The Negotiation of Intimacy Between Tourist Women and Local Men in a Transnational Town in Caribbean Costa Rica

Fluid Exchanges: The Negotiation of Intimacy between Tourist Women and Local Men in a Transnational Town in Caribbean Costa Rica

SUSAN FROHLICK University of Manitoba

In a transnational tourist town in black Caribbean Costa Rica situated both on the margins of “white” Costa Rican society and squarely in global tourism, the mobility of European and North American women tourists in and out constitute a significant tourist flow. Central to the town’s social sexual history and modes of sociability are economically ambiguous sexual and often intimate relations between female tourists and local predominantly black Caribbean men. I use the concept of “fluid exchanges” to comprehend the fluidity and corporeality of these relationships in which, I argue, intimacy plays a significant role. Local men, who are situated outside of hegemonic masculinity, use sexual knowledge and masculine privilege to “give” intimacy freely as well as to bargain for payment and acquire cosmopolitan identities, and to regulate the unfettered mobility of First World women tourists within a disparate global sex market and era where new erotic subjectivities and transnational intimate relations are being forged in hybrid and fluid places like Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. [Keywords: transnationalism, globalization, intimacy, sexualities, women’s sex tourism, Caribbean]

Introduction: fluid terrains

n a small, transnational tourist town situated on the Caribbean coast in Costa Rica close to Panama, “fluidity” describes the flow Iof people in and out, and the modes of sociability between the predominantly international tourists and Afro-Caribbean locals that take place there. Known for its abundant ecological diversity and eco-adventure touristic activities such as surfing, nature hikes, and river rafting, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca and the surrounding area is also discursively framed in travel guidebooks as a place on the tourist map where foreign women will “inevitably be chatted up by the resident dreadlocked hustlers” (McNeill !""#:#$%).# Since the late #&'"s, when tourism took off in Costa Rica as an

City & Society, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 139–168, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/city.2007.19.1.139. City & Society

ecotourism “poster child” (Honey !""(), and more intensely since the late #&&"s (Raventos !"")),! along with many other foreign visitors, European and North American female tourists have traveled to this area in search of Caribbean culture and a Caribbean aesthetic (beauty and other sensory pleasures associated with the Caribbean). For complicated reasons, many foreign women become involved in “situational” forms of sexual tourism (Phillips #&&&) as well as long-term romantic relationships and other configura- tions of sexual and intimate relationships with local men, which often results in the women staying longer than they had planned or returning for repeated visits to spend time with their local lover. The predominantly white foreign female tourists whose corporeal travels are linked to local heterosexual relationships in and out of this area can be seen to constitute a kind of “ethnoscape” (Appadurai #&&)). Ethnoscapes are fluid and local/global terrains. Appadurai (#&&):%%) situates tourists as one particular social category within a global landscape “of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live” that also includes immigrants, exiles, guest workers and other mobile subjects. Costa Rica as a global tourist destination is bifurcated along gendered and ethnic lines with regards to sexuality and tourism, where white North American and European men travel to the Pacific Coast for sex with local women (Ticas), and white female tourists tend to prefer the Caribbean coast known for sexually appealing local Caribbean men. I use “Caribbean men” as a broad category of racial and ethnic difference to refer to a diverse group of men residing in the area whose backgrounds include Women some Caribbean heritage (Jamaican, Cuban) often mixed with Latino ancestry and/or who claim Caribbeanness as their identity. tourists affect Racialization in Costa Rica is also more or less bifurcated, into two broad categories: “white” reserved for mestizo Ticos and “clear” local practices skin, and “black” used to mark Afro-Caribbean and dark skin.% of sex, White Tico men also hook up with foreign tourist women in Puerto Viejo but are positioned outside the Caribbean aesthetic and thus sexuality and seemingly not as desirable. The guidebook representation above contributes to a popular global and local imaginary of Puerto Viejo gender through as a “female sex tourism” destination situated complexly within a wider ethnoscape, or mobile landscape, of First World female tour- embodied ists whose travels to Third World places include participation in heterosexual relationships with local men.( relations This relatively recent phenomenon and global pattern is only now being documented in terms of the nuances that play out in specific locales. Scholars have written about Western women travelers in the Caribbean (Jeffreys !""%; Kempadoo !""(; Mullings 140 Fluid Exchanges

!"""), in particular Jamaica (Pruitt and La Font #&&*; Sánchez Taylor !""#), the Dominican Republic (O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor !""*), and Barbados (Phillips #&&&; !""!). Others have written about Western women traveling to Ecuador (Meisch #&&*), the Gambia (Ware #&&$), Indonesia (Dahles and Bras #&&&), Egypt (Jacobs !"")), and Japanese women traveling to Nepal (Yamaga !"")) taking advantage of local men who make themselves sexually available to women for a variety of reasons including erotic desire, social status, economic benefit, and emigration. As a social group of gendered, sexualized, racialized, national subjects mobile on a global scale, women tourists affect local practices of sex, sexuality and gender through embodied relations. In many places of the world, the presence of foreign women as tourists with economic, racialized power profoundly influences how local men negotiate masculine identities and subjectivities. I draw on Nagel’s (!""":#*&) conceptualization of “ethnosexual tourism” to underscore sexual relations between tourist and local that depend upon both upholding and crossing boundaries of convergence between ethnicity and sexuality. Not all vacation sex is ethnosexual tourism therefore nor is all ethnosexual tourism the same. Within Gender matters. Nagel pointed out that “the image of a safe but exotic vacation affair has remained a stable feature of women’s sex the global tourism” (!""%:!"$ emphasis added). Scholars conceptualized female tourists engaging in ethno- economy, sexual tourism as “sex tourists” and “romance tourists,” both terms women from that underscore the structural economic exchange relation of the tourist-local encounter, and thus the agency and privilege of First First World World women as consumers of sex and romance, and the related commoditized and under-privileged bodies of local dark-skinned countries can men. Yet Jeffreys argues that “by virtue of male privilege and the construction of male dominant sexuality” (!""%:!!&) female and do exert tourists in the Caribbean are just as likely to “service” their local lovers, than the other way around. Similarly, Nagel (!""%:!"$) their relative suggests that women engaging in ethnosexual tourism appear more interested in “being swept away by” than in asserting control over economic power their male partners. Within the global economy, women from First over local lovers World countries can and do exert their relative economic power over local lovers and others in the communities to which they travel in Third World countries, but power associated with masculinity complicates this schema. This article aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of wider patterns of global flows of female tourists as mobile subjects whose sexualities and desires for intimacy are negotiated 141 City & Society

