscape are the Centro and the coastline. Sex workers who worked in Praça da Sé, in the Centro, saw it as a ponto that had certain benefits over other places they could procure clients, such as bars and brothels. Despite the risks associated with being in an open, public place, women who worked in Praça da Sé were generally able to keep all of the money they earned rather than giving a proportion to a third party such as an agent or pimp.³ Gilmara, a young black sex worker with long braids, said that by working in the Praça, “you don’t have to drink or listen to loud music,” and violence was generally no longer a problem as a consequence of Aprosba’s work.

My discussion of caça-gringas offers a lens through which to understand the intimate connections between the cultural and sexual politics of the transnational tourism industry in Salvador. Afro-Brazilian men commonly referred to as caça-gringas or pega-turistas capitalize on their cultural expertise to attract female and male foreign tourists by teaching capoeira and Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The caça-gringas illustrate how the figure of the black body/cultural expert is vital to the marketing of Bahia as the Black Mecca (Patricia de Santana Pinho 2004). Malik, an African American male expatriate in Salvador, said, “Caça-gringas are typically someone who does capoeira. It’s easy to seduce and meet gringas because capoeira is exotic and physical.” Fabiana, lead organizer and cofounder of Aprosba, knew a black man in Salvador who was the leader of a Carnaval group. He met a French woman who paid to take him to France with her. Fabiana also knew other capoeiristas who did programas (commercial sexual transactions) with this French woman, who, according to Fabiana, “established a capoeira school for male prostitutes in Europe!”

Jeremy, an African American man from Washington, D.C., who had come to Bahia in August 2005 for capoeira, told me that there is a lot of “situational bisexuality” in capoeira because many of those who have the resources to bring capoeiristas to Europe and North America are gay men. Caça-gringas can be seen as working-class Bahian men of African descent who attempt to reap some of the benefits of the transnational tourism industry in Salvador by capitalizing on the central role of Afro-Brazilian culture in shaping Bahia as a tourist destination. As Angela Gilliam (2001) argues, the commodification of Afro-Brazilian culture as a symbol of Bahia is intimately connected to the construction of stereotypes regarding the sexuality of black women and men that perpetuate and encourage sexual tourism.

This chapter explores the racial meanings attached to spaces of tourism and sex work in Salvador. It also provides historical background and ethnographic accounts that lay the foundation for understanding how Bahia has been marketed in the international tourism industry as the Black Mecca. I discuss the shifts in how blackness and Afro-Brazilian culture have been treated by the state over time and how the tourism industry has explicitly used that culture to market Bahia to the rest of the country—and the world—as a popular tourism destination. Heeding Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick’s call for black studies scholars to pay attention to “how human geographies are integral to black ways of life” (2007, 7), this chapter engages black geographies scholarship to analyze how class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador. Black geographies scholarship enables an understanding of the multiple ways in which space is socially produced and perceived (Clyde Woods and McKittrick 2007; Lipsitz 2007). As feminist geographer Doreen Massey argues, “Spaces and places are not only themselves gendered, but … they both reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood” (1994, 179). She encourages scholars to see the significance of class and gender relations in the structuring of space and place. Thus, drawing on these scholarly influences compels me to ask how Afro-Brazilians and sex workers (and Afro-Brazilian sex workers) negotiate and produce space. Furthermore, what practices do black women sex workers “employ across or beyond domination” to assert their sense of place in Salvador (McKittrick 2006, xvii)?

To articulate what distinguishes Bahia as a site of both sexual and cultural tourism, this chapter provides background on the history, political economy, and development of the region’s tourism industry. It explores how class and race are used as signifiers to delineate spaces of sex work and describes the exclusion of marginalized black Bahians and sex workers in Pelourinho. This neighborhood offers a compelling example of the explosive consequences of the convergence of the tourism industry, sex work, and black cultural production. This chapter also interrogates how Afro-Brazilian culture is used to market Bahia to the rest of the world and how that approach plays out in the everyday lives of Afro-Brazilian tour guides, dancers, and Candomblé adherents.

