by Elaine Carey
13. Market scene in Mexico City, circa 1920, photo 73001, Casaola, Fototeca, Pachuga Hidalgo, reprinted in Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Yerba, goma, y polvo: Drogas, ambientes, y policía en México, 1900–1940 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1999), 31.
14. Mule in Mexico City, circa 1920, photo 70646, Casaola, Fototeca, Pachuga Hidalgo, reprinted in Pérez Montfort, Yerba, goma, y polvo, 27.
15. U.S. Consulate, Nuevo Laredo, to Treasury Department, translation of “Inducía su hijo a vender drogas,” La Prensa, December 22, 1939, box 22, DEA-BNDD. Margarito Oliva was arrested for selling marijuana. His son was also turned in by one of his schoolmates for selling marijuana cigarettes at school. C. E. Terry, Report on Field Studies to the Committee of Drug Addiction, December 1926, folder 555, box 1, series 4, Bureau of Social Hygiene Records, RAC. This study examined six cities in the United States, including El Paso, the only city examined that reported high rates of addiction and peddling among schoolchildren. The study’s author associated this disturbing trend with Mexicans in El Paso. Interestingly, the study also showed that the adult Mexican population in El Paso had lower rates of addiction compared to adult Anglos.
16. For a discussion of familial connections, see Dunlap, Stürzenhofecker, and Johnson, “The Elusive Romance of Motherhood,” 1–27; Denton, Dealing; Dunlap and Johnson, “Family and Human Resources,” 175–98; and Adler, Wheeling and Dealing.
17. Roumagnac, Los criminales en México, contains reports on children’s addiction in Mexico.
18. Carey and Cisneros Guzmán, “The Daughters of La Nacha,” 23–24. In the interviews, contemporary drug peddlers described marrying the suppliers of their mothers, who also sold.
19. Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras; and Nicole Mottier, “Organized Crime, Political Corruption, and Powerful Governments: Drug Gangs in Ciudad Juárez, 1928–1933” (master’s thesis, Oxford University, 2004). There is little information on who Lola la Chata had contact with in Ciudad Juárez.
20. Attorney general of the republic to commissioner of narcotics, Treasury Department, January 22, 1962, box 161, DEA-BNDD. This document disclosed the arrests of one of her daughters as well as her nieces.
21. Recio, “Drugs and Alcohol,” 21–42.
22. Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, Seventy-First Congress, HR 10561, March 7–8, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930). The urgency of the problem is illustrated by an attached map of the United States representing the “Estimated Average Drug Addiction Among Violations of the Harrison Narcotic Law (1922–1928).” See also William Walker, Drug Control in the Americas.
23. Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930–1962,” Journal of American History 72, no. 4 (March 1986): 919.
24. Information regarding Anslinger, Morgenthau Diary, FDR Archive. Anslinger’s phrase is famous and has been widely quoted. See Michael Woodiwiss, Organized Crime and American Power: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 242; and John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930–1962 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990).
25. Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 257. Anslinger and Tompkins argued that there were 150,000 to 200,000 narcotics addicts in the United States prior to 1914, most of them women.
26. Ibid., 152–53. Diarte was later killed by his associates. Anslinger describes the arrests that followed as one of the biggest drug busts in Mexico to that date.
27. William Walker, “Control Across the Border,” 201–16.
28. Consul Henry C. A. Damm, Opium Poppy Planted in Northern Sonora, August 16, 1927, RG 170, DEA-BNDD. In 1927, Damm wrote that he received information from U.S. informants living in Mexico about the Chinese in Sonora. He stated: “The large Chinese population on the Mexican West Coast would undoubtedly offer a market for a large quantity of opium produced, but this consulate has not heard of any attempts to smuggle the drug of Sonora origin into the United States directly across the border.” See also H. S. Creighton to the Commissioner of Customs, Treasury Department, United States Custom Service, Houston, December 11, 1940; and translation of an editorial in El Centinela, a weekly tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, titled “El escandalo del robo a los Chinos,” December 1, 1940, box 22, DEA-BNDD.
29. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1991). For a discussion in Spanish of the Chinese in Mexico, see Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento anti-chino en México; Trueba Lara, Los chinos de Sonora; and Humberto Monteón González and José Luis Trueba Lara, Chinos y antichinos en México: documentos para su estudio (Guadalajara: Gobierno de Jalisco, 1988).
30. Guerrero, La génesis del crimen en México; and Roumagnac, Los criminales en México.
31. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, “El mito de la marijuana,” Criminalia (December 1938): 206–37.
32. Ibid. In 1931, the Mexican government amended the Federal Penal Code to make the use, buying, and selling of drugs a criminal offense (currently Article 195). For an extensive discussion of the 1930s, see Astorga, El siglo de las drogas, 43–60.
33. League of Nations, Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, Twenty-Fourth Session, June 2, 1939, box 22, RG 170, DEA-BNDD; Daniel Bailey, customs agent in charge, Intelligence Bulletin, no. 8, September 19, 1936, and Intelligence Bulletin, no. 9, September 26, 1936, Henry Morgenthau Correspondence, box 206, FDR Library.
34. In studies of drug dealers and traffickers, Patricia A. Adler argues that the most successful traffickers create distance between themselves and the actual sale. Moreover, they avoid unwanted attention that may jeopardize the enterprise. Adler, Wheeling and Dealing.
35. Denton, Dealing. In Denton’s research, la Chata fits the profile of women who grow up in the trade and then forge alliances with men in the business.
36. La Prensa, May 1937. The newspaper La Prensa published a series of exposés about the federal judicial police, the attorney general, and the narcotics police involvement in the distribution of heroin for Lola la Chata. The articles in La Prensa connected her to high levels in the Department of Health and to judges and customs agents. Other arrests of traffickers in the 1940s exposed the ties of police and government officials to traffickers. James B. Stewart, American consul general, to Secretary of State, February 28, 1940, clippings of newspaper articles, “Funcionarios en fabuloso trafico de drogas,” Excélsior, December 7, 1940; and “Es tremendo el trafico de drogas,” Excélsior, December 8, 1940, box 22, RG 170, DEA-BNDD.
37. Denton, Dealing, 32.
38. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–99.
39. See José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán, “Las tres jefas,” in Las jefas del narco: el ascenso de las mujeres en crimen organizado, ed. Arturo Santamaría Gómez (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2012), 125–38. See also Carey and Cisneros Guzmán, “The Daughters of La Nacha.”
40. Gabriela Cano, “Unconceivable Realities of Desire: Amelia Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 35–56.
41. Javier Piña y Palacios, La colonia penal de las Islas Marías: su historia, organización y régimen (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1970). Female Cristeros were the first women imprisoned on Islas Marías. Ernestina Vanegas, “Vivimos en la cárcel con Papa,” in La colonia penal de las Islas Marías, ed. Piña y Palacios, 97–102 Vanegas, the daughter of a prisoner who had killed his wife, describes the routine of prisoners and their families in 1958. Vanegas’s life spanned the time that la Chata was in Islas Marías.
42. George White to H. J. Anslinger, newspaper clipping, “Blow to Narcotic Traffic,” box 22, DEA-BNDD.
43. Ibid.
44. For a discussion of the complications of “proletarian virtue” in Latin America, see Klubock, Contested Communities; Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises; and Tinsman, Partners in Conflict.
45. “Criminal History of the Beland Family,” box 42, file “Female Addicts,” RG 170, DEA-BNDD. The Belands were a Texas family of addicts and sellers whose arrests for possession and distribution of narcotics extended from the 1910s to the 1960s.
46. Texas Department of Health, Texas Death Indexes, 1903–2000 (Austin: Texas Department of Health, State Vital Statistics Unit), at http://search.ancestrylibrary.com, accessed July 17, 2012.
47. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942).
48. Department of the Treasury, “Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1940), 39–41.
49. “Dozen Girls of Tender Age Involved in Shoplifting, Detectives Claimed,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, August 29, 1911.
50. Charlie Beland, Leavenworth inmate no. 68030, and Joe Henry Beland, Leavenworth inmate no. 64288, National Archives and Record Administration–Kansas City (hereafter NARA-KC).
51. “Sitting Hen Proves Faithless Guardian of Morphine Supply,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, December 10, 1921.
52. “Lure of Drug Traffic Mother and Three Follow Son to Prison,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, December 12, 1921.
53. Texas Department of Health, Texas Death Indexes, 1903–2000.
54. Department of the Treasury, “Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936), 36–37.
55. Department of the Treasury, “Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 25–27.
56. Charlie Beland, Leavenworth inmate no. 68030, Admissions Summary, NARA-KC.
57. United States Senate, Illicit Narcotics Traffic: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Improvements in the Federal Criminal Code of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Fourth Congress, first session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955), 3285.
58. “Drug Taste at School.” Fort Worth Star Telegram, December 17, 1921.
59. Charlie Beland, Leavenworth inmate no. 68030, Parole Report, NARA-KC.
60. Charles Louis Beland, Alcatraz inmate no. 18-AZ, National Archives and Record Administration–San Francisco.
61. Interstate I-35 extends from Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, north to Duluth, Minnesota.
62. Charles Louis Beland, 618-AZ, NARA–San Francisco. Conversation with Joe Sanchez of NARA–San Francisco, August 2, 2012.
63. S. J. Kennedy, Treasury representative in charge, to supervising customs agent, Treasury Department, July 27, 1944, RG 170, DEA-BNDD.
64. “Detection of Clandestine Narcotics Laboratories,” File Mexico Border, RG 170, DEA-BNDD.
65. Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, 39–60.
66. Cable no. 134, June 15, 1945, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request 1150736-00. Notes on cable document teletypes sent to offices in Philadelphia, San Antonio, and El Paso on June 18, 1945.
67. The Narcotics Division was housed in the Department of Pensions and National Health. Charles Henry Ludovic Sharman, formerly of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, remained a staunch ally of Anslinger. He represented Canada on many international narcotics commissions.
68. H. J. Anslinger to Colonel C. H. L. Sharman, chief, Narcotics Division, Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa, “María Dolores Estévez Zuleta,” DEA-BNDD.
69. Office memorandum to Ladd from C. H. Carson, June 1945, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request 1150736-00.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. J. Edgar Hoover to FBI Communications Section, July 14, 1945, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request 1150736-00.
73. S. J. Kennedy to the supervising agent, Treasury Department, United States Customs Service, DEA-BNDD.
74. Lola la Chata to the president and Soledad Orozco, April 1945, Fondo Manuel Ávila Camacho, AGN.
75. Donna J. Guy, Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, 1880–1955 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Kristina A. Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism, 1917–1940,” in Sex in Revolution, ed. Olcott, Vaughan, and Cano, 199–222.
76. Anslinger and Oursler, The Murderers, 4. This scene was repeated in Steven Soderbergh’s film Traffic when Caroline (played by Erika Christensen), the daughter of the U.S. drug czar (played by Michael Douglas), becomes a heroin addict.
77. Nancy Campbell, Using Women. Also see Anslinger and Oursler, The Murderers. Anslinger’s nativist views were widely circulated in his talks as well as the press. See Anslinger, “Marijuana,” 18–19, 150–53.
78. Lic. Arnulfo Martínez Lavalle, visitador general, Procuraduría General de la República to H. J. Anslinger, February 21, 1950, box 29, RG 170, DEA-BNDD.
