Satan's Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America's Greatest Gaming Resort (review)

Legendary is undoubtedly the single best word that conveys the short but colorful history and enduring popular image of the luxurious Agua Caliente casino and resort, which rose from scrublands just south of the U.S.-Mexico border during the Jazz Age, a conspicuous product of U.S. Prohibition. But like most urban legends, separating fact from fiction and history from histrionics about the gaming resort and the people associated with it has proved to be highly problematic: gross misconceptions and myths abound. Indeed, despite its significance in the western borderlands experience, critical scholarly interpretation of Agua Caliente, the men who built it and the reasons for its spectacular rise and fall, the casino has been inexplicably neglected. Happily, that situation has ended with publication of Satan's Playground. Vanderwood has filled a gaping hole in the professional borderlands literature, not only setting the record straight about Agua Caliente itself, but also capturing in the process much of the fascinating (anti)social history and character of the greater region during this transformative period.

In his effort to chronicle the biographical, social, economic, and political dynamics that surrounded Agua Caliente, Vanderwood takes both a traditional and a kind of postmodernist approach. On the one hand, the story is unveiled in standard chronological sequence, from the 1920s to the present. Although clearly a serious academic treatise, the prose is often evocative with close attention to detail and a strong narrative sense of place, time, and character. The fine writing is augmented as well by the inclusion of historical photographs, mostly of the casino and resort (strangely devoid of people in most shots) and of the cast of famous and infamous characters who populate the story.

On the other hand, Vanderwood eschews scholarly convention by failing to identify the study's intent; there is no introductory chapter with stated objectives, no prevailing thesis or argument, not a word on methodology (neither is there a conclusion in the formal sense). He just jumps right in there and begins the story, telling it in an unorthodox fashion, in which the history of Agua Caliente and its bigger-than-life entrepreneurial founders is juxtaposed across twenty-three chapters with a criminal subplot involving gangsters who held up the resort's money car en route to a bank in San Diego, and their subsequent capture, trials, and travails. In so doing, Vanderwood is tacitly acknowledging that an understanding of Agua Caliente cannot be separated from the general culture of vice and criminality that permeated the area and era; it did not emerge in a vacuum, but rather was an expression of, and has come to symbolize, that particular time and place.

There is much to recommend about this work beyond the attributes already identified, including the lavish attention devoted to conveying a sense of the ambience of Agua Caliente as a place: its architecture and design; its nightlife and cuisine; its A-list celebrity guests. In my mind, however, the major contribution of the book rests in its detailed and insightful analysis of the "Border Barons," as Vanderwood labels them—James Crofton, Wirt Bowman, Baron Long, and Abelardo Rodríguez—three Americans, one Mexican. And what a quartet they were! All rich, well connected, driven, corrupt, and fascinating. Reading their stories alone is worth the price of the book. To be sure, this is a volume that is less about place and process than it is about people; it is character-driven from start to finish, and that seems altogether appropriate in this particular case.

But Satan's Playground is not beyond criticism. While some will surely fault its failure to conform to academic protocol, I remain more concerned about context, not temporal but spatial. Specifically, I am disappointed that Vanderwood did not elevate his study into a broader, more comparative, and conceptual framework. Tijuana's...