Book Reviews

Abstract

The migration of Mexicans to the United States of America (USA) has traditionally drawn the interest of researchers from different disciplines, proving its multidimensional spectrum, and thus far, different perspectives ranging from legislative accounts to labour and economy have been covered. However, other social dimensions, such as sexuality, have been significantly understudied, and as new fields of migration research-such as sexual migration-emerge, new questions (should) reshape the research agenda. Héctor Carrillo, a Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, IL, USA, attempts-with this book-to contribute to the systematic research on sexual migration in this particular geographic area. He has expertise in the fields of sexuality, migration and health promotion, especially in the innovative cross-disciplinary research that combines the intersected implications of the aforementioned fields of research. Pathways of Desire: The Migration of Mexican Gay Men constitutes a book that is both shaped by and shapes the current research agenda and could rightly be perceived as a collective fruit of Carrillo's long-standing research efforts. The multiple goals of this book, as the author claims, revolve around the exploration of the social, cultural and political strands of the complex web of sexual migration, as perceived and narrated by the sexual migrants. Consequently, Carrillo is interested in holistically examining the pre-migration phase, especially their sexual life back in Mexico and the construction of the dream of sexual freedom. Thereafter, he explores their pathways, the migration process itself, in order to study how their migration was initiated and completed. Ultimately, he is interested to study their post-migration experiences and whether they have eventually found the life prospects they were dreaming of. Carrillo's research site is San Diego, the most developed USA-Mexico border city with a visible and well-organised gay community (p. 11). He has managed to obtain interestingly diverse qualitative data through his interviews of Mexican gay and bisexual male migrants, as well as American Latinos and white men. This methodological decision provides him with the privilege of drawing safer and more grounded comparisons and bipartite analyses of both the migrants' as well as the BOOK REVIEWS