Gringo Gulch: Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility in Costa Rica

Gringo Gulch

Gringo Gulch

Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility in Costa Rica

Megan Rivers-Moore

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

MEGAN RIVERS-MOORE is assistant professor at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37338-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37341-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37355-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226373553.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rivers-Moore, Megan, author.

Title: Gringo Gulch : sex, tourism, and social mobility in Costa Rica / Megan Rivers-Moore.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042765 | ISBN 9780226373386 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226373416 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226373553 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Prostitution–Costa Rica–San José. | Prostitutes–Costa Rica–San José–Social conditions. | Sex tourism–Costa Rica–San José. | Neoliberalism–Social aspects–Costa Rica–San José. | Transnationalism–Social aspects–Costa Rica–San José.

Classification: LCC HQ154.S26 R58 2016 | DDC 306.74097286–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042765

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Para Lucía Pilar, luz de mis ojos

Para Amaru, bienvenido

Para Leo, siempre

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Commerce of Sex in Costa Rica

PART I Sex, Class, and Consumption

2 Almighty Gringos and the Relational Economy of Sex Tourism

3 Selling Sex, Selling Care: Affective Labor in the Tourism Sector

4 Motherhood, Consumption, and the Purchase of Respectability

PART II Regulating Sex in the Age of Neoliberalism

5 The State and the Sex Industry

6 Good for the State, Bad for the Nation: Race, Space, and Migration

Conclusion: Getting Ahead in Gringo Gulch

Methodological Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was a decidedly transnational affair, having been written in Cambridge, San José, Geneva, London, and Toronto. A new job at Carleton University in Ottawa further expanded this project’s geographies, both physical and human. As such, the list of people who contributed and to whom I am profoundly grateful is long indeed.

This research was made possible by very generous financial support from the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Centre of Latin American Studies, the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust, a Murray Edwards Overseas Bursary, and travel grants from the Worts Travelling Scholars Fund, Murray Edwards Grants for Graduate Research, and the Murray Edwards MCR. The manuscript was significantly revised and updated while I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.

My work has benefited from feedback from a veritable army of brilliant and generous scholars and comrades. Thank you, Sarah Radcliffe, David Lehmann, Juan Maiguashca, Elizabeth Bernstein, Peter Wade, Nayanika Mathur, Jessica Dionne, Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Kate Hardy, Alissa Trotz, Teela Sanders, Susan Frohlick, Carlos Sandoval García, Anne Hayes, Ella McPherson, Catherine Trundle, and Amrita Hari. To be a researcher, writer, and teacher is a pleasure and a privilege, and I thank all my students and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, la Universidad de Costa Rica, the University of Toronto, and Carleton University. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough engagement with my work. And I thank Kyle Wagner, Mary Corrado, and especially Doug Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press for making the book-publishing process so smooth and enjoyable. Thank you to Susan Cohan for her outstanding copyediting.

I have been blessed with illustrious and supportive mentors, who demonstrate every day how to be engaged, committed academics (while maintaining a sense of humor and living interesting lives). Thank you, Sarah Radcliffe, Judith Taylor, and Alissa Trotz for your mentorship and friendship. It means more to me than you know.

I received encouragement from a multitude of friends and family around the world, too numerous to mention (lucky me). Thanks especially to Valerie Eisenhauer, Mary Elizabeth Hellyer, Hettie Malcomson, Jocelyn Thorpe, Xenia Ngwenya, Violeta Méndez Calvo and Manuel Antonio Solano Avendaño, Emilia Méndez Calvo, Koen Voorend, María Díaz, Alvaro Carvajal, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Damian Rivers-Moore and Meaghan Eley, Simon Rivers-Moore and Silvana Rotili, Dorothy Rivers-Moore, Anne Collinson, and Marie Vander Kloet.

Thank you to all the state, hotel, and NGO employees who took time out of their very busy schedules to answer my many questions. The hardworking staff and volunteers at Fundación Rahab and La Sala in particular continuously challenged and inspired me. I am eternally grateful to Alfredo Sanabria for sharing his memories and extensive personal archive with me. For obvious reasons, I cannot name the sex tourists and sex workers interviewed for this research, but I am indebted to them for sharing their lives with me. They humbled me with their openness and honesty, and while I am certain that they will not agree with everything I have written, I hope that they will find something of themselves and their struggles here.

Valerie Rivers-Moore read every word of this book, multiple times, and I thank her for her superb copyediting skills and for her unceasing curiosity and support. I am deeply grateful to her and to John Platt for their patience, keen interest in discussing my research, and unconditional love. I truly could not have done this without them.

