Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status.

Theories of migration have tended to concentrate on what causes people to move to new countries, focusing on structural conditions such as recomposition of capital or globalisation of markets, national policies and the rational decisions of ‘household units’. Discourses of ‘push-pull factors’ at the point of origin and the point of reception centre on causes such as wage differentials between countries, loss of land or crop failure, recruitment by employers abroad, family reunification projects, favourable immigration policy, flight from violence, persecution and armed conflict and the ‘feminisation of poverty’. None of these conditions excludes the others, and migrations are obviously best thought of as having multiple causes, since no single condition guarantees that migration will take place.

That such factors exist is unarguable, but they envision human beings as being acted upon, leaving little room for more subtle issues of desire, aspiration, frustration, anxiety or a myriad of other states of the soul. ‘Push-pull’ factoring, which sounds like something that happens to less-than-‘civilised’ people, is not usually mentioned when Euramericans are the migrants; these are more likely to be described as modern selves searching actively for better situations in which to realise their identities.

We know that choice is always at work, even with the poorest migrants, simply because everyone does not migrate from places having ‘push’ factors.

If it were true . . . that the flow of immigrants and refugees was simply a matter of individuals in search of better opportunities in a richer country, then the growing population and poverty in much of the world would have created truly massive numbers of poor invading highly developed countries, a great indiscriminate flow of human beings from misery to wealth. This has not been the case. Migrations are highly selective processes; only certain people leave, and they travel on highly structured routes to their destinations, rather than gravitate blindly toward any rich country they can enter (Sassen, 1999: 2).

Since the media, many governments and numerous supporters of migrants tend to talk as though the proverbial ‘avalanches’ of migrants were actually occurring, it seems important to underscore this point.[1] Even in the most trying situations, there are people who prefer to remain at home, while other people prefer to leave. Both are acted upon by world forces, yes, but they do not lose their ability to think through their options. Individual personalities play their part, differences such as degree of self-confidence, willingness to take risks and adaptability in the face of change. Being in a structurally less powerful position than people in the first world does not mean that one is not making decisions, and those decisions are influenced by a vast multiplicity of circumstances, including individual desire. Being poor does not make people poor in spirit.

In the same way, it does not follow that people who have decided to leave home, travel abroad and look for work, even in the most arduous conditions, never have leisure time, engage in tourist activities or look for pleasure. Combining business with pleasure is a concept available to the poor as well as the rich, to those with a false passport as well as those with a real one, and to those working in stigmatised occupations such as sex work as well as those doing what societies call ‘dignified work’. Saying migrants are people exclusively dedicated to work makes as little sense as saying business travellers are—it means rendering them one-dimensional, less than human.

A good deal of the fault for this reductionism goes to the media overload on the issue of how people migrate.

The manner of arriving

Until recently, the way people migrated was not a central issue in migration studies. They were assumed to have got the money together somehow, taken a bus, train, boat or plane and landed somewhere. Until they tried to make money, asked for help or presented some kind of social problem, they were more or less invisible. But now that the focus is on people getting past border controls to work in the sex industry, questions of how people get out of their own countries are on the agendas of numerous national and international governments.

Without a job offer, work permit and associated documents, entrance to the first world and many other countries is legally out of the question. Entering with a tourist visa is therefore a conventional solution, the idea being to overstay the time allotted and ‘disappear’ from authorities’ control. But obtaining a tourist visa can also be next to impossible for citizens of many countries with destinations in the first world, or may require long waiting because of quotas. Or the potential tourist-migrant may indeed be able to get a visa but not have the money to buy tickets and survive while looking for work. For these and other reasons, would-be travellers commonly seek help from intermediary agents in the travel process. These intermediaries sell services and documents that many travellers cannot afford to buy, so loans are a common feature of these trips. Those who help (in this context selling the service is helping) are often family members, old friends, tourist acquaintances, independent entrepreneurs or any combination of these, and they may play a minimal part or offer a whole travel ‘package’ which links them closely to the migrant at every step of the way.

Services offered for money may include the provision of passports, visas, changes of identity, work permits and other documents; advice on how to look and act in interviews with immigration officials (at the border, in airports, on trains and buses, in the street); the loan of money to show upon entrance with a tourist visa; pick-up service at the airport or car transportation to another city or country or to pre-arranged lodgings; and contact information for potential employers or other intermediaries at the destination. These services are not difficult to find in countries where out-travel has become normalised over time, and in certain countries, formal-sector travel agents offer such informal services.

Once in the destination country, travellers continue to need help and advice if they are going to get safe jobs with decent pay and without egregious labour abuses. They need contacts who can provide transport schedules or transport, addresses of safe places to stay, translation services, information on labour and cultural norms, medical references and other, conventional travel advice. In short, the creation of an economic niche for outside agents is a normal development in the informal economy facilitating migrations. That part of this economy turns to criminal exploitation does not mean the entire network does, nor that the clientele are all its ‘victims’.

I remember one day in a café in the centre of a Caribbean town. While Europeans were enjoying typical tropical holidays on nearby beaches, everyone in the café was talking about how to get out of the country. A young waiter discreetly chatted me up, soon asking if I could help him travel to Europe, in exchange for any kind of services I liked. Many vacationers who have been in poor countries have had this experience, and some will still remember the sympathy they felt, and the desire to help. Some will, in fact, have helped with money, ideas or contacts, thus becoming part of the informal networks that assist migrations, but few of these think of themselves as ‘traffickers’ or ‘smugglers’, no matter what job a migrant is destined to do.

The processes described involve potential migrants in a series of risky judgements and decisions. Each step of the way, they must weigh the story they are being told against what they have heard from returned migrants, friends abroad and news reports. Whether migrants buy a ‘full package’ from a single entrepreneur or make a succession of smaller decisions, only one link in the chain needs to be bad in order for things to go wrong. Obviously, this kind of clandestine market, outside all regulation, is not ‘fair’ in comparison with what people expect to enjoy in the first world. But the people who act within it are real, whole people who do not merit being generalised as ‘victims’. Néstor Rodríguez describes such migrations:

It is important to understand that autonomous migration means more than unauthorized (‘illegal’) border crossings: it means a community strategy implemented, developed, and sustained with the support of institutions, including formal ones, at the migrants’ points of origin and . . . points of destination. Precisely because core institutions (legal, religious, local governmental, etc) support this migratory strategy, undocumented migrants do not perceive its moral significance as deviant. Migrants may see their autonomous migration as extralegal, but not necessarily as criminal (Rodríguez, 1996: 23).

This point demonstrates that the ‘other’ of the victim—the ‘criminal’—is also a misleading notion for describing great numbers of people both travelling and facilitating travel in these immense worldwide networks.

Thinking about migrancy another way

Granting agency to migrating individuals does not mean denying the vast structural changes that push and pull them. On the other hand, granting them autonomy does not mean making them over-responsible for situations largely not of their own making. Global, national and local conditions intervene in individuals’ decisions, along with doses of good and bad luck. Many situations come up during a migration in which migrants have to choose between doing things the ‘right’, or legal, way, or doing them so that they might turn out the way they want. This brings to mind the conversation I had with a Colombian woman through the bars of the detention centre where she was being held in Bangkok after spending a year in prison. Her anguish did not derive so much from her having been in prison as from her own feelings of guilt because she had semi-knowingly broken the law, allowing a fake visa to be prepared for her in order to get into Japan. Her family had helped her with this, and her resultant conflicts over love and blame were tormenting her. While this woman had been a victim, she had also made choices and felt responsible, and I would not want to take this ethical capacity away from her.

