by Elaine Carey
Medical professionals first introduced heroin as a substitute for other opium derivatives such as codeine and morphine that had proven to be addictive. Doctors and pharmacists prescribed heroin for a host of ailments, and it became a common treatment for respiratory illnesses.18 Administered orally in pill form or as an elixir, only small amounts of heroin needed to be consumed to alleviate wheezing and to relax the bronchial tubes. Heroin was first introduced as a treatment for respiratory infections in U.S. prisons. Having experienced the euphoric effects of the narcotic, prisoners sought the drug on their own once outside prison walls. Former prisoners became the first large group of male addicts in the United States. Once heroin entered society’s mainstream, whether for treatment or recreational use, it evolved into a problem.19
In 1903, U.S. physician George Pettey caused a stir when he contradicted conventional wisdom and noted that heroin was indeed habit forming.20 Doctors in the United States took note of his warning, and by the 1910s were prescribing less heroin. Just when the U.S. government was forcing pharmaceutical companies, pharmacists, and medical professionals to comply with changes in the law, heroin entered the general population as a replacement for other narcotics because of its ability to maintain its euphoric effect when adulterated; thus, it was the least expensive of the narcotic drugs.21
The shifts wrought by the Harrison Act in the United States also contributed to the criminalization of drugs along the border, coinciding with the violence of the Mexican Revolution, which pushed people toward the northern border.22 With the population shifts from the South, U.S. military and customs officials on the border realized that this invisible line in the sand had become a site of dangerous pleasures and a space for criminality. For most of the first third of the twentieth century, Mexicans and Americans freely moved across the border for the purpose of trade and commerce. The population in northern Mexico was sparse, as was that of the southwestern United States. With growing concern, U.S. military and customs officials noted the border’s permeability in that people, alcohol, and other commodities easily flowed into the United States. For those on the border trying to survive in a difficult economy, smuggling became a viable economic opportunity although one fraught with danger, including dealing with policing agencies and military forces. Often, law enforcement officers became the smugglers’ customers. By 1916, U.S. soldiers stationed along the border had developed a taste for tequila and mescal, and Mexican smugglers were more than happy to oblige their vices. As journalist W. D. Hornsday noted:
One of the many interesting and strange phases of the animated military life upon the long strip of United States territory that fronts Mexico is the native bootlegger and smuggler, who in some mysterious unaccountable way, manages to cross the boundary line without detection and through confederates on this side, place the contraband fiery intoxicating liquors within purchasing reach of some of the camps of soldiers.
Ever since the Rio Grande became the dividing line between the United States and Mexico, mescal smuggling has been a fine art with many of the brown skin natives of the border. It is more or less a family vocation with them. In the old days it was regarded as an honorable though somewhat hazardous method of earning a livelihood. Mescal smuggling is not confined to men but many Mexican women are adept in the business. . . . It is petty lawlessness that the border customs officers and their guards have never been able to suppress.23
Hornsday’s 1916 article about alcohol smuggling was a harbinger of greater profits to come with drug smuggling. Smuggling to avoid paying customs, in turn yielding greater profits, gave men and women of the border region during a time of economic instability a means to make a living. Even before Prohibition in the United States, Mexican bootleggers created the paths and ports of entry that would serve their successors in the trade of marijuana and opiates. Bootleggers learned early on that customs officials and border agents were few and far between, and that they could bypass fees and duties by smuggling their goods over the border to gain greater profits. In 1963, the U.S. Department of the Treasury estimated, for example, that it had intercepted only 5 percent of the narcotics smuggled into the United States from Mexico.24
The role of women and the Mexican family in transnational bootlegging, which Hornsday recognized early on, evolved into an essential characteristic of the illicit trade of narcotics, although not unique to Mexico.25 As early as 1916, Hornsday challenged expected gender roles in Mexico and their emphasis on marianismo and machismo.26 These stereotypical concepts assumed that women are self-sacrificing, private, and submissive to the male members of the family, who are public and more prone to violence. In Hornsday’s piece, men and women are observed to engage in bootlegging with equal success. For many women, street vending was one of the few economic opportunities open to them, but bootlegging served as a more lucrative extension of selling beverages, whether alcoholic or not. In the United States, women of all backgrounds found a revenue source before and during Prohibition from the “cooking,” selling, and distribution of alcoholic beverages.27 They and their children collected and cleaned bottles that were used in speakeasies; they sometimes even managed speakeasies; and they bootlegged alcohol whether selling it from their own homes or trafficking it across international borders.28 During Prohibition, the number of women arrested for bootlegging surged, whether on the U.S.-Mexico or U.S.-Canada border, in both cities and rural areas.29 Bootlegging gave women another area of work, whether as sellers or distributors, whether acting as lookouts, couriers, assistants, or small business owners. Historically, women dominated the informal economic sector whether selling food, drinks, or their own bodies. In many ways, they created a separate economic sector for themselves since they were unable to work in the formal economy. Immigrant women in the United States turned to making homemade wine or bathtub gin to supplement their income. As one Italian bootlegger who had immigrated to the United States wrote in 1932:
We see our Federal Courts filled with young and old, men and women, mothers of families. We see these mothers convicted, disgraces, and broken for selling a small amount of wine, a glass of whiskey, a bottle of beer to clothe their children, feed their babies, to keep a roof over their heads. We are taught the doctrine, and the law so holds it, that it is far better and less blameful for these mothers, these American women to become prostitutes, scarlet women in the streets of our cities than for them to dare sell a glass of wine.30
The majority of working and lower-class women have always had to subvert societal gendered expectations by being public and engaging in commerce in order to survive and support their families. Women of the lower classes have worked in factories, labored as domestics in the homes of the middle and upper classes, served food and beverages in restaurants and bars, sold items on the street, taken in piecework, and prostituted themselves. In most studies of Prohibition, scholars have focused on the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). While some working-class women joined the WCTU, most women involved were from elite or middle-class backgrounds, and they had little experience supporting a family. While the saloon, pub, bar, and, in Mexican-American areas, cantina took money away from women and children because men frittered away their wages on drinks, as the WCTU argued, the private and localized vending of spirits maintained many families.
