Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime by Elaine Carey (review)

Elaine Carey’s Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime is a powerful, comprehensive, and historically complex study of diverse salient roles women played in the flow of drugs to the United States from Latin America. The author critically addresses various historical events – e.g., drug trafficking in various decades, President Reagan’s war on drugs and antidrug campaigns, as well as the specificities of U.S-Mexico border relationships, among numerous others – from an intersectional perspective. In other words, in addition to providing a comprehensive report on numerous historical events related to drug trafficking, she focuses on the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and class in the social construction and performative execution of the organized crime.

From a historical perspective, Carey has produced an intensely informed and profoundly analyzed piece, from her critical review of the literature in the field, to her detailed archival work, enriched by data from multiple institutional sources, as well as numerous scholars, librarians, archivists, journalists, filmmakers, museum curators, and former police/law enforcement officers. Geo-politically, this virtual scholarly journey includes a significant part of the Americas: the Unites States, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and Canada. The author’s specific focus on the role of women in the history of drugs makes the book especially captivating and innovative due to the fact that historically, drug culture has been commonly considered and conceptualized as men’s social milieu, women being typically either underrepresented or generally understudies in the field. That is why the author’s rigorous travel across borders for the sake of data collection – in order to uncover women’s diverse business models with maximum sensitivity and anonymity – has greatly benefited the piece.

The business models of women drug traffickers are truly remarkable. The author provides the reader with a nuanced understanding of historically- and culturally-specific features of certain business categories, and simultaneously explains sociopolitical and psychological incentives for women to pursue salient – if not leading – roles in risky organized crime. Carey’s suggested models include mules, smugglers, bootleggers, peddlers, addicts, lovers, the so-called “notorious women,” “white ladies,” and “women who made it snow.” The author’s tropes and metaphors describe each particular case, always profoundly historicized and at the same time always brought to life with a captivating story, as well as the corresponding archival photographs and media coverage and visual representation, when available. The reader is naturally immersed into the corresponding narratives in all their complexities and – even more importantly – without judgment.

The book consists of five chapters, preceded by a captivating introduction and followed by a thought-provoking conclusion. The introduction is a particularly strong piece that sets the tone of the book and emphasizes the author’s deliberate deviation from a traditional “good versus evil” binary as a common framework to address the drug trade. Not only does Carey offer multiple perspectives – she also addresses the phenomenon of fluidity of narcoculture, and the inseparability of narco-narratives from the transgression of border crossing, convoluted rhetoric of immigration, shifting narratives of nationhood, and class-related marginality and xenophobia.

The first chapter of the book focuses on the emergence of a particular transnational discourse of “vice” and its interweaving with race, gender, modernity, and moral degeneration in North America. She problematizes the phenomenon of the race (la raza) in specifically Mexican-American cultural context and draws attention to representation of the Other in the realm of drug trafficking. The second chapter is dedicated to the illicit drug trade in Mexico in 1910s-1930s. It addresses performative and economic aspects of smuggling with all their historical and political controversies. The striking peculiarity of this chapter is its economic twist and conceptualization of the shifting terrains of drug trafficking as premises for economic opportunities and thus, consequently, class travel. The correlation between gender and social class in the narcoculture of the Americas is the focus of the third chapter of the book, dedicated to Lola la Chata, known as the...