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New Book Explores Misperceptions About Mexican Smuggling
Arcadia Weekly Sep 09, 2015
Photo Courtesy of Savannah Lauren.
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As Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has continued to defend his position on Mexican immigration and the types of characters who choose to cross the border, a book recently released by Sam Houston State University assistant professor of history George T. Díaz takes a very different look at clandestine activity across the U.S. border.
Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande, published by the University of Texas Press, focuses on the development of illicit trade across the U.S. over the past century.
In it, Díaz explores the real and imagined links associated with contraband trade and the materials smugglers bring across the border, which Díaz learned about firsthand as a child growing up in Laredo.
“I remember asking my mother about the empty boxes (littering the Walmart parking lot),” Díaz said. “She told me that they once contained things like shoes and televisions. People would take those goods out of their boxes and put them in their cars to cross the border and sell them in Mexico.
“What was different about that type of smuggling was that although the act of smuggling itself was illegal, the items being ferried across the border weren’t,” Díaz said. “And it occurred to me while researching law enforcement memoirs that this less criminal smuggling was more frequent than tequila trafficking during prohibition and the later drug trade.”
Through his research, Díaz learned that that smuggling across both sides of the border in 19th century developed as a result of high tariffs on imported goods, which made everyday items very expensive and turned local commerce into international trade.
“Where it was relatively easy in harbors like New York to enforce the tariffs, it was difficult to properly enforce trade along the border between Texas and Mexico because the Rio Grande was a giant zone of trade,” Díaz said.
Because there was very little incentive for people who moved items across the border to declare their goods and pay the proper taxes, early—and even a significant deal of current—smuggling isn’t done to carry over illegal goods, but is simply a method of tax evasion.
“Early smuggling was mainly done by average people who were just trying to make a living or survive,” Díaz said. “The majority of smugglers were not gangsters, despite what the media would like to have us believe.”
Around the time the income tax was introduced in the U.S., the Mexican Revolution was well underway and tensions were mounting due to World War I. Customs agents who once worked as tax men on the border transformed to bona fide border guards.
“The American government was very concerned about revolutionaries and spies,” Díaz said. “U.S. Customs agents tried desperately to stop the movement of prohibited goods, and the focus turned from taxing items to policing banned ones such and guns, alcohol, and later drugs.
“Also during that time, items like flour, sugar, gasoline and cloth were rationed in the U.S., but people in Mexico who were in need from the Revolution were starving and needed to eat. There was a lot of money to be made from smuggling these innocuous items across the border.
“Of course, there was violence involved even in the earliest days of smuggling, but I wanted to shift the focus from spectacular stories of violence and talk about how common smuggling really is,” Díaz said.
Border Contraband was produced after years of field work and archival research in Mexico and the U.S. during which Díaz noticed that there were some major shortcomings to the records he found, namely that information presented from newspapers written in English was one-sided and often formulaic in its portrayal of border smugglers, which also contributes to the notorious stereotype.
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