In major U.S. cities, Italians, Irish, Jews, Germans, Poles, and other immigrants sought socioeconomic advancement through bootlegging and smuggling. In the Southwest and California, Mexican immigrants captured much of the whiskey market. Scholars like José M. Alamillo and George Díaz have depicted how bootlegging became associated with masculinity among Mexicans, leading to masculine competition over the market.31 Bootlegging and smuggling in immigrant communities gave men, like women, a vehicle to economically survive and, in some cases, thrive. Many men in the these communities found that they could not secure loans from banks to open businesses, so they resorted to illicit means to generate income that funded both legal and illegal business ventures.32 The image of the succe
ssful bootlegger established ideals of proper masculine behavior for men who found little opportunity for economic advancement through legitimate means. During Prohibition, this demonstration of masculinity often came at a dangerous price.
As Díaz has documented, competition between men for valuable smuggling routes into the United States emerged. Those with greater access to new forms of technology such as cars, trucks, and firearms displaced those bootleggers who still relied on mules and more peaceful means to navigate the desert terrain. With Prohibition, attacks on Mexicans by Anglo Americans increased along the border because of suspicion that they were making, selling, and drinking alcohol; attacks on immigrants in northeastern cities were also on the rise.33 While Mexicans along the border encountered violence due to their alleged association with bootlegging, the Mexican embassy in Washington ensured that cases of whiskey, tequila, sherry, and wine cleared U.S. Customs for use in the embassy.34 Moreover, the Man in the Green Hat scandal emerged, ensnaring various U.S. congressmen in a sting operation. The man, George L. Cassiday, regularly delivered spirits to members of Congress and other Washington dignitaries, demonstrating that the Prohibition laws were really meant for certain classes of people and not applicable to all. A World War I veteran, Cassiday found bootlegging to be far more lucrative than other jobs for which he was qualified, and he found excellent customers among the very same congressmen who supported Prohibition.35
Less often discussed but still observed was the extended role of women in bootlegging. Journalist Hornsday had observed a common phenomenon in the informal economic sector, whether legal or criminal: a family business passed from generation to generation, and both men and women participated in it equally. The family, thus, served as an instrumental institution for social acculturation and economic maintenance. Families not only passed on their cultural and social practices, but they also bequeathed economic practices.
In Mexico, a country where informal markets flourished, street vending and peddling provided far greater profits than traditional jobs.36 Along the border in a time of economic crisis and massive social upheaval due to the Mexican Revolution, Prohibition, and the global economic depression of the 1930s, such economic activities sustained families that had experienced displacement through violence or been deprived of their traditional means of earning a living. The traditional work of women may have been valued within the family, but contraband became a way to economically survive. It is no mystery why or how women engaged in illegal trafficking.