by local actors in complex ways, in this case Caribbean men in a transnational tourist town in the Caribbean of Costa Rica. Given the increasing numbers of women involved in global tourism, and in sexual relationships while on tour, this issue warrants more nuanced attention with regards to how sexual tourism is linked to larger questions about the challenge of intimacy in the twenty-first century where “globalization marks the end of any sort of space of intimacy in social life” (Appadurai #&&$:##*; Giddens #&&!). I will analyze female sex tourists through a consideration of intimacy beyond sex acts as central to ethnosexual tourism. Within Puerto Viejo, flows of female tourists arriving and leaving the town are central yet not all too obvious to the town’s emergence as an ethnosexual tourist destination. Male tourists, for the most part, are bracketed out of the scene with regards to sexual tourism.* Although sexual relationships between foreign men and local women occur, men looking for commercial cash-for- sex exchanges with local women, what O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor (!""*) refer to as “the hardcore sex tourists” are less common here than on the Pacific coast (also see O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor #&&*).) Some prostitution takes place on the periphery of town, situated within the poorest barrio, where cheap sex is available along with crack cocaine. More prevalent to the tourist-local modes of sexual socialibity in the town are a variety of sexual and intimate relationships between foreign women and local men in which economic exchange is markedly ambiguous. As Phillips (!""!) and others show to be the case in many ethnosexual tourist destinations where men avail themselves sexually for foreign women, local men in Puerto Viejo do not see themselves as pros- titutes or gigolos, but rather as players and boyfriends. Pruitt and La Font (#&&*) explain the ambiguity of the economic exchange Monetary as bound up with gender ideologies about women’s preference for romance over sex and where money is seen to spoil any authentical- exchange does ly romantic relationship. O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor (!""*:&() argue too that the fantasy of emotional gratification take place even across ethnic and racial lines of difference often sought by female though its role (and some male) sex tourists is sustained by the (illusory) image of mutual and noncommercial sexual relations with a local partner. is muted by Monetary exchange does take place even though its role is muted by the women who wrestle with or chose to ignore the wider the women political economy of their fantasies and erotic desires. Some men hustle the women upfront for cash or stuff. Other men want only sex (but nevertheless hope to gain some material benefits), while some want to impregnate foreign women.$ Still others hope for land and a house or an airplane ticket and visa out of the country as the 142 Fluid Exchanges ultimate outcome of their sexual encounters with foreign women. While I have heard of women who arrive with cash in hand to pay willingly for sex with a local man, all of the women I interviewed conveyed anxiety, confusion, or even anger when the mention of money by their local partner tainted what the women viewed as a developing romance or intimate connection. Eve, an American woman in her twenties, was upset when her partner, also in his twenties, asked her for money to pay for his passport application (about US +#"") after they had been lovers for less than a week.' She refused, and then became even more upset when he (tempo- rarily) stopped seeing her because she thought that they shared a special connection. Another young American woman, Zoe, who had traveled with her sister to Puerto Viejo as a graduation present to herself, felt betrayed by her boyfriend when he began to ask her for small loans (about US +#"). She severed ties with him over this but not without agonizing over whether his feelings for her were authentic. These narratives underscore the salience of “the intimate” as a kind of “ethnosexual frontier,” or “sensual space on both sides of the ethnic divide for sexual contact” (Nagel !""":#*&) where social control and desire are negotiated. Intimacy in and beyond sex acts, as I will explain, hold a significant exchange value as something foreign women want from local men, paradoxically, as mobile subjects engendered by a privilege that enables them to come and go. Local men in turn use intimacy to both lure women into paying them and to regulate foreign women’s seemingly limit- less mobility. “Fluid terrains” is a term meant to conceptualize a number of convergent factors in the sociability of this town: the flows of sexually available female tourists, the corporeality of their presence in Puerto Viejo, the fluidity of the economic exchange between the women and their local partners, and the intimate, proximate nature of sexual relations as exchanges of body fluids. The constitutive nature of these fluid ethnosexual touristic relations demonstrates specific ways in which people negotiate complex transnational intimacies within a matrix of cultural hybridity and era of uneven mobilities and capital.

Ethnography in a transnational town y own flows in and out of the town were shaped by my university teaching job in the North and parental respon- Msibilities. An initial visit in !""( was brief, followed by a series of lengthier visits in !""* and !""). My initial connections 143 City & Society

with a group of young women from the United States and Canada advanced the project in a particular direction, as did my positioning as a single mother living with my child in a local beach community inhabited by mostly wealthier Ticos from San José, and expatriates from Europe and North America. Through personal contacts, I was introduced to foreign women living in the area whose children were fathered by local men, and to women working as massage therapists and yoga teachers, options open to them through the popularity of health consciousness and New Age spirituality in Costa Rica and prevalent in this area. I spent time with the mothers at local beaches or at their homes where our children played together. I also spent time hanging out at restaurants, reggae bars and nightclubs. Because many of the women I interviewed had entered Costa Rica on three-month tourist visas, their residency status was the topic of conversations about marriages of convenience and other hopeful strategies for staying on past the expiration of their tourist visas. It proved unfeasible to make meaningful contacts with more fleeting tourists—those visiting for only a few days or so. The women whose narratives from which my analysis derives are mostly women who arrived as tourists but choose to stay or, at least, to return regularly to visit their local boyfriends. Not all were strictly “tourists,” although I use the term loosely in this article. Some had come to Puerto Viejo as part of a volunteer group to do community service work, or on a study abroad program. One woman had arrived in the #&&"s while working for the Peace Corps. The women I spoke with (approximately forty) came from Canada, the United States, Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, France, New Zealand, England and Greece. Their lengths of stay ranged from one month to twenty-plus years. While their backgrounds including age, nationality, occupation, relationship status, and personal histories vary, one commonality was their cosmopolitanism. Nearly all of them were bilingual (Spanish plus their first language) and many were multilingual.& Most had traveled internationally either as tourists or through school or development-based overseas programs, and held university degrees or professional certifications from their home countries. Finally, a crucial aspect of their subjectivities as white foreign women involved sexually with local black men is that they expressed an appreciation of cultural difference and, more specifically, were drawn to this area because of fantasies and images of the Caribbean as a laid-back tropical paradise. English-speaking women tourists were the main focus of my research but I also interviewed ten local men about their sexual relationships with foreign women. These men lived in the area (at least at the time of interview) and ranged in age from early twen- 144 Fluid Exchanges ties to fifties. Their formal education backgrounds varied. Most had gone to the local colegio (high school), but not all. None had attended university. Some had received formal vocational train- ing as nature guides. Some were employed in the formal tourist economy as guides, surfing instructors, or working in restaurants. One was a business owner. Their ethnic/racial backgrounds were mostly Afro-Caribbean from Jamaican, Cuban or mixed heritage, or from the Caribbean region of Nicaragua or Panama. The men too can be characterized as cosmopolitan. All of them spoke at least two languages. Most but not all had traveled outside of Costa Rica (some of them quite extensively). All the men expressed an appreciation for what they saw as open, friendly, and worldly per- sonalities of foreign women. Researching mobile subjects is one problem. Researching sex is another matter. I rely extensively on narratives from foreign women and local men, and on rumors and gossip to comprehend this phenomenon. The implication of this strategy is that the knowledge I acquired is as much about the stereotypes, fantasies, stigmas, and misinformation that people articulate in their stories about their own and other people’s sexual relationships as it is about actual sexual behaviour. However, the nature of the innuendos and accu- sations leveled towards particular people is more than social drama playing out in a small, sexualized tourist town. As Friedl (#&&(:'(#) argues, “The wariness and ambiguity engendered by private sex acts serve as an underlying theme of gender relations on which cultural variations are constructed.” #"

Learning masculinity amidst the flows of tourist women

“We all say that girls from Europe are hot, really wild, they like sex.”

