Abstract
Hardships that face transmigrants working in agriculture include the potential for drug use. Reliant on village-based networks that facilitate border crossing and developing a plan for a destination within this country, transmigrants who try new drugs/alcohol and/or continue on accustomed drugs/alcohol are facilitated in these endeavors through locally generated networks as alternative forms of access and support. Seven cases of undocumented men from Mexico are reviewed to show how use of illicit drugs is minimally affected by economic success and time in the United States, or village-based networks that first facilitated entry into this country. Prior conditions, especially childhood difficulties and search for socioeconomic autonomy, precipitate new and/or continuing drug use within the United States on this side of the border, where both forms of drug use are facilitated by locally generated networks.
Highlights
Like many men and women who preceded him, Pepe Gardel crossed the border between the United States and Mexico without immigration papers
Social science monographs are rare that consider crack use by immigrants, beyond the fieldwork of Philippe Bourgois [37] of mostly second-generation men who sold and used crack in an immigrant Puerto Rican neighborhood in Spanish Harlem and Terry Williams [38] on crack sales by several entrepreneurial Dominican adolescents in immigrant communities of The Bronx and upper Manhattan. Both focused on areas of New York City, the site where crackcocaine was revealed to the rest of the country through the media, at the same time that it remained an iconic site of immigrant peoples who “arrive” and “gather,” as transmigrants, in search of a better life
Several men and women in my research experienced a form of debt peonage similar to that reported by Rothenberg [6], Kilborn [55], and Vander Staay [48], wherein crack was added to commodities, such as food, shelter, transportation, alcohol, and cigarettes provided by a contractor, who subtracted from weekly wages what a worker had consumed
Summary
Like many men and women who preceded him, Pepe Gardel crossed the border between the United States and Mexico without immigration papers. Except for the distinction of founding an AA chapter and ten days of wilderness survival the first time that he Journal of Anthropology crossed the international border, Mr Gardel’s story shares similarities with several generations of men and women in US agriculture from Central America and Mexico: (a) persistent return to this country despite deportation [3,4,5,6], (b) lowpaid employment and little security [7,8,9,10,11,12,13] and inconsistent enforcement of safety regulations [10,11,12], (c) investment of earnings to purchase property, consumer goods, and house construction in Mexico [3, 5, 14, 15], and (d) difficulties that accompany consumption of alcohol [16,17,18,19] and drugs [20,21,22]. I refer to men who have left a former place to arrive in a new one, whereas undocumented, known as “without papers” (sin papeles), refers to construction of identity that leads to vulnerability as “cheap labor” [26] and, for this analysis, vulnerability to the availability of drugs and alcohol in agricultural settings
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