Figure 7. Public prosecutors examining drugs. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 142937, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, numerous cities served as central ports of entry, and these developed further due to the flows of alcohol and money during Prohibition: Laredo–Nuevo Laredo, Brownsville-Matamoros, and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez in Texas; Douglas–Agua Prieta in New Mexico; Nogales in Arizona; and Calexico-Mexicali and San Diego–Tijuana in California. Sleepy border crossings became important transit sites for experienced smugglers and their North American partners. Smugglers treated these cities as central points of trafficking whether they were moving cattle, people, goods, tequila, or mescal. Despite their focus on alcohol, U.S. customs agents grew concerned about narcotics that entered the United States and Mexico along the California and Baja California coasts.37 By the 1930s, certain cities in Mexico long known as illegal alcohol ports were transformed into transit stations for heroin and marijuana. The U.S. Department of the Treasury shifted its focus to narcotics after the passage of the Blaine Act and the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 that ended Prohibition and again legalized alcohol consumption, distribution, and sales. Heroin and marijuana use, however, had increased during that same period in the United States.38
By the end of Prohibition, both marijuana and opiates had moved beyond their traditional users. U.S. officials asserted that Mexicans in the Southwest gravitated toward marijuana whereas Chinese, sailors, and bohemians preferred opiates. By the 1930s, marijuana and opiate use had spread to the major cities of the United States, far from the ports of California and Baja California and the border states. Relations between the United States and Mexico grew strained due to narcotics because the United States sought to control opiate smuggling from Asia, and Mexico was a convenient trafficking point.39 By the early 1930s, Mexican and U.S. authorities resolved to collaborate in their antinarcotics efforts, since the transit routes already existed.40
SMUGGLERS, MULES, AND PEDDLERS
With the beginning of the first U.S. war on drugs in the 1930s, Mexico was forced to respond to the internationalization and Americanization of narcotics enforcement in Mexico.41 The century-long interaction between Mexico and the United States challenges the assumptions that the internationalization of narcotics enforcement is something that emerged only with the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973.42 Instead, it had followed the ebb and flow of policy initiatives on both sides of the border that corresponded to one another. The realities of transnational trafficking challenge conventional wisdom regarding the image of mules as portrayed in contemporary scholarship focusing on the United States and Mexico.43 It is far more complex and fluid. Modernization and changing policies in the United States and Canada have had dramatic effects on Mexico. Beginning in the 1910s, the United States controlled drug trafficking locally, with the states having the authority to pass laws at the local level. In the 1920s, Prohibition in the United States further strengthened enforcement powers for both local officials and those in the Department of the Treasury. The Treasury’s Prohibition Unit stationed agents in ten countries to control the illegal flow of alcoholic beverages to the United States. The use of agents and controls established during Prohibition served as a model for U.S. drug enforcement efforts in the following decades. In the 1930s, with the end of Prohibition and the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) within the Department of the Treasury, official focus shifted toward drugs.44
In Mexico, nation building and the push to reestablish domestic businesses that promoted Mexican manufactured products led to increased monitoring of smuggling along the nation’s northern and southern borders. The government viewed contraband, even of legal products, as a threat to the growth and development of new business. Mexico and the United States thus engaged in further agreements regarding trade, for vastly different reasons. Those trade agreements evolved into a relationship between the United States and Mexico about the issue of narcotics in the 1930s. With heightened U.S. attention to narcotics, Mexico responded with its own investigations, which led to greater transborder cooperation. For many residents of the borderlands, the lure of smuggling, whether drugs, alcohol, or licit products, was a risk worth taking regardless of the penalties and fines, and regardless of nationalistic rhetoric condemning such activity.
Cases along the border reveal that women smuggled almost anything, and they used various crossing points. In 1936, for example, Mexican customs agents in Nogales detained forty-eight-year-old Luisa Primero Mendoza, a widow from Guadalajara. She had attempted to smuggle clothing and cleaning products from the United States for her profession as a washerwoman in Mexico. She was found guilty of carrying contraband and received a sentence of one year in prison and a thirty-peso fine. Although poorly educated, she wrote a letter to President Lázaro Cárdenas demanding her early release in order to care for her children.45
Primero Mendoza was one of countless women and men who smuggled legal as well as illegal items into Mexico. To border agents, they were avoiding taxes and defrauding the state. In the eyes of the Mexican federal government, contrabandists of all stripes undermined the progress of the nation through their fraud. Sales of Mexican products, and the collection of taxes on the transactions, were important to rebuilding the economy. Primero Mendoza, however, in transporting clothes and cleaning products, sought greater economic stability for herself and her chil
dren.46
For the most part, women acquired and smuggled items associated with their work. Thus, they smuggled clothing—such as undergarments, socks and stockings, baby clothes, purses, shoes, and dresses—as well as food products, face creams, hair products, soaps, dishes and crockery, cloth, thread, and linens. They packed their own clothing with the contraband items or layered them one on top of the other and stuffed their pockets, bags, and suitcases. Customs officials even reported bolts of cloth as contraband. Once detained, women argued that they had brought the items for their own personal use, with no intention of reselling for profit. The amount of material that could be transported on one’s body without drawing attention was minimal, but women attempted to pass enough items to stock a small shop.
In 1937, Anastasia Serna Mendoza la viuda de Mendoza walked across the border from Laredo, Texas, to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, wearing or otherwise carrying six brassieres, various dresses, forty-eight pairs of stockings, and other items.47 In 1939, also in Nuevo Laredo, Eloisa Cárdenas Benavides de Guerra smuggled a wedding dress, four pairs of gloves, undergarments, three large spools of thread, three pairs of stockings, an ordinary dress, and two necklaces.48