Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
I am grateful to have had the time and support while on the UC Presidents Postdoctoral
Fellowship to finish this essay. Many thanks to all of you who have spent the time to give
thoughtful feedback: Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Jennifer Pierce, Anne Martinez, Lucy Burns, the
participants of the MacArthur International Gender Consortium at the University of Minnesota, and the reviewers and editors at Signs.
1
Nicole Constables book, Romance on a Global Stage (2003), is the only exception.
While I am differentiating my work from traditional studies on the mail-order bride industry,
there are many similarities in the ways women from Latin America are castas better mothers,
as warmer, more sexual, and less outspoken than U.S. womenthat resonate with how Asian
women are popularly constructed within the global economy. See Glenn 1986; Parren
as
2001; Kang 2002.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2005, vol. 31, no. 2]
2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3102-0007$10.00
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ern capitalist relations while also in need of being saved from anachronistic
nationalism. Men in the United States imagine themselves as the benevolent force saving globally disadvantaged middle-class women (docile
laborers) abroad as well as saving the U.S. nation from the so-called
disintegration of the family brought about by feminism, womens entrance
into the labor force, and U.S. women of color, who are stereotyped as
welfare recipients (viewed as unruly and lazy laborers). As Ana Teresa
Ortiz and Laura Briggs describe, in the popular industry of adoption of
children from Romania the Third World poor are romanticized as malleable innocents who can take advantage of the opportunities passed up
by the dysfunctional domestic underclass (2003, 42). By analyzing race,
gender, and the family in a transnational context, I hope to bring Latin
American women into a relational framework with immigrant women and
U.S. women of color, whose labor is envisioned as polluting and crippling
the progress of U.S. nationalism and family values.
While men lament that U.S. women are overdetermined by their labor
outside the home, Latin American women represent the utopian prospect
of importing spiritual rejuvenation and purifying the boundaries of the
self, the nuclear family, and the nation. Latin American women embody
the last frontier, merging colonial and new cyberfrontier possibilities.3
Thus, finding a foreign bride converges with four discourses: colonialism,
modern self-help movements, transnational capitalism, and futuristic ideals
of flexibility, mobility, and a postracial society. These themes demonstrate
the ways technology and ideas about globalization are incorporated into
mens everyday lives as a yearning for a utopian, multiracial, postbody
affinity to masculinity and citizenship, regardless of skin color, profession,
or class affiliation.
In chat room discussions, men from various ethnicities, classes, and
professions construct themselves through fantasies of colonialism and empire and as cosmopolitan citizens of the globe. I am concerned here with
the role of the Internet in altering patterns of intimacy and subjectivity,
as well as the labor Latin American womens bodies perform as reproducers
of the new nation. The thousands of men who flee the United States for
wives and adventures abroad reveal one way men transform their sense of
victimhood into empowerment. Men in the United States elevate their
value and social capital through their association with hegemonic masculinity predicated on a traditional wife and family and on heroic ideals
of global adventure, risk, and self-exploration.
3
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Methodology
In this article I combine chat room discussions, interviews with more than
forty men at Vacation Romance tours, and guidebooks to show continuities between cyberspace discussions, face-to-face interactions, and
Web site images and narratives.4 I discovered that even as a lurker, or
invisible voyeur, in Planet-Love, the stories men told me at the tours
mimicked the stories repeated in Planet-Loves chat room. While I feared
my identity as a mixed race Chicana from the United States would hinder
the openness and sincerity during interviews with men at the tour in
Guadalajara, Mexico, most men were eager to share their stories with me.
The fact that I interviewed men and women, that I spoke Spanish, and
that I had permission from company owners to conduct interviews at their
tours contributed to my association by some of the men as one of the
guys. My willingness to listen to mens stories and the fact that I was
racially visible as nonwhite (and to them, nonfeminist) contributed to my
insider status.5 While being one of the guys was neither my intent nor a
position I felt comfortable with at all times, I was able to engage men in
honest and open discussions to which, at times, I wished I was not privy.
