Yazmín tells her story of motherhood and sex work: the economic possibilities it opens, the loneliness she feels because of stigma and social rejection, and her struggle that no woman should have to raise her child alone.

Text by Yazmín*, originally published February 13, 2022.

Images by Inimisqui.

Translated by Dawn Marie Paley.

MÉXICO CITY– My name is Yazmín or Lombriz (Worm), I’m 24 years old and I have a five year old child who I’ve been able to look after for the last three years through sex work. I’m part of the Mexican Alliance of Sex Workers, a collective that formed by compañeras and in which I oversee some of our projects.

Since I started sex work, the way I talk about the work has changed, as has how I self-identify. I think the same thing happened with motherhood. I got pregnant at 17 when I was still in high school. I had to do my last year with a huge belly and a backpack on a cart so as not to lift anything too heavy.

As a teenager experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, little by little I accepted the idea of what caring for someone else meant. Over the past years –the years my child has been alive– there’s no way I can’t not see myself without seeing both a mother and a sex worker. 

Teenage mother

It’s hard for me to talk about one thing without mentioning the other, because I became a sex worker to, among other things, be able to look after my child. It is impossible to say if I would have done sex work if I hadn’t been a mother, to me it seems like a waste of energy to think about the what ifs. The fact is that most of the things I am now, I am because I am a mother. Being a mother takes up a big part of my attention right now.

Thinking that because I was a teenage mother I didn’t have a choice other than sex work puts me in the position of a victim, as if I had no free will or power to make decisions. Even though my context isn’t one of privilege I had the agency to decide how I wanted to work and this was the option I chose. 

When my child was around two years old I was halfway through a degree in psychology. I went to school tired because I was breastfeeding at night, but my grade point average wasn’t bad. I pushed myself a lot because I had needs that weren’t the same as my compañeros. My motivation was to earn money as a professional. I imagined a future in which we had enough money to live apart from my parents, and if I did well, I could even earn extra money to save, travel, and give some to my parents. 

My fantasy collapsed when I saw the reality of my professors: they had three jobs, one of them started at 7am and sometimes couldn’t leave until 7pm. The youngest was 10 years older than me. I didn’t want that for myself.

I started to see the reality of labor in my context and it made me freak out. I went through a time where I was without income, during which my parents started covering the economic burden of my studies and my child. I didn’t want that, and I started looking at other options.

The first thing I did was to try and find work and keep studying, but it was impossible. I went to school at 8am and finished at 2pm. The jobs that gave me the income I needed started at 3pm and ended at 10pm. I wouldn’t even have time to help my child with their homework. I started selling sandwiches at school, but it didn’t even bring in half of what I needed. Sometimes I didn’t even sell one, but I’d already spent on ingredients. 

One day I fought with the father of my child because he didn’t want to give me more money. While we fought, I said to him “well, if you don’t give it to me I’ll get it, I’ll become a whore.” And the idea stayed in my mind. I had a friend who was a sex worker and I never had any prejudices against her. I have always been surrounded by people who are sexual dissidents (gays, lesbians, trans, etc), so I wasn’t spooked by talking about sex work. 

That’s how I decided to explore sex work.

Being independent

I started working on social media, offering on Facebook and then Twitter, where I saw there was a bigger audience. Because of my looks, I was able to get established quickly. Because of that, and because of my urgent need to help my child. I would be in work events with compañeras and they would be surprised how quickly I got involved and understood everything. I started working in all the ways I could: in person, virtually, at parties, in booths. I became known very quickly.

It was a decision that brought many good things. In less than one year I became independent from my family and started living alone with my child. I got my own furniture, paid for everything he needed, and traveled with him. All of that made me very happy.

I was also able to get therapy for both of us, which was something I knew we needed. There were many reasons I felt my child and I needed therapy, also because of what I had learned at school. When I was in university I accompanied a boy one year older than my child and he had speech problems. I accompanied his process for one semester and it helped me see my own child better.

When my child was 2 he could say only about 10 words, and I knew, because of my studies, that he should have been able to say 50. He couldn’t even say half that amount, and I felt so guilty. I felt guilty because I knew that my child, among many other things, could be slowed down in learning because I was absorbed in university, I used all my energy there and my child resented it.

As I was accompanying the boy during my practicum, I wanted to be with my own child. I wanted a professional to help us, because a child that has speech issues also usually has problems following instructions and socializing.

I didn’t just need therapy because of my son’s problem, but also for myself. I needed a therapist who could help guide me in raising my baby, trying to make up for lost years. I had that need and one other: the weight of stigma was something I couldn’t deal with on my own. With help from my therapist I was able to reconcile with some of my feelings. At the same time I had someone with me to help with my sadness because of a lack of family support. I had to face many situations alone, and I realized that many people in my life wouldn’t ever be as close to me, some I would never see again.

Activism

Another one of my steps forward was becoming an activist. It was on March 8th that I met my compañeras from the Mexican Alliance of Sex Workers (AMTS) and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I was sure that I wanted to defend my rights and those of others too.

When I arrived at AMETS they had been organizing for two years, but they were still trying to achieve the stability they needed to do larger projects. Much of what my compañeras talked about I didn’t understand or recognize as my own. They helped me grow, to recognize when someone is racist, classist, whorephobic, transphobic, and other things. I wouldn’t have had a discourse if it wasn’t for them, they supported me through struggle and they gave me emotional support, we accompanied each other as equals.

In a discussion I participated in with compañeras who are sex workers, we agreed that naming ourselves sex workers could be, for others, a sinonym of failure, of doing something wrong. I know that that’s how it is, because even though I reached my personal goals, my relationship with my family and some of my friends deteriorated.

Family distance

Some people, upon learning what I do for a living, had an attitude like as if they were sorry, like when someone close to someone dies and you try to give them your condolences. My relationship with my biological nuclear family hasn’t been the same, to this day, and for years we took space from each other until they realized how I was transforming my life.

Before I became a sex worker, the strongest relationship I had was with my mother. I didn’t do anything without thinking about how she would take my decision. She was an authority figure to me, but also someone I deeply cared for. My mom was everything to me.

When she found out I was a sex worker, her world collapsed. She thought it was a selfish decision, and that I wasn’t thinking about how it would make others feel. For me it was hard to understand that she wouldn’t support me in something so important.

When I started working as a sex worker, I was still living with my parents and that generated a lot of tension. It took my mother a whole year before she had a caring conversation with me. I felt like she ignored me, she avoided me, and when we talked she would always get angry. That’s when I had to deal with rejection from my family.

I decided to move, I could do it with my earnings. I spoke with a close friend who let me live with him until I found a place, and I left my parents’ house for the first time. I was scared that it was an irreversible decision that there was no coming back from.

The friend I was staying with started to become hostile towards me, at times he was very direct in telling me that he got jealous knowing that my access to money was “easier” than his. Even though I was thankful he gave me refuge when I needed it most, I quickly understood I couldn’t share space with him. Now I have the tools I need to know that those comments are whorephobic, that he was not able to deal with what it meant to live with a sex worker.

Other friends who I considered close became more distanced and by the time I realized it, I was alone with my child. Less than six months after starting as a sex worker I had already moved twice. I didn’t last long in one place because I had problems with my landlords and due to the stigma related to sex work. 

I was earning well, but the same money I earned went to doing things quickly: moving all of a sudden, paying high rents, buying appliances or having repairs done. I started to look for a place and I hit the obstacle of bureaucracy: the guarantor, the proof of income, and so on. I didn’t have any of that and the place I found was self-contained and small, in a tenement house. The most important thing for me was not to have to live with roommates.