Since Manuel Castells proposed the idea of a ‘space of flows’ for human movements in a ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996), migration scholars have used this metaphor in various ways. Doreen Massey emphasizes the ‘power geometry’ of flows:

Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it (Massey 1994: 149).

The migration-project consists of a vast complex of forces, from the national and global to the most local, personal and serendipitous (whom one happens to meet in a café). How people move, how necessary knowledge moves toward them, how they move their money and how its value moves them, as well as how they encourage other migrants to make similar moves: all form part of these flows. We are surrounded by images and sounds that foment the desire to ‘see the world’, and although we don’t have solid proof that this vision affects the desire to travel, we all know that it does.

In the classic distinction, migrants ‘settle’. So very many don’t, though: because they never (mentally or physically) relinquish a house, village, city or culture they are accustomed to, because they set themselves up to do business between the old and new country or because they find it unavoidable or impossible not to leave and go back. The latter possibility by no means signifies failure of the migration project, which may end up taking the shape of repeated use of tourist visas or simply repeated attempts to cross the border illegally and manage not to get caught while working. Most of these people come to feel they have more than one ‘home’, and that they live in both of them.

Living in more than one place

Take the titles of two texts written about the Dominican diaspora: Between Two Islands (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991) and One Country in Two (Guarnizo, 1992). In this case, a large number of Dominicans are said to live in both Santo Domingo and New York City, or live between them, on the ‘bridge’ they have built during the past 20 years.

Family arrangements in which one or both parents live in the U.S. with none or some of their children, while their other children live on the island, are frequent. Although having more than one household in two different countries might be a source of emotional stress and economic hardship, it also arms family members with special skills to deal with uncertainty and adversity. They become more sophisticated than nonmigrant people in dealing with a rapidly globalising world. (Guarnizo, 1992:77)

These arrangements may derive from enormous injustices committed against a people in the past but be expressed as great strengths. Take the case of the West Indian island of Nevis:

The global quality of West Indian culture is seen to be related to the circumstances of slavery and colonialism which sought to suppress and make invisible the Afro-Caribbean community within the island society. For this reason the Afro-Caribbean people employed colonial institutions, to which they gained access, as frameworks within which to formalize and display a culture which they saw as their own. After emancipation these frameworks increasingly derived from migration destinations in the West Indies, North America and Britain, where waged employment was available. In the course of these historical processes a global culture emerged which was characterized by its ability to cultivate and promote a locally developed system of values and practices through the appropriation of external cultural forms (Fog Olwig, 1993)

Karen Fog Olwig’s study is called Global Culture, Island Identity, again demonstrating the ‘bothness’ of many peoples’ sense of home. These concepts, so common to studies of diaspora and hybridity, are so far not recognised widely in studies of migrations in general, which makes me ask whether we think diaspora is something more profound or complex than mere migration, and why. Diasporas began, after all, with ordinary migrants, ‘pushed’ or ‘pulled’ by ‘factors’.

Cosmopolitanism should give us another way to position migrants, but Ulf Hannerz, in another classificatory exercise, said:

Most ordinary labour migrants are not cosmopolitans either. For them going away may be, ideally, home plus higher income; often the involvement with another culture is not a fringe benefit but a necessary cost, to be kept as low as possible (Hannerz, 1990: 243).

How in the world does Hannerz know this? It’s patently not true of many, many migrants, and anyway—at what point does a person stop being a migrant and become something else? Hannerz fixes migrant identity in an early stage, that of ant leaving, self-protection and wariness toward the new. We can be thankful that most migrants, especially younger ones, do not remain in this stage for long, and they may just as well go on to be cosmopolitans as anything else.

Alejandro Portes et al have proposed a new social field to be called Transnationalism, composed of

a growing number of persons who live dual lives: speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders. Activities within the transnational field comprise a whole gamut of economic, political and social initiatives—ranging from informal import-export business, to the rise of a class of binational professionals, to the campaigns of home country politicians among their expatriates (Portes et al, 1999: 217-8).

Defining a field means the authors have to delimit the phenomena involved, to avoid the term’s ‘spurious extension to every aspect of reality, a common experience when a particular concept becomes popular’ (219). From the quoted text, it would appear that transnationals are middle class, but I see no need for this. Delimitation is not my project, however.

Beyond labelling

I opened this piece with a complaint: that (unconscious) victimisation is the growing modus operandi of people speaking on behalf of migrants. Obviously, those who work in victims’ services meet only victims, and as long as they speak on behalf of those particular people there is no problem. But the tendency is wider, and it is not solved by trying to distinguish precisely between a ‘smuggled’ person and a ‘trafficked’ one. Possible abuses committed by facilitators of migration know no boundaries; they may happen to men as well as women and to those working in sweatshops as well as in private houses.

I suggest that we re-confirm the idea of agency for migrants, with the emphasis on the process they are going through. Although some migrants may experience a (sad) feeling of being permanently uprooted, many others do not, and the whole theory of social ‘integration’ of migrants depends on their desires and abilities to adapt, assimilate and lose not their own identities but their identification with migrancy. At best, ‘migrant’ refers to a stage of life.

I also suggest that researchers and supporters consider the ‘transnational’ as a way to understand many migrants’ customs, including those that have caused polemic (‘sacrifice’ of animals, wearing headscarves and so on). Perhaps I don’t use the term in a carefully delimiting fashion, but it seems to me that many individual migrants evolve transnational ways of living that show creative adaptation and strength: looking for ways out of bad situations, trying to maintain something of the past while opening to the future.

Notes

[1] According to the director of the external relations department and senior regional adviser for Europe at the International Organization for Migration: ‘The 150 million migrants estimated to be in the world today make up only 2.5 percent of the world’s population’ (Schatzer, 2001).

References

Barry, Kathleen (1979) Female Sexual Slavery. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Fog Olwig, Karen (1993) Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Reading UK: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Grasmuck, Sherri and Pessar, Patricia (1991) Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guarnizo, Luís Eduardo (1992) One Country in Two: Dominican-owned firms in New York and in the Dominican Republic. Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.

Hannerz, Ulf (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’ in Mike Featherstone (ed) Global Culture, special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, 7.

Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, 1-37.

Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis and Landolt, Patricia (1999) ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 2, 217-237.

Rodríguez, Néstor (1996) ‘The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and the State’, Social Justice, 23, 3, 21-37.

Sassen, Saskia (1999) Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press.

Shatzer, Peter (2001) ‘Illegal migration needs firm but compassionate solution’. Presented at Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Conference on Illegal Migration in Paris, on 13 December 2001.

Book Review by Laura Agustín in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 pp 703-15, September 2005

Abdelmalek Sayad, 2004: The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Initially I thought this book’s title might signal the growing trend to victimize migrants, but I was wrong. On the contrary, The Suffering of the Immigrant presents the strongest possible arguments for recognizing migrants’ agency in the face of inherent, structural conditions that are all against them and whose consequences they must, undoubtedly, ‘suffer’.

