Mexican Americans and the War on Narcotics: Racialized Policing Practices and Community Responses in the Postwar Texas Borderlands

“Mexican Americans and the War on Narcotics: Racialized Policing Practices and Community Responses in the Postwar Texas Borderlands” examines how Mexican communities in the United States experienced the postwar anti-narcotics crusade from 1950 to 1975. This project explores how federal, state, and local narcotics-control programs served as powerful tools to criminalize the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and police transnational urban spaces. I argue that anti-Mexican sentiment fomented in Texas contributed to federal narcotics policies and situated San Antonio as a central site of anti-narcotics policing because of the city’s large Mexican population. Lawmakers and law enforcement officials framed San Antonio as an extension of Mexican narcotics networks because of the city’s mixed-citizenship Mexican population and racialized drug markets in the city’s Mexican West Side. The anti-narcotics crusade served as a flexible project that could target African Americans with deliberate precision, while concurrently targeting Latinxs or other criminalized communities of color, depending upon which regional narratives of racialized crime circulated to the national level. State actors imposed narcotics control regimes upon Mexican subjects in the U.S-Mexico borderlands by drawing upon racial scripts of migratory and pathologically criminal families, deviant drug boss women, and predatory drug peddlers who lured white victims into lifelong addiction. In addition to federal- and state-level histories of the war on drugs, this dissertation offers an untold, community-based history of how Mexican residents in San Antonio experienced the myriad carceral apparatuses of the nation’s war on drugs. Community stakeholders, many of whom were recovering addicts, reached out to addicts in their neighborhoods, contested racially discriminatory drug policing, and fought for federal funds to establish local rehabilitation programs. Mexican residents thus wielded their racial and place-based identities to create culturally sensitive substance abuse programs in response to narcotics policing and incarceration. I argue that Mexican residents in social organizations, religious organizations, and homeowners in the Model Cities neighborhood, as well as self-identified Chicanos, offered contesting visions of drug control programs. These local histories are imperative to understand the realities of the twentieth century anti-narcotics crusade and how communities of color confronted an increasingly punitive landscape. This project contributes to the growing body of literature on the national anti-narcotics crusade, the carceral state, and urban histories of racialized policing by illuminating how Latinx populations are central to histories of drug policing and rehabilitation programs.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/172608/1/toniannt_1.pd