Pues me llamo como me llamo, <eh? Y soy quien soy, simplemente. (I call myself what I am, right? And I am who I am, just that.)

Eso (trabajadora sexual) se escucha muy feo, ino? Desde cuando trabaja Ud. en el ambiente de noche, mejor digo. (That [sex worker] sounds really ugly, right? Better say: How long have you been working in this scene at night?) -Tijuana prostitutes to Rangel G6mez F his article is explicitly concerned with trying to understand the concrete social situation of women working in prostitution in Tijuana, Mexico. Nothing in this seemingly simple statement is either simple or straightforward, however. To talk about the "social" immediately embeds our study in a complex dynamic of competing institutional discourses and practices in which the traditional sociological methodology of participant observation is compromised a priori. To talk about working women opens the topic of work (that of both the researcher and the research subject) as an emancipatory, nonhierarchical, theoretical, activist practice, as vociferously theorized by both Anglo-European and Latin American feminists in various, competing, and often mutually contradictory ways. To talk about women involves a necessary exploration of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality--both its dominant stereotypes and its unruly