79. Nancy Campbell, Using Women, 64.
80. H. J. Anslinger to Colonel C. H. L. Sharman, chief, Narcotics Division, Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa, “María Dolores Estévez Zuleta”; and Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras, 166. The description of la Chata also builds upon Anslinger and the FBN’s view of the typical dealer. In his book The Murderers, Anslinger focused on the “Negro” drug gangs.
81. Adler, Wheeling and Dealing. In her research, Adler noted that women involved with traffickers were very beautiful. She argued that they were drawn to the wealth and the lifestyle of trafficking. The image of the beautiful lover of the drug dealer is celebrated in popular culture. In Brian De Palma’s Scarface, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character becomes the archetype of the trafficker’s companion.
82. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, “Open Letter to Lola la Chata.”
83. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 39; and Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 18.
84. Julia Sudbury, “Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex,” Feminist Review 80 (2005): 162–79.
85. Foreign Service Dispatch from Embassy in Mexico City to the Department of State, “Visit of Gene Sherman Los Angeles Times Correspondent to Mexico City,” May 16, 1960, RG 170, DEA-BNDD. Gene Sherman submitted information to the embassy about traffickers.
86. H. J. Anslinger, Memorandum for the Secretary, Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, September, 3, 1936, Henry Morgenthau Papers, FDR Library.
87. William Walker, “Control Across the Border,” 94.
88. See box 22, file Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, DEA-BNDD; James B. Stewart, consul general, to State Department, “Laws and Marijuana,” October 27, 1938. Stewart reported that the Mexican press depicted Salazar Viniegra as a “propagandist for marijuana,” after a concerted effort by U.S. and Mexican officials to tarnish his image.
89. R. W. Artis to H. J. Anslinger, December 12, 1947, and Terry A. Talent to H. J. Anslinger, Treasury Department, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, El Paso, December 1, 1947, box 23, RG 170, DEA-BNDD. This document contains a list of names of Mexican citizens who had been reported for narcotics violations since 1940. One hundred and twenty-five names were listed; seven were women and six were still active. Lola la Chata was listed as imprisoned.
90. See French, “Prostitutes and Guardians Angels,” 530–53.
91. Although focused on the Victorian-era explorers of Africa, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1
995), for a discussion of transgressive sexual fantasies and interracial sex. Jack Kerouac’s semiautobiographical novel Tristessa (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960) exemplifies Young’s theories, because it is about an affair between a gringo and a Mexico City heroin-addicted prostitute. Burroughs’s own fictional work also shows an interest in interracial sexuality.
92. Burroughs maintained a lifelong fascination with crime in general. His interest in criminals and criminal networks in both Mexico and the United States was evident in the circle of friends that he kept. See Oliver Harris, ed., Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking Press, 1993).
93. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1959). Lola la Chata appears in a number of Burroughs’s works: Cities of the Red Night (New York: Viking Press, 1981); and The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1971).
94. Robles-García, La bala perdida. Even shortly before his death, Burroughs was still fascinated by la Chata. Robles-García gave Burroughs a photograph of la Chata in which one could make out her gold-capped, jewel-studded teeth. Burroughs made a mixed-media piece using the photo with the words “Folk Hero” inscribed on the bottom. See the photo in Spann, “Unforgettable Characters,” 26.
95. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, 145.
96. Ibid.
97. William S. Burroughs, The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984), 137–39. In this short story, Lola la Chata hosts an annual party on her birthday where everything is free, and during which the police receive their payoffs in drugs. Burroughs wrote: “Yes, it’s once a year on her birthday that Lola la Chata gives this party and on that day everything is free. On that day she gives. On other days she takes.”
98. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, “Open Letter to Lola la Chata.”
99. For a contemporary discussion of street vending in Mexico, see Cross, Informal Politics.
100. These aspects of life for the unprivileged are depicted in popular culture, such as in the film María Full of Grace, in which María decides to become a mule after losing her job in a flower plantation. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Queen of the South, the protagonist, Teresa Mendoza, is also poorly educated but has a mind for numbers.