Gringo Gulch

"Gringo Gulch” is a spot in San Jose, Costa Rica, home of female sex workers who have male clients from abroad (from North America in particular). Rivers-Moore’s work leads the way in a burgeoning scholarly initiative to explore global sex tourism based on long-term qualitative research. Her work on the gulch is populated not only by sex workers and their clients, but also by state agents and NGO workers. All of them, she argues, use sex tourism as a strategy for getting ahead. Rivers-Moore addresses central questions: why has Costa Rica (a middle-income country thought to be an exceptional success in Latin America) emerged as a major site of sex tourism? How do sex tourists and sex workers derive meaning from their experiences, in what way do they profit from their encounters with each other? And how has the neoliberal entrenchment of state services and provisions across Latin America affected the role of the nation-state in relation to sexuality? This book shifts the conventional analysis away from questions of whether third world women’s participation in sexual exchanges with first world men in tourism economies are exploitative; it asks, instead, new questions about how something is gained by all parties involved (presenting opportunities for economic and social mobility in terms of class positioning for all). Audiences for the book will include anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, as well as scholars in Latin American and Caribbean studies.