Luis, twenty-eight year-old male resident of Puerto Viejo

he transnationality of the town is apparent in the Western Union office, the taco stand, dive shop, and sports bar run by TCanadians, a profusion of Italian restaurants, Japanese sushi, merengue, reggae, and European house music playing simultane- ously at different bars, and Jamaican patty wagons. The main 145 City & Society

street, lined with souvenir and clothing shops, restaurants, a bank, and pulperias (small grocery stores), forms a grid with a few dirt side streets where small guest houses can be found bearing names of Caribbean flora and fauna. Along with the draw of Caribbean culture, female tourists were also drawn by the cosmopolitanism of the town—the yoga retreats, a permaculture farm further south, the European food, and mix of Latino and Jamaican music. Although not all the women I interviewed had fantasized about sex with Caribbean men as their motivation to travel to this area, they nevertheless noticed the men once there. Groups of men hung around the bus stop, the boats, and the main corner (outside of a bar showing nightly Hollywood videos on an outdoor screen), some sat on quads (ATVs), wearing low-rise surfing shorts and often little else, they chatted amongst themselves, and called out to women walking by. Although indications of female sex tourism are not all that apparent in Puerto Viejo in contrast to Jamaica, for example, where “foreign women on the arms of local men are a regular part of the landscape” (Pruitt and La Font #&&*:(!(), there are occa- sional hints of liaisons between foreign women and local men: a white European women in the internet café with a black man in dreadlocks man leaning over her shoulder; a sunburned, red-haired North American woman sitting on a curb talking to a local vendor selling Bob Marley and other reggae souvenirs; a white foreign woman pedaling a bicycle slowly while a local man walks alongside selling her on the idea of taking a tour with him. These scenarios are part of the nascent global tourism in this area, which is situated in a complex way to Costa Rica as a nation. Limón is the province along the eastern coast of Costa Rica in which Puerto Viejo is located, and has historically been marginalized and racially segregated from the rest of country. Predominantly Afro-Caribbean people, mostly from Jamaica, settled in Limón at the end of the nineteenth century as migrants working on the rail- way and then later in the banana plantations, and formed a kind of cultural enclave that was very different from the dominant Latino culture in the highlands of Costa Rica.## Dominant members of Costa Rican society who saw the nation as “racially pure” and “white” discriminated against and ignored residents with different ethnic backgrounds and dark skin including Afro-Caribbean and also Nicaraguan and indigenous people (Harpelle !""#; Sandoval- García !""(). In the early twentieth century, Puerto Viejo was a small hamlet of mostly families related to one another who sub- sisted on fishing and small gardens, worked for the foreign-owned United Fruit Company and other banana plantations, and also sold cocoa to outside buyers (Palmer #&&%; Harpelle #&&%). When a 146 Fluid Exchanges road from the port city of Limón was finally completed all the way to Puerto Viejo in #&$) (Palmer #&&%), the transnational world of the tourism industry displaced in part the transnational world of the banana industry that had been central to the social and economic development of the area in which mostly English-speaking Afro-Caribbean immigrants fought long and hard for ethnic identity and cultural space (Harpelle #&&%, !""", !""#; Purcell #&&%; Putman !""!).#! The road was central to opening up the town as a tourist destination for the heartiest of tourists looking for a distinct cultural The experience. A German woman told me how she had decided to transnational travel to Puerto Viejo in the early #&'"s because it was “a dot at the end of the road” on her tourist map. “End of the road” suggests world of the the complicated way Puerto Viejo is still marginalized as an Afro- Caribbean “cultural enclave” within “white” Costa Rican society tourism industry (see Harpelle #&&%) and within the nation’s tourism industry, and at the same time is becoming trendy because of its location quite displaced in part literally at the end of the road close to the Panama border. Many Ticos continue to denigrate the area in racist discourses that con- the transnational struct the region as an unsafe, unclean, and undesirable destina- world of the tion, while foreign travel agents promote the area as a “remote”, “wild” and “hip” place. The “laid-back” Caribbean culture in banana combination with the cosmopolitan “vibe’ is touted as the promise of something different in contrast to the Pacific coast, seen now as industry too Americanized and thus devoid of culture. In spite of its cultural geographic location as an Afro-Caribbean “enclave” at the “end of the road,” Puerto Viejo in the twenty-first century is situated at a busy multicultural intersection. A quiet trickle of eco-tourists ini- tially, within thirty years the pace of the growing tourist town has intensified to a noisy crescendo of turista buses, scooters, and rental SUVs loaded with surfboards. “Local culture” is a hybrid mix of Caribbean, Latin American, European, North American, and local indigenous cultures, along with Catholic, Protestant, New Age, Rastafari, and other ideologies about gender and sexuality. Various stories attribute the beginnings of ethnosexual tourism to foreign women from different countries. For instance, Celeste, a yoga teacher from Canada who had arrived in Puerto Viejo two years ago, told me, “It goes back to the seventies when German women first started coming down here for the drugs and the Rastas.” Other stories trace the “beginning” to Norwegian women who had “black babies” with local Caribbean men so that they could live cheaply off their social welfare checks. Other stories suggest American women were the “first.” Such narratives suggest that the arrival of female tourists from First World countries shaped the 147 City & Society

sociability of the town in particular ways. The grandson of Jamaican and Columbian grandparents, Matthias experienced these changes firsthand. Now in his late fifties, he recalled in nostalgic terms being fifteen years old when he met the first European women to visit this area. He felt that tourists used to be more genuine, explaining, “People fell in love with the place [in those early days]. They had a serious life. They came because they liked the place.” His remark to me that “shit happens” recounted a turning point, starting in the late #&&"s, when globalization embodied in streams of tourists including single female tourists intensified in the area and, in his view, resulted in the disruption of local norms of sexual conduct and relations:#%

I think that for the local [expatriate women] and the single women now who come to this town, for whatever reasons they come, they think they can go to Puerto Viejo for the weekend and have some fun. Well, there are people here who have a heart and like to share. The situation now comes where it’s like buying a lottery ticket on the Saturday and winning on the Sunday morning, to fall in love with someone. It’s so loose here now. Families are changed. Their lifestyles change. It’s so easy to step out of your house and see the naked women walking around, knowing that you can have that if you want it. Family life becomes threatened. For teenager boys growing up now, it’s a real danger.

