This chapter explores commercial sex work in farming areas, utilizing
materials prepared for workshops at migrant stream conferences, attended by frontline
migrant service workers. The existence of sex work in areas where farm workers
predominate underscores practices of gendered exclusion, which compels local women
into survival sex and generates opportunity structures for trafficking. The field materials
cover examples of sex work as it occurs in agricultural areas. Many of the women once
performed farm labor (a few still do), but gradually left it, as their structural
vulnerability compelled shifting into new roles and their corresponding drug use
escalated.
This chapter concludes with a discussion of sex work as an example of the
consequences that result from few opportunities of meaningful work for women,
general attitudes towards women that lead to gray zone practices, and willful neglect
that allows sex work in rural farming communities.
Keywords: Backup protector, brothel, campera women, canvassing, economic
entrepreneurship, finishing moment, free union, gendered exclusion, live-in
arrangements, managers, mobility inversion, opportunity structures, scouts,
seasonal slackness, serial sex, Sex worker, sponsors, street strolls, survival sex,
trafficking.