As an educated, confident, middle-class woman with knowledge of Mexican culture and language, I occupied a complicated position of power
vis-a`-vis the men I interviewed.
Unlike face-to-face interviewscarried out over a short period of time
and with a limited number of peoplechat room ethnography provides
an unending dialogue among a rotating group of men. As people increasingly find intimacy and a sense of community through the Internet,
this type of ethnography is an indispensable tool for following the ways
men and women create consensus about their participation in this industry
and how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn. Rather than
focusing on what is true versus what is false, ethnographic narratives are
important in unraveling the trends and frameworks within which people
tell the stories they wish to tell.6
4
The Romance Tours are held at five-star hotels, and men usually pay steep prices to
attend (from $500 to $1,200, plus travel expenses) while women are invited for free.
5
Most men I interviewed equate feminism with white, upwardly mobile women and
assume Latin American women and, to a lesser extent, U.S. women of color, to be more
feminine and thus not feminist.
6
In order to answer the question of whether Internet chat room observations are legitimate or accurate places to do research because of preoccupations with deception and
identity play, scholars have conducted in-depth analysis comparing online and offline interactions. Like Lori Kendall (2002) and Constable (2003), I found that there was not much
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Global masculinities
S I G N S
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cated white woman at home were distinct from sexual conquests with the
hypersexualized, racial, and/or lower-class other and from the hypersexualized colonized male subjects outside the nation. Connell elucidates
the continuities and disjunctures between colonial masculinity and its hegemonic manifestation, transnational business masculinity (2000, 51).
He describes this current world gender order as the masculinity associated
with those who control its dominant institutions: the business executives
who operate in global markets, and the political executives who interact
. . . with them (51).
This new transnational business masculinity departs from traditional
bourgeois masculinity by its increasingly libertarian sexuality, with a
growing tendency to commodify women (Connell 2000, 52). New sexualized industries have cropped up within patterns of transnational business, which include hotel porn videos and sex tourism. Similarly, Hooper
describes corporate manhood alongside a sexual imaginary described as a
rape script, including images of penetrating markets and male exploration and adventure in virgin territories (2001, 13940). The Internet
marriage industry utilizes similar discourses of adventure, with landscapes
imagined as womens bodies. Despite similar racial and sexualized fantasies, these metaphors create a simplistic binary between the violent gaze
of white men, on the one hand, and victimized women, on the other.
These debates do not take into account how multicultural configurations
of race, sexuality, class, and the nation are transplanted onto a global
economy of desire. I depart from this linear narrative of colonization to
globalization by arguing that this new transnational masculinity builds on
previous colonialist fantasies and rewrites them by drawing from the discourse of corporate multiculturalism. In other words, masculinity is not
associated with colonial constructions of Western whiteness in contrast to
racialized, native others or with contemporary anti-immigration nativism and white supremacy.8 Instead, men imagine themselves as the benevolent engineers who racially uplift the moral fabric of the national
family by importing a superior breed of women. Furthermore, in both
Connell and Hoopers theorizations, global manhood is characterized
through images of white, male entrepreneurs, erasing the ways men of
color collude, resist, and compete with this Western white male construct.9
Men access a multicultural patriotic manhood through adherence to the
8
For a discussion of U.S. nativism against immigrants, see Reimers 1985; Parea 1997;
Chavez 2001.
9
For an account of other versions of global manhood, see Kondo 1997; Ong 1999; Lu
2000.
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Global multiculturalism
Just as corporate multiculturalism promises new markets and the comparative advantage that will solve all business problems, so too are men
turning to Latin America to renovate their image back home. In the
Internet marriage industry, women from developing nations embody the
frontier of the future; their bodies and the products they represent promise
spiritual vitality, a connectedness to nature, and access to a new, rejuvenated self. This departure from understanding race as a marker of inequalities to a celebration of cultural difference speaks to the excess labor
racialized bodies provide in revitalizing a dominant U.S. subject position
and the economy more broadly.
