International migration and related globalization processes have profoundly altered every aspect of U.S. social, political, economic, and cultural life in the past quarter century. Despite rich scholarship about the causes and consequences of international migration, there has been little consideration of how sexual arrangements, ideologies, and modes of regulation shape migration to and incorporation into the United States. Thus, important questions about sexuality and migration have yet to be addressed. These include: How does sexuality shape migration processes? How do concerns about sexuality shape U.S. immigration control strategies and constructions of citizenship? How has mass migration in the past quarter...

In April 2002, Christina Madrazo, a transsexual woman from Mexico seeking asylum in the United States, announced she was planning to sue the U.S. government for $15 million. She alleged that while she had been held in an immigration detention facility in Miami, Florida, in May 2000, a guard raped her. Twice.¹ The second assault occurred after she had already complained to authorities in the detention center about the first rape, yet the offending officer had been assigned to guard her again. Madrazo brought criminal charges first, and in August 2000 the guard, Lemar Smith, was indicted on two felony...

Under its asylum laws, the United States provides refuge to those fleeing persecution in their home countries. Once recognized as a bona fide asylum seeker, a person can remain legally in the United States, eventually applying for permanent residency and citizenship. Typically, an asylum applicant must argue his or her case before an asylum officer, who may grant the case or refer it to an immigration judge who makes the final decision. In some cases, asylum applicants or the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services¹ may appeal these decisions to the Board of Immigration Appeals and, sometimes, eventually to a...

Between 1999 and 2002, Cantu served as an expert witness in five cases involving Mexican men who petitioned for asylum in the United States on the basis of persecution for sexual orientation. The cases were processed in California, and all five men were eventually granted asylum. Cantú’s participation as an expert witness reflected his commitment to using his sociological training and university faculty status to challenge inequalities and to assist those with less privilege. Having researched the lives of men who have sex with men in Mexico, and in migrant Mexican communities in the United States, Cantu appreciated the struggles...

The relationship between nationalism and sexuality has had a central place within queer studies for more than a decade, but the field has attended less frequently and consistently to the ways that the state itself (rather than the individual citizen or the nation) might be understood as sexualized.¹ This emphasis on the nation may result, in part, from the influence of Foucault, whose formulation of power directs attention away from the state. It may also stem from the traditional ways that the distinctions between the state and nation have been theorized. While it is difficult to find agreement on the...

It’s obvious to me that the Statue of Liberty is one hot butch. Her outfit, I know, doesn’t really suit her. Yet there’s something sexy about the way her butchness shows through anyway. You can tell, for instance, despite all that drapery drag, that her hips would never swing side to side. She’d stride or saunter and then plant her feet in that I’ll-move-when-I’m-ready way, alert for any encroachment, yet confident that no one would dare to try. Liberty’s the kind of butch who makes her muscles evident without ever looking like she’s showing them off. Her calves are visibly...

I was a young girl when the Mariel boatlift occurred. After one man drove his truck into the Peruvian embassy in Havana in early 1980, a series of events unraveled that led to the mass migration of 125,000 Cubans to the United States. The political leader whom they had fled, Fidel Castro, invited Cuban Americans to come pick up their relatives in Cuba’s Mariel Harbor. Cuban Americans arriving at Mariel to pick up their family members were required to take other Cubans back to the United States. Faced with a public relations nightmare of tens of thousands of Cubans desperate...

I was sitting in a cramped apartment in Queens, New York, in the spring of 1992 after talking for more than an hour with Roberto, one of my informants, when he suddenly blurted, “Look around you, this is not the glamorous life that people back in Manila think I have. They all believe I live in a brownstone or a spacious house on Fifth Avenue—like the ones in the movies and TV. They don’t know the daily drama I have to go through here just to make it. Although if you ask me whether I would exchange the struggle...

By the time viewers see and hear the above border-crossing sequence in the 1999 independent, Spanish-language filmDel otro lado(On/from the other side), they have already followed Alejandro’s own “adventures” in Mexico City. Finding himself among strangers while weighing the risks for crossing the U.S.–Mexico border, after thecoyote,or people smuggler, has deserted them in an isolated mountain in the middle of the night, Alejandro already carries multiple losses during his trip. He has left behind his biological family, his gay male lover, and his tight circle of gay friends in Mexico. Certainly a dangerous adventure for...