Love in the Drug War: selling sex and finding Jesus on the Mexico-US border by Sarah Luna

The Mexico-US borderlands are principally, and popularly, conceptualised through the lens of violence; they evoke imagery of US border patrol agents’ vicious hyper-militarised tactics to deter and orchestrate the disappearance and deaths of Mexican migrants1 and of intense cartel conflict related to drug and human trafficking. Anthropologist Sarah Luna contends with this deeply ingrained imaginary through centring on the ostensible antithesis of violence: love and intimacy. Love in the Drug War is embedded within the cement-walled compound of the regulated prostitution zone, la zona, colloquially referred to as Boystown by Americans, in the border-city of Reynosa, Mexico. But to think of it as an enclosed, bounded entity would be erroneous, for its walls are porous. With varying degrees of difficulty, two of the three ‘protagonists’ – sex-workers from rural Mexico, on the one hand, and American missionaries, on the other – move through la zona’s walls and coexist. We discover that these two protagonists, in addition to another, are partly entangled in a three-way relationship, and the nature of this polyamorous configuration inspires and forms the core of Luna’s research enquiry. The presence of the third protagonist, God, also extends far beyond the walls of la zona, and the relationship between sex workers, missionaries and God is kept for the final part of the book. Luna devotes twelve months in 2008–2009 to ethnographic fieldwork in this unique ecosystem, teeming with the lives of our three leading characters as well as pimps, drug workers and the everyday inhabitants of la zona. As part of her anthropological approach, Luna, whose mixed Mexican-American and White heritage allow her to roam with sex workers and missionaries with relative ease, develops close relationships with both parties and engages in their quotidian 1087123 RAC0010.1177/03063968221087123Race & ClassBook Reviews research-article2022