Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland by Holly M. Karibo (review)

In her first monograph, Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland, Holly M. Karibo examines the social history of vice economies in North America's urban borderland. She explores the rise of cross-border prostitution, heroin trafficking, and leisure tourism in the Detroit-Windsor region in the post–World War II era. The aim of the book is to trace the broader cultural meaning of illicit economies that came to embody the social space of this border region.

Karibo tells the story of "vice" from multiple perspectives. We are introduced to the women and men who worked as sex workers; to heroin users, sellers, and smugglers; to their customers, who kept the businesses booming; and to the middle-class residents, moral reformers, and legal authorities who attempted to eliminate what they considered to be unwanted and dangerous activities. The result is a finely crafted narrative of previously little-known stories, a narrative that sometimes reveals surprising accounts of illicit activities.

Karibo argues that the emergence of cross-border crime and vice in the wake of World War II reveals the contradictory nature of the border in a period when the United States and Canadian governments were actively promoting more amicable relations and when more Americans and Canadians were crossing the border for leisure purposes than ever before. Karibo points to the incompatibility of the dual objectives of making travel and trade across the border easier and more efficient while at the same time trying to block the crossing of people and goods deemed illegal and unwanted. Furthermore, the pursuit of the second objective—that of making the border less permeable—was often at odds with the needs and aspirations of local residents who crossed the border for work, travel, and entertainment on a daily basis.

Sin City North forcefully challenges the characterization of the 1950s as a period of cultural conformity, of economic prosperity, and of the dominance of middle-class values. For example, in chapter 1 Karibo examines cross-border smuggling as the root of what she calls local border culture beyond the Prohibition era into the 1940s and 1950s. In the years before the Second World War, several changes, including industrial growth, the building of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel (the latter colloquially dubbed the "Detroit-Windsor Funnel"), and the relatively lax border policies of the two countries, facilitated the formation of a sense of cross-border community. The transformation of the border cities in turn propelled the growth of cross-border smuggling. Some welcomed the illicit trade, while others fought to halt it, and the expansion of the vice economies had a range of conflicting impacts on local residents in Detroit and Windsor.

Informal and illegal exchanges that women and men engaged in across the border unevenly shaped the social spaces of the northern borderland and were dependent on structures of race, class, gender, and nationality. In chapters 2 and 3 Karibo charts the rise of prostitution and heroin use in the late 1940s and 1950s. The flourishing of the vice trade in the border cities stands in sharp contrast to the more familiar stories of white flight to the suburbs that have characterized existing historical writing. Karibo shows that the selling of sex and drugs that sprang up in the downtown cores of these postwar cities presented alternative forms of leisure and making money. They also provided a way to escape normative social codes. For example, in Detroit, interracial commercial sex defied the social norm that sexual pleasure should be confined to the marriage bed and within the color line. Yet as Karibo illustrates, the transgressive nature of the illicit economies was circumscribed by the class and racial hierarchies that defined who could or could not participate in the trade and in what capacity.

In Detroit and Windsor, the national...