Contrabandista communities: States and smugglers in the lower Rio Grande borderlands, 1848-1945

"Contrabandista Communities" is a transnational examination of illicit trade that combines social, economic, and new borderlands approaches. It considers how states regulate and prohibit trade on their borders and how border people subvert state laws through smuggling. The creation of the Rio Grande as an international boundary at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War upset customary trade patterns by placing international regulations on what had once been local commerce. What had traditionally been local trade became subject to high international tariffs. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary taxation, borderlanders on both sides of the river developed a moral economy of illicit trade, or a contrabandista community, which accepted some forms of smuggling as just. This moral economy persisted in the wake of increased policing by the U.S. and Mexican governments in the early twentieth century. Although arms, alcohol, and narcotics traffickers threatened to upset the moral economy of illicit trade by prompting increased state policing, criminal traffickers inadvertently reinforced state tolerance of low level illicit trade by prompting states to concentrate their limited resources combating drug and gun trafficking which posed a greater threat to the state."Contrabandista Communities" provides a transnational model of an enduring and prevalent borderland phenomenon and a theoretical framework with which to understand it. Rather than simply chronicling the evolution of smuggling across the border, my work shows how illicit trade was a nuanced process where smugglers negotiated their needs and desires with U.S. and Mexican laws. State agents also participated in the moral economy of illicit trade when they compromised on the strict enforcement of tariff collection in order to concentrate their limited resources against state threats such as arms and drug trafficking. Border enforcement directly led to borderlands becoming sites of contraband trafficking and contributed to the rise of organized crime and violence on the border. Casual smuggling within the moral economy continued, but more and more often violent criminal trafficking came to dominate state efforts and worked to cement the border's image as a criminal space in popular discourse. Moreover, although smugglers' success could be seen as an example of states' failures to regulate their borderlands, smugglers' trade could not have been possible without state attempts to regulate their borders. Thus smuggling, specifically the profits that smuggling brings, can be seen as an example of how border people used international boundaries to their own benefit.