by Elaine Carey
After the revolution, Mexican elites relied upon and embraced certain narratives of European superiority that had circulated during the Porfiriato and the early years of Mexican modernization to set them apart from the lower classes.3 Yet, these tropes grew complicated with evolving concepts of crime and nation. Thus, the Nahums’ ability to accumulate wealth and establish a business that allegedly thrived on vice led the state government of Durango to undertake an investigation initiated by a single letter of complaint. The Nahums’ ties to the police, asserted in the denunciation, also revealed an increasing local concern over police corruption in the postrevolutionary period. The perceived ability of foreigners to bribe and manipulate certain police officers for financial gain or protection led to considerable numbers of investigations and speculations. Moreover, Durán, the letter’s author, suspected Vida, a successful immigrant woman, of sexual deviancy with her brother, buying into the era’s rhetoric of xenophobic nationalism. One can only suspect that Durán may have owed her money or had an ongoing argument with the Nahums over disputed property or some other matter.
In the 1930s, after years of civil war and violence, the Mexican government tried to rebuild the nation and modernize. No easy task. From 1926, the Mexican revolutionary government encountered the Cristeros, a counter-revolutionary faction that protested many new anticlerical laws. Peasants and elites challenged the revolutionary government in other ways, undermining attempts to rebuild the nation.4 Mexico endured years of upheaval that were then followed by efforts to rebuild and modernize the nation. During the revolutionary and then the Cristero fighting, the United States militarized its border with Mexico due to the flows of people fleeing the violence. Ironically, in the midst of this militarization, the United States embarked on its first war on drugs. As the violence subsided in Mexico, both nations became increasingly concerned about the impact of drug addiction on the health of their citizens—Mexicans and Americans—associating physical health with the general health of their respective nations.
The intersections between nation building and narcotics that arose from the 1910s to the early 1930s informed gender, race, nationalism, and modernity.5 Mexico’s official government policy shifted in step with that of the United States. These coordinated moves reveal the interconnectedness of policies on both sides of the border, a scenario that created shared narconarratives. Rather than providing an extensive policy history, I will examine these themes through the quotidian experiences of people who transgressed certain spaces in the pursuit of profit. Their personal movements across borders and their passage through diverse social spaces generated similar discourses and ideas about drugs among both the elites and the emerging middle classes, and how they envisioned the lower classes and immigrants. In this era, from the 1910s to 1936, people were highly mobile, and their mobility illustrated a period of rapid change. Sources and documents from the era demonstrate how policy makers contextualized a shared language, experience, and rhetoric of narcotics that reflected concerns of “foreign contagion.”6 As elites adopted moral codes of conduct in North America, they constructed a gendered language of deviancy as it pertained to drug use, trafficking, and addiction.7 In Mexico and the United States, immigrants—whether from Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in the Americas—became targets of repression and were depicted as a threat to the moral and physical health and the general good of the nation. The development of the “other” as a “contagion” shadowed national policies. Conversely, Mexican women in the drug trade, although lacking modern methodology and technology, were relentless in their entrepreneurial pursuits. Informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism, I consider how the United States and Canada applied these internal constructs of deviancy to control their more exotic neighbor to the south, Mexico.8
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICAN DOPE
The use of narcotics and mind-altering substances has a long history in Mexico. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún wrote about intoxicating mushrooms, or teonánacatl (flesh of the gods), in the sixteenth century.9 Despite their interest in documenting the use of previously unknown plants, Spanish colonists in Mexico attempted to abolish the use of mind-altering substances among Amerindians in religious ceremonies. Their practices undermined the Spanish clergy’s evangelization efforts.10 Although ingesting psilocybin, the toxin found in certain mushrooms, remained common, the Spanish associated these practices with indigenous religious beliefs that were deemed offensive to the Catholic Church. Spanish clerics documented three separate types of psychoactive mushrooms, but there were actually many more—over fifty have now been identified.11
The struggle to control the use of mind-altering substances (such as mushrooms and other plants), narcotics (opiate derivatives such as morphine and heroin that induce sleepiness), and marijuana led to continued struggles and growing concern for scholars, medical professionals, and politicians that has continued into the modern period. By the Porfiriato, Sahagún’s initial list of psychoactive plants of the sixteenth century had greatly expanded. Beginning in the 1700s, European travelers came to believe that marijuana was indigenous to Mexico because of its ubiquitous presence.12 The idea that marijuana was indigenous to Mexico continued to circulate into the twentieth century, informing policy arguments in the United States to the present day. Marijuana actually is native to Asia, not the Americas, and the Spanish introduced marijuana (hemp) during the colonial era for the purpose of making rope. Yet, even scholars of narcotics associated marijuana with Mexican workers who allegedly introduced it to the United States.13 Thus, marijuana usage became associated with Mexicans of working-class or lower-class origin, and the plant’s origin itself remained an accepted “truth” about Mexico.
