Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America’s Borderlands, edited by Elaine Carey and Andrae M. Marak

Abstract

Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America's Borderlands, edited by Elaine Carey and Andrae M. Marak. Tucson, Arizona, University of Arizona Press, 2011. xii, 250 pp. $55.00 US (cloth). Over past twenty years, a new generation of historians has begun to examine North America's borders and borderlands from a myriad of angles, ranging from cultural encounters and environmental linkages to economic nexuses and asymmetrical political relations, to name only a few examples. The study of US-Mexico borderlands has been a particularly fruitful area of research, while regions along US-Canada border have been subject to more recent scrutiny. However, there has only been sporadic borderlands research from a comparative outlook. The collection seeks to address this lacuna by presenting historical case studies of contraband and/or vice from late nineteenth century to 1960s in US-Mexico and US-Canada borderlands to observe larger issues concerning international political relations, economic practices, and morality. The cheeky-titled Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine offers new perspectives on transnational flows of contraband and vice across North America's penneable borders to examine, as editors Elaine Carey and Andrae Marak articulate in their concise introduction, the consequences of globalization as it intersects with hegemonic spaces and ideas, national territorialism, and mobility (or lack of mobility) (p. 1). To that end, each contributor eschews a state-centric approach in favour of a bottom-up perspective that views borderlanders as agents of change, and considers such analytic categories as race, gender, and class. Inspired by framework presented in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and Other Side of Globalization, edited by Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel (Bloomington, Indiana, 2005), volume differentiates between illegal (prohibited by law) and illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable) interactions to highlight constructedness of crime. The essayists also recognize that within transnational movements licit or illicit nature of commodities, individuals, or cultural practices in question is dependent upon historical and physical contexts; an activity or good may be legal on one side of border but illegal on other at various points in time. Carey and Marak divide nine essays into two broad sections. Establishing Borders examines cross-border flows of specific tangible goods or peoples. Robert Chao Romero explores smuggling of excluded Chinese labour into United States through Mexico as well as Cuba between 1882 and 1916; Brenden Rensink examines cattle rustling and horse thieving in Montanan borderlands during early 1880s to demonstrate transnational Crees' strategic use of Forty-Ninth parallel as a tool of resistance; Sterling Evans focuses on early twentieth-century smuggling of US-made binder twine into Canada within broader context of North American agricultural market system; George T. …