Desire across borders: markets, migration, and marital HIV risk in rural Mexico

This paper presents five concepts that articulate specific processes through which political and economic factors shape sexuality, drawing on ethnographic research on changing notions of marriage, love, and sexuality conducted in migrant-exporting rural Mexico and with Mexican migrants in Atlanta and New York. The first section describes how changing beliefs about love, marriage, sexual intimacy and fidelity constitute a cultural terrain which facilitates 'vaginal marital barebacking' in rural Mexico. The paper details sexual opportunity structures; sexual geographies; the multi-sectoral production of risk (including the ways in which housing, transportation, and other policy sectors together create the 'recreation-deserts' in which many migrants live); sexual projects, and externalities as conceptual tools that articulate how political and economic factors from the meso- to the macro-level shape sexuality.