The story of sex tourism in the Gringo Gulch neighborhood of San Jose, Costa Rica could be easily cast as the exploitation of poor local women by privileged North American men--men who are in a position to take advantage of the vast geopolitical inequalities that make Latin American women into suppliers of low-cost sexual labor. But in Gringo Gulch, Megan Rivers-Moore tells a more nuanced story, demonstrating that all the actors intimately entangled in the sex tourism industry--sex workers, sex tourists, and the state--use it as a strategy for getting ahead.

Rivers-Moore situates...