I use Matthias’ framing of the recent influx of foreign women as an incursion on local values, especially the young men’s developing sexual mores, to underscore the complicated and often pernicious positioning of female tourists within the community as sexual agents. His comment about “the danger” of single female tourists suggests a need to control the influx and mitigate the threats they pose, a point I return to. When I arrived in !""(, more than forty different ethnic groups made up the community, many from European and North American countries. The racial demographics had shifted from a black majority to a predominantly white popu- lation including white Costa Ricans. This shift suggests that men negotiate their sexualities within increasing hybridity and racial marginalization. The men that I spoke with identified themselves as “mixed”—white (mostly Tica) mothers and black fathers, or black mothers and white (mostly Tico) fathers—and articulated their ethnicities in terms of interracial families and relations forged with outside groups (extranjeros) that arrived after the road was 148 Fluid Exchanges completed. The area has thus for a number of years been marked by intensifying diversity, international tourism, and “fluidity,” which bears considerable import on the men’s lives, identities, and sexualities. The men learn about sexuality bound up with race and ethnic- The men learn ity at a relatively early age through encounters with tourist women that transpire in the context of local practices of sex and sexuality. about sexuality Philippe, a man in his forties who grew up in Puerto Viejo, told me about how in his childhood it was common for young children bound up with to watch their parents having sex because the houses were small race and back then, and sex was not so private. He told me about children masturbating in public, although those who were caught by adults ethnicity at a were severely chastised. Due to the strong influence of the Catholic Church few formal sex education programs exist in Costa Rica, and relatively early none in Puerto Viejo. A local politician spoke of bringing some discussion into the community but that there is a serious lack of age through public discourse on sexuality.#( Boys learned about sex, and still do, from the anecdotes told by older boys and men. In the words of encounters with Luis, a Caribbean man in his twenties who grew up in this area in tourist women an extended family, “You listen to men’s stories and how they used to have sex on the beach. The old men. Then you start to think of that. Maybe I can take a walk on the beach with this girl. Then you see this girl, and you try it.” Through stories of multiple relationships with foreign women Luis articulated how his masculinity was shaped through cumula- tive knowledge about the sexual preferences, practices and erotic desires of visiting women from diverse backgrounds and nationalities. His earliest sexual experiences as a young teen were with local women (categorized along racialized lines as white Ticas and black Caribbean women) but once he acquired some confidence in his late teens, his interest shifted to the pursuit of sex with foreign women. He wanted to experience for himself what the older men were saying about foreign women. When you get starting to feel like a man, you can get the tourist girls, when the shyness goes away... I used to think they weren’t interested in me. I didn’t have locks before... so I start to like the dreads, leave it go... By the time I was nineteen, I started to see so much tourist girls, all so different—the way they dress, the way they smell. They’re so expressive so you get more tempted. They show you that they’re interested. Smiling at you. You want to just try that. You get your confidence up, and soon the boom girls come hitting on you. 149 City & Society

He talked about the different tastes, smells, and feel of different foreign women, as though he was consuming them. As a guapo (hand- some man), he easily acquired experience and became increasingly cosmopolitan in his markedly heterosexual and foreign erotic desires. Through his sexual encounters with many different tourist women he learned to associate certain characteristics with particular nationalities such that foreign women were seen as “free,” “expressive,” and “easy” to be with. “Canadian girls are shy, French girls and girls from Holland, they’re kind of rude. You have to watch for rude girls,” he told me. His interest in local women eventually lessened, which speaks to one of the multiple implications of the flows of tourist women for local women. Not so much that the local women suffer a loss in terms of losing potential lovers as the men shift their erotic interest to foreign women, but that the local women suffer increasing invisibility, an issue I will return to. Luis’ narrative shows how racial stereotypes and ethnosexual dynamics of mutual desire (that is, the desire for black men by white foreign women and desire for white foreign women by black men) play out such that the men imagine themselves as hypersexual black men because in part this is how they are imagined by the tourists. As in other Men’s sexual subjectivities, complicated by their hybrid identities as Afro-Caribbean-Costa Rican, are forged through encoun- Caribbean ters with foreign women that began for some when they were fourteen years old. destinations, As in other Caribbean destinations, black masculinity is sexualized through naturalizing global discourses about the erotic black masculin- Other as virile, masterful, and attractive (see also Kempadoo !""(; Phillips !""!). Numerous websites and travel blogs represent ity is sexualized black Caribbean men in Puerto Viejo in terms of what are seen as through naturally well-toned physiques. One example, from a website called travelblog.com, says: naturalizing I always think of men down here [in Costa Rica] as being global discourses conservative, but here, I guess because it is a surf town, the guys (young ones) wear very little and what ever is covering about the erotic their crotch is dropped down in many cases so their butt crack is starting to show and sometimes the lines of their Other as virile, pubic hair… Interesting I see very little overweight guys. I guess with the economic situation, lack of processed foods, masterful, and combined with heat and lack of cars, they stay pretty slim.#* attractive Foreign women’s narratives situate what they describe as the local black men’s natural beauty and well-toned physiques in terms of “culture,” “history” and “genetics,” effectively colonizing individual men into a stereotype of pre-modern black male sexuality. Alex, a 150 Fluid Exchanges

Canadian woman in her twenties, said, “The men here are naturally buff. They fish. They surf. They play soccer on the beach. They don’t sit at desks all day, not ever. They have inherited these genes from their Jamaican ancestors who were slaves.” Masculinity is learned, negotiated, and performed within this specific context and political economy of mutual interracial erotic heterosexual desire. The relationship between tourist women and local men, whose sexual subjectivities are mediated through interactions with tourist women, is dynamic. At the most obvious level, men stand on the street corners, surf beaches, and in the nightclubs look buff and cool in low-rise surfer shorts and t-shirts or bare chests as foreign women admire them. Many of the men who seek liaisons with tourist women, picking and choosing from a Benetton range of multiple cultures and sexual “tastes and smells,” earn income from outside the formal economy except the surf instructors or nature guides, whose work is seasonal and often tenuous. Western constructions of hegemonic masculinity are based on men as high-income earners, and certainly within Latin America “work and financially supporting one’s family are central defining features of masculinity” (Gutmann !""%:#%). Many Caribbean men in Puerto Viejo are thus situated outside of hegemonic masculinities in this regard, although not in other ways—particularly with regard to homophobia, machismo, and misogyny. Gutmann noted, “homophobia, machismo, and misogyny are dominant male ideo- logical expressions of hegemonic masculinities in Latin America,” which does not mean that every man acts this way but rather that a complex interplay exists “between normative and practical mani- festations of masculinity” (ibid:%). Outside of formal economies and the realm of high income- earning, the men in various ways consolidate power over many foreign women, who tend to have more money than the men (but not always) and irrespective of actual income are situated firmly in middle-class privileged traveling cultures. Due to their continual although fluid presence (varying according to seasonal fluctuations, for example), and the importance of women more generally “to the construction, performances and practices associated with men and manhood” in the Caribbean and Latin America (Gutmann !""%:#&), foreign women play a central role in the formation of local men’s sexual subjectivities.#) On the one hand, tourist women are regarded as “dangerous” to the developing masculinities of young men, as expressed in Matthias’ narrative that alludes to reli- gious ideology that constructs women in terms of temptation and seduction. On the other hand, they are seen as “the boom girls,” the guapas, and the corporeal bodies/subjects through which social 151 City & Society

status is acquired and cosmopolitan modern subjectivities and masculinities are forged.