Mapping Salvador: Space, Sex Work, and Exclusion

Salvador’s touristscape is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who belongs and who is out of place. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, and Barra, on the orla, are two contrasting racialized spaces in the sexual economies of tourism. Despite the state’s attempts to rid Pelourinho and Praça da Sé of sex workers, including persistent harassment by police, sex workers are still there, working with local and foreign clients alike. Salvador is divided into two parts—Cidade Alta (Upper City) and Cidade Baixa (Lower City). Cidade Alta, where the Centro Histórico is located, is considered more privileged, while Cidade Baixa is seen as more impoverished (Cidade Baixa 2005). Even as an early colonial settlement, the Cidade Alta was the administrative and religious center, while the Cidade Baixa contained financial, port, and market facilities (Hita and Gledhill 2009). The Centro Histórico, which encompasses Pelourinho, Praça da Sé, and Dois de Julho, is the site of hundreds of stores, restaurants, and office buildings, yet it is also run-down, with old colonial architecture in constant need of renovation. Conversely, the orla neighborhoods running from the southwestern part of the city to the northeast feature prime beachfront real estate that many locals and foreigners aspire to own or rent.

Tourists are expected to stay in the carefully circumscribed corridor between Pelourinho and Barra or in other neighborhoods along the orla, where hotels are plentiful; signs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese abound; and bus routes are easy for newcomers to navigate. When I first visited Salvador as an undergraduate exchange student, I lived in the middle-class bairro nobre (upscale neighborhood) of Graça, had classes every day in Pelourinho and Ondina, frequented the beach in Barra, and attended dance and music performances in Pelourinho and Campo Grande. I could take direct buses to get to my destinations with ease, and if I was willing to pay a few reais more, I could travel on compact, luxury air-conditioned buses with plush reclining seats. Only on subsequent visits to Salvador did I discover that there was much more to the city than the tourist district.

Tourist maps of Salvador show the populous neighborhoods where the vast majority of Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian residents live as expansive stretches of green, as if they were parks, jungles, or otherwise empty spaces. In June 2011, I was codirecting a Spelman College summer study abroad program in Salvador. One day, we visited the Steve Biko Cultural Institute, where an Afro-Brazilian economist gave a presentation on racial inequalities in Salvador and in Brazil as a whole.⁴ A young Afro-Brazilian woman who had recently graduated from college was translating the presentation from Portuguese to English for the students. When the economist showed the tourist map of Salvador, the woman interjected that her Cidade Baixa neighborhood, Paripe, was nowhere to be found. Her spontaneous outburst proved the economist’s point about the racial and class demographics of Salvador’s neighborhoods. This technique of making marginalized populations invisible on maps is not unique to Salvador. The popular Brazilian television series Cidade dos Homens (City of Men), a spin-off of the film City of God, included a scene in which the young black male protagonists Laranjinha and Acerola look at a map of Rio de Janeiro that does not depict their neighborhood and other favelas.

Black Brazilian feminist Lélia Gonzalez’s work reveals the ways in which racism influences the constitution of places as well as the social and spatial dimensions of racial and gender inequality (Ratts 2011). She asserts that black Brazilians “are in the garbage can of Brazilian society” (Gonzalez 1980, 224). While “the natural place of the dominant white group are the healthy residences, situated on the most beautiful corners of the city or in the countryside and duly protected by different forms of policing,” the “natural place of the black person is the opposite … from the slave quarters to the favelas, slums, invasions, wetlands and housing assemblies” (quoted in Ratts 2011, 2).⁵ Pelourinho exemplifies this racialized distinction of neighborhoods.

Pelourinho (Whipping Post) was the center of the colonial elite. By the late nineteenth century, however, the collapse of the sugar market led to Pelourinho’s decline as a site of wealth and power. The neighborhood suffered from decades of degradation, poverty, and social abandonment. In the period before military rule (1964–85), elite families began to move away from the old Cidade Alta and toward the Orla Marítima (Atlantic Coast), thereby “abandoning the historic centre to a growing number of lower class residents” (Hita and Gledhill 2009, 10). In the 1980s, the neighborhood became best known for gangs, petty crime, and prostitution before bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Geographies of Blackness: Tourism and the Erotics of Black Culture in Salvador
• Chapter 2. Racial Hierarchies of Desire and the Specter of Sex Tourism
• Chapter 3. Working-Class Kings in Paradise: Coming to Terms with Sex Tourism
• Chapter 4. Tourist Tales and Erotic Adventures
• Chapter 5. Aprosba: The Politics of Race, Sexual Labor, and Identification
• Chapter 6. Se Valorizando (Valuing Oneself): Ambiguity, Exploitation, and Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter 7. Moral Panics: Sex Tourism, Trafficking, and the Limits of Transnational Mobility
• Conclusion. The Specter of Sex Tourism in a Globalized World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index