Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh

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    Sex brings people together, literally but also socially. It seemed to weave its threads all through this hidden world, bringing the community together in a thousand different ways. South Asians clerked and managed the video stores. West African men stood outside dance clubs to recruit johns. The wives of those West Africans provided day care to mothers who sold sexual services. Mexicans and Central Americans toiled clandestinely inside the video parlors and clubs as cleaners and laborers. And since the sex workers I was meeting came from every corner of the world—fromEurope and Africa and Australia, from China and Singapore and Brazil—you could say the invisible thread of sex was weaving the whole world together. Certainly they were as global a phenomenon as a multinational executive on his corporate jet.
    Angela’s role in the life of Manjun’s shop seemed to perfectly demonstrate my thesis. The illegal money she brought in helped keep the legal business alive, and the legal business gave her a refuge for conducting her illegal business. There was no clear line between underground and aboveground. With her peers, I tried to trace the same connections through monetary transactions. How much did they earn? Where did they save and launder their money? Did they have credit cards or did they use loan sharks? With each answer, I was able to tease out a surprisingly elaborate infrastructure that ranged from Manjun’s store to the strip bars and peep shows, to the bars, hotels, and health clinics. I began to see that these women weren’t supporting drug habits—the conventional and suspiciously convenient view of prostitutes—but more likely families, neighborhoods, businesses. And most of the women also had other part-time gigs, often legal, that wove them into the community in another way.
    But the underground economy didn’t stop at sex and drugs, of course. Day laborers told me they earned only minimum wage for cleaning bodegas and washing dishes. Most worked sixty to seventy hours per week at multiple jobs. Each job brought them an average of three hundred dollars a week and lasted about nine to twelve months. They piled together in astonishingly cramped apartments, most of which violated every possible city zoning code. The security guards at the porn shops brought home about five dollars an hour, but their hours varied, so they also drove taxis and gypsy cabs. Homeless persons panhandled, shined shoes, and—when they could get away with it—washed car windshields at the more lively intersections. They made about a hundred dollars inany given week and they were routinely arrested for vagrancy, loitering, shoplifting, and other petty criminal acts.
    On and on I went, gathering data and identifying broad economic patterns. But good sociology is always a mixture of close focus and long shot. You dial in and pull back, dial in and pull back, a delicate dance over the data gaps. And as I pulled back, it became quite clear that, for many immigrants and underclass Americans in the area, the story of living in the global metropolis wasn’t at all glamorous. It was one of worsening outcomes and increasing vulnerability. This was most visible in the decline of street prostitution, for example. Women who might have brought home three hundred or four hundred dollars a night before told me they were barely making a hundred dollars a night and fought with one another over the lone john walking the streets. They were all depressed, and without a clear sense of what the future held.
    I felt the need to learn more about their vulnerability as well as the associations, like those of Mortimer and his friends, that helped them make ends meet. Since my work with the Urban Justice Center had given me expertise in the sexual underground, and since the sale of sex was so integral to this world as well, it made sense to keep sex work as a point of focus. I decided to look into the infrastructure