Abstract
On the busy street corners of many U.S. cities, day laborers, known as jornaleros, wait patiently on sidewalks for someone to offer them work. These men remain invisible, however, in sexuality research with Latin American immigrant populations. Based on in-depth individual interviews with 20 self-identified heterosexual Mexican immigrant men living in Los Angeles, this article examines two ways in which migration destabilizes the boundaries of heterosexuality in these men’s lives. First, they work under conditions that expose them not only to economic exploitation but also to potential sexual harassment by their employers, frequently White gay men. And second, same-sex encounters with other immigrants are prompted by contexts of marginality and selective sexual agency. The fluid nature of heterosexuality within these specific migration-related contexts and new capitalist relations that globalize and commodify the bodies of Latin American men help to explain the vulnerabilities of poor Mexican immigrant men.
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This article is based on a chapter entitled “Sexual Bargains: Work, Money, and Power” in my book Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives (González-López, 2005) and was presented in an earlier version at the Society for the Study of Social Problems conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 12–14, 2005.
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González-López, G. Heterosexual fronteras: Immigrant mexicanos, sexual vulnerabilities, and survival. Sex Res Soc Policy 3, 67–81 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2006.3.3.67
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2006.3.3.67