Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine

In considering the intersection of vice and boundaries in North America, most will probably think of drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States and the attendant social chaos that has engulfed these countries’ border region in the last several decades. To be sure, there is a chapter covering just such ground in Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine, a new essay collection edited by historians Elaine Carey and Andrae M. Marak. In her own contribution to the volume Carey tells the story of a heroin peddler who long confounded authorities on both sides of the border, but this particular account of US-Mexican drug trafficking comes with a twist: Carey’s protagonist is a woman, Lola la Chata, and she operated not during the recent heyday of the illegal drug trade but rather from the 1930s to the 1960s. So, too, does the rest of this brief collection pleasantly surprise with its trenchant examination of the intersections of the study of vice and borders as well as with its broad thematic and geographic coverage.The volume is divided neatly into two parts of four and five chapters each, with assiduously balanced attention to both of North America’s international boundaries. The first group of essays appears under the heading “Establishing Borders” and features case studies that explore how authorities at the local and international levels attempted to regulate the border crossing of goods and human beings. “Consolidating National Space” is the focus of part 2, which, in the words of the editors, homes in on “border crossings that do not necessarily involve anything crossing a border” (p. 6). As they go on to note, these are important to study because “the promotion of ideas and ideologies across international borders by transnational moral entrepreneurs often cause the mere threat of border crossings (of drugs, certain social practices, or particular kinds of peoples) to create a moral panic” (p. 6).Although there are some excellent chapters on the US-Canadian border—Sterling Evans’s study of henequen smuggling across the 49th parallel and Holly Karibo’s examination of sex tourism in the Detroit-Windsor corridor after World War II both stand out—readers of this journal will presumably be drawn more to the four selections that interrogate the southern border, with which they will not be disappointed. In part 1, Robert Chao Romero ponders the smuggling of Chinese laborers into the United States via Mexico and Cuba during the decades after the passage in 1882 of the Chinese Exclusion Act, while George T. Díaz chronicles the rise and fall of Mexican tequila traffickers in Prohibition-era South Texas. Included in part 2 is a chapter by Marak and Laura Tuennerman that explores the joint efforts of the US and Mexican governments to eliminate perceived vice among the Tohono O’odham, whose homeland was bisected by the international border, as well as Carey’s aforementioned piece on la Chata “and her [supposed] threat to civilization” (p. 141).Taken together, these essays make a handful of notable contributions. For one, the chapters do indeed “bring history back in,” as the editors claim, providing an essential corrective to “the often present-focused, knee-jerk analyses of transnational issues” (p. 1). But the contributions are not blind to useful models offered by scholars engaged in other fields of inquiry, most notably the social scientists Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, whose work on the gap between legal and licit—in other words, between what is sanctioned by nation-states versus what is deemed acceptable by people on the ground—informs many of the essays. Boundaries, of course, are terrific places to explore such questions, given that the laws and customs governing one location may not obtain in another, no matter how proximate. Moreover, the chapters confirm and strengthen the notion, now widely accepted among borderlands experts, that the state wields far less power than it might presume when attempting to control the movement of people and goods between nations, while also suggesting the very contingent nature of so-called success stories enjoyed by federal authorities in policing boundaries.Those familiar with the contours of academic publishing know that edited collections are especially challenging to place these days. Editors are wary to take them on due to the complexity of their production, the difficulty in getting the individual contributions to cohere around a central set of themes, and the uphill climb to get such collections adopted in the classroom. Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine is a volume, however, that justifies the efforts of the editors and contributors as well as the University of Arizona Press. Specialists will find it a helpful intervention into the study of vice and borderlands, but it is also sufficiently accessible for use in undergraduate courses

Geography · Political science · Sociology · Surprise · History · Latin American and Latino Studies

• The American West and the World

  Open Access•Janne Lahti•American West and the World•2018

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