Sarah Luna knows how to build spaces for herself and others. Here, that space is an office tucked into the Department of Anthropology, where her endearingly strange-looking dog Tenoch curls up in a corner of the couch. This office, minus the specifics of dog and couch, is where Professor Luna pictured herself arriving one day. Back home in San Antonio, Texas, in her first semester as a first-generation college student, Luna resolved to become an anthropologist and a professor. Prior to that semester, she hadn’t really known what anthropology was. “But I became interested in issues that seemed politically pressing,” she tells me. Cultural anthropology struck her as a way to have a direct impact. Currently, Luna studies forms of difference along the Mexico/US border, where she spent twelve months conducting ethnographic research. This research forms the basis for her forthcoming book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico/US Border. In the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, she studied two categories of migrants: “women who migrated from different parts of mostly rural Mexico to work as sex workers in a prostitution zone regulated by the local government, surrounded by walls, called ‘la zona de tolerancia,’ or ‘Boy’s Town’,” and the white, Englishspeaking missionaries who had come “to love the sex workers” and, in so doing, convert them. Ethnographic research is always a challenge, requiring that the researcher pay close attention and keep detailed notes, but Professor Luna’s field site carried additional challenges. She lived in Reynosa during a period of intense drug violence, when people feared being kidnapped and killed. She was afraid for her own safety and afraid that her research would endanger those she wrote about. And then there was another set of fears, arising from her identity.
“I was afraid of working with the missionaries,” she admits, “because I had grown up in an evangelical church and then I ended up rejecting it once I went to college…so I was afraid they would reject me if they found out I was queer, if they found out I wasn’t a Christian.” Working within the framework of cultural relativism, she was cognizant of not imposing her own beliefs on her research. This allowed her to render a more complex picture of life in la zona de tolerancia—“not only how the rescue industry can be harmful and coercive for sex workers, but also how some of these relationships [between missionaries and sex workers] were actually very meaningful, and what both parties would consider to be love and friendship. I hope that my book shows both those sides.” Professor Luna sees the structural as a lens through which the personal can be understood. Now entering her second year as a professor of anthropology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, she teaches courses that lean fully into difficult topics: a course called Sex and Money, an upperlevel seminar on the anthropology of race and racism, an introductory course in Latinx studies, and starting in the fall, Queer Anthropology. In each of these courses, Luna has been struck by her students’ maturity. “They’ve been so respectful to each other…in a way that shows a lot of intellectual generosity,” she tells me. She describes moments in which students have become choked up during class presentations and proceeded through delivering powerful points. Their willingness to continue to engage with what is difficult strikes her most deeply—perhaps because she recognizes, in that intersection of thoughtfulness and tenacity, her own approach to academia. —ABIGAIL MCFEE
SARAH LUNA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE KATHRYN A. MCCARTHY PROFESSOR IN WOMEN’S STUDIES
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