Leonardo Solano Méndez, through so many travels across so many continents, you have always been my home. Thank you for your sense of adventure, for your unfailing support, and for your superior suitcase-packing skills. Gracias, Leo, Lucía, and Amaru, amores de mi vida, my hearts, my sweetest of peas, for filling my days with so much laughter and so much love.

Introduction

You know, I don’t regret it, having been a sex worker. I don’t regret it. If God gave me the opportunity to be born again, I think I would still go into sex work.

—SUSAN, thirty-year-old sex worker from San José, mother of two

I don’t have many expectations; my expectations are very low. I come here so that I can have some engagement with members of the opposite sex in a positive way that makes me feel a little bit better about myself as a man. And I like to think of it as my support for the local economy.

—BARRY, fifty-one-year-old sex tourist and teacher from Virginia, father of two

I would have thought that prostitution is illegal, but you’re telling me it isn’t. It seems to me that if it isn’t illegal, like you say, then we would provide assistance to any worker, even if their work is inconsistent with good morals and good customs.

—NANCY, legal assistant, Department of Labor Relations, Ministry of Labor

This book is about Susan’s lack of regret, Barry’s low expectations, and Nancy’s confusion. Why do Barry’s contributions to the local economy make him feel better as a man? How does Susan’s experience of sex work relate to Nancy’s assertion that it is immoral? This book is about the meanings that a variety of subjects make out of their connections with one another that take place through the purchase, sale, and regulation of sexual services in the tourism district of a Latin American city. I argue that sex tourism is a strategy for social mobility for all participants, including not only sex tourists and sex workers like Susan and Barry, but also the state, through the attitudes and actions of public employees like Nancy. As such, Gringo Gulch offers an ethnographic exploration of how various kinds of mobility operate in the sex industry by looking at three key spheres that define sex tourism: the experiences of sex workers, sex tourists, and the state. The book considers how practices in all three spheres can be theorized as a search for ascendancy through social and economic mobility. This attention to mobility requires bringing class back into our analysis, suggesting that sex tourism is a class project that is being accomplished by participants on all sides of sex tourism encounters. Through ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews with female sex workers, their male clients, state agents, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers in San José’s main sex tourism neighborhood, known as Gringo Gulch, I argue that all the actors intimately entangled in the sex tourism industry use it as a strategy for getting ahead.¹ Utilizing a theoretical approach grounded not only in feminist analysis but also in transnational political economy, I consider the intersections of sex tourism and the pursuit of symbolic capital alongside the state’s role in facilitating these exchanges, as well as the state’s own interest in advancement through sex tourism. In this way, I am able to connect the micro level of bodies, desires, and subjectivities to the macro level of international political economy and local and national state policy. This is accomplished by resituating sex workers (and sex work) within the realm of the Costa Rican tourism economy more generally, enabling me to foreground not just gender, sexuality, and race but also issues of labor, class, mobility, and consumption. Gringo Gulch seeks to answer three central questions: Why has Costa Rica, a middle-income country usually considered an exceptional success in Latin America, emerged as a major site of sex tourism? How do sex tourists and sex workers make meaning out of their experiences, and what do they gain from their encounters with one another? And how has the neoliberal entrenchment of state services and provisions across Latin America impacted the role of the nation-state in relation to sexuality?²

Many scholars have addressed the macro-level structural changes that have taken place in the global political economy since about the 1970s (Appadurai 1996; Castells 1996; García Canclini 1995; Harvey 1990; Held and McGrew 2007; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Ritzer 2004). Fewer have focused on gender and sexuality, though this trend is changing, with new attention to the key role of women in low-paid, manual jobs in maintaining the current global economic system (Bedford and Rai 2010; Bergeron 2001; Nagar et al. 2002; Sassen 1998b). Some have addressed the importance of theorizing sexuality in the context of rapid global changes, but this work remains largely theoretical rather than empirical. It rarely takes into account the ways in which global processes impact subjective experiences and meanings of sex at the level of day-to-day encounters (Altman 2001; Bauman 1998; Binnie 2004; Giddens 1992; Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). There have been a few recent exceptions to this trend, including the groundbreaking ethnographies by Bernstein (2007b) and Padilla (2007). It is to this emerging body of work that Gringo Gulch contributes.