Technology ads contribute to a vision of a world unencumbered by
race. An example of this genre of advertising is an advertisement by MCI
that promotes conservative multiculturalism through images of people
across age, race, and gender. The ad states, There is no race. There is
no gender. There is no age. There are only minds. Utopia? No. The
Internet (Nakamura 2000, 15). While race is idealized as no longer a
relevant category for the future of our technological world in the West,
where everyone now supposedly has access to technology, Internet ads
also project those outside of technology, in developing countries, as the
place race now resides. Lisa Nakamura also discusses an IBM advertisement
that uses an Egyptian man on a camel to reflect the idea that technological
modernity has yet to spread to underdeveloped nations, which are thus
in need of corporations to bring development to the rest of the world
(20). A better future is equated with developmental capitalism and a future
time when the entire world will have access to technology. Thus, the U.S.
corporate empire is projected as a benevolent force that promises to spread
democracy through worldwide access and to wipe out racial difference
and inequality. Yet this presents a contradiction, because for bride-seeking
men, women from developing countries are imagined to embody
traditions felt to be lost in U.S. culture. Women represent the last pure
space untainted by modern life and in opposition to the crisis of the
domestic sphere in the United States. This is the context, I argue, in which
men imagine Latin American women as the last pure frontier, bodies that
promise to rectify a crisis in U.S. masculinity and the breakdown of middleclass family structures. They moralize the need for new genes and bodies
and for a postnational family structure that will rejuvenate not only the
U.S. domestic sphere but also their own inner journeys to selfhood.
For example, many Internet bride Web sites offer links to an array of
guidebooks or how-to manuals on finding a bride in another country.
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Men with the same resentful feelings are prompted to take action against
ungrateful women, to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and take charge
of their lives through a foreign, less demanding, and more docile wife.
Many Latin American women I interviewed were aware that men
wanted a woman who was more family oriented than U.S. women supposedly are. In fact, many rejected being labeled a feminist for fear of
their association with white women popularly thought to be selfish, sexually loose, or too domineering. This did not mean, however, that women
were not strong in their conviction that they wanted a man who respected
them and who saw their contributions as carrying equal weight in the
family.
While at a Romance Vacation Tour in Mexico, I was told by Blake,
a forty-two-year-old Anglo club owner from Los Angeles with a muscular
physique and a tanning-salon glow, that he was looking for a woman from
Mexico because I think these women are culturally grown to want what
we also want (interview, September 2001). Latin American and other
foreign women are naturalized as having the right biological makeup
and cultural grooming, making them more feminine, traditional, docile,
and better mothers of the family. Unlike nineteenth-century constructions
of racial mixing as degenerative, in this instance foreign genes are constructed as regenerative. This shift in racial construction connects with
individualistic ideals of multiculturalism in the global marketplace. Once
again, diversity and race are advertised as products that promise to bring
one closer to nature, toward ones true self, and to contribute to the
making of natural gender and racial hierarchies. The idea of flexible
genetic engineering emphasizes an understanding of womens bodies as
mutable through the masculine hands and gaze of the Internet techie.
Men imagine themselves as the heroic engineers of the family and nation
(contradicting the popular image of them as outcasts), just as ethnic
women embody the transformation. Even though suburban flight reflects
the fleeing of whites from racial urban centers and the search for nature
and purity they themselves have destroyed, these individualized interracial
dramas remain at the level of the family. This personal lament connects
with empire as chat room discussants reveal mens anxiousness to push
into new frontiers, into countries with women less tainted by U.S. culture.
These sentiments are echoed in the statement of a U.S. owner of a Colombian agency, Latin Life Mates, in an interview posted on his Web site:
Because of the drug wars . . . Colombia has been off the map for U.S.
tourists for the past 15 years. During that period, the country experienced
considerable economic growth. Now it is filled with well-educated women
who have maintained pristine values because they were isolated from
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U.S. tourists. . . . You used to think of drugs when you thought of Colombian exports. . . . But forget that. Now the big demand in the States
is for Colombian women (November 1998, http://www.latinlifemates
.com/faq.stm). The malleability of people, commodities, and notions of
space reflects the ways decentralized production infiltrates the intimate
spheres and desires of mens everyday lives.
