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: transnational- ism, 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 trav- eled 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 corpo- real 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 trav- elers 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 (!""%:!"$) their relative suggests that women engaging in ethnosexual tourism appear more interested in “being swept away by” than in asserting control over economic power their male partners. Within the global economy, women from First over local lovers World countries can and do exert their relative economic power over local lovers and others in the communities to which they travel in Third World countries, but power associated with masculinity complicates this schema. This article aims to contribute to a nuanced understand- ing of wider patterns of global flows of female tourists as mobile subjects whose sexualities and desires for intimacy are negotiated 141 City & Society by local actors in complex ways, in this case Caribbean men in a transnational tourist town in the Caribbean of Costa Rica. Given the increasing numbers of women involved in global tourism, and in sexual relationships while on tour, this issue warrants more nuanced attention with regards to how sexual tourism is linked to larger questions about the challenge of intimacy in the twenty-first century where “globalization marks the end of any sort of space of intimacy in social life” (Appadurai #&&$:##*; 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

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