Whereas many contemporary commentators refer to migration as a phenomenon of ‘globalization’, Abdelmalek Sayad makes no bones about which stage of globalization we should be looking at: the north’s imperialist colonization of the south. Most commentators agree that current migratory flows are related to free-market capitalism’s need for flexibility, moving its workplaces around the world while workers move to find them. And probably few would deny that ‘earlier’ colonial relations were implicated, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’.

But Sayad obliges us to consider a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study is the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, during which time many migrants passed from being French (citizens of the colony) to Algerian (citizens of an independent Algeria) and back to French (as legal workers and residents in France), with the complication that the majority were Berber peasants. The colonial relationship is seen in the subordination of the economic and social life of rural colonies to the industrial activity of the country in which peasants become ‘workers’.

Sayad’s arguments, however, go much further than this particular case. First, he demonstrates how discourses of migration focus on the situation of ‘immigrants’ — meaning, on how receiving countries view immigration as their own social problem. With this move, the dominant member of the migration relationship firmly maintains control over knowledge and management of this ‘problem’, according to which immigrants are always ‘lacking’ necessary skills and culture. Sayad insists that research must begin at an earlier stage, a demand that has begun to be met by a trend towards studies of ‘transnational’ migrations. But Sayad points to a more intransigent problem here, in which countries of origin participate in the negative construction of their own citizens abroad, construing them as simply absent, treating them as martyrs to the country’s economic good and considering them traitors who lose their original culture and become contaminated by another. If they do manage to return, they are pathologized as being difficult to ‘reinsert’ into society. Sayad shows how individual migrants reproduce this colonialist view of themselves as subaltern misfits only useful in an accountant’s version of migration that selectively calculates ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’.

Sayad debunks categories of migration imagined to be separate, in which ‘settler migrants’ supposedly value families and domestic morality more than ‘labour migrants’, as well as the idea that labour migrations are transitory and without a political dimension. Rather, he suggests that all migrants are united by a distancing from their original home, wracked by guilt that they should never have left and, having done so, that they will not perform well enough. Though they may achieve legal status, they are always treated as foreign by their second country and referred to via ‘digestive’ metaphors about their capacity to be assimilated, integrated or inserted into society. They fail to perceive the social, medical and other ‘helping’ sectors as being on their side. Their loyalties are divided, they don’t know which patrie iis really theirs and they experience an alienation from their own children, who may have no interest in their ‘homeland’. They are doubly excluded from real political participation in both countries of origin and reception, thus being deprived of even

the right to have rights, to be a subject by right . . . to belong to a body politic in which [they have] a place of residence, or the right to be actively involved — in other words the right to give a sense and a meaning to [their] action, words and existence (p. 227).

While some of this may seem familiar to migration scholars, its presentation renders it new. Sayad belonged to the group he studied: emigrant from Kabylia, immigrant in France. He gives significant space to migrants’ own words, sometimes in the form of long, repetitive and even confusing testimonies. Although one can imagine his anger over the many injustices he recounts, he recognizes their cultural logic.

Sayad makes an important contribution to migration study in his development of Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘state thought’, which he considers one of our most intractable cultural givens. Slurring migrants as ‘hybrids’ and ‘bad’ social products, society manifests its fear of those who ‘blur the borders of the national order and therefore the symbolic value and pertinence of the criteria’ used to establish differences between nationals and foreigners (p. 291). For Sayad, nothing less than the delegitimizing of the state is necessary, the denaturalizing of what we consider passionately real — our national being.

This is a book about men. The Algerian case that Sayad details was initially about single males, who are pictured as alienated from a natural cycle of courtship and marriage. Sayad reproduces one man’s speculation on a potential woman migrant’s fate: ‘whilst she might gain something by coming here . . . she’d pay a high price for it . . . she would be imprisoned in one room . . . she would miss the sky’ (p. 156). Given the current protagonism of so many women in migration, their absence here is notable, and in this sense Sayad’s case study imposes a restriction. Given the wealth of ideas here that go far beyond any single case, this restriction can be forgiven.

Before Sayad died he asked his friend and colleague, Pierre Bourdieu, to make a book of the disparate manuscripts he had produced over the years. The result is intellectually rigorous, anthropologically perceptive, moving and poetic.

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión,  Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . .  says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . .

“I took my first ‘chickens’ across when I was nine years old, and when I grew up I started moving drugs across the border. My mother taught us the business and made us tough. She hated poverty. For her, power was everything,” says Cristal, daughter of the notorious drug smuggler Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiveros, . . . And like their male counterparts, female coyotes engage in extortion and bribery – of both Mexican and American authorities – which are prerequisites for setting up and maintaining human trafficking rings.

“In this business, everybody gets a share. The ministries, the Border Patrol and the narcos. You have to keep them happy so they let you do your job. Here, no money means no business,” says Adamaris, a young woman in El Paso, Tex. As she tells it, her children’s hunger drove her to turn her home into a “safe house” where more than 500 undocumented migrants have passed through in less than a year.

In addition to bribing federal agents, the women coyotes must also fill so-called “quotas” – monthly payments ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 – demanded by members of the major drug smuggling cartels, in order to be allowed to operate.

According to the women La Opinión interviewed – all U.S. citizens except Adamaris – many female coyotes smuggle migrants through the border crossings, rather than the mountains or the desert. “It costs more but it’s safer. That’s why they come to us. We don’t mess around with walking for three lousy days in the desert, but you gotta have balls to take people across the border,” says Margarita, who limits herself to smuggling women and children through California border crossings.

“We all got into this business out of necessity. Some of us are single mothers, and others have husbands in jail. The fact of the matter is that we’re all on our own. What bastards are gonna blame us for what we do? Who wouldn’t do the same thing if the miserable pay you get in a factory couldn’t be stretched far enough to feed your kids, and you find you can get twice the money for just giving a drink or taking care of a goddamn ‘chicken’ (an undocumented migrant)? Anybody who blames us has never seen their kids cry out of hunger,” affirms Esperanza, who smuggles undocumented migrants, money and narcotics in the Nogales, Ariz. region.

As Esperanza says, women’s stories of smuggling must not remain untold, because, she says, “Getting laid by the coolest guy at the party isn’t worth it if your gang doesn’t know about it.”

Which doesn’t mean that being prostitutes didn’t have anything to do with it. The report says that the news of what these women were doing reached China, where stigma against them would be enormous, and implies this might have caused someone to murder them. But it’s not clear, because they don’t know, and what’s better here is how the reader is asked to consider a lot of disparate information and make up her or his own mind. I’ve highlighted some particularly interesting lines in bold.

The Sydney Morning Herald - 24 January 2009

The murky world of sex for survival  - Ruth Pollard

Australian brothel

“WE WANT to recruit ladies, we guarantee a minimum pay of $1000 per week,” the advertisement in a Chinese-language newspaper reads.

It is likely “Jenny” and “Susan”, the two Chinese women murdered in Auburn late last year, saw these ads and found their way to one of the many brothels in southwestern Sydney, the money too good to refuse and the security it bought their families far greater than anything they could earn back home.

Like most migrant sex workers in Sydney, it is understood they were here on valid temporary visas that allowed them to work a certain number of hours each week without breaching their conditions. And they would have come from a culture that criminalises prostitution, where corruption of police and public officials is rife.

