Contrabandista Communities

Download or read book Contrabandista Communities written by George T. Diaz and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contrabandista Communities" is a transnational examination of illicit trade that combines social, economic, and new borderlands approaches. It considers how states regulate and prohibit trade on their borders and how border people subvert state laws through smuggling. The creation of the Rio Grande as an international boundary at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War upset customary trade patterns by placing international regulations on what had once been local commerce. What had traditionally been local trade became subject to high international tariffs. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary taxation, borderlanders on both sides of the river developed a moral economy of illicit trade, or a contrabandista community, which accepted some forms of smuggling as just. This moral economy persisted in the wake of increased policing by the U.S. and Mexican governments in the early twentieth century. Although arms, alcohol, and narcotics traffickers threatened to upset the moral economy of illicit trade by prompting increased state policing, criminal traffickers inadvertently reinforced state tolerance of low level illicit trade by prompting states to concentrate their limited resources combating drug and gun trafficking which posed a greater threat to the state.