Abstract
As a queer sociologist, I feel that I am always chasing the notion of sexual freedom in my life and in my work. What does it mean to be free or, conversely, sexually oppressed? To what lengths would I and have I gone to find sexual freedom? In Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Gay Men, Héctor Carrillo brilliantly charts the diverse ways that sexual freedom and oppression can manifest. Exhaustively researched and meticulously presented, Pathways of Desire demonstrates the power in the lives of Mexican immigrants to the United States of the simplistic narrative of the United States as a haven of sexual freedom and Mexico as a realm of sexual regressiveness and tradition. Thoroughly refuting this tale, Carrillo demonstrates the complexity and diversity of experiences of gay Mexican immigrant men, while also charting changes to their sexuality and the role of sexuality in shaping their migrations.
One of the book’s strengths is the triangulation enabled through the three samples interviewed by Carrillo and a wide team of collaborators and research assistants. He uses interviews with Mexican immigrants in San Diego, California, U.S.-born Latinos, and a smaller sample of non-Latino, largely white U.S. men. The book broadly follows three parts of their sexual journey. First, Carrillo examines the sending cultures and motivations of Mexican immigrants to the United States, breaking apart monolithic notions of sexual oppression. Particularly interesting is Carrillo’s finding of a “gay culture of migration,” in which in addition to family support for the journey, Mexican immigrants also received support from Mexican gay friends, potential U.S. boyfriends, and, in one case, other gay family members. I found the continual reminders of his participants’ early sexual experiences, often in childhood and early teenage years, to be fascinating because of their role in their eventual crossings, understandings of sexuality, and integration into communities. Although many took up “global gay” understandings of homosexuality, early homosocial same-sex desire or activo/passivo gendered constructs kept returning in the U.S. context.
Second, he examines integration into San Diego’s queer community, especially within the geographic zone of the gayborhood, and the roles of receiving populations of U.S. whites and U.S.-born Latinos in integrating newcomers within queer communities. Carrillo charts how Mexican immigrants manage to find queer communities, including sometimes literally stumbling into the area, and demonstrates the role of understanding “global gay” culture, such as rainbow flags, in being able to locate or even imagine the idea of the gayborhood. Carrillo presents a powerful reminder of the politics of visibility in a discussion of the ability to hold hands in public and its effects on participants’ developing sexual citizenship.
In the third and final phase of the journey, Carrillo looks at how migration influences the sexuality of Mexican immigrants. Sometimes sexuality here is understood as identity, such as a participant’s newfound bisexual identity that he conceives of after an encounter with a U.S. man. Often, though—and this is a strength of the work—sexuality is understood as desire and sexual behaviors such as sexual positioning (e.g., bottoming and topping, oral versus anal, etc.). Particularly of interest in this section is the discussion of the racial imaginaries of the participants and the concept of “sexual passion” as an organizing trope of Latino sexuality, for each of the three groups.
Of course, no study can be everything, even one as thoroughly researched as this one, but I look forward to someone exploring a follow-up with Tijuana non-migrants or those that decided to settle in Mexico after returning from migrations, or an examination of whether U.S. white understandings of sexual passion returned and circulated. Carrillo discusses how Mexican immigrants used sexual passion as a so-called positive stereotype—partially through circulation of “pro” stereotypical framings of Latino and Mexican family life that U.S. whites primarily deployed as sexual tropes, but also through constructing those tropes as resisting frames—and saw Mexican culture and sexual mores of passion as superior to U.S. white “coldness” and anti-family individuality. Although these stereotypes circulated and fit within some understandings of sexual passion they had brought from Mexico, it would be interesting to see how they combined.
In Pathways of Desire, Carrillo demonstrates an impressive ability to weave together a massive amount of data from interviews and field notes. The presentation of the data in the empirical chapters really lets readers see and connect with some of the men and also allows them to witness the range and complexity of different expressions of sexuality and migration experiences. Each section focuses on representative men that allowed Carrillo to document the diversity he was seeking to emphasize. He helpfully pairs this organization with sections emphasizing the trends across his participants. While at first I worried that this would lead each man to be decontextualized, many of the men came up frequently across chapters, allowing readers to see the full spectrum of their reasons, contexts, and desire.
However, I often also found myself wondering about the possibility of vast generational differences, which Carrillo muses about directly in the conclusion. These men migrated during very different circumstances that are reflected in their individual stories: changing economic climates, immigration patterns and laws, U.S. and Mexican social movements and legal rights for LGBTQ peoples, the HIV epidemic, and changing health care for people living with HIV. Through these many changes, Carrillo makes convincing arguments for the role of migration itself as a driver of changes in sexuality, both identity and desire. By using three samples, Carrillo is able to demonstrate the differences between, for instance, U.S.-born Latinos’ interactions with U.S. white men and those of Mexican immigrants. Without the comparison samples, and the ability to hear from both migrants and U.S. white men that were engaging in relationships with them, the causal function of migration in these changes would have been obscured. Although clearly a massive undertaking across years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant support, Carrillo’s methodological design should be emulated by future interview-based studies.
Pathways of Desire makes significant contributions to several different literatures. Within the sociology of sexualities, Carrillo’s consideration of both identity and desire, as well as his deft discussion of the traditional gender-based sexuality understanding of some of his participants, pushes us forward to consider sexuality fully and as a core way of understanding human behavior. Not being a migration scholar myself, I found the immigration narratives to be particularly important for understanding the diversity of “sending” and “receiving” communities, especially as there was considerable complexity to the journey many took to eventually reach the United States, including rural-urban pathways of desire within Mexico. These migration narratives should be read by those studying assimilation and race/ethnicity in the U.S. context. Finally, I see Carrillo contributing perhaps an underappreciated aspect to urban and spatial sociology, in showing how the wide variety of sending city sizes affects migration, the importance of geographic integration to finding community, and the power of borders in enforcing difference. Pathways of Desire would contribute to courses on sexuality, race and ethnicity, international migration, and globalization. It will be a text I return to as I continually chase, like these men, the phantasm of sexual freedom.