Card workers on the Las Vegas Strip, advertising for the sex trade and often working without papers, endure humiliation from tourists, fight their employers for pay, and are targeted by police. One block away, a woman puts on a shirt featuring the QR code for a pornographic website. They are famous for their T-shirts; gift shops even sell them as souvenirs.
They put them on when they have to. Neither does the rest of Las Vegas. Targeted for citations by police, barred from casinos, singled out by lawmakers and frequently accosted by tourists, the handbillers are β like the women on their cards β among the most disenfranchised workers in the city. Your sister?
Your daughter? Is that your wife? I stay silent. All of our conversations took place in Spanish and every name but one has been changed. Competing escort services post handbillers right next to each other all along Las Vegas Boulevard, but each stands alone anyway β if they are caught talking to one another, they say, they will be berated for it. Sometimes The heat can be insufferable. I feel it from the soles of my feet. Carla, from Mexico, and Victor, from Cuba, said they were ashamed of their pornographic product.
Sin City is not overflowing with work for unskilled migrants. Rafael does however have a second job steam-cleaning restaurant floors on the overnight shift, part of a hour workday. In her spare time, Consuela bakes bread for Mexican bodegas. I learn more about that later. Occasionally, a tourist asks them for advice on which escort to call. Other times, handbillers are castigated for enabling a vast and pernicious sex trade.
I can do lots of work. The handbillers admit to feeling shame β but they shrug it off when they can. The effort to remove the handbillers is an ongoing legal saga that has turned undocumented immigrants into unlikely advocates for constitutional rights. In the late 90s, at the tail end of an effort to rebrand Las Vegas as a family destination, Clark County, the municipal area encompassing the Strip, outlawed the distribution of commercial content in the resort corridor, a sweeping measure the ACLU challenged as a violation of the first amendment.
