Border Lives: Prostitute Women in Tijuana

Abstract

A few years ago, Lynn Sharon Chancer published an article which began by asking the reader to imagine the hypothetical existence of a sociologist involved in participant observer field work on prostitution in Chicago. The theoretical grounding of this article rests upon the readers' and the audience's shared perception about impossibility, or at least, the extreme ambivalence of reception, attending such a project within the U.S. academic setting. As Chancer notes, the responses she received to her suggested scenario lead her to conclude that "something about sex work is especially threatening, putting the researcher socially/sociologically at risk above and beyond the dangers attaching to the researched activity itself' ' (Chancer 1993, 167). This perception of a risk that is both personal (participant observation with sex workers is frequently dangerous because of the social spaces in which these women work) and professional (Chancer's comment that colleagues, when approached about this hypothetical project, all asked her in confidence if she had once been a prostitute), leads to a paradoxical positioning on the part of the researcher which undermines her work on at least two levels. The highly charged social connotations of this kind of study tend to identify the researcher as a member of that stigmatized community, to her professional detriment. Of even greater concern is the degree to which the work itself is compromised. More intensely, perhaps, than in other participant observer situations, the academic researcher has an important stake in maintaining a distance between herself and the women who are the objects of her study, to the degree that "the benefits of 2 participant observation are seldom brought to bear" (Chancer 1993, 153). This is true of both the researcher, who needs to separate herself from the women, and of the women themselves, whose difficult lives have taught them distrust of strangers who may only want to use them. 2Chancer's observations serve as important cautionary reminders in the study that follows, a collaborative work between a public health researcher, a social activist, and a literary critic on prostitutes in Tijuana, Mexico. Experience in Mexico shows that the first reaction of people working in prostitution when approached by researchers is to ask, "Why are you interested in us? Do you have AIDS?" If they are not satisfied with the answer to these questions, they will not participate in the interviews and will influence companions not to participate. Published research in Mexico, as elsewhere, frequently marks the difficulty of securing useful material: commercial sex workers are "reluctant to talk about their trade--especially to outsiders identified with public institutions" (Zalduondo 1991, 167), and researchers often have to adjudicate on the accuracy of the information gathered; as one research article puts it delicately when referring to the veracity of a particular statement, "doubt exists" (Uribe-Salas 1996, 124).This article derives from ongoing work with both male a...

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