Commodification of intimacy

rotics extend “beyond sex acts or desires for sex acts” and are “enmeshed in fantasy, everyday practices, and social relations” E(Mankekar and Schein !""(:%*'). Erotic intimacy within a touristic setting can involve proximate relationships to people whose corporeality is fused with the landscape. Moki, an avid eco- tourist, described her affair with a local man, who lived in the forest and had tremendous knowledge of its flora and fauna, in terms of this kind of fusion. She said, [After arriving] my body had taken on all the attributes of the environment. I was constantly ripe, and could not stop relating to all the luscious ripe fruits around me. Reproduction was going on all the time. The tropical rain- Touristic forest is the most sensual place on earth, and he was part intimacy is part of that for me. He knew everything about everything that lived and reproduced there. The sex we had was so incred- of a larger quest ibly good because of that, we meshed on that level. for connection Eve, a backpacker in her twenties, whose story I recalled earlier, talked about her sexual experience with a young Rasta as being, that tourists in her words, “totally roots.” She felt she had fulfilled a fantasy about having sex with a Rasta because he embodied the ideologi- seek in crossing cal fabric of how she constructed the Caribbean (a simple lifestyle, living close to nature, rooted to the community) that she wanted international to experience firsthand. Harrison (!""%:*#) uses the concept “touristic intimacy” to borders articulate the way travel enthusiasts seek intimacy (as a particular kind of sociability that is often eroticized and intensified) through worldliness and a displacement from home rather than at home, which historically in the West has been the locale for intimacy (ibid). Touristic intimacy is thus part of a larger quest for connection that tourists seek in crossing international borders and is also the moral discourse that serves to justify international travel as a means through which cross-cultural understandings are gained. Alterity, or the state of being Other, is central to this desire for modes of intimate sociability in the context of international border-crossing in that Western tourists seek to know themselves and to be transformed through encounters with the Other (Bruner #&&#). I use “intimacy” to extend analyses of women’s sexual tour- 152 Fluid Exchanges ism into a wide domain of physical and emotional closeness and erotic desire for alterity (becoming part of the landscape), as well as to highlight the corporeal, quotidian aspects of people’s lives that are enmeshed through ethnosexual touristic relations. “Intimate” provokes the carnal, messy, proximate, and confusing social relations that are culturally situated yet often ignored, strangely, in accounts of sexuality and tourism. In the Caribbean imagined as “a geography of tropical entice- ment and sexual availability” (Sheller !""(:#$), Moki and Eve’s narratives suggest that sexual experiences are as much about “fuck- ing” the landscape fused with a Caribbean man’s body as they are about sex acts. This desire to become essentially part of the “fecund” “rooted” environment holds tremendous social currency. Women spoke about wanting to become “wild women” through their intimate relationships with local men whom they constructed through racialized discourses of primitivism (Torgovnick #&&"). Through their own intimate knowledge of foreign women’s erotic desires enmeshed in the women’s quest for touristic intimacy, and through their physical and emotional labor as particular kind of lovers, men are able to transform intimacy into somewhat of a commodity, as the story of Filipo, a local young man in his twenties, illustrates. Filipo’s Jamaican mother and Costa Rican father separated when Filipo was young, making it difficult for his mother to support the family of nine children. When he was fifteen, he left the family home to make it on his own, working in a relative’s restaurant for low wages until the day he was offered a more lucrative means to earn a living. A tourist woman, ten years his senior, took a liking to him and offered him money to “be with her.” This was his first sexual experience with a foreign woman, and not his last. Over the years, he acquired a cosmopolitan desire for fine food, expensive clothing, and world travel. When he is not visiting women in other countries, he spends time in the finest restaurants in Puerto Viejo, eying up women who are sitting alone and exhibit signs of wealth. He has learned how to get women close to him, and knows how to show them a good time in the town. He introduces them to his friends, and generally makes them feel that they are getting access to the local community in ways that the average tourist does not. Some of the women become involved with him long term, coming down to Costa Rica every few months to spend time with him, taking him to resorts and buying him things in order to sustain the relationship. Money is never discussed. He told me, “I never ask for anything.” Rather, the women enter into an implicit exchange relationship with him. His knowledge that these relationships are about fulfilling a desire for intimacy (as well as sex) was made 153 City & Society

obvious to me when he explained that as soon as he threatens to withdraw from a particular arrangement with a woman, “she offers me more money just because she doesn’t want to lose me.” Filipo’s story illustrates how he derived an understanding of the The erotic value of intimacy desired by a foreign woman when he was barely desires of some the legal age of consent in Costa Rica (which is eighteen). The erotic desires of some female tourists are inseparable from their female tourists desires for touristic intimacy, a kind of sociability in which they connect with and essentially become part of the body/landscape of are inseparable the Other. Women told me how local men offered them access to a material, corporeal, and proximate kind of intimacy that they could from their desires not obtain at home. One woman said, for touristic There’s an instant intimacy you get from the men here intimacy that you don’t find at home… They want you close to them. They cook for you. They wash your clothes for you. One boyfriend took care of me when I was sick, bringing me medicine from his uncle who knows medicinal plants. They want to live with you as soon as they meet you.

Bethany, a twenty-eight year-old woman from the United States who traveled to the area to teach yoga, moved in with her boyfriend, Harris, a young man whose family migrated from Nicaragua in the #&'"s during the revolution, soon after she met him. Living in a two-bedroom house shared with his extended family of eight adults and six children allowed Bethany to feel as though she was living what she perceived to be a “Costa Rican” lifestyle. She was amazed that he allowed her to share so much of his intimate everyday life with her, and articulated her experience of meeting him as a manifestation of a dream that was part of her understanding of Costa Rica as an “ecological paradise.” As I mentioned earlier, most of the women I interviewed had traveled extensively, and as backpackers and budget travelers valued cultural difference and connection with local people over resort amenities and luxurious accommodations. Sharing a house with a man from a poor family and a seemingly culturally distinct household organization, and hearing familial sounds and smelling odors and aromas, were treasured experiences in which sexual desires were entangled with desires to be part of the cultural landscape. While dreams to be enmeshed in the fecund and ecologically lush surroundings were realized by some of the women through their sexually intimate relationships with local men, women struggled bitterly with the ultimate contestations that arose over the question of the men’s in/fidelity. Tourist women arrive with a norma- 154 Fluid Exchanges tive Western model of heterosexual relations in terms of exclusive sexual rights between a couple, and then wrestle with what appears at least in terms of cultural stereotypes to be a cultural acceptance of men’s promiscuous behaviour. Women tended to internalize and pathologize their inability to accept “a core assumption about Caribbean men,” that is, that they are “exceedingly promiscuous” (Lewis !""%: #"$).#$ A French woman in her thirties characterized women who continue relationships with local men who habitually cheat on them as “sick women,” drawing on popular Western psy- chology. She said, “we are women who love too much… who give too much for the men we long to be close to.” For some women, the desire to retain the intimacy that was so eagerly offered by the men in the first stages of romance is the point at which they exert their economic power by bargaining for exclusive sexual access with gifts or cash. This is the point at which the messy, carnal, and proximate enactments of intimacy are transformed into commoditized actions within a “fluid” market, as Filipo’s story demonstrates. Thinking of this Caribbean Costa Rican town in terms of a “fluid” market where intimacy is commodified and where semen is proffered in the (non-reproductive) form of ”primitive sex” as well as in making babies and forging transnational kin relations complicates the question of racialized power in ethnosexual tourism. Granted, the women who arrive as tourists from First World countries hold considerable consumer power. They are able to procure men and sometimes even virgin boys with the promise of good meals, a private room for a few days and, for some, substantial cash. They fulfill their fantasies of becoming part of the fecund tropical landscape for very little, often nothing. At the same time, local men demonstrate that they have learned experientially how sexuality is a “dense transfer point for relations of power” (Foucault #&$':#"%). The men “give” themselves and their bodily fluids freely to foreign women but also withhold intimacy from women who desire exclusivity and not merely casual sex, and some hold out for a price. I asked a friend, Jesus, why men felt that women should pay for their lover’s food or give them money. Jesus told me, “if a woman takes my semen, she owes me something. My energia [energy] [in the form of semen] is worth something.” When I asked him about the women’s energia, he looked puzzled, as though I had asked him a completely irrelevant question. In addition to the masculine privilege regarding the act of sex where a man’s semen is imbued with an exchange value, men have learned to recognize the symbolic and economic value of particular forms of intimacy that foreign women expect and attempt to demand. In specific ways, the men can be seen as producing, performing and commodifying 155 City & Society

