ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the diverse ways in which sexuality and masculinity organize the lives of Latino immigrants in the US. The sexual lives of immigrants are shaped by relations of power, race, class, and gender and masculine ideologies. The experience of migration is a field of negotiations, tensions and contested power relations, where structural factors intersect with ideologies of masculinity, sexuality and modernity. Migration reconfigures local and global masculinities, some immigrants become modern transnational ‘winners’, while other struggle not to become ‘failures’, embracing in the process a ‘good enough masculinity’. Heterosexual and gay immigrant men experience challenges and changes in their sexual lives and the nature of their partnerships with their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, and significant others back in their country of origin and in their new place of residence. Notions of courtship, fidelity, and partner expectations are also revised and challenged by this separation. For some heterosexual and gay immigrants, migrating to the US represents an expansion of their opportunities for engaging in new forms of sexual relations and transnational sexual markets. However, for many others, due to multiple dislocations and displacements, they find themselves in situations of vulnerability, loneliness, and isolation.
