In 2000, in Havana, I had an unforgettable conversation with a gorgeous 19-year-old girl named Mairim I had met at a street party. She told me all about her Italian boyfriend who would come to Cuba a few times a year, always bring her presents and sometimes send her money in between visits. Money. Presents. Seemed fishy. But then she said they were getting married and she was moving to Italy. Slightly less fishy. Oh, and by the way, she asked, did I know anything about Italian law, because she wanted to know, if things went wrong, how soon she could get divorced from this guy and still remain in Italy legally. And, fade to fishy.
Over the years, I heard more stories about these relationships between relatively rich North American and European men and relatively poor Latin American women (and men). And back in my more innocent, guilty days, I participated in a few. Most of the men I know (myself included) never paid for sex, but that is too simple in relationships when economic power imbalances are so obvious. But often there is also romance and fantasy involved — on both sides. I began to realize what many of sociologists already knew: we Americans are often too simplistic in our categorizations. There is such a thing as a romance and there is certainly such a thing as prostitution, but there are a million shades of in-between.
When I started writing about Brazil about five years ago, I saw a lot of the same confusion going on in Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana neighborhood. I think this is clear in the piece, but to reiterate: I'm not talking about the pure "sex workers" who negotiate fees for services. And I'm not talking about the real relationships that develop between educated, professional men and women who happen to be from different parts of the world. But a lot of what happens in Copacabana, where I've been introduced to plenty of "girlfriends" by Americans that I've met there (often doing interviews for other stories), does not seem to fit either category. The girlfriends are sometimes beautiful, often dark-skinned, and usually poor. But things got confusing. In internet cafes, these same young women talked via webcam in English to guys clearly halfway around the world. I have watched after the women hang up. They don't appear to be acting. They were having — fun? They were — in love? Yes, and no, and who knows.
I always wanted to talk to them, to find out what the heck was going on in these relationships. What I saw in the press was almost exclusively told from the man's point of view. But the voices of the women, of Brazilian Mairims, were mostly restricted to academic papers I found, written by sociologists. So last the last time I was in Rio, I carved time out from other commitments and spent some time interviewing women in Copacabana, and that's where this story comes from.
Click here to read my dispatch.
http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/brazil/090127/background-todays-dispatch
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