Book Review

The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and

Mexican Immigrant Men By Lionel Cantú, Jr.
Edited by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz

Deborah A. Boehm
University of Nevada, Reno, U.S.A.

In The Sexuality of Migration, Lionel Cantú, Jr. proposes a “queer

materialist theoretical approach” (2) for analyzing and understanding
“how migration is constitutive of sexuality, and how sexuality is
constitutive of migration” (9). Focusing on “Men who have Sex with Men
(MSM)” (22), Cantú traces the migrations of men from different regions
of Mexico to Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. While the ethnographic
component of his study was primarily conducted in the Los Angeles area,
Cantú also completed fieldwork in Guadalajara, the capital city of the
Mexican state of Jalisco. The author conducted interviews with MSM who
have migrated to the United States, have migrated and returned, hope
to migrate, or choose to not migrate. Additionally, Cantú studied
elements of queer tourism in Mexico and the efforts of community
organizations in Los Angeles. Cantú’s “queer political economy of
migration” (21) outlines the diverse motivations driving the migrations of
queer men, how men are embedded within (or excluded from) family
networks and transnational communities, the legal and political contexts
within which MSM migrate or not, and the ways that sexualities
constitute north-south tourism.
Published posthumously, the book is an innovative collaboration, with
multiple voices supporting and in dialogue with Cantú’s theoretical
frame. The editors-Cantú’s dissertation advisor, Nancy A. Naples, and
colleague and “intellectual comrade” (xvi), Salvador Vidal-Ortiz-are to be
commended for situating Cantú’s contributions within current debates in
the “Editors’ Introduction” and “Editors’ Conclusion.” The editors trace
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the trajectories of various academic discussions that Cantú influenced and

of which he certainly would have been part had he not tragically passed
away early in his career. In the “Afterword by Dissertation Liberation
Army,” Cantú’s friends and colleagues, former graduate school peers who
formed a writing group with him, honor the author, demonstrating how
the scholarly impact of Cantú’s work goes far beyond his publications
and can be mapped within the work of numerous researchers with whom
he socially and intellectually connected.
The concept of “borderlands” as theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa
(Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987) runs throughout the
book and centrally informs Cantú’s theoretical frame. Based on what
Cantú calls a “queer borderlands approach” (36), his research cuts across
and draws on multiple disciplines, is methodologically creative and
diverse, and challenges-and in many cases, bridges-theoretical boundaries.
Building on Edward Soja’s notion of “Thirdspace” (Thirdspace: Journeys to
Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996), Cantú identifies
“new queer Latino spaces” (143). Cantú’s borderlands approach also
provides a way to consider identity itself and the multiple and shifting
expressions of sexuality within communities of “MSM,” “gay men,”
and/or “queer men” (through the use of multiple labels, Cantú
intentionally complicates categorization). As both reflections of and
constructs that emerge from socioeconomic and political power structures,
“queer sexual borderlands . . . are both liberating and oppressive” (117). The
contradictions that come out of the transnational logics of power are a
primary focus of Cantú, and his analysis of such paradoxes represents a
significant contribution to both queer theory and migration studies.
Focusing on the U.S. state, Cantú outlines how heteronormativity and
its contradictory effects play out through policies, state practices, and
constructions of citizenship and national membership. Linking historical
events and contemporary politics, Cantú compellingly demonstrates “how
the state, through immigration policy, has produced identities in order to
regulate groups of people located within and across national borders”
(41). Here, Dorothy Smith’s concept of “the relations of ruling” (The
Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, 1987) elucidates state
power. Throughout the book, Cantú revisits and extends Smith’s analysis
to study “the institutional workings of power” (26), authority that,
paradoxically, results in exclusion and, at times, inclusion. For example,
 Asian Women 2009 Vol.25 No.4 ❙ 115

