Citation

Carey E. History Compass 2008; 6(3): 774-795.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00516.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

After the arrests of a number of prominent women traffickers in 1975, the Federal Bureau of Investigation proclaimed that there was ‘no anti-woman bias’ in the Latin American drug trade (New York Times, April 22, 1975). Long before, narcotics warriors in the US, Mexico, and Canada had monitored the activities of a number of prominent women traffickers. Using official documents, reports, and newspapers, this article examines five cases of women smugglers of opiates and marijuana who operated from the early 1910s to the 1960s. Two of the women lived in the US, two in Mexico, and one in China. For all of them, Mexico served as a source of supply, a site of transit, a point for contacts, and/or a place for peddling. In this study, I argue that women found lucrative opportunities in the trafficking of narcotics just as men. Moreover, this study challenges the masculine constructions of the narcotics trade by considering how female peddlers used certain spaces in the economy to develop their enterprises or how they exploited certain gendered stereotypes to undermine the law.