Notwithstanding, the cultivation of poppy and the production of opium and its derivatives grew in Mexico, although poppy too is not indigenous to the Americas. By the early 1800s, poppy had been introduced in Mexico, particularly in the northern states, by Chinese immigrants who grew it for medicinal and personal use. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, poppy was grown in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango, and it later spread to Tamaulipas and Veracruz.14 By the 1870s, poppy could be found in Michoacán, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, as well as northern Guatemala.15 Mexico as well as Guatemala provided an excellent environment for poppy cultivation due to the soil and to mostly full sun exposure for much of the year.
Travelers to Mexico in the 1800s circulated the belief that the Mexican people were especially prone to vices and alcoholism, but few travelers directly and specifically discussed the use of narcotics or marijuana.16 Their journals documented the exotic aspects of Mexico, accounts similar to narratives written about Asia and Africa. Marijuana, opium, and cocaine could be found, but their intoxicating features only entered the popular imagination of Mexicans by the mid- to late 1800s. Narratives of drug use and alcoholism came to be associated with Mexicans. In Mexico, people found items such as cocaine cordials and opiate derivatives such as morphine and heroin on the shelves of local pharmacies, just as they did in the rest of North America. Yet that availability was reduced in the 1910s and 1920s due to the revolution, which cut off supply lines.
Mexico’s role in Andean cocaine and Asian heroin flows emerged early in the 1900s, much to the consternation of officials influenced by the concerns of northern diplomats, ministers, politicians, and policing agents. At international meetings prior to the Mexican Revolution, politicians, ministers, and medical doctors gathered to construct policies to stem the flow of narcotics. The United States became increasingly concerned about opiate use during its occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. The prevalence of opium use in the Philippines troubled missionaries, who in turn reported their findings to U.S. government officials.17 For example, Episcopal minister Charles H. Brent traveled to the Philippines, where he noted the use of narcotics; his experience there led to his global campaign against narcotics, which was adopted by the United States.18
By the early 1900s, Brent’s influence on the question of narcot
ics and trafficking had taken hold. Controlling international drug flows led to a growing interest in Mexico. In their report to the U.S. Senate, the American delegates to the International Opium Conference, Bishop Brent, Hamilton Wright, and Henry J. Ford, reported a growing crisis south of the border that they believed would continue to have serious implications.
A recently enacted Canadian statute not only forbids the importation of this form of the drug, but its manufacture, transshipment, or exportation. The Attorney General has held that under our opium-exclusion act of February 9, 1909 prepared opium may not be imported into the United States for immediate transshipment. Mexico has no law on the subject. The result is that the great mass of Macanise opium is brought to San Francisco and immediately transshipped by sea to Western Mexican ports, from whence it is added to the direct Mexican import, is mostly smuggled into the United States across the Mexican border.19
Although Mexico produced opiates, in the early 1900s it also served as a site of transshipment of Asian contraband, whether opiates or Chinese workers, to the United States. Lack of oversight in Mexican ports drew suspicion from the country’s northern neighbors. With the emerging drug war and the inflammatory rhetoric that surrounded drug abuse and criminal trafficking, U.S. officials and social reformists demanded greater control over the Mexican ports.20 In the end, Mexico’s northern neighbors would have to wait more than a decade for an improvement in Mexican law enforcement, due to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
Along with growing international concern about the lack of port security, the issue of drug use also caused concern among Mexican criminologists during the Porfiriato. Carlos Roumagnac, in his well-analyzed and historicized work Los criminales en México: ensayo de psicología criminal published in 1904, documented the use of marijuana among male and female prisoners.21 He wrote:
Marijuana . . . is well known; it is a grass that is smoked and causes a delirious drunkenness. The “drunken” marijuana user becomes a lunatic; and once he has contracted the vice, he delivers himself to it until he succumbs. It is, along with pulque, one of greatest and terrible national dangers. Therefore its sale must be rigorously prohibited.22
Roumagnac’s work may have created an early version of “reefer madness,” an illogical fear of marijuana that swept the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. In his interviews, prisoners discussed their use of marijuana, but few reported psychotic outbreaks, and marijuana then, like today, served as a form of currency in prisons. Using a variety of means, prisoners’ friends and families routinely smuggled it inside. Roumagnac found that women braided it into their hair, passed it to prisoners in baskets of fruits and vegetables, or hid it in food products like tamales. Some men and women visiting their imprisoned friends and family members stuffed the heels of their shoes with marijuana and passed tobacco cigarettes that were in fact marijuana or laced with marijuana.23 Despite Roumagnac’s claim that the Porfirian regime prohibited the formal sale of marijuana, men, women, and children sold it openly on the streets and in markets. It even appeared in songs, in the early 1900s, that told of its uses and pleasures.