As NSW police continued to appeal for information that could lead them to the killer of the women - discovered on November 13 in a flat in Queen Street, Auburn - they appear to have faced a wall of silence from other sex workers unused to trusting authorities to properly investigate crimes. What they have learnt is that the women worked in the sex industry - a report in a Chinese-language newspaper indicated the two were employed by brothel in Bankstown - and were sending money to their families in China.

“These are people who had come from a very, very hard life,” said Detective Inspector Jim Stewart, who heads the strike force investigating the murders. “So far we have learned that Susan, a widow whose husband died many years ago, was supporting her daughter who is being looked after by relatives in China.” Preliminary autopsy results indicate whoever killed them was a “strong, powerful person” given the extent of their injuries, Detective Inspector Stewart said. “This was an absolutely brutal murder, and there is now an eight-year-old child back in China without her mother.”

The women had left a holiday tour early to work. Detective Inspector Stewart confirmed they had sought protection visas to stay in Australia and that these were being considered at the time of the murders. There was “nothing to suggest the women were involved in trafficking,” he said - indeed a recent study of Asian sex workers revealed most had made their own arrangements for travel and work in Australia and retained their passports.

The study examined data from more than 1800 Asian sex workers who visited the Sydney Sexual Health Clinic from 1992 to 2006, and found the women had a very low prevalence of sexually transmitted infections, rarely had serious drug or alcohol problems and were more likely to be married and have children than comparable Australian sex workers, its author, Chris Harcourt, said yesterday.

At the time, neighbours said they believed the women were students as they were often seen carrying backpacks, although those who work in services that support sex workers say it is not surprising the women were discreet about their jobs. “Confidentiality is obviously a primary concern for sex workers, but for migrant sex workers it is even more important because you are talking women who are living in small communities in Sydney, and they are women that have children and families back home in China,” said Jo Holden, the manager of the Sex Workers Outreach Project.

“Culturally, there is a high level of stigma and shame attached to sex working so they are very, very careful about what they disclose and to whom they talk.” Many were often reluctant to report domestic violence, assault or other criminal activity to police, Ms Holden said.

It is often the language barrier that leads these women to sex work - it prevents them from finding employment for reasonable pay in other industries and leaves them with little alternative. And once they see the newspaper advertisements seeking women for work in brothels and do the figures, it is seen as the best way to earn a decent living. “It is all about securing a better future for their family in China,” Ms Holden said.

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.

The word development is in scare quotes because too often rich countries impose endless economic and cultural rubbish on poorer ones in the name of ‘developing’ them, - supposedly bringing them up to the level of the rich ones but often messing things up more than anything else. If you’re interested in that idea, see some references at the end of this post.

According to mainstream ‘development’ values, prostitution is always something to be ashamed of and sorry about and to get rid of. Migrants who leave home and end up selling sex abroad may send back lots more money than they would if they were maids or farm workers but are not recognised as making a contribution. Read the original of my own article in English if you don’t read Chinese. If you know people who do read Chinese, please send this link on to them!

Contributing to ‘Development’: Money Made Selling Sex
對 「 發 展 」 的 貢 獻 ： 金 錢 促 使 性 交 易

Laura María Agustín

今年年初我在 Ecuador（厄瓜多爾）與比較貧窮的從事性交易的婦女聊天，她們談到也許會考慮旅行到另外一個國家賣淫。富國政客們每每批評到「經濟移民」，就彷彿她們去掙錢的欲望是件壞事。而且，在很多富國中，這類移民如果聲稱他們是受害者（難民、尋求政治庇護者、「被賣的婦女」 ，往往比那些剛剛到達、且甘願做任何工作的移民，更容易獲得停留核准。

這種針對經濟移民的偏見真是可笑，因為我們生活的世界，不就是鼓勵個人賺錢，而且賺大錢更代表個人的成功。不僅如此，當移民在這個國家中從事所謂「正式」的經濟生產時，也就是經過政府認可（並管理、收稅、檢查等等）的行業，就算這些行業薪水很差、工作環境不良、又沒有合理的工作權利，但是，這些移民的經濟追求動機完全不是問題。只有歸類在「非正式」經濟的工作，才無法被接受，儘管事實是現在「非正式」的工作也許比正式的工作來得多。注意：沒有人知道準確的數字，因為根本無法統 計各地沒有註冊登記的職業和從業人員。

非正式經濟或行業這個詞是在1970年代早期創造的，用來描述貧窮國家裏不受勞動法規保護卻有經濟收入的活動。

那時候人們認為非正式行業只是短暫的現象，與低度經濟發展相關，只要經濟發展後就會消失。然而，這種假設已被證實錯誤。前所未有的一大群人從事「正式」經濟之外的職業，並且投入各式各樣的職業和場所 (ILO 2002：v)。

但是現在，較富裕的國家也逐漸接受以非正式行業和正式行業來描述各種產業。所謂正式的行業，僅僅由官僚們所認可，所以就被認為是「真正的」、「有生產力的」和正常的。而非正式行業卻被認為灰色的、黑暗的、隱誨的、地下的，且往往被視為壞的、令人不快的、暫時的、不正經八百嚴肅的或毫無生產力。然而，對幹活的人來說，行業高低對他或許沒有什麼關係，因為無論行業有無執照，秘書或工人的工作任務大同小異。

非正式性質造成不公平的工作條件，虐待工人也相當猖獗。可是，至少非移民身份的工人或多或少還能享受公民身份的基本權利、保護和利益。但是移民／工的人身安全，卻取決於他們與雇主，經理及其 他員工所能發展的個人關係。如果出了意外，這些工人不能向政府機關求助，或者尋求司法途徑。為什麼？因為他們會被老闆隨意開除，也因為他們是移 民／工，更容易被騷擾或者遣送回國。然而，也越來 越多有公民身份的工人受僱於臨時、非正式的合同，面對惡劣的工作條件 (Precarias 2000: 6)。

所以，聽起來我們應該避免從事非正式工作，對吧？但是沒有正式許可從事正式行業的移民，卻很樂於接受這些非正式工作。未經正式認可和取得許可的公司雇傭那些沒有正式許可的人來幹活，這就解釋了有大量的移民在不會發給他們簽證和工作許可的國家中工作。餐飲、建築、家務、工廠、農業、照護和性工作者一樣都是偷偷摸摸地暗中工作。沒有工作許可證，移民們不能使他們的身份合法化，成為有證的居民或享有一般的權利，但是，他們能夠掙錢。「非正式」這個詞使得這些職業聽起來很微小、短暫、不穩定、甚至非良善的，是由街邊商販和流浪漢組成。但事實遠非如此，這些行業高度發展且市場非常龐大，之所以被稱為「非正式」，僅僅是因為它們（還）未被正式認可。性產業，存在於許可和不許可的行業之中，許多還是以非色情的許可形式下經營著(像是酒吧)，在全世界帶來數十億美元的收入，並使用先進的、高科技的設備和經營策略。非正式的性質使得商人們可以不受政府規範約束，卻仍然可以有機會獲取巨大的利潤，也使得從業人員可以比任何其他的方式賺更多的錢，只要他們願意使用性交易的手段。這適用於合法公民和無證移民，不管他們有無接受過正規教育，也不管他們是男、是女、或是跨性別。