Men have intimacy, and thus exerting agency bound up with masculine power within a fluid market that is salient to the ethnosexual relations learned to playing out in this town. recognize the Regulating the flows of female tourists symbolic and “Here is not much different than anywhere else. People economic value meet and fall in love. The problem for men here is that they fall in love and the woman can leave, she will leave…” of particular Filipo, July !""* forms of en and other residents in the community including their intimacy that wives, mothers, and sisters perceive the mobility of female tourists traveling at will back and forth across borders foreign women M as somewhat pernicious, as I have suggested. I take “mobility” to expect refer to the corporeal travel that “lies at the heart” of modern social life and modernity (Urry !""":('). Mobility is associated with privilege, knowledge, and the promise of liberation where subjects seek “mobility as a panacea for constraints in identity in capitalist cultures” (Kaplan !""!:%(). The men living in Puerto Viejo have their own histories of mobility, including migration from Nicaragua, as I have described above.#' Yet one of the most common refrains I heard is that “the foreign women always leave.” This accusation reflects the marginalized circumstances, specifically with regards to asymmetrical mobilities, in which local men negotiate these relationships. Even if they muster or are given the resources to follow girlfriends to Europe or North America, which many do, their ability to cross borders is constrained by their Costa Rican citizenship. It is difficult for them to obtain visas to travel to Canada, Germany, and elsewhere, especially the United States. Nor do they necessarily want to travel internationally. Some men told me that they prefer to stay in Puerto Viejo rather than travel overseas because they are happy with the pura vida (“pure living”) that is said to embody a nationalistic ideology about “the good life” that is possible in Costa Rica. Many of the men have Costa Rican children for which they bear a financial responsibility and by law cannot evade through relocation out of the country.#& Regardless of their individual economic circumstances and the interlinked political, personal, and familial reasons for choosing to remain in Puerto Viejo when their North American or European girlfriends leave, the men’s narratives construct foreign women’s mobility in terms of inevitable departure and leave-taking. Filipo and other men told me, “the woman can leave—she will leave.” 156 Fluid Exchanges

Given that they arrive as tourists, it is hardly surprising that the majority of foreign women do leave, although many do stay extended periods of time and some eventually relocate to Costa Rica. Staying is actually quite a tenuous option. It is difficult to make a living wage in this area. Obtaining legal residency status is often impossible. Leaving, however, is not as simple as hold- ing the proper passport or a return airline ticket either. Stories circulate about women who wanted to leave but could not. !" Nevertheless, the men’s grievances about the women’s ability to take flight on a whim serve to emphasize the real gaps between their own lack of mobility and the license of foreign women to leave whenever they want, although women’s experiences complicate this. The women arrive in recurring waves as tourists, as I have explained, embodying a kind of global cultural flow. They are seen as free to come and go, crossing international borders with little restriction as First World citizens, and free to partake in the multi- tude of fluid exchanges available for them as consumers in a global sex market. Within the town, however, female tourists’ mobility is negotiated within a wider cultural context and contest over public space in the Caribbean and Latin America where masculine power is often expressed in homosocial practices, especially within the domain of “the street” (calle) (Chevannes !""%; Vigoya !""%).!# One night a young American woman, April, was riding her bicycle back to her guesthouse. Two local men stopped her. They knew her because she was a frequent visitor to this area. They went to the same discos, and shared some of the same friends. The men had never been unfriendly towards her but on that particular night, in part because they were drunk, angrily accused her, before letting her pass by, “Why are you here? Why don’t you go back home? You and the girls that go riding your bikes around here, you never talk to us locals, you just stick together. You’re not local. We are. We can do what we want.” After that encounter, she could no longer imagine a displacement from the category of “tourist.” No matter how long she stayed or how friendly she became with local men, they would position her in terms of her entitlement to come and go, and re-position her by threatening to control her movements. April’s story suggests that, contrary to the women’s ubiquitous mobility that is salient to the town’s social landscape and the men’s own romance narratives about women leaving them behind with broken hearts, and as a response to their mobility, tourist women’s freedom is regulated through homosocial practices whereby men attempt to “re-claim” the street space as their own. One man told me about his experience with a tourist woman on a beach one day when she tried to stop him 157 City & Society

from shooing away one of the many scraggly, semi-feral dogs that run loose in the town. He told me, “She don’t know these dogs. I tell her to mind her business. I put she in her place.” April’s story suggests that the transnational spaces of Puerto Viejo where foreign women and Caribbean men cross paths over and over are a kind of “ethnosexual frontier” (Nagel !""":#*&). Ethnosexual frontiers are “erotic locations and exotic destinations that are surveilled and supervised, patrolled and policed, regulated and restricted, but are constantly penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic “Others” across ethnic boundaries” (ibid.). By “regulation” I am not referring to the legal apparatus of the law and state, but rather to the everyday informal kinds of control and management that occur through normative behaviors and performances of gender/race/sexuality that affectively define “socially approved men’s and women’s sexualized bodies” and “approved kinds of sexual desires for numbers and approved types of sexual partners” (Nagel !""%:'). Both women and men’s narratives suggest that a significant amount of knowledge underwrites the enact- ment of intimacy that the men manipulate and stipulate through particular boundary keeping strategies and homosocial practices. Performances of intimacy (and by “performances” I do not mean to suggest that the men’s emotions are inauthentic) play out in the context of and in order to ameliorate the mobilities enacted by and associated with the foreign women, and within a complex hybrid mix of Latino-Caribbean-European-North American gender relations. This was made evident to me one night early in my fieldwork. I sat in a restaurant with four North American women who learned of my research through a mutual friend, Carolyn. All of them had sexual involvements of some kind with local men. Carolyn suggested that we meet at a touristy restaurant rather than one of the cheaper sodas where their boyfriends typically ate, explaining that she “definitely won’t say what I might say other- wise. Let’s go to a place where locals wouldn’t be caught dead.” Her suggestion as to where we could place ourselves in the town safely out of earshot of their boyfriends evokes a number of modes of sociality within the town—the surveillance over women by local men, the racially segregated everyday practices such as eating, and the marked invisibility of certain residents of the town. By eating at a pricier restaurant, we avoided not only the eavesdropping of local men but also possible looks and even glares from local women who are the men’s wives or girlfriends and who tend to be muted in the women tourists’ romance narratives except occasionally as antagonists.!! The layout of the town is such that the touristy 158 Fluid Exchanges restaurants are located along the main paved road and the places where locals (and some tourists) eat are situated along the back dirt roads. Rarely do the foreign women’s boyfriends accompany the women to the front street restaurants but instead eat with their friends at a soda then join the women at the bar or nightclub later. Few of the women eat with the men either, however, unless the man has specially prepared a meal for her, which is an event most women I interviewed cherished because of the intimacy symbolized by home-made local food. After we got settled in one of the trendier restaurants in town, the women spoke with one another as much as to me. I was surprised to discover that this was a rare occasion. Zoe, whom I introduced earlier, turned to Rayne, who had recently arrived from California to visit her boyfriend, and asked, “Does your boyfriend have other girlfriends?” Rayne replied somewhat defensively, “Maybe he does, but when he’s with me, he’s with me.” “And I’m fine with that [arrangement],” Rayne added. The women nodded. It became clear, however, that Rayne was struggling to accept the possibility that the rumors about her boyfriend might be true. She repeated to us a couple of times, “He’s just confused. He’ll figure it out.” When I raised the topic of money, she first told me that they shared the cost of everything but later admitted, “His brother did come by earlier today and asked for !, """ colones. Maybe that’s the start?”!% Her face was gloomy as she swirled the remains of her batido (fruit milk- shake) in the bottom of the glass. Bethany tried to console Rayne: Women just don’t talk to one another in this town. It’s all kind of a secret really. Women seem to compete with one another when they first arrive to attract a black Costa Rican man and nobody says anything because word spreads like fire. The men are very possessive, and intolerant of women who cheat. Yeah, double standards for sure. You never really know what they’re doing during the day but they sure know what you’re up to! Bethany’s comment, “you never really know what they’re doing but they sure know what you’re up to,” alludes to the visible male- dominated street culture and how this street culture effectively reg- ulates tourist women’s sexual subjectivities. A Canadian woman, Alex, spoke of such homosocial everyday practices in Puerto Viejo as a kind of fraternal knowledge exchange,