Despite Roumagnac’s pragmatic views about the formality of the law, the internal marijuana trade within and beyond prison walls carried on as usual. Those legal regulations and controls had to be reintroduced after the Mexican Revolution. More significantly, as an early criminologist, Roumagnac’s studies of crime and criminal behavior intersected with his own racialized and elitist views of criminal behavior. His early work did not disappear with the Mexican Revolution; instead, it found a growing audience that considered crime and criminality a detriment to progress and development. As Mexicans struggled to redefine national identity after the Porfiriato, a new narrative that associated depravity with race and ethnicity inserted social hygiene as a central component of nation building. Ironically, despite views that the Porfirian era triggered excesses and vice, many of the proponents of social hygiene programs employed similar ideas and concepts from the era that they criticized. In the midst of the chaos of war, certain Mexican states attempted to control the production and consumption of narcotics and alcohol. In the wake of the 1912 International Opium Conference, Mexican leaders too sought to respond to the global shift to control production. By 1916, the Constitutionalists, who had gained control of the government, issued the first federal laws controlling narcotics distribution and use.24 President and leader of the Constitutionalists, Venustiano Carranza, decreed it illegal to produce, consume, and sell narcotics throughout Mexico. The newly formed Departamento de Salubridad (Department of Health) held the only rights to import and distribute morphine, heroin, and cocaine for medicinal purposes. The department also maintained control of particular substances produced in Mexico: marijuana and opium.25
Figure 1. Basket of confiscated goods. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 142917, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
In 1917, the delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Coahuila, Dr. José María Rodríguez, requested the creation of the Consejo de Salubridad General (Department of Public Health) to support and expand public health initiatives to facilitate modernization. Initially, the Department of Health focused its efforts on fighting diseases such as yellow fever and sleeping sickness through the use of vaccinations. Its social workers also struggled to remove raw sewage from public streets in many cities. Through research and international conferences and communication, the department sought new models that had been adopted in Europe and the United States, and it reported them to the federal government, issuing studies and proposing projects that could be adopted in Mexico. In 1919, Rodríguez petitioned the Mexican president and Congress to fight syphilis by implementing educational campaigns to promote effective condom use and by issuing a certificate of health to couples who married.26 These requests mimicked those reforms advocated by the Bureau of Social Hygiene in the United States, funded by John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, too, was gravely concerned about drug abuse, since it contributed to illness, undermined workers’ ability to perform their jobs, and ultimately destroyed the lives of men and women.27
Like in the United States, Rodríguez’s department also issued statements that reflected a growing public concern about drug and alcohol abuse. He suggested that the Department of Public Health should “correct this sickness of the people (la raza) principally provoked by alcoholism and medicinal drugs such as opium, morphine, ether, cocaine, and marijuana.” As a medical professional, he recognized that such substances were necessary for medicinal purposes, but when abused, they contributed to the degeneration of the people and ran counter to nation building. Later, the department would focus on alcohol abuse, but also opium, marijuana, heroin, and cocaine abuse, because drug use had spread across class and ethnic lines.28
CONTROLLING THE DEGENERATES
By 1920, Edmundo G. Aragón, the secretary-general of the Department of Health, implemented restrictions and limitations on the cultivation and distribution of products that “foment vice and that degenerate the people.” The federal government required that the Department of Health grant permissions and maintain records of businesspeople and medical professionals who wished to import opium, morphine, heroin, or cocaine. These products could only be imported for medicinal purposes issued by medical doctors and pharmacists. Previously, the United States and Canada had passed similar laws.
By 1921, provisional president Adolfo de la Huerta’s administration further considered the problem of narcotics trafficking. The Department of Health submitted a report to the president summarizing U.S. controls on narcotics and the history of Mexico’s involvement in international agreements and meetings.29 Enclosed in the report was a Spanish translation of the 1912 International Convention on Opium. Federico Gamboa represented Mexico at The Hague for the conference. Delegates debated and formalized a treaty to control the distribution of raw opium “to limit exclusively to medicinal and legitimate purposes
the manufacture, sale, and use of medicinal opium, morphine, cocaine, and heroin and all new derivatives of these products.”30
Gamboa signed the agreement, but the Mexican Senate never approved it, nor did the president at the time sign it.31 Because of the political instability of the revolutionary period, the Mexican government did not consider the opium convention to be a priority. This changed ten years later in 1923 when the Department of Health asked the president to ratify the convention in order to establish better control over opium.32 In the 1920s, debates in Mexico about narcotics control illustrated shifting disagreements about modernization and nationalism in the country. With the requests from the Department of Health, President Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924) finally signed the 1912 Opium Convention and prohibited the import of opium (morphine and heroin) as well as cocaine in 1923, except for medicinal purposes. The United States and Canada, however, pressured the Mexican government to enact additional restrictions in the 1920s.
Legal changes in the United States began in 1906 with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and evolved with the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, the 1922 Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act, and the 1924 Heroin Act; however, actual drug enforcement was meager. The Pure Food and Drug Act dismantled the patent remedies industry in the United States, in which consumers easily found opiates and cocaine in everything from gripe water (treatment for colic in children and toddlers) to love potions and asthma treatments. These American initiatives as well as the increasing number of medical studies on narcotics use helped determine the legislative agenda in Mexico after 1920. Druggists and doctors on both sides of the border did not welcome many of these legislative restrictions and vigorously fought them, questioning whether politicians should legislate how doctors treated their patients. Patients feared that the laws would render their accustomed relief-giving prescriptions illegal.33