相較那些遵循傳統的職業路徑、或者一生都從事同一職業的人來說，「彈性從業人員」是指根據市場 的需求與個人網絡的資訊來更換職業。彈性從業人員哪裡有工哪裡去，而且如果他們想要成功，他們就需要能適應新環境。性工作者就是最好的例子，對工作地點和工作內容的適應性都很強。雖然當中有些人在道德上並不反對出售性服務，但ㄧ些原本反對的人也在道德上變得靈活些，認為為了賺錢並不反對出售性服務。這適用於大多數移民，他們優先考慮的事情是盡可能快、盡可能多地賺錢，有時為了盡快還債得以往下一個地方賺錢，有時為了能夠繼續旅行，有時為了把錢寄回家或者帶回家裏。

移民寄回家的錢叫外匯。在某些國家，外匯是他們的主要收入來源。透過像西聯國際銀行(Western Union)的匯款服務記錄，我們可以知道匯款來自哪個國家，但這些記錄並沒有告訴我們匯款來自什麼樣的工作。但是，因為性工作的工資比其他絕大多數工作的工資高許多，所以很明顯地，大部份的外匯肯定來自性工作。

很多人都以為外匯只是用來買一些基本生存和消費用品(食品、冰箱、首飾、DVD)，但是最近的研究顯示，移民寄回來的錢，是重要的社會建設計畫，也就是所謂「發展」計畫的資金來源 (O’Neill 2004；Sorensen 2004)。這些錢來自採草莓、運送建材、給嬰兒洗澡和提供性交易等。不管這些錢是硬幣、支票或信用卡，不管這些錢怎麼來的，錢都一樣不會少一毛。這些錢被用來資助家庭、社區和整個地區的建設計畫、小生意和農業合作社。此外之外，購買像火爐的消耗品，即意味著能夠煮沸不潔淨的水，改變人的生命和健康，然後擁有健康的人就能為更大的經濟計畫工作。

在 Ecuador（厄瓜多爾），到國外從事性交易的婦女飽受批評。人們告訴我，這些女人「迫使」她們丈夫去找其他的性伴侶，她們不給子女應得的母愛，她們毀壞傳統的家庭生活。社會工作者便談到，當這些移民回到家鄉時，她們是個問題，而這彷彿她們在外習得的新知識一文不值，彷彿她們人已經變得奇怪和「特別」。除了石油以外，Ecuador（厄瓜多爾）最大的收入來源便是移民外匯款，也因此，上述的想法非常令人困惑，因為言下之意是他們可以接受賺錢，但無法接受提供錢的人。所以，移民成為「發展」經濟的金錢來源，但卻沒有人感謝她們，或者讓她們也能夠享受到發展的好處。她們變成只是一個被自己國家邊緣化和汙名化的社會群體。也難怪她們當中許多人，一旦離家一段時間後就不想再回來。

長久以來，「發展」經濟計畫一直受到極大的批評，因為富裕國家一直在貧困國家強加施行「援助」與「進展」計畫 (Harrell-Bond 1986；Escobar 1995)。然而，大多數文化都有其發展的願景，而移民寄錢回 家有助於實現這些願景，當中當然包括數百萬從事性交易的移民。

允許性產業繁榮發展的社會，可以將性產業納入政府會計裏。這一決定將把性產業納入常規的政府管制：一、經營許可所需的規範（如工作場所安全規定、合適的區域劃分規定）；二、工作場所需符合衛生和安全標準；三、標準的員工勞動保護，包括無論她們是否是移民，都須把她們列入國家社會保障體系。對這項性產業的規範，與傳統商業性性交易的規範不同，因為過去商業性性交易只考慮「賣淫」，工作條件與場所也只方便老闆、管理者和顧客，而從不考慮性工作者的需要。我同意國際勞工組織的說法，唯有政府認可性產業從業人員的存在，才能夠保護他們的權利 (Lim 1998)。

這篇文章圍繞著這一期的主題「金錢」，因此許多常見的相關議題並沒有納入討論：性工作是否是「有尊嚴」的勞動？還是性工作有各式各樣壓榨工作者的花樣？如果對商業性性交易的研究始終還是回到道德的層面上，就算這些道德觀有多麼重要，這些研究就顯得狹隘、簡化和嘮叨。在其他文章中，我的研究顯示買賣性行為的意義並不一定相同，而是取決於複雜的社會文化背景 (Agustin 2005；2007)。錢不只是實質的物品，也是一種文化，它的用途和好處為我們提供另類的道德觀。

資料來源
Agustín, Laura. 2005. ‘The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex.’ Sexualities, 8, 5, 621-34.

Agustín, Laura. 2007. ‘Fast Money in the Margins: Migrants in the Sex Industry’, in Livelihoods at the Margins: Surviving the streets, J. Staples, ed., Left Coast Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Harrell-Bond, Barbara. 1986. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ILO, ed. 2002. ‘Unprotected labour:What role for unions in the informal economy?’ Labour Education 2002/2 No. 127.

Lim, Lin, ed. 1998 The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, Geneva: International Labour Organisation.

O’Neil, Kevin. 2004. ‘Discussion on Migration and Development: Using Remittances and Circular Migration as Drivers for Development’. Washington: Migration Policy Institute.

Precarias a la deriva. 2000-2006. http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm

Sorensen, Ninna Nyberg. 2004.‘The Development Dimension of Migrant Transfers’. Copenhaguen: Danish Institute for International Studies.

Translation Credits

Translators: 姚剛 Gun Yao (freelancer, P.R.C), 鄭亘良 Keng-Liang (Ted) CHENG (volunteer of COSWAS, Taiwan)
Copyeditor: 張榮哲 Jung-Che CHANG (consultant of international affairs of COSWAS, Taiwan)
Art editor: 李雅伶 Ya-Lin Lee (art editor of COSWAS, Taiwan)

In a battle of statistics and ‘evidence’ last week on the Guardian’s comment website, both sides claimed to have the correct, evidence-based analysis of the extent of trafficking in the UK. To my thinking, this is a fruitless debate. That is, I agree with the 27 academics arguing that figures have been extrapolated and manipulated shamelessly by fundamentalist-feminist politicians. I was one of the first people, many years ago, to say so and take the flak. But the painful conflict is not about numbers It’s about definitions, visions of the world, passions, sex and money. My contribution to this business has been, from the beginning, to complicate conversations that present black versus white versions of something that is very grey indeed. For those who would rush to legislation my vision is not satisfying because it says ‘Wait, stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind.’ This is not useless ‘postmodern’ dithering. It is a position that says that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives, you cannot responsibly take actions to help them.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual enough not to use the term prostitutes, but I wasn’t and still am not in a position to make a clear substitute with the term sex workers. Here I was trying to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out okay for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. This is also the piece that suggested that many migrant sex workers can be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects. The reference to ‘challenging place‘ derives from the editorial focus, for a journal issue, on women and place, the local and the global. I couldn’t fit migrant workers into that framework, and this was the result.

Challenging ‘Place’: Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 45.1, Spring 2002, 110-117.

