Ethnic erotic capital in contexts of xenophobia: commodified desire among Venezuelan migrant male sex workers in Peru

Amid Venezuela’s displacement crisis, millions have migrated across Latin America, with Lima, Peru emerging as a key destination marked by informal labour markets, racialized hierarchies, and intensified xenophobia. While sexuality and migration are deeply intertwined, scholarship has largely focused on North–South mobilities, leaving South-South sexual hierarchies and nationalised forms of difference underexamined. This study examines how Venezuelan gay and bisexual male sex workers in Lima navigate the entanglement of xenophobia, eroticisation, and economic precarity. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative design conducted between 2023 and 2024–including 21 semi-structured interviews with sex workers, five focus groups (n = 42), and ethnographic fieldwork–we analyse how national identity is simultaneously a source of exclusion and value. Participants described pervasive xenophobia that limited access to housing, employment, and social belonging. Yet, Venezuelanness was eroticized, as clients attributed heightened desirability to Venezuelan men. Participants strategically mobilised this desirability through practices of ethnic branding to enhance visibility and income. We conceptualise these dynamics as conditional inclusion, whereby eroticised desirability facilitates limited economic incorporation while leaving social belonging fundamentally constrained. The findings advance scholarship on migration and sexuality by showing how South-South mobility reconfigures intimacy and inequality through economically productive yet socially exclusionary inclusion.