Boy's Town (or "La Zona" — the Zone — as it is known in Spanish) is a commercial district in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, serving primarily as a "zone of tolerance" in the city for legal prostitution, and also a variety of other nocturnal entertainment. It is a walled compound containing three short east-west streets and two short north-south streets. These enclosed compounds, called zonas de tolerancia or Boy's Towns, were eventually established in at least seven Mexican cities along the U.S.-Mexico border

(San Luis Río Colorado, Agua Prieta, Ojinaga, Ciudad Acuña, Piedras Negras, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa). Later, several other cities, not located on the border, established enclosed zonas as well, including Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, and Salina Cruz, Oaxaca. The government of Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, has considered establishing a similar zone.

The current enclave in Nuevo Laredo was constructed in the 1960s, during the municipal administration of Ernesto Ferrara Ferrara, to concentrate prostitution activities within a controlled zone.

Scholarly analysis of Boy's Town has been limited to a sociological study in the 1970s (Stevenson 1975) and several geographical surveys in the early 1990s (Arreola and Curtis 1993, Curtis and Arreola 1991a, Curtis and Arreola 1991b).

See also

  • Prostitution in Mexico

References

  • Boystown : la zona de tolerancia / with essays by Cristina Pacheco, Dave Hickey, and Keith Carter; afterword by Bill Wittliff. New York : Aperture, in association with the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography, c2000. 108 p. : chiefly ill.; 27 x 30 cm.
  • Arreola, Daniel D., and Curtis, James R., The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (1993). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
  • Stevenson, Robert J., La Zona in Transition: Bordertown Prostitution in Frontier City, Mexico (1975). Unpublished M.A. thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook. This project has been expanded and was published as A Mexican Border Prostitution Community During the Late Vietnam Era: La Zona. Edwin Mellen Press. New York. 2005. Detailed maps of the site, the region, and photographs (circa 1972) appear in Appendix A.
  • Map: