Chapter 11: Pathways of desire: The sexual migration of Mexican gay men

Abstract

Pathways of Desire by Héctor Carrillo (professor of sociology and gender and sexuality studies at Northwestern University) is a long-overdue book—but one fully worth waiting for. It comes at a critical time for Latinx, transborder, migration, and gender/sexuality studies. Carrillo’s must-read work tackles some of the most fundamental questions unfolding in these fields today, such as the unstable meanings of concepts like gay and queer, particularly when confronted with processes of migration and shifting landscapes of desire. The book traces the migration of gay and bisexual subjects from Mexico into the United States, while critically interrogating the epistemic assumptions that would falsely homogenize people’s identities and practices across different sociocultural and class geographies. In this regard, the book reveals the urgency of finding more flexible modes of analysis for studying the sexuality of transnational mobile individuals. Carrillo challenges deficiency models that (re)present the United States as an exceptional space of queer emancipation and define, by default, migrants’ places of origin as repressed, uncivilized, and uniformly homophobic. He assembles instead a richer, more complex picture of a “Queer” Mexico, where race, locality, class access/mobility, age, religion affiliation, and heterosexual performativity define people’s same-sex experiences.