in categorizing individuals based on sexuality, the U.S. state both

excludes people from membership in the nation-such as those who were
labeled as “afflicted with psychopathic personality, or sexual deviation”
(47) -and can also be, albeit in limited cases and through essentializing
discourse, a path to legalization for some immigrants seeking asylum,
those who demonstrate “well-founded fears of persecution” based on
sexual orientation (53). Throughout the book, Cantú explicates the efforts
of organizations working for queer rights in local/global communities,
ranging from legal action (Chapter 3) to HIV/AIDS support and
prevention (Chapter 7).
Cantú acknowledges what is not included in his work, as he calls on
others to move forward such analysis. For example, stating that
“women’s sexuality constitutes a very important dimension of migration”
(22), he explains that the experiences of lesbians in transnational context
have not been sufficiently theorized, suggesting a direction for future
research. Similarly, Cantú posits that heterosexuality, although not the
topic of his research, also shapes migration, proposing that scholars
further study the role of diverse sexualities in motivating, directing,
and/or obstructing migration flows. A case that supports this point is
Mexican migration that began with the Bracero program, through which
the U.S. government contracted with Mexican guestworkers (1942-1964);
as men migrated to the United States for agricultural work and women
and children stayed in Mexico, intersecting masculinities and
heterosexualities came to define who migrated and who did not. Cantú
cites Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s seminal work on gender and Mexican
migration, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (1994),
as research that explores the links between heterosexuality and
transnational movement (169-170). Recent studies that further develop
this line of inquiry include Jennifer S. Hirsch’s A Courtship after Marriage:
Sexuality and Love in Transnational Mexican Families (2003) and Gloria
González-López’s Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives
(2005).
Cantú’s work also contributes to a growing literature about transnational
desires, particularly through his focus on transnational relationships and
queer tourism. Like Nicole Constable (Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals,
Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages, 2003), Denise Brennan
(What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in
116 ❙ Deborah A. Boehm

the Dominican Republic, 2004), and Lieba Faier (Intimate Encounters: Filipina
Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan, 2009), among others, Cantú
demonstrates how multiple agents express diverse forms of “desire” in a
global context, again linking intimate relationships with structural factors.
By focusing on the experiences of MSM in Mexico and the United States,
and as they move between the two nations, Cantú illustrates how
sexuality is indeed constituted transnationally. In his analysis of
north-south movement-queer tourism-Cantú identifies a “queer manifest
destiny” (108) shaped by (post) colonial relations and desires: “the phallic
dream knows no borders” (111). Highlighting another paradoxical
dimension of a “queer political economy of migration” (21), he outlines
how relationships that begin while U.S. men are tourists in Mexico may
facilitate future transnational movement and structure kin in significant
ways.
Throughout The Sexuality of Migration, Cantú underscores how sexuality
has not been a central topic of study within migration studies, and the
ways that queer studies have not adequately theorized transnational
movement. Here, Cantú anticipated another theoretical move in the
academy-a focus on “queer diasporas”-explored in works such as Martin
F. Manalansan IV’s Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003)
and Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian
Public Cultures (2005). Cantú’s analysis has been fundamental in initiating
this shift, although, tragically, he was “unable to carry his project
forward” (179). While Cantú is not here to continue discussions in these
multiple emergent fields of study, his work has played a key role in
advancing research agendas to this place. Indeed, queer studies, feminist
inquiry, and the study of borderlands and transnational migration are “all
the richer for the work he did” (179). Owing much to Cantú’s research,
“a dialogue has begun” (170).
 Asian Women 2009 Vol.25 No.4 ❙ 117

Biographical Note: Deborah A. Boehm is an assistant professor of

Anthropology and Women’s Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno,
U.S.A. Her specializations include (im)migration and transnationalism;
gender and women’s studies; family, kinship, and childhood and Mexico,
the United States, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. She conducts
ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with transnational Mexicans in a rural
community in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí and several locales
in the U.S. West and Southwest. Current research explores the
gendered character of migrants’interactions with the U.S. state, gender
subjectivities in the context of migration, cross-border families with
mixed U.S. immigration statuses, transnational childhood, and the
effects of deportation and “return” migration. She is finalizing a book
manuscript about intimate lives and the U.S. state’s production of
“illegality,” and is co-editor (with Cati Coe, Rachel Reynolds, Julia
Meredith Hess, and Heather Rae-Espinoza) of Everyday Ruptures:
Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective (Forthcoming,
Vanderbilt University Press).