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For a long time I worked in educación popular in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others. Therefore, this essay is not about whether domestic service can ever be pleasant or prostitution should be accepted as ‘work’.[4]

The bad beginnings or sad, frightening or even tragic moments of people’s migrations to work need not forever mark them nor define their whole life experience. Relative powerlessness at one stage of migration need not be permanent; poor people also enjoy ‘multiple identities’ that change over life-courses composed of different stages, needs and projects. By insisting on the instrumentality of migrating under less than ideal conditions, the existence of the worst experiences are not negated. The abuses of agents who sell ways to enter the first world extend to migrants who work as domestic servants and in sweatshops, maquiladoras, mines, agriculture, sex or other industries, whether they are women, men or transgender people. But these most tragic stories are fortunately not the reality for most migrants.

Displacement or misplacement? Questions of will and ‘choice’

Research among migrant prostitutes and domestic workers reveals little essential difference in their migration projects and demonstrates that migrations that may have begun as a kind of displacement (a feeling of being pushed out, of having no reasonable choices) are not doomed to be permanently sad stories.[5] Even the poorest and even the partially ‘trafficked’ or ‘deceived’ look for and find spaces to be themselves in, run away, change jobs, learn to utilise friends, clients, employers and petty criminals. In other words, they do the same as other migrants and in all but the worst cases tend to find their way eventually into situations more to their liking, whether that means finding a good family to clean for or a decent brothel owner or the right contacts to work freelance.

Neither are migrations totally economically motivated. Exposed to media images that depict world travel as essential to both education and pleasure, potential migrants learn that first world countries are highly comfortable and sophisticated places in which to live. They are excited at the prospect of meeting people from other countries. All poor people do not decide to migrate; many that do are people interested in and capable of taking the risks involved in uprooting in order to ‘find a place in the world’.

My example here is migrant women and transsexuals in Europe, but the discourses which construct them as ‘trafficked’ exist all over the world and are being addressed by international bodies.[6] At the time of this writing, the majority of migrant prostitutes in Europe come from the west of Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and countries of the ex-Soviet Union. While domestic workers have begun to unite across ethnic borders to demand basic rights, sex workers have not, making them impossible to fit into classic migration frameworks, in which associations are formed as an essential step to ‘settling’ down. For a variety of legislative and social reasons, not least of which are the repressive policies of police and immigration all over Europe, prostitutes tend to keep moving, from city to city and from country to country.[7] This itinerant lifestyle creates a particular relationship to ‘place’ that impedes doing the things migrants are ‘supposed’ to do, related to establishing themselves and becoming good (subaltern) citizens (the Roma suffer from the same impediment). While nomadism is found romantic in people who live far away (such as the Bedouin) it tends to be seen as a social problem inside the West.

Writers on migrations and diaspora maintain a nearly complete silence about migrant prostitutes,[8] though they can be studied as daring border-crossers who typically and (repeatedly) arrive with little information, luggage or local language. But the only aspects of their lives discussed (by everyone, not only by lobbyists against prostitution) are their victimhood, marginalisation and presumed role in the transmission of HIV/AIDS, injustices which reproduce stigmatisation. Yet it is safe to surmise that if men were the large group using prostitution as a strategy to get into Europe and good wages then it would be seen as a creative move and not routinely characterised as a tragedy.

Finding pleasure in the margins

A crucial element in this gendered reaction is the widespread assumption that a woman’s body is above all a sexual ‘place’, where women’s experiences of sex and their sexual organs is essential to their self-respect. While this may be true for many, it is not universal, and the use of the body for economic gain is not considered so upsetting or important by many prostitutes, who usually report that the first week on the job was difficult but that later they adapted.[9] Some theorists assume that something like the soul or real self is ‘alienated’ when sex occurs outside the context of ‘love’, and that women are fatally damaged by this experience, but these must remain moralising hypotheses impossible to prove. Some women feel this way and some find pleasure in prostitution, which only means there is not a single experience of the body shared by everyone—no surprise, after all. In any case, even prostitutes who don’t like what they do say it’s better than a lot of other options that they also don’t like; learning to adapt to necessities and ignore unpleasant aspects of a job is a normal human strategy.

In the sentimentalising that occurs around ‘uprooted migrants’, the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many women, homosexuals and transsexuals are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, overbearing fathers and violent boyfriends. ‘Home’ can also be a boring or suffocating place, as evidenced by the enormous variety of entertainment sites located outside of it. In many third-world cultures, only men are allowed to partake of these pleasures, occupy these spaces; in Europe, everyone can. People in prostitution also have private lives, go to films, bars, discotheques, restaurants, concerts, festivals, church parties and parks. Their wish to leave work behind and be ordinary is no different from that of other people; in the context of urban spaces they become flâneurs and consumers like anyone else.

Social constructs of prostitutes’ ‘place’

Various NGO projects in Europe work with migrant prostitutes and would like to foment their self-organisation to defend their basic rights.[10] Such projects inevitably require, however, that subjects identify as prostitutes, which few do; rather, they identify as migrant people from Cali or Benin City or Kherson who are doing sex work temporarily as a means to an end. This means they are less interested in questions of identity than in being allowed to get on with earning money the way they are without being harassed and subjected to violence on the one hand or pitied and subjected to projects to ‘save’ them on the other.[11]

Very often the discourse of solidarity sets up a dichotomy about ‘place’ for migrants which consists of (1) home (which you loved and were forced to leave) and (2) Europe (which you don’t want to be deported from). The complicated relationships migrants have to ‘home’, which may or may not be a place they wish to visit or actually live in again, are excluded from discussions about them. And when migrant prostitutes are constructed as ‘trafficked’ they are assumed to have been wrested away against their will, allowing immediate unsubtle deportation measures to appear benevolent (and to be characterised by some ironic activists as ‘re-trafficking’).[12] Various theorists have pointed out how migrants’ work of caring for children, the elderly and the sick creates ‘chains’ of love and affection which take in the families migrants leave behind, the families they come to work for and new relationships started abroad. This more nuanced vision of the role of ‘place’ in women migrants’ lives is generally not extended to sex workers, however.

Milieux as workplaces

All this theorising impinges little on women focussed on getting ahead, whose relationship to ‘places’ is dramatically mediated by the industry they work in, a series of milieux. A rural woman from a third-world country can arrive in Europe and, with the right contacts, soon be in a position to earn 5000 or more euros a month. This figure does not refer to what are sometimes called ‘luxury’ prostitutes who work with ‘elite’ customers (and who can earn much more) but refers to an amount commonly earned in large or small clubs and brothels as well as flats, whose names and particular characteristics change from country to country.[13]

With this amount, a migrant may be able to pay back debts undertaken to migrate fairly soon, and to earn it she works in multicultural, multilingual clubs, brothels, apartments and bars. Here you find people from Ecuatorial Guinea working alongside people from Brazil and Russia and people from Nigeria alongside people from Perú and Bulgaria. Milieux are ‘workplaces’ for those selling sexual services in them, who spend many hours in the bar, socialising, talking and drinking with each other and the clientele as well as other workers like cooks, waiters, cashiers and bouncers. In the case of flats, some people live in them while others arrive to work shifts. The experience of spending most of their time in such ambiances, if people adapt to them at all, produces cosmopolitan subjects, who, by definition, have a special relationship vis-a-vis ‘place’. The cosmopolite considers the world his oyster, not his home, and there is nothing in the concept which impedes him or her from being poor or a prostitute.