When human agency and culture are included in theories of globalization, they are often defined as the local in relation to the global, and transnational feminist analysis has frequently focused precisely on this relationship (Bergeron 2001; Gibson-Graham 2006; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Nagar et al. 2002). Explorations of the gendering of theories and processes of globalization have sought to problematize constructions of the global as masculine and the local as feminine. From this perspective, cultural, economic, and political processes must be recognized as mutually constitutive of both the local and global, involving gender at all levels. Local forms of globalization are not merely effects, but play a role in shaping, limiting, and redefining global processes. For example, Freeman (2001) positions women as central participants in global economics rather than simply as its victims, showing how processes of production and consumption, empowerment and exploitation both reinforce and challenge notions of femininity and masculinity at multiple scales. Rather than passive victims or active resisters, transnational feminist analysis crucially reveals that women may be empowered in contradictory ways through consumption and by buying into and participating in upholding globalization. Transnational feminist studies of globalization, including my own, stress the connections between global and local in order to suggest that the local should be understood as constitutively global.

Much of the literature on transnationalism that gets beyond a strictly economic account of global processes has emphasized migration (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; McEwan 2008; Vertovec 2001). While some have pointed out the importance of including the vast numbers of people who do not move within accounts of transnational webs, even referring to transnational cognitive space (Mahler and Pessar 2001), the focus then tends to be on the impact of transnational migration on those left behind (Hirsch 2003). But are only migrants and those connected to specific migrating individuals transnational? The metaphor of transnational social spaces, spaces that are anchored in but extend beyond the borders of any one nation-state (Mahler and Pessar 2001, 441), can potentially prove fruitful in extending the concept of transnationalism into analysis of the encounters that occur in sex tourism. By theorizing San José’s sex tourism neighborhood as a transnational space, I consider how global processes and forms are embedded in local social and spatial structures (McEwan 2008, 501); I also interrogate the ways in which national identity and nationalism continue to be present and significant in transnationality. This approach to studying globalization requires paying attention to varying transnational social spaces and acknowledging the many ways of being transnational. It also means acknowledging that various actors will experience transnationality differently depending on gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and class, including, but not limited to, the impact these variables have on the ability to move.

Though in the context of sex tourism in Costa Rica it is primarily white North American men who travel and Costa Rican women who stay still, I resist the tendency to gender transnational mobility, and globalization as a whole, as masculine and hegemonic. The relationships between sex tourists and sex workers are embodied, gendered, and raced, but they are also about labor, consumption, class, mobility, and age. Taking into consideration this wide range of factors provides a more complex and detailed account of these encounters, and emphasizes the nuances, tensions, and contradictions of everyday transnational contacts. The analysis considers the multiple ways of being transnational beyond migration, and as such, various kinds of mobilities are central to Gringo Gulch. These include the trips that tourists undertake and why, the opportunities that participation in the sex industry offers for increased symbolic and economic capital and the improved social status that capital makes possible, and the circuits of particular ideologies and priorities that help determine the parameters of state and NGO interventions. By turning attention to the complex emotional and moral textures of quotidian relationships of inequality (Ray and Qayum 2009, 3), this book also contributes to the literature on gendered transnational processes, demonstrating that sex workers and sex tourists are participants in a complex set of encounters that are produced through individuals, states, and transnational political economy.

One of the most important factors in understanding the sex tourism industry in Costa Rica is neoliberalism. By neoliberalism, I mean the deregulation of corporate and financial institutions, privatization and decline in welfare provisions, free trade, belief in unfettered markets and individualism, and diminished labor unions and social programs. The lived effects of these trends, their gendered nature, and the resulting precariousness for so many have been analyzed in a variety of contexts (see Bernstein and Jakobsen 2013 for a useful overview). In Latin America, this combination of economic policy and social values has been referred to by Perreault and Martin (2005) as the moral economy of neoliberalism. In Costa Rica, neoliberal policies were put in place at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and USAID throughout the 1980s, and this perspective has remained dominant in the country’s political economy ever since. Neoliberalism and changing gendered labor markets in both North America and Latin America are shaping the shifting dynamics of the sex industry in Costa Rica, dynamics that are now primarily defined by the search for upward mobility by all parties.

