ABSTRACT
Between 1999 and 2002, Cantu served as an expert witness in five cases involving Mexican men who petitioned for asylum in the United States on the basis of persecution for sexual orientation. Two issues particularly drew Cantu’s attention. One issue was that to gain asylum on the basis of being persecuted for one’s sexual orientation, the applicant has to prove that being gay is an “immutable” aspect of his selfhood. The second issue was that, as Saeed Rahman has described, receiving asylum requires painting one’s country in racialist, colonialist terms, while at the same time disavowing the United States’ role in contributing to the oppressive conditions that one fled. For an asylum petitioner from Mexico to prove that he is immutably gay, and has been persecuted as a result, is an undertaking fraught with contradictions. Mexico, by contrast, emerges as backward and oppressive, as evinced by its sex/gender system and treatment of effeminate men.
