Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (55 page)

and it has the reputation of being a town in which Dominicans can get rich quick. It is this fantasy of what
might be
that keeps so many new people arriving everyday. Meanwhile, some foreign tourists fall in love with living in a Caribbean “paradise” and move to Sosúa permanently. Although Dominican sex workers and other Dominican migrants usually end up disappointed and no better off economically than when they first migrated to Sosúa, foreign tourists and residents often find what they are seeking. This chapter examines how Dominican migrants to Sosúa’s tourist and sex-tourist industries strategize for the future regardless of the outcomes. These migrants attempt to circumvent asymmetries of power to turn Sosúa into a space of opportunity, rather than a space of exploitation and domination and are engaged in an ongoing struggle to wrest some of the profits and control away from the foreign owners who have taken over Sosúa.

S O SÚA A S A TR A N S N ATI O N A L P L A C E

With its constant influx of Dominican and Haitian migrants seeking work in the sex and tourist trades and of European tourists seeking to play, as well as a large foreign-resident community living there year-round, Sosúa became a transnational sexual meeting ground. So many foreigners visitors live in Sosúa
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that Dominicans often see it as a town outside the Dominican Republic. With no place to buy a plate of Dominican rice, beans, and chicken in downtown Sosúa at Dominican prices, the town indeed looks and feels “un-Dominican.”

Instead, Sosúa’s streets, lined by German beer gardens and kiosks selling European newspapers, remind its passersby that many non-Dominicans now live, own businesses, work, and vacation there. As a banana plantation for the United Fruit Company in the early part of the 20th century, and a sanctuary for European Jews at the beginning of World War II, Sosúa has long been an economic, social, and cultural crossroads between the local and the foreign.

Known now both for its beaches and for its sex bars, Sosúa’s development into an inexpensive tourist and sex-tourist destination is the latest phase of its encounters with the outside world. Tourism and sex tourism have only sped up and intensified Sosúa’s engagement in the global economy.

Since Sosúa both offers sex for sale and houses an economically powerful foreign expatriate community, foreigners are more likely than Dominicans to find what they are seeking there. Sex tourists, for example, can pay to fulfill their sexual fantasies, while expatriates can buy a life of comfort at a cheaper cost than in Europe or North America. Sosúa emerges as a kind of transnational space in which many imagine that their dreams for better lives will be attained. Yet globalized hierarchies of race, class, gender, citizenship, and mobility dictate whether these dreams are realized. Possibilities for economic mobility do exist in such transnational spaces but they are available only for a few. Many foreign residents reinvent their daily lives, installing pools and hiring domestic help, while Dominicans only rarely make significant improvements to their economic status in tourist economy, even though they imagine their prospects otherwise. Although most foreigners are from the working to middle classes, they have sufficient resources to travel internationally or even to move permanently overseas if they so desire. Meanwhile, Sosúa’s sex workers have limited resources and face numerous legal constraints to migration off the island.

S E XS C A P E S

Sosúa’s sex trade stands apart from many other sex-tourist destinations in the developing world because it does not involve pimps or the coercion of women into selling sex, and therefore it allows sex workers a good deal of control over their working conditions. I do not suggest that these women do not risk rape, beatings, arrest, and HIV infection; the sex trade can be dangerous, and Sosúa’s trade is no exception. However, Dominican women are not trafficked into
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Sosúa’s trade but usually are drawn to it through social networks of family and female friends who work or have worked in it. The absence of pimps in Sosúa is critical to sex workers’ lives. Without them, Sosúan sex workers keep all their earnings, essentially working freelance. They decide how many hours they will work, with whom, and for what price. Sosúa’s sex trade is also notable for its two tiers: one with Dominican clients and the other with foreign clients.

The meager earnings with Dominican clients make this sale of sex a survival strategy, whereas the benefits of working with foreign clients make women’s use of sex tourism an advancement strategy. Without the transnational connections that can grow out of relationships with foreigners —faxes, money wires, clients’ return visits, and the possibility of traveling to or moving to clients’ home countries—Sosúa’s sex trade would be no different from sex work in any other Dominican town.

As Sosúa became known as a place where tourists can buy sex, Sosúa and Sosúans experienced monumental changes. Because sex tourism has played a critical role in the town’s transformation, I see it as a space inextricably tied up with transactional sex. I use the term
sexscape
to refer to both a new kind of global sexual landscape and the sites within it. Sexscapes link the practices of sex work to the forces of a globalized economy. Defining characteristics are international travel from the developed to the developing world, consumption of paid sex, and inequality. In a sexscape, there are differences in power between the buyers (sex tourists) and the sellers (sex workers) that can be based on race, gender, class, and nationality. These differences become eroticized and commodified inequalities. The exotic is transformed into the erotic—both privately in consumers’ imaginations and quite publicly by entire industries that make money off this desire for difference. These differences, between sex workers in the developing world and sex tourists traveling from the developed world, are essential to distinguish sexscapes in the developing world from red-light districts (or other sites where paid sex is available) in the developed world. Within sexscapes, the sex trade becomes the focal point of a place, and the social and economic relations of that place are filtered through the continual selling of sex to foreigners. In contrast, the sex trade in red-light districts in the developed world—such as in Frankfurt, Rome, Brussels—by no means defines social and economic life outside of these districts. Neither do the female citizens of these places necessarily become associated with sexual availability. As Altman notes, although sex is “a central part of the political economy of all large cities,” few cities base their economies on sex.7

When sexscapes emerge within a globalized economy, hierarchies of race, class, gender,8 citizenship, and mobility create undeniable power differentials between the actors in these geographic spaces, which, in turn, give them
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unequal opportunities. There are very different and often uneven opportunities for foreigners and locals, and men and women, while race and age also play a role. The asymmetries and inequalities that result from the mix of differences in Sosúa reveal an unevenness. In this sexscape, the buyers eroticize these differences—particularly gender and racial differences—as part of their paid sex experiences. Meanwhile, the sellers often struggle to capitalize on these differences. One way is through their “performance of love.”

