ABSTRACT
Many Mexican migrants living in the USA return home annually to renew kin ties, jockey for social status and experience pleasure in their native land. These seasonal journeys represent a crucial shared reference point for local ideologies of gender, sexuality, and consumption as well as a vital factor shaping regional epidemiologies of HIV risk (Hirsch et al. 2007). In this chapter, we explore Mexican men’s stories of homecoming, shedding light on how migration-related sexuality is negotiated within the moral and sexual geography through which Mexican migrants travel. We close with a discussion of the implications of these sexualized homecomings for the regional epidemiology of HIV and for HIV prevention. The US Census Bureau estimates that in the year 2000 there were more than
20,000,000 Mexican-origin individuals in the USA, almost half of whom were foreign-born1 – although it is hard to know for sure since a sizeable proportion of that population is undocumented. Circular labour migration between Mexico and the USA dates back at least to the late nineteenth-century Chinese Exclusion Act, which cut off the flow of Chinese workers and created a need for another source of low-cost labour for the expanding railroads of the American West. Since then, changing economic and political currents in the USA have produced some eras in which recruiters have penetrated deep into rural Mexico searching for able-bodied men and others in which US officials have rounded up and deported sizeable groups of Mexican-origin men, including even US citizens. Migrants bring home more than dollars; recent evidence suggests that migra-
tion has been an important factor in the spread of HIV to rural, migrant-sending communities. The Mexican epidemic is primarily an urban gay epidemic, but the lower rural sex ratios and the large proportion of rural cases linked to migration suggests that in states such as Puebla, Guanajuato, Michoacan, Zacatecas and Jalisco there are important links between circular labour migration and HIV transmission; men get infected in the USA and then they return home to infect their wives (Hirsch et al. 2002; Bronfman and Leyva Flores 2008). In 2008, 350 thousand Mexicans are estimated to have migrated to the USA. The same year, return migrants were significantly over-represented among local
HIV-positive cases. In the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, for example, where 752 and 814 people, respectively, are infected with HIV, anywhere between one-quarter and a half of HIV cases occur among migrants and their family members, and across Mexico a growing proportion of HIV cases occur among migrants. A great deal of attention has been paid to the sexual risks faced by labour
migrants, both Mexican and otherwise, during their sojourns abroad. Migrants’ vulnerability to HIV reflects the individual characteristics typical of many migrants, who tend overwhelmingly to be young men with little formal education and limited English skills. In addition, migrant men’s vulnerability to HIV reflects the social characteristics of the communities in which they arrive, including generally more open norms about sexuality (in comparison to Mexico), the anonymity provided by being in a large urban context far from home, a lack of infrastructure to provide social support for migrants, exploitative working conditions, and a lack of access to health care (Magis-Rodriguez et al. 2004; Shedlin et al. 2006). Little has been written, however, about return migration and sexual risk. We take up that topic here, locating it within a broader discussion of the gendered sexual geography through which migrants navigate on both sides of the border.