Similar to Duggan’s (2003) findings in her work on the United States, sexual politics are playing an increasingly important role in neoliberal Latin America (Bedford 2009), as recent struggles around issues such as same-sex civil unions and abortion make clear. The role of the state has also been a central focus in debates about neoliberalism. Results have been decidedly uneven: while some states may indeed have been weakened, others appear stronger than ever. In practical terms, how societies have become neoliberal has often depended on a central role for the state in privatization and the creation of market opportunities. In many Latin American contexts in particular, neoliberalism has not meant a reduction in state size or function, but rather a reconfiguration and reinstitutionalization of state power (Auyero 2012; Perreault and Martin 2005). Indeed, rather than enfeebled states, research has demonstrated that the era of neoliberalism has been defined by a new modality of government (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 989), dependent on complex transnational networks of states, international financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations, private corporations, and individual entrepreneurial subjects (Babb 2005; A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose 1996; Freeman 2014; Gledhill 2004; Harvey 2005; Rose 1996; Rose and Miller 1992). Neoliberalism is not just about a reduced role for the state, then; rather, it is about extending the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision making criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or primarily economic (Foucault 1997, 79). Neoliberalism reconfigures relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, sovereignty and territoriality. It is not just a market ideology that reduces government but rather one that establishes a new relationship between governing and knowledge whereby governing activities are seen as nonpolitical, nonideological issues that need technical solutions. According to Perreault and Martin:

The techniques of neoliberalism are . . . multiple, varied, and often contradictory. Neoliberalism is best characterized not as a coherent end product, but rather as a complex and contested set of processes, comprised of diverse policies, practices, and discourses. Although neoliberal policies share an underlying logic and ideological foundation, they emerge from, and take hold in, distinct social, political, cultural, and environmental contexts. (2005, 194)

We must consider neoliberal processes in both North America and Central America in order to make sense of the sex tourism industry in Costa Rica. For example, as we will see in chapter 2, the dual processes of increased criminalization of men who pay for sex and the growth in the middle-class sex market in North America and Europe are tied to the trips that working-class and lower-middle-class men make to Costa Rica to pay for sex. This demonstrates the importance of focusing on class in our analysis of neoliberal sex tourism and its impact on men’s commercial sexual practices. The book also emphasizes the importance of looking at gendered relations in sex tourism in new ways, with attention to classed masculinity along with femininity, but also to the variety of different models of womanhood that are appealed to by female sex workers, including traditional notions of proper behavior and modern ideas about motherhood and consumption. In chapter 4, I argue that sex work can be seen as a class mobility strategy deployed by women for managing and contributing to neoliberalism in Costa Rica, a strategy that very much links up with neoliberal ideology and economic goals while simultaneously challenging the conservative cultural politics of sexuality that have accompanied neoliberal economic policies. The chapters that follow therefore make a significant analytic contribution to recent work on postindustrial transformations of emotion and intimacy (Bernstein 2007b; Giddens 1992; Hochschild [1983] 2002; Zelizer 2007) by arguing that they unfold not only in terms of a specific period in political economy and history, but also geographically within the social spaces that lie between distinct locales. While there has been some talk of a move toward a postneoliberal moment in Latin America as various governments have embraced a populist Left rhetoric (Lind 2010; Macdonald and Ruckert 2009), Costa Rica continues to champion neoliberalism wholeheartedly. Gringo Gulch suggests that the changes taking place in the sex industry must be understood in relation to local manifestations of neoliberal cultural and economic politics (Bedford 2009; Duggan 2003) but also in relation to the changes occurring in the sex industries in North America and Europe, both in terms of the increasingly middle-class background of participants and a renewed focus on persecuting and prosecuting male clients (Bernstein 2007b; Sanders 2009). The book demonstrates that these patterns are intricately connected and must be analyzed and understood relationally. What is central to the overall argument of the book is the necessity of examining neoliberal processes in different places relationally, and with attention to how neoliberalism manifests itself in the macro-level sexual politics of transnational tourism and the state governance of sexuality, as well as in the micro-level interactions between North American tourists and Latin American sex workers.

In some ways, the literature on sex tourism has provided a potential challenge to the trends toward macro-level analyses of global processes in that it tends to focus on profoundly unequal relationships between male tourists and female sex workers, emphasizing the ways in which sex tourists derive power from a framework of real racialized and gendered inequalities which are written on the body (Sánchez Taylor 2000, 50). The fact that many of the world’s main sex tourism destinations are former colonies and/or have had a significant foreign military presence in their histories confirms the importance of addressing the gendered and raced power inequalities inherent in sex tourism (Bishop and Robinson 1998; Jeffrey 2002; Kempadoo 2004; Law 2000; O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor 2005; Seabrook 1996). The literature on sex tourism therefore, and perhaps inevitably, often rests on a binary that sets up North American and European men as always oppressive, and Caribbean and Asian women (the regions most studied) as therefore necessarily disempowered. Scholars sympathetic to struggles for sex workers’ rights are careful to recognize the existence of women who have actively chosen sex work, but usually emphasize the white middle-class background and northern location of this demographic (Bernstein 2007a; O’Connell Davidson 1998). Much research on white middle-class sex workers has been criticized precisely from the perspective that prostitution cannot be theorized from their experiences because they represent only a handful of relatively privileged white American women (O’Connell Davidson 1998, 113), with poor women in the Global South inevitably standing in as the point of comparison and the evidence of sex workers who are oppressed and exploited. The unfortunate implication is that these same sex workers are defined by their structural disadvantages and always therefore exploited by powerful white men, while agentive white women are potentially able to gain pleasure and power from sex work. Comparison with white middle-class sex workers leaves the binary of power between North American men and women in the Global South intact, and even reinforces the notion that third world women occupy the location of most oppression and are unable to speak for themselves (Spivak 1988). The emphasis on domination assumes that there are few other processes at work and ignores complicated questions about sexual desire (Wade 2008).