P E R F O R M I N G L O V E

Beyond the assumed transaction of sex for money, complex politics of relationships are at work in the encounters between sex workers and sex tourists. As they present themselves as sexually desirable and available to both attract and to anchor sex tourists to their own lives and futures, they also deploy love strategically. This role playing is not without costs, however, as sex workers find themselves both exploited and exploiters in a cascade of customers, suitors, boyfriends, and partners. Dominican sex workers’

strategies to get ahead (
progresar
) through sexual commerce with foreign tourists—successful or not—often hinge on their performance of love. Of course, the sex trade in any locale relies on the charade that sex workers desire their clients and enjoy the sex. Yet in Sosúa’s sexscape, some workers also pretend to be
in love
. This is highly strategic. With so many financial demands on them as single mothers (nearly every sex worker I met was a mother), and so few well-paying jobs available to them, Dominican sex workers in Sosúa who perform well at being “in love” have much at stake. Keeping transnational ties open is a daily task for some workers. Many send faxes to several foreign clients at the same time with whom they have simultaneous ongoing relationships (it costs under $1 to send or receive a fax at the tele-communication offices in town). For some, dropping by these services to see if they have received any faxes is a daily ritual. Those considered lucky receive faxes instructing them to pick up money at the Western Union office in downtown Sosúa—something that also occurs in other sex-tourist sites.9

Others receive word that their foreign clients or boyfriends are planning a return visit. The most envied women receive “letters of invitation,” essential to obtaining a tourist visa to visit the men in their home countries.

Sex workers’ active emotional labor is clear in their performance of “love”

in their faxes. Workers less experienced at building transnational relationships come to colleagues, such as Elena, who has a proven track record of receiving money wires and return visits from clients. Elena has helped compose letters
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and faxes for women who were uncertain about what to do with the addresses, fax numbers, and telephone numbers clients gave them. She helped a sex worker, Carmen, for example, write a letter to a Belgian client who had sent her a money wire and then abruptly stopped corresponding with her. Carmen came to Elena because, at the time, Elena was living with Jürgen and was experienced, indeed successful, at transnational courting. Elena’s advice was simple and centered on Carmen’s performance of love: “You have to write that you
love
him and that you miss him. Write that you cannot wait to see him again. Tell him you think about him every day.” Following Elena’s guidelines, Carmen composed the following letter that I helped her translate into English: Dear ___, I have been thinking of you every day and have been waiting for a fax to hear how you are. I got your money wire, thanks. But I still want to see you.

Please send me a fax at the following number—, and if possible, a fax number where I can reach you. I miss you very much and think of you all the time. I love you very much. I wait to hear from you. I hope you come to visit again very soon.

Many kisses, Carmen

Carmen never heard from this client again.

Sensing which men are not already married, and are likely to continue corresponding and to return for future vacations or to extend an invitation to visit Europe or Canada, often proves an elusive skill. While sorting through all the pictures and letters of her European clients, Nanci, for example, commented on which ones seemed the most serious about keeping in touch.

She deemed several too young and thus not likely to follow through on the relationships. Nanci had honed her ability to detect which transnational suitors were worth pursuing during her 4 years in Sosúa. She had been receiving money wires on and off from five or six European men at the same time. Her many and varied transnational ties were envied and difficult to replicate, yet many tried. Stashed away in a spare pocketbook, Nanci kept a bundle of letters and faxes. She also had photos of the men back home and photos of her with the men during their vacations in Sosúa. Taped to her wall were photos of at least 15 different foreign men. Several of them had returned to Sosúa to see Nanci and expressed interest in bringing her to Europe and marrying her. Expressing her love for them, and how much she missed them, were central themes in Nanci’s performance of love with her suitors.

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S E X TR A D E A S M I G R ATI O N STR ATE GY

Poor women use the sex trade as a first step to marriage and greater financial security in other sex-tourist destinations. Kamala Kempadoo, for example, writes about migrant Colombian and Dominican women who work in the sex trade in Curaçao, whose work with clients might develop into relationships that lead to marriage. Women also might pay to acquire Dutch citizenship by marrying, which means that migrant women could stay and work legally as sex workers in Curaçao or travel to Europe without restriction.10 A similar dynamic is found in some other Caribbean nations, such as Jamaica, as well as in some Asian countries such as the Philippines and Thailand. In each case, women see the sex trade as a possible route to marriage to western men and migration to their countries.11 Much like the perceptions Dominican sex workers maintain of life in Europe, Filipina and Thai sex workers also hope for a better life for themselves and their children in the West. Like their Dominican counterparts, these Asian women lack other opportunities for legal migration.

With much of any tourist experience relying on fantasy, tourists on vacation often engage in behavior and activities they would never engage in at home, such as paying for sex or having interracial relationships. Male tourists in Sosúa often told me that they never had paid for sex at “home,” but since they were on vacation they thought, “why not?” Chant and McIlwaine also found that some foreign men—who had not intended at the outset to pay for sex—did so in Cebu’s bars in the Philippines, they claim because of “peer pressure.” One man boasted to his friends, for example, that he had bought five women in one night.12 In encounters between locals and foreign tourists, locals often have more practical goals—such as laying the groundwork to receive money wires from tourists once they return to Europe—and might need to “perform” for tourists to achieve them, whereas foreign tourists primarily seek fun and pleasure.