The city’s famous brothels and bars survive by breaking lockdown rules. For sex workers, this is both a blessing and a curse. 

In the neon glow of Tijuana, Mexico’s red-light district, called Zona Norte, women work the streets. Wearing clothes that attract clients better than they protect from the oncoming winter, they entice passersby to spend a night with them in any one of Tijuana’s famous—and infamous—sex hotels. It’s a hard life, but these women face few alternatives. If they partake in sex work, they risk contracting COVID-19. If they shelter at home, they risk starvation. 

So, sex workers try to be as safe as possible. Each has their own protocol before a session. Some require clients to shower before meeting. Others forbid kissing. Others generously apply hand sanitizer throughout the process. But sex is sex. The work remains innately intimate and dangerous. 

The pandemic rendered an only halfway decent living even harder to come by. These workers rely on tourists visiting Tijuana seeking the services of sex workers, a practice called “sex tourism.” Though the United States and Mexico limited cross-border transit only to essential travel, plenty of Americans still manage the trip to Zona Norte. Otherwise, sex workers would be out of business.

As would the bars, strip clubs and hotels they frequent. Lockdowns forced these and other businesses vital to the industry to shut their doors; plenty remain closed. To survive, employers decided to admit customers through the back doors. Bouncers check customers’ temperatures, but the experience inside harkens back to a pre-COVID world, devoid of masks and social distancing. Patrolling police officers prevent the practice from looking too obvious. 

This marks the first time that Tijuana’s sex industry has had to function in secret. The city is famous across the world for its permissive sexual attitudes for heterosexual men. YouTube videos that introduce curious men to the do’s and don’ts of visiting Tijuana abound. For many, the city offers a travel back in time to an era before #MeToo when groping or catcalling women, they claim, wasn’t frowned upon. Pepe Avelar, former director of the Tijuana Tourism and Conventions Committee, urged the city to promote sex work and brothels as a way to attract tourists, arguing that, “We should let them operate and exploit their appeal as much as possible, allowing for more regulation.”

As bold a proposal as that is, it might provide more security for workers in the dangerous sex industry. Tijuana counts 8,000 legal, registered sex workers, but the government doesn’t track workers who test positive for COVID-19, as it does for other professions. Involving the authorities could mean men who abuse sex workers face legal repercussions. Proponents of Avelar’s viewpoint often point to rural areas of Nevada, where sex work is legal and regulated, as an example for Tijuana to follow.

Regulation could only do so much. Tijuana’s sex workers face stigma and persecution on a society-wide level. Many are migrants from Central America trapped in legal limbo as they attempt to navigate the United States’ asylum application process. Roughly 4,000 migrants come from Haiti, fleeing economic ruin. The Trump administration made the process more exhausting and labyrinthine when it directed officers to deny claims of asylum based on domestic abuse or gang violence. Haitian migrants who crossed the border and tested positive for COVID-19 were immediately flown back to Haiti, causing outbreaks in the areas they returned to. 

LGBTQ+ migrants face additional hurdles. They must prove to officers that they were persecuted in their home countries, an often impossible task given the treacherous circumstances under which many fled. Tijuana is no safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community either, particularly for transgender women. Local officials mishandled an investigation into the muder of Jeanine Huerta Lopez, a trans woman. Officials left her body to decompose in the morgue, where it was improperly stored. Both activists and the U.S. Embassy have called for a thorough investigation. In Tijuana, as in the United States, trans women face high levels of hate-fueled violence.

Sex work, dangerous as it is, provides migrants one of the only avenues for earning a livable wage. Stuck between the persecution they fled from and their dream of life in America, they must make do with the environment around them. Tijuana’s sex industry preys on the town’s most vulnerable residents, demanding that they make the impossible choice between infection and starvation. Though it demands countless sacrifices, sex work provides a decent enough living, even during a pandemic. 

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Michael is an undergraduate student at Haverford College, dodging the pandemic by taking a gap year. He writes in a variety of genres, and his time in high school debate renders political writing an inevitable fascination. Writing at Catalyst and the Bi-Co News, a student-run newspaper, provides an outlet for this passion. In the future, he intends to keep writing in mediums both informative and creative.