The story of sex tourism in San José could be told relatively easily as the exploitation of poor Costa Rican women by privileged North American men in a position to take advantage of the vast geopolitical inequalities that make Latin American women into suppliers of low-cost sexual labor. Instead, I expand the story to analyze how the encounters between sex tourists and sex workers are produced through a variety of intersecting sites of power and are quintessentially neoliberal, in that they operate within an almost entirely unregulated but highly competitive market beyond the reach of the state. By exploring the intersections of gender, race, class, and national dimensions of the sex industry, I avoid a limiting view of Costa Rican women, and especially sex workers, as hapless victims (Mohanty 2003). I also show that sex tourists are more than just racist neoimperialists. Instead, Gringo Gulch argues that both groups are involved in complicated processes of class mobility that must be situated within the neoliberal marketization of leisure, consumption, and sex. This analysis of sex tourism as a class project, and the ways in which gender and sexuality work through class in this context, has been neglected by scholars of the transnational sex industry, and as such my focus on class is a key contribution of this book. The book is thus in conversation with recent sociological work that has attempted to refocus academic attention on class relations (see, for example, Jackson 2011; Kotiswaran 2011; Ray and Qayum 2009; Sayer 2005; Taylor 2011).

Both the sociological and the feminist literatures on sex tourism too frequently fail to situate questions of gender and sexuality in terms of the broader structural dynamics and complex, contextual meanings that are simultaneously at play. While much of the research into the sex industry (and feminist research more generally) attempts to address the intersections of gender, race, and sometimes class, in practice, most focus on the gendered power dynamics of sex tourism, with some attention to the role of race in determining why men travel for sex (Kempadoo 2004; O’Connell Davidson 1998; Penttinen 2008). However, the importance of class is ultimately often only implied in the analysis or disregarded altogether. By paying attention to the role of class formation and the pursuit of social mobility in the ways in which both sex workers and sex tourists make meaning out of their encounters, Gringo Gulch marks a novel attempt to write class back into sociological analysis of sex tourism. I argue that sex tourism is best understood as what I am calling a relational economy, as value is being produced through particular kinds of relationships and comparative processes. Similarly, I pay close attention to how social and economic mobility can be theorized in relation to particular state strategies toward sex tourism. Unlike other states such as the Philippines, where remittances are relied upon and celebrated in order to advance (Parreñas 2001b), and South Korea, where the presence of migrant entertainers is encouraged in the context of changing labor markets and rapid economic advancement (Cheng 2010), the Costa Rican state has adopted an approach to the sex industry that I refer to as permissive ambivalence, allowing room to condemn the sex tourism industry while simultaneously harnessing its benefits for the state’s upward mobility.

In sum, Gringo Gulch looks at both the subjective and structural aspects of the transnational sex tourism industry in order to locate the ethnographic analysis within a broader historical and political-economic framing. The aim is to demonstrate how the experiences of sex workers and sex tourists are connected to local, national, and transnational patterns that are quite specific to Costa Rica but that also provide a lens for looking at the ways in which neoliberalism has had varying impacts on differently situated subjects that shift significantly according to space and context. It also argues that the story of sex tourism in Costa Rica is very much about how gender, sexuality, and sex tourism work are projects of class formation and social mobility in a neoliberal context.

Terminology

When researching sex tourism, one must always eventually address the question of terminology. There has been much debate about the use of the term sex tourism, and it sometimes seems that each writer on the topic comes up with a slightly different definition. For example, questions of intention (does the transactional sex have to be planned ahead of time?), type of payment (does the payment have to be in cash, or does in-kind payment also count?), type of travel (does it have to be for leisure, or do business or voluntourism count?), and distance from home (does an international border have to be crossed?) all come up in discussions of how to define what becomes a murkier concept the more we attempt to pin it down. Furthermore, like other researchers, I recognize the problematic nature of using labels, especially when they are labels that participants