We all [foreign women] say that there must be an extra hour in the day where the men all go meet at the Casa Cultura [Community Centre] because they all know every- 159 City & Society

thing: Who’s with that girl, what hotel she’s staying in, who wants her, who’s been with her. There must be an extra hour in the day that we know nothing about, because somehow they seem to know exactly what’s going on. They know who was with her last night—how do they know that? They must have some secret sign language that we don’t get.

Another woman spoke of how men share intimate details in their conversations at the taxi stands and other places men congregate. Like Zoe, many women talked about how they cannot go out at night or even during the day without their boyfriend finding out from his friends about the women’s excursions. The town is small, and the men are often related to one another or grew up together. The men standing about in the street, in addition to other things, Information are watching foreign women and keeping tabs on them. Through fraternalism, information is exchanged about the women, who spread in they have slept with, what they do as far as sex, as well as how much money they have, and so forth. Information spread in the the form of form of gossip and rumors serves also to regulate a woman’s actions. gossip and Fraternalism fosters the suppression of knowledge too about sexual assaults and rapes, unfortunately a common scenario in many of the rumors serves tourist women’s narratives about themselves or other women. This regulation of intimate details about the sexual lives and also to regulate practices of foreign women by local men does not transpire in the same way between female tourists and foreign women living in a woman’s Puerto Viejo. As Bethany’s narrative suggests, tourist women new to the town are often strangers to one another (many of them travel actions alone) and maintain silence about their relationships with local men for various reasons, including the heterosexual competition they feel towards other tourist women, and the ways in which their sexual agency as gringas is morally coded and thus regulated. Guarding and disseminating intimate information about tourist women is one mode of regulation that occurs through local homosocial practices. Another mode of normative masculinity that has even more resonance in the women’s narratives is what I refer to as “the specter of infidelity.” By specter I invoke both the practice of men having multiple sexual relationships whether in a union or single, and the threat that this bears. My use of “specter” is meant to underscore how the threat of being cheated on pervades and hangs like a cloud over foreign women’s sexual subjectivities in this town. A Canadian man who has lived in Puerto Viejo for many years described one particularly common image of the specter of infidelity (linked to tourist women’s mobility) like this: 160 Fluid Exchanges

We watch the girls get off the buses and we predict which kind of guy each one will go for—that one with a Rasta, that one with a surfer, and so forth. We’re not the only ones watching. The local guys know exactly who to approach, because they just dropped off their Canadian girlfriend, or German girlfriend, or whoever. They have a steady flow of girls, and if they don’t approach them directly at the bus stop then they’ll go for it later that night at the disco. Some guys need Palm Pilots just to keep all of their tourist girlfriends organized. Recall how Filipo spoke of controlling foreign women’s movements within Puerto Viejo and also to and from Costa Rica so that he could manage two or three foreign women at the same time. Once women have spent enough time in the town to witness such occurrences themselves, what I call the “turnstiling” of tourist women becomes a source of anxiety and distress whether or not it actually happens. One woman’s story, where a seemingly mythical “other girlfriend” eventually did show up, is revealing. Marcia had heard about her boyfriend’s previous girlfriend through friends in town but chose not to give much credence to the stories because of the rampant gos- siping that goes on. One day her boyfriend asked her to go with him to San José but she declined his invitation. At the end of the day, she went to the bus stop to greet him upon his return presumably alone. As she put her arms around his shoulder to hug him, she could not help but notice an American woman standing in his shadow. This was the woman he had been telling her about for months but she had refused to believe existed! She felt sick to her stomach, ran back out onto the street, and was completely bewildered about what to do, whether she should leave him or not. She told me, “he left me in a mess. It took me months to get my confidence back.”

Conclusion

emale tourists arrive as relatively wealthy vacationers from the North to play and relax, and to enact fantasies often formed Fin childhood about the Caribbean as paradise. These dreams include the desire to be close to a Caribbean man, to learn about a simple, pure, natural lifestyle through a union with a Caribbean man, even to have his babies and thus consolidate their entitlement to live out this paradisal fantasy for as long as possible. Their ideas are often romantic, hopeful, and naïve about the harsher realities of 161 City & Society

