Border Contraband

In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande, George T. Díaz sets out to document a history of products that are smuggled across the US-Mexican border. He uses Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as the setting for illicit business that subverted the nation-state, highlighting tariff collections and the gun and drug trade. Díaz's work begins with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ends the US-Mexican War, and moves on to the Mexican Revolution and World War I, ending with World War II. The author states that contraband in the borderlands took many forms; smuggling was often part of a moral economy or illicit trade leading to contraband communities and many times allowed for folk heroes to form on both sides of the border. Díaz is able to successfully provide evidence that contraband flowed both ways. For example, as the United States received alcohol during Prohibition, Mexican rebels received guns and ammunition. Such informal economies are still part of the US-Mexican borderlands today. The author demonstrates how smuggling activities had great costs on both sides of the border, such as violent encounters with Texas Rangers and American soldiers. Many times, such discourses led to ethnic and racial violence, causing ethnic Mexican and Anglo casualties. Such discourses also fueled the continuing militarization of the US-Mexican border with the building of Fort Brown (1846), Fort Ringgold (1848), and Fort McIntosh (1849). Events such as the Cortina War, the Plan de San Diego, and the Zimmerman telegram kept the United States' fear of Mexico at the forefront of borderland news and relations.Border Contraband provides excellent examples of smuggling activities that continue today in the US-Mexican borderlands such as the gun and drug trade. Recent gun programs such as Operation Fast and Furious by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives from 2009 and 2011 have continued the history of smuggling contraband into Mexico from the United States. Although programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement helped limit smuggling to both countries, contraband is still part of the large informal economies of the borderlands. If one is to understand our current situation with Mexico, one only has to look to Díaz's Border Contraband, which highlights the long history of smuggling and illicit business by people of both countries that dates back to the 1840s.Díaz's work is grounded in primary sources from both sides of the border. Using reports from policing agencies such as the Texas Rangers, in particular from ranger Jesse Perez, the author is able to give local accounts of smuggling activities. Díaz also uses court records to demonstrate the many times that local businessmen and working-class people, both Anglo and ethnic Mexican, used the court system to exonerate themselves. In turn, such investigations demonstrate that not all smuggling or people were prosecuted the same. Border Contraband adds to the growing historiography of transnational borderlands. Díaz's work follows Samuel Truett's Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands (2006) and, more recently, Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez's River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (2013), all of which are grounded in a transnational landscape giving a clearer account of life on the borderlands.Border Contraband is a great addition to the history of the US-Mexican borderlands, giving both countries insight into the making of the border. Díaz has set the international research bar high, and as a result scholars and students will greatly benefit from such research. The author's work is well written, and jargon is limited to only a few pages of the text

Economic history · Ethnic group · Frontier · Mexican State · Militarization · Organised crime · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Treaty · Cuban History and Society · History · Law