Exclusion

One day while I was at home I played an audio message from the collective where I work. I thought I was alone in my apartment but then I saw my landlord, who lives next door. She learned I was a sex worker. It was never the same. If her husband was home and I showed up out front, she got upset. She didn’t say hi, and she became hostile towards me. Later she got access to the room I rented and she stole money out of a drawer. I knew that was the limit, that I didn’t want to live in a space where I didn’t feel secure, so I moved again. At this point I was afraid of how people would react knowing my line of work, and I felt guilty, I thought people treated me that way because I deserved it.

Based on my previous experiences, I rented a private suite with no shared access, paying above market because I didn’t have a guarantor. Finally, I was able to stay in one place for a year, until the pandemic started.

Looking back I realize that starting to work as a sex worker was very violent, but not because of the clients themselves, rather because of the social exclusion it entails. I had to generate income for my child, maintain a home, pay for therapies and constant moves. I couldn’t have the stability I was seeking because each move meant one month of energetic work. I would be packing again before I was fully unpacked, I didn’t know how long I would end up staying in each place. I looked around and I realized I couldn’t reach out to my family or my friends. 

The constant and abrupt changes impacted my child. I think even at his young age he could perceive our close friends and family didn’t stick around and that was very stressful. It was harder to get him to obey or to follow a routine. I was constantly mourning. More than angry, I’m astounded people think that sex workers are bad mothers when I see how I moved heaven and earth to make something for my child, and because I see that my case isn’t unique, a lot of compañeras are in the same situation.

These difficulties helped me figure out my life goals. I was able to see who was in my life and who it was I really loved. I learned that even though my profession separated me from people who felt uncomfortable, I was still able to grow with my child. In this difficult process, support networks among whores helped me realize that what I was doing wasn’t bad. That I was doing very important things for myself and for my child, and that I was meeting my goals.

My child is a huge motivation for me. Sex work influences how I am a mother in many ways, but not in the awful ways predjudiced people imagine, people who think that because I am a whore I’m bringing them up in an irresponsible way.

No. The influence on the kind mother that I am doesn’t enter into the box of cis, heterosexual motherhood in which I should be married to a man, ideally to the father of my child. I began to become a mother at 17 years old, even in that way, I was outside of the recommended norm. Our ways of life were not going to be conventional.

Child rearing

It took me a long time to recognize that I was going to raise my child in a non-hegemonic way. That I didn’t “look like a mother” and that a little loneliness is always part of sex work. That we were going to be few friends, few family members. Because, in the eyes of others, I would always have Whore tattooed on my forehead, and my child would have “child of a whore” tattooed on theirs. But we would never lack affection.

My child is older now and he already notices that people don’t want him there, and I have to do a kind of emotional neutralization in order to talk to him. I have to calm his emotions about issues I’ve had to accept myself; he at his age also has to understand them, in his way.

I know when he is older he’ll realize what was happening, right now he can’t see the entire context. Sometimes I worry that when he gets older he’ll think that, because of what I am, he lost contact with other family members. But I also think he’ll understand the efforts we made so that we could both thrive.

Sometimes we have to stay in hotels because of problems with housing, but he’s always approached that as something fun, he explores the place, he plays hide and go seek, and he’s impressed with the elevator. I want my child to keep those memories, even though it seems really chaotic, that he remembers it as a fun moment. And that when he’s older and he realizes what we’ve lived through he’s able to come to his own conclusions, but that he never feels that we went without each other. 

I would like to think that when my child is older it will be easier to talk about sex work, without so much stigma. I know that this will help my son understand me, and that other whores won’t have to have such a solitary existence as I did.

The collective I am part of is helping make that change, but I think making big changes is a collective task, like getting access to the same labor rights as other jobs. That in the same way as a dentist, a stylist or another professional who doesn’t have to experience violence because of their work, we won’t either.

*Yazmin is a pseudonym chosen by the author.

This story was produced with the support of OSF and is part of a larger project by the Red de Periodistas de a Pie to train journalistst covering sex work in Mexico City.