Mens concerns with natural gender differences are part of a wider
ideology endemic in popular mens movements, such as those of Robert
Bly and within the religious right, and even within academic debates.
David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, contributed
a lengthy study on the deplorable state of marriage and the family in
contemporary times that was designed to help reinvigorate a dying social
institution. He writes, In order to restore marriage and reinstate fathers
into the lives of their children, we are somehow going to have to undo
the cultural shift toward radical individualism and get people thinking
again in terms of social purposes (1996, 197). In Wendy Klines book,
Building a Better Race, she argues that if we replace the word social
with race, then this statement resounds with the earlier project of David
Popenoes father, Paul Popenoe, who in the 1920s and 1930s warned of
the threat of race suicide if eugenic projects to reproduce white middleclass families were not taken with utmost seriousness (Kline 2001, 164).
Many men I interviewed concurred that it was high time for a new
kind of family in the United States. An agency owner from Mexico suggested I speak to Barry, a well-known advocate of international marriages.
Referred to as a guru of the cyberbride industry, Barry himself married
(and later divorced) a woman from Colombia and attempted to open an
agency; he now counsels U.S.-Colombian married couples and is writing
a book about the industry. Barry capitalizes on David Popenoes marriage
study and his academic cachet to argue for the need not for racially
superior (or white) families but for men to go outside the nation to find
more appropriate wives. Like Popenoe, Barry uses biological gender differences between men and women to argue that the market dictates demand. During a phone interview in 2003, he described to me the thesis
of his forthcoming book, The Marketplace of Love. He said that when you
combine U.S. mens frustration with their relationships with U.S. women,
and womens dissatisfaction with the way they are treated in Latin America,
you have a natural market exchange of supply and demand. In fact, he
argues, no man looks overseas first, but the marketplace drives men
(interview, February 2003). In describing the development of the marketplace as inevitable and as taking on a life of its own, Barry does not
S I G N S
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Latin American womens bodies are reconfigured within the global marketplace as young, untainted natural resources. For example, a former
company out of San Diego called Sonoran Girls opened its Web site with
a picture of smiling young women from the northern town of Sonora,
Mexico; bold letters over the picture read: Discover Mexicos Greatest
Treasures (fig. 1).
These photos are of young Latinas positioned in front of the colors of
the Mexican flag, as symbols of the nation. Young Mexicanas are the new
resources, or as Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2002) describe
them, the new gold, whose laboring bodies are in need of men to import
them to the United States where they will become fully realized.
Other Web sites depict women as cultural and biological mestizas (fig.
2), hybrid bodies that visually narrate the progression of history and the
nation. Womens bodies mark the transition between the indigenous past
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Girls of Sonora, Web site image from a former Internet marriage company,
2000. Color version available as an online enhancement.
Figure 1
and the modern future, and they are figured both as individuals yet simultaneously as overabundant and technologically reproducible (and thus
expendable).
Figuring womens bodies as those of light-skinned mestizas also makes
visible mens central role in neocolonial fantasies. Men take part in the
colonial narrative of turning nature (raw materials) into culture (finished
modern products). On these Web sites, womens bodies are young and
pliable. Not only have these girls symbolically survived colossal regime
changes, but they also synthesize the best cultural and biological traits
from both worlds, signaling their partial assimilation into U.S. culture.
Furthermore, mestizaje is visually narrated as a biological form of development where whiteness embodies the future and indigenous people exist
only as a past to be excavated (Saldan
a-Portillo 2003). Contrary to scholarship on immigrant Latina bodies as the site of pollution within the
nation-state (Calvo 2001; Chavez 2001; Inda 2002), Latinas are revamped
as the site of redemption from a breakdown of family values. Women are
depicted in Web images alongside nature, embodying anticapitalism (thus
making these womens labor invisible), and as existing outside corrupting
forces such as materialism and feminism. Many men and Web sites echo
the idea that U.S. feminism is the polluting force of the family and nation.