It is easy to find migrant sex workers who have lived in multiple European cities: Turin, Amsterdam, Lyon. They have met people from dozens of countries and can speak a little of several languages; they are proud of having learnt to be flexible and tolerant of people’s differences. Whether they speak lovingly of their home country or not, they have overcome the kind of attachment to it that leads to nationalist fervour and have joined the group that may be the hope of the world, the one that judges people on their actions and thoughts and not on how they look or where they are from. This is the strength of the cosmopolite.

Some doubt that ordinary work relations can exist in milieux. This doubt seems to construct all other work sites as less alienating: office, medical, factory, domestic, mining, sweatshop, farming, academic, homework, etc. But the sex industry is huge, taking in clubs, bars, discotheques and cabarets, erotic telephone lines, sex shops with private cabins, massage parlours and saunas, escort services, some matrimonial agencies, flats, pornographic cinema, erotic restaurants, services of domination and submission and street prostitution. Much of this work is part-time, occasional or a second job, and working conditions for these millions of jobs worldwide vary enormously, so they cannot be generalised in terms of ‘place’. Though frequent change of personnel is common, this is also a characteristic of work in the cinema and performing arts, as well as of ‘temporary’ office and computer workers (where no one doubts that normal relationships occur). Relationships with colleagues may cross ethnic lines or not, according to the individual; the chance of this is increased where a great variety of people is found with no one type predominating. This is the situation in the milieux, now that migrants constitute the majority of prostitutes across Europe—as many as 90 per cent in Italy (Tampep 200).

. . . and milieux as borderlands

Milieux are not only multi-ethnic; they are borderlands: places of mixing, confusion and ambiguity, where the defining ‘lines’ between one thing and another are blurred. Since so many of Europe’s migrant prostitutes are foreigners, languages spoken in the milieux include pidgins, creoles, signing and lingua francas, where Spaniards learn to communicate with Nigerians, Italians with Russians, French with Albanians. Similarly, many clubs would appear to be carnival sites, the world upside down, where the prostitute is like the pícaro, the half-outsider who substitutes trickery for dignified work, living the role of “cosmopolitan and stranger . . . exploiting and making permanent the liminal state of being betwixt and between all fixed points in a status sequence” (Turner 1974, 232).

The milieux are sites of experimentation and show, where masculinity is performed by some and femininity by others. Investigations as far apart as Tokyo and Milan demonstrate that for many the sexual act carried out at the end of a night on the town or puttan tour is not at the centre of the experience, which rather resides in sharing with male friends an experience of talking, drinking, looking, driving, flirting, making remarks, taking drugs and, in general, being ‘men’ (Allison 1994, Leonini 1999). The prostitute in her work uniform does what will lead to making money, in the case of the transsexual a hyperperformance of womanliness. While any sexual service contracted usually occupies no more than fifteen minutes, not only workers but clients spend long hours having no sex at all.

In the patriarchal institution of the sex industry it is men who are publicly ‘permitted’ to experiment with their masculinity and relate to people they would not meet anywhere else. The availability of migrant women, homosexual men and transsexuals means that millions of relationships take place every day between people of different cultures. The essentialisation of these relationships as undifferentiated ‘acts’ and their elimination from cultural consideration because they involve money cannot be justified.[14] For some who theorise sex as culture, sexual practices are seen as constructed, transmitted, changed, even globalised, and migrant sex workers as the bearers of cultural knowledge.[15]

Everyone agrees that the sex industry exists within patriarchal structures. Some critics will continue to lament migrant prostitutes’ loss of home and the near impossibility of their organising formally. But one must also give credit where credit is due, recognise the resourcefulness of most migrant women and allow them the possibility of overcoming feelings of victimhood and experiencing pleasure and satisfaction within difficult situations and in strange places.

Notes

[1] The word ‘home’ in English connotes much of this all by itself, but this is not omnipresent in other languages.

[2] David Sibley has contributed invaluable evidence of this in his chapter on W.E.B. DuBois’ rigorous sociological research on ‘The Philadelphia Negro’, which never was accepted by the academy (1995).

[3] Domestic service involves many of the same isolating characteristics as work in the sex industry, and the two are undertaken simultaneously by numerous women looking to acquire more money in a shorter amount of time.

[4] As one member of Babaylan, a migrant domestic workers’ group, said: “We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but a restructuring of gender relations.This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations.The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute.” Anny Misa Hefti: 1997 (my emphasis).

[5] Published findings by and personal communications with researchers in Spain, the U.K., Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland.

[6] Important other current sites of discourse on the issues are India, the Mekong Delta, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, as well as Canada and the U.S.

[7] Police and immigration efforts to ‘clean up’ prostitution sites or pick up ‘undocumented’ workers vary from city to city across Europe, change from day to day and are targeted, according to the moment’s policy, on street, bar or brothel workers. Few workers are completely exempt from fears of police attention.

[8] The most notable exception to this silence is negative and emblematic. Discussing Mira Nair’s film India Cabaret, Arjun Appadurai begins by describing young women from Kerala who “come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay”, a neutral enough treatment of the situation. Two sentences later, however, he refers to “these tragedies of displacement”, without providing any justification, and likewise criticises the men who frequent the cabarets as returnees from the Middle East, “where their diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be”. Appadurai provides no references and no theoretical backup for these typically moralistic opinions about how sex and relationships ‘ought’ to be. (Appadurai 1996, 38-9) It is also interesting that he did not change his vision of this phenomenon since its first publication six years earlier, in Public Culture.

[10] Note that these are solidarity projects with sex workers and not composed of sex workers.

[11] Many will note that being allowed to ‘get on’ in sex work relies on the prior social proposition.

[9] I am not referring here to particular people who actively enjoy their sex jobs and want their rights as workers recognised. Some of these are organised and lobby against the criminalisation of prostitution and for prostitutes’ rights.

[13] The surprise this figure may cause is related to the media’s nearly exclusive coverage of either street prostitution or interior sites of worst exploitation. The ability to earn such an amount depends on being introduced or introducing oneself into this market, having the skills to operate there and learning to manage this kind of money (a frequent problem is large-scale consumption which tends to cancel out high earnings). Working fewer hours or days or taking breaks between contracts reduces income. For more on the ‘skills’ required, see Agustín 2000.

[12] The late realisation that such arguments are convenient to conservative immigration policies—those basically intended to close borders and exclude migrants—has led to various national proposals to allow trafficked people to remain, whether they agree to denounce their exploiters or not.

[14] The latest ‘place’ to be inhabited by migrant prostitutes is cyberspace, like cosmopolitan space borderless. The stigmatisation of prostitutes and the wish of many clients to hide their desires make cyberspace ideal for everyone, and, in a rapid proliferation of forms, sexual services are offered and/or completed in chat rooms, on bulletin boards, in pages with images and recorded sound, in direct advertisements with telephone numbers, and, via webcams, in both one-on-one and more ‘public’ shows. Here women are emerging as consumers, perhaps because of the dearth of ‘places’ where women may go to seek anonymous, public or commercial sex. Consider a study carried out in Europe which showed women to make up 26 per cent of visitors to pornographic websites. (Nielsen Netratings 1999)

[15] “Contextualising sexuality within political economy has underscored how extensively prevailing notions about sexuality, gender, and desire are fueled by a colonialist mentality that presumes a crosscultural rigidity and consistency of sexual categories and the durability of geographic and cultural boundaries imposed by Western scholars.” (Parker, Barbosa, and Aggleton: 2001, p. 9).

