| Ethnic Mexicans' relationships to alcohol reveal conflicts and survival strategies in the stratified social world of Prohibition era Greater Los Angeles. Their traffic in and consumption of alcohol inspired various forms of surveillance based on ideas about race, citizenship, gender, and class. Yet these systems of surveillance, whether legal or familial, always had their blind spots and this dissertation considers ethnic Mexicans who sought cover in these concealed spaces as they followed the economic and social opportunities alcohol offered. The project integrates records from various courts, police departments, incarceration facilities, and governmental inquiries, as well as oral histories. A diverse collection of narrators speak not only about daily experiences, but also about topics such as bootlegging, illicit sex, and family violence---realities often shrouded in secrecy within families.;Producers, purveyors and consumers of contraband alcohol encountered various forms of surveillance and a central question of the dissertation is how individuals negotiated this with their own economic and social needs, and their methods of concealment. Chapter one contextualizes and interrogates the intersections of Prohibition and anti-Mexican discourses through newspapers, academic studies, and governmental reports, which to varying degrees framed Mexican criminality and degeneracy around alcohol in ways that rationalized heightened policing and exclusion. In chapter two, I examine bootlegging as a survival strategy and means of upward mobility. For some families, the informal economy expanded into illegality, and while the profits supplemented and sometimes replaced the labor market, they also increased ethnic Mexicans' visibility to authorities. Bootleggers creatively sought to mitigate this visibility while seeking the rewards of the black market. Chapter three focuses directly on the family by questioning the generational, gendered, and classed boundaries of drinking within households. For many upwardly mobile families in this era, alcohol abstention separated them from the perceived lower classes of Mexican immigrants, and as oral interviews reveal, many such families forbade drinking within their home. Chapter four considers alcohol in social relationships from courtship to celebration, and also in domestic violence. Neither romanticizing nor dismissing the evils of alcohol, my dissertation documents events and trends unrecorded by history and often silenced by the historical actors themselves. |