Henry Makow reiterates this point: Today feminism has morphed into
a potent and virulent disease attacking the biological and cultural foundations of society (2000, 123). The contemporary use of the language
of eugenics resembles the surge of biological theories of gender in the
1970s that followed on the heels of the womens liberation movements.
In contrast to the bodies of U.S. women, Latin American womens
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Figure 2
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It is interesting that they divorced after two years, because in 1986 President Ronald
Reagan signed the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment (IMFA) in hopes of decreasing
marriage scams by imposing a two-year waiting period for women to obtain permanent
residency status.
14
There has been a great deal of feminist scholarship on womens role as missionaries
in relation to British imperialism and U.S. empire. See Tyrrell 1991; Chaudhuri and Strobel
1992; Abraham 1996; Santiago-Valles 1999.
15
For more on the historical whitening of the Polish, Germans, Italians, and Irish, see
Jacobson 1998.
S I G N S
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uplift others. Having a foreign wife reinvigorates the idea that the United
States is an immigrant nation where those who work hard can make the
American dream come true, while erasing the unequal system of power,
slave labor, and colonial violence at the foundation of this nations continuing global dominance. For those who do not achieve this dream, the
blame falls on pathologizing the individualwhich Stuart describes as his
wifes lazinessrather than examining deeper structures of disempowerment.
The Internet has been a powerful medium for reflecting on and performing identity in new ways. That said, the Internets technological capability
for connectivity and interaction is not often discussed in tandem with
other kinds of social formations. Chat room boards share a history with
the emergence of self-help and support groups popular in the United
States. Influenced by Protestantism, self-help culture emulates the desire
for personal growth, a strong work ethic, and the idea that confession
and personal redemption, exemplified through sharing and honesty, bring
one closer to ones true self. Support groups help change behavior and
reformulate the conception one has of oneself, combating social stigmas
and redefining norms of behavior (Katz 1993, 34). Men who have no
one else with whom to share their lives find that cyber chat groups offer
a sense of camaraderie and a place where they can express themselves
openly. Much like the processes Michel Foucault describes regarding sexuality and confession, describing ones intimate desires is how men come
to uncover an assumed truth about themselves, women, and the cyberbride industry in general (Foucault 1990, 6167).
Groups such as Blys mens groups actively reclaim their own brand of
masculinity or desirable masculine behavior. While feminists have worked
hard to make mens gender power visible, many men interpret this as
limiting their ability to assert a dominant or overtly masculine performance
of gender. Many mens groups convey feeling disempowered by feminism
and advocate empowerment, coming to self-actualization through the
collective sharing of oneself. Based on womens consciousness-raising of
the 1960s and 1970s, the self-help/support group model inverts the radical structure of consciousness-raising by placing value on the collective
self rather than on larger structures of power. Divorced from the original
goals of consciousness-raisingwhich were to critique how social structures affect the individual, to make the privileges of race and class visible,
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ruly Chicanas/Latinas in the United States) signifies his journey to rediscovering his true self that he has had to hide in order to assimilate into
Anglo culture. Situating Latin American women as the authentic other
enables Latino men to construct an ethnic identity as white in relation to
Latin American women, manual labor, and immigrants in general. Conversing on this board has connected hombre rosas to other professional
Latinosas well as to white men who appreciate Latin American culture
and it becomes a safe place for him to openly celebrate his cultural heritage.
The act of revealing oneself personally serves as an initiation or a rite of
passage where this new, sensitive masculinity is encouraged. In the world
of self-help and male support groups, sharing ones experiences marks the
journey of finding a bride, discovering ones self, and finding the true
man one really is. Male camaraderie is founded on releasing the male
energies participants believe are suppressed by domineering women from
the United States and, for Latino men, by U.S. culture in general.