being seen as a gringa from which to make money or to manipulate through sex and its intimacies. They arrive as new graduates from university or massage therapy school, and as participants in international humanitarian tour groups seek to transform themselves and the community in some kind of betterment. Babb (!""(:*(!) speaks about how some places hold special appeal for travelers who seek more than “a comfortable holiday at the beach or visit to colonial towns” wishing to align themselves within a moral discourse of international activism and political awareness. She refers specifically to “Sandalista” tourists drawn to the romantic appeal of post- revolution Nicaragua, but a parallel can be drawn to Puerto Viejo as an area that attracts a significant number of community-service oriented tour groups.!( As the women’s narratives demonstrate, their mobility underwritten by class, race, and nation-bound privilege is complicated, and is compromised when they choose to stay in the area to seek out relationships with local men, who attempt to negotiate these relationships on their own terms as a means to counterbalance the women’s license to go at “any time.” The “cost” of seeking intimacy with local men and having suffered through the consequences is often constructed in psychological and pathological terms. Women spoke about the loss of their self-esteem, “giving too much,” loss of identity, and so forth, although more tangible costs are suffered as well, including domestic abuse and poverty. The fluidity of the transnational tourist town in the Caribbean region of Costa Rica in terms of the corporeal travels of tourist women in and out, and the economically ambiguous sexual and intimate relations between foreign women and local men, can be analyzed in terms of both the upholding and the crossing of ethnosexual boundaries. Both men and women cross ethnic boundaries in seeking out alterity (the Other) bound up with sexuality. The women’s mobility engenders them with considerable privilege in terms of modes of sociability in the town including access to men’s sexual, personal, familial, and intimate lives. At the same time, the knowledge and social status that local men acquire as cosmopolitan lovers negotiating masculinity within a moving landscape of sexually available foreign women engenders the men with power to regulate to some degree the women’s erotic desires, expressions of consumer power hinging on First World privilege, and physical movement. Puerto Viejo as a fluid terrain is also a place where female tourists (and other transnationals) aspire to become part of the landscape through the subjective experience of tourist intimacy as well as intimate relations that transcend the liminal temporal- ity that being a tourist entails. How foreign women succeed in their pursuit of intimacy for an affordable price in this fluid market 162 Fluid Exchanges depends on a number of factors, including their desirability as sexual subjects where age, attributes of beauty, and friendliness come into play. Different men, too, want different things from these very complex interracial, cross-cultural, ethnosexual relations. In sum, the presence of foreign women in this town is a highly complicated and for some pernicious aspect to the town’s social Erotic sexual history and modes of sociability. Rather than treat female tourists as sexual predators by virtue of their position in the global subjectivities and political economy as First World tourists, as many scholars have cogently argued, it is prudent to regard women who make up this practices of desire global ethnoscape of gendered, sexualized tourists as permanent although contingent occupants in local communities such as play out across Puerto Viejo and whose sexualities will continue to be part of the national borders local mix. In theorizing the local-global spatiality of global sexualities and moving landscapes of sexual subjects, scholars suggest that in new “scapes” intimate relations are respatialized such that erotic subjectivities and practices of desire play out across national borders in new of desire “scapes” of desire (Appadurai #&&)), where desires for commodi- ties, marriage, and normative and transgressive sexual relations are often highly charged and socially consequential (Mankekar and Schein !""(:%*'). I situate female tourists within these complex and nuanced contestations and negotiations taking place within fluid modes of sociability and exchange.

Notes

Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Of course I would not be granted the privilege to write this article without the generous cooperation of many people in Costa Rica who gave their valuable time and knowledge to this project, and who shared intimate details of their lives with me, for which I am very grateful. Promises of anonymity prevent me from naming all of you unfortunately but Sam, Maria, Shaun, Angela, Susana and Denise warrant special mention. A huge thanks nevertheless: ¡Muchisimas gracias! I would like to acknowledge the careful readings of earlier versions of this paper by Jessa Leinaweaver and Stephen Holden. The suggestions made by Petra Kuppinger and two anonymous reviewers were very helpful. As always, Breck and Alex deserve special acknowl- edgement for putting up with my time away in the field and at my desk.

#After much deliberation, I decided to use the actual name of the town. While acknowledging that this is a murky issue, I feel that my ethno- graphic contribution might be diminished if I were to use a pseudonym. 163 City & Society

!Costa Rica’s most intensified growth period as a tourism destination was #&'&-#&&( (Raventos !"")), and has grown steadily since then. In #&'* tourism brought in revenue of US + ##' million compared with over US + #.! billion in !""" (ibid). %Indigenous people remain outside either of these two categories. (I use the term “local men” as a more inclusive term than “Costa Rican men” because there are men living in the area who are from Nicaragua, Panama, Columbia, and also men who have Jamaican or Cuban backgrounds. *This is not to say that male tourists do not engage in vacation sex; I make a distinction between vacation sex (sex between tourists while on vacation) and ethnosexual tourism, which involves “forging sexual links with ethnic ‘others’ across ethnic boundaries” (Nagel !""":#*&) in tourist-local encounters. )Male surfers play an interesting role in the social sexual history in this area. While outside of my research knowledge, it is worth noting that surfers, who were one of the first groups of foreigners to arrive, have established themselves in the community with businesses, land ownership, and some in marriages with local women. $The situation in which children are the outcome of tourist-local liaisons begs a number of questions to do with transnational kinship, citizenry and “blood,” and other issues that I am currently exploring. 'I have changed the names and identifying features of research participants in order to protect their anonymity. &I conducted nearly all the interviews in English. My basic Spanish skills were a limitation to the study. #"See Frohlick (!""$) for a discussion of methodological issues I grappled with in studying sexuality in this town. ##Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this useful notion of “cultural enclave.” #!I thank an anonymous reviewer for providing me with this frame- work. #%Raventos (!""):%$$) describes the late #&&"s as the “evolution period” of tourism in Costa Rica, when numbers of increasingly “multi- faceted” tourist arrivals grew along with an increase in segmentation of the market, and the popularity of three and four-star hotels as opposed to cabinas and basic lodgings. The Puerto Viejo area experienced this evolution period in a particular way. #(This is especially important when considering that foreign women arriving from countries whose resources and cultural practices sanction and provide public sex education presume that local men will have the same knowledge as they do around sexual diseases and condom use. #*http://www.travelblogs.com/colin/fashion_is_truly_dead.htm. Accessed July #!, !""). #)The role of local women in ethnosexual relations between foreign women and local men is complicated. In general, their presence as the wives and girlfriends of local men is bracketed out of female tourists’ per- ceptions of the town as a hetero-ethnosexual playground, and relations 164 Fluid Exchanges between the two groups are palpably antagonistic. More research is called for regarding this issue. #$Kempadoo (!""() draws attention to the complications of ‘outside relationships’ that are normative within the Caribbean as both a post- colonial response to the European monogamous marriage system and a means to legitimate informal polygyny and thus men’s power over women through sexual and procreative urgings. #'The mobility and subjectivity of local men as transnationals is another area of future research. Stories circulate regarding the alleged dangers of traveling outside of Costa Rica, for example, of being “kept in a box” in a city in Germany as one man who lived for a short time there with his German girlfriend recounted to me. #&See http://insidecostarica.com/dailynews/!""*/february/#$/ nac".htm. !"One of the reasons women cannot always leave so easily even when they want has to do with violence or the threat of violence against them by men they are involved with. One woman spoke of needing her father to come to Costa Rica from Europe to help diffuse the situation enough so that she could leave without suffering more abuse from her ex-boyfriend. Another woman told me how she stayed in the town much longer than was physically healthy for her because of her boyfriend’s constant threats to hurt her if she did leave. Other women found leaving difficult because of drug addictions they developed while living in Costa Rica. Careful examination of gender relations and sanctioned domestic violence, drug and substance abuse issues, as well mental health issues within the community and Costa Rica more broadly is required to understand the com- plexity of each of these situations. !#Gutmann (!""%) defines homosocial practices as sociality between men that serves to consolidate male friendships and heterosexual identities. !!See also Ware (#&&$) who discusses the disappearance of black women more generally from narratives about white foreign tourist women’s involvements with black men. !%!""" colones in !""( was worth about US +(. !(I appreciate one reviewer’s observation that the female tourists who arrive on these humanitarian-type tours might share commonalities with male peacekeepers who enter into sexual liaison with local women. More remains to be said about this.

References cited

Appadurai, Arjun #&&$ Fieldwork in the Era of Globalization. Anthropology and Humanism !!(#&): ##*-##'. Appadurai, Arjun #&&) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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