References

Agustín, Laura. 2000. “Trabajar en la industria del sexo.” OFRIM Suplementos, No. 6,
June, Madrid. English translation, “Working in the Sex Industry”, at
http://www.swimw.org/agustin.html

Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a
Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. “Globalization and Migration”. Presentation at conference Responding to Globalization, 19-21 September 1997, Zurich.

Leonini, Luisa, ed. 1999. Sesso in acquisito: Una ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.

Nielsen Netratings, published in Ciberpaís, 9, March 2001, p. 13, Barcelona.

Parker, Richard, Barbosa, Regina Maria and Aggleton, Peter. 2000. Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge.

Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in
Europe Project). 1999. Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep. Amsterdam: Mr A de Graaf Stichting.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Highway venues called clubs or puticlubs - not in the sense of having membership

Streams of cars and trucks roar along multi-laned routes that connect Spain with France, Germany and other states east and with Portugal to the west. For long-distance truck drivers, the backbone of European commerce, long stints of solitary driving must be broken up with places offering rest and recreation. The buildings strung along these superhighways, as well as along smaller, provincial roads, are known informally in Spanish society as puticlubes (whoring clubs), but to those that work there they are hoteles de plaza, a term that refers to the employment system used, in which those offering sex for sale pay a daily rate for a place to live and work for three-week stretches. These businesses may house 50 workers or more, and in some areas, such as between Burgos and the Portuguese border, numerous clubs are located close together, forming a veritable erotic shopping area. With multiple floors, luxurious decorations, videos, live shows, jacuzzis and ‘exotic’ music—the latest rock from Moscow, for example—these clubs have come to represent luxurious sites of conspicuous consumption. Here customers pay as much as ten times the ordinary price for drinks, and it is the job of those working there to get them to buy as many as possible, since this is the owner’s major source of income. The array of nationalities living in the club at any one time is a phenomenon surely unique to sexual milieux: a German or Spanish truck driver or businessman may find himself surrounded by Rumanians, Nigerians, Colombians, Ukrainians, Brazilians and Moroccans. Imagine spaces filled with people speaking many languages, spaces where people from very different cultural backgrounds mix: the result may feel extravagantly cosmopolitan to some customers, who use these lavish venues to entertain and impress their own business clients. Other habitués include young men wanting a night out (and perhaps a sexual initiation) and lovelorn bachelors or widowers seeking company, all of whom may spend hours drinking, talking and watching. There is no requirement to purchase sex at all, and if it is, it occupies no more than twenty minutes (rules of the house, which wants workers back promoting drink as soon as possible). A large number of support personnel is needed to keep these high-overhead businesses going, and because they employ many migrants, good public relations are necessary with local police and immigration inspectors. Workers move on after their three-week stints, assuring that novelty will always be on offer.

To consider this venue as only ‘prostitution’ requires focussing exclusively on the 15-20 minutes when customers may retire to a private room with workers. Much feminist polemic has been written about concepts of exploitation, coercion and the lack of choice suffered by women in these jobs, as well as how they have reached this destination. Ignored are the work and lifestyles of long-distance truck drivers; cultures of entertainment among businessmen; multi-ethnic workplace cultures; the performance of masculinity and femininity and the reproduction of gender roles; homosociality (masculine bonding, competition, deal-making); financial advantages of owning such businesses and the extent to which lack of regulation makes it possible; relationships with local communities, employees and management and how sites may be used to accumulate social and cultural capital.

Private Flats

Where clubs specialise in splashiness and publicity, private flats offer discretion. They exist in most towns. Here the client rings up first to make an appointment in the kind of building that suggests tenants are ‘respectable’ middle-class families. The manager of the flat arranges for clients not to run into each other, and the flat itself displays few or no sexual signs; on the contrary, it may have floral-patterned covers and teddy bears on the beds, crucifixes and images of saints on the walls and the smell of home cooking wafting from the kitchen. A chain and cuffs hanging from a hook on one wall may indicate special services offered. If the customer has not requested a worker he already knows, he makes his selection and goes to a bedroom. Again, the mix of nationalities and ethnic groups is notable. These businesses rely on classified advertisements and mobile telephones, the two elements also making possible the boom in independent workers who run their own business from their own flat.

Again, most theory has focussed on the sexual acts that occur in flats and the extent to which women workers have chosen to perform them. Subjects that need researching include the cultural role of privacy and discretion; the possible meanings of domesticity as a sexual setting, including religious and family icons; communications technology’s contribution to the development of businesses.

The Agricultural World

In the southern province of Almería, a large proportion of the tomatoes and other vegetables Europeans eat are grown under plastic in vast plantations operated under semi-feudal conditions. Closeby, various kinds of sex businesses coexist, ranging from luxurious bars with private cubicles to rustic, poor housing where tenants open their doors to clients. The luxurious are located close to the plantations, even directly across from them, and those who enter and pay the prices are Spanish owners and other ‘whites’ from the managerial class, many of them men who were once agricultural labourers themselves. Women who work here come from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The rustic are located farther away, sometimes up inconvenient roads with few public services; here the clients are ‘non-white’, often undocumented, migrants. Here, Nigerian women offer offer sex and other domestic services in their houses (meals, drinks, washing and ironing, music, a place to stay the night). Occasionally tourists wander up from the beaches, seeking something different from the nightlife of the tourist coast.

While ‘prostitution’ is present here, this form of commercial sex attests to a traditional link with migrant sectors such as farming, mining and shipping. Useful research would look at the interrelation of commercial sex with other industries; the intersections of different informal-sector economies and forms of servitude; how the business segments by class, colour and ethnic group. Ethnographic work would consider what kind of relationships are developed among subaltern employees in different expatriate sectors.

The Cosmopolitan Frontier

This is the area of Spain where Spanishness fades and cosmopolitanism, tourism and hybridity reign. Businesses in Torrelinos, Marbella and smaller towns along the coast highway advertise in a brochure called Encuentros (meetings) which categorises its offerings under the terms Gay Bars, Swapping, Private Establishments and Contacts and Sex Shops. A plethora of clubs, bars, party rooms and flats advertise, mentioning as specialities piano-bars, saunas, jacuzzis, turkish baths, dark rooms, go-go shows, striptease, escort services, bilingual misses, private bars, dance floors, a variety of massages, private booths with 96 video channels, gifts for stag and hen parties, latex wear and aphrodisiacs. Apart from the sexual products and services available, other conditions are announced, such as air conditioning, valet or private parking, swimming pools, credit cards, select clientele, television and accessibility for the handicapped. Many adverts play down the commercial aspect by emphasising the ‘non-professionals’ present. Fitting the international environment, businesses are called Milady Palace, Play Boy, Melody d’Amour, Dolly’s, New Crazy, Glam Ur Palace Club and Titanic. Many are located in ordinary shopping strips.

Obviously, ‘prostitution’ occurs in these venues, but further areas for research include the influence of tourism and its correlation with questions of image and class in services; the positioning of gay culture and diverse sexual subcultures with commercial sex; the existence of subcultures within commercial sex; the role of entrepreneurism in the proliferation of sites. It would be interesting to know which kind of customer goes to which kind of place, how entrepreneurs decide what to offer in such a compact area chockful of sex businesses and how long businesses last. Are there sexual cultures here that extend into the rest of Spain or that tourists take home with them?