White mens self-conception as the good guy who is sensitive yet in
control is fabricated alongside an idealized image of Latinas and in contest
with hypermasculinized Mexican/Latino masculinities. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael Messner (1994) argue that white, educated,
middle-class constructions of the sensitive new male image must not be
too quickly heralded. This image builds itself on the backs of poor, working-class, and ethnically subordinate men who are the projected targets
of aggression, domination, and misogynistic attitudes. Often overlooked,
however, is how Latin men reassert their masculinity by feminizing white,
Anglo men. A respondent called The Watcher says: If any of these
guys put down Latin men, they have some damn nerve! When they finally
realize that 99% of the reason that ANY foreign woman would want to
marry them and come to this country is for HER OWN opportunity and
benefit and that of HER family, and NOT because American men are so
special, then maybe they will check their egos and see the light (PlanetLove.com chat room, June 24, 1999). Through his critique of U.S. men,
The Watcher offers a disruptive moment of competing masculinities.
He diminishes U.S. mens status by elevating women as creative survivors,
thus negating womens supposed adoration of U.S. men. He also suggests
women use men to improve their lives and that of their families. He
continues, Latinas need strong men. Men who are macho, thats right,
I said MACHO, but in a good way. They dont want a man who will beat
them around and treat her like trash, but they dont want some pansy
who acts like a feminist sympathizer either. They want a Man who is not
afraid to be a MAN! (Planet-Love.com chat room, June 24, 1999). The
Watchers hostility reveals a Latin male perspective regarding white U.S.
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return home. Similarly, womens subject positions and reasons for marrying U.S. men are also much more complex when examined from a
transborder perspective.
Conclusion
The desire for a Latin American woman from outside the United States
speaks to the power of the erotic imagination and the role of technology
in transporting ones personal fantasies into a transnational social forum.
The self-help model of individual transformation hijacks the feminist
model of consciousness-raising, evacuating its radical potential through
personalizing social transformation, and makes evident self-helps genealogical roots within Christianity and Western individualism. Mens search
for a Latin American bride necessitates a critique of U.S. capitalist culture,
yet men and industry Web sites ghettoize this critique onto U.S. feminist
bodies rather than onto larger structures of power. In other words, men
blame consumption, materialism, and even greed for high divorce rates,
for the fact that women leave them for wealthier and younger men, or
that women seek their own empowerment through entering the workforce. Mirroring the tension between the global economy and the state
in protecting the unbounded needs of capitalism and, conversely, the
bounded role of the state (Noble 2002), men justify their search outside
the nation for foreign genes through a moral desire to improve the national
family and, simultaneously, via fantasies of mobility through the tropes of
empire and the heroics of global manhood. Through their desire to improve the culture of national family, they are caught in the dilemma of
embracing ethnic, gender, religious, and national differences while maintaining global hierarchies.
The consequences of mens imaginaries are best reflected in an e-mail
interview with Manuela, a Mexicana who participated in the Latinaesposa/
Latinawife e-mail exchange for married women who moved to the United
States to live with their husbands. She has been married to her Anglo
husband for more than three years. In an e-mail interview she described
to me one of the many contradictions discussed by women: While men
want a Latina because she is supposedly more passionate, when we have
this passion, they dont know how to respond. Men prefer Internet pornography than to make love with us. Theyd rather watch perfect women
than normal and real women. All of us agree that we cant compete with
these unreal bodies, that dont fight, that dont get angry, who dont veer
from the norm. . . . Its easier for los gringos to masturbate in front of
the computer, where they dont have to put forth any effort to satisfy
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anyone. Like many things here (in the US), [U.S. men are] . . . the most
individualistic and self-absorbed (interview, December 10, 2004). Manuelas theorizing of Western individualism, masculinity, and whiteness in
relation to technological power ends up deflating Western fantasies as
getting lost in the maze of their own simulations. The role of the Internet
in facilitating visual and interactive fantasies and even marriage speaks to
yet another way U.S. individualism and the capitalistic gaze turn a potentially powerful means for men to experience themselves as a decentered
subject rather than the center. While many men turn to Latin American
women and culture in hopes of living a life outside of the tyranny of
capitalism, materialism, and rugged individualism, many simply seek a
fantasy-ridden image of women as the object of change they seek to import
back home without having to change anything about themselves.
Department of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
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