June 07, 2007
Elaine Carey, Ph.D., discovered her passion for Latin American
history as a student. Pursuing that passion, she traveled to Mexico
on a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship to research her graduate
dissertation on the 1968 Mexican student movement. Today, the St.
John’s associate professor of history remains in love with
contemporary Latin American history, especially that of Mexico and
Central America, and teaches several courses on the subject in St. John’s College of
Arts and Sciences.
In August, Carey will return to Mexico once again, thanks to
winning a second
Fulbright- Garcia Robles grant from the United States
Information Agency. During her nine-month stay, she will conduct
research, primarily at the national archives and its affiliates in
and around Mexico City. While there, she also intends to present
her research at several Mexican institutes of higher learning,
including Iberoamericana, El Colegio de Mexico, the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Autonomous
University of Mexico (Federal District, UAM).
Carey, who also teaches in St. John’s Women’s
and Gender Studies program, applied for the Fulbright-Garcia
Robles award after receiving a contract for a book tentatively
titled, Selling Is More of a Habit than Using: Women and Narcotic
Trafficking, 1900-1970. It’s a topic that has intrigued her since
she became familiar with Mexican literary criticism of U.S. beat
writers. It’s also something she encountered reading the works of
William S. Burroughs, an American writer who frequently used real
people—including a Mexican drug-trafficker named Lola La Chata—in
his stories. In researching this subject, Carey is marrying her
interest in Latin American history to another teaching and research
interest, gender studies.
It was her interest in, and research of, Lola La Chata, “who
controlled the heroin market in Mexico City and who developed a
transnational criminal enterprise,” that acquainted her with “the
abundance of material about Mexican women and drug peddling in a
number of archives and libraries,” Carey relates.
“By the late 1930s and early 1940s, women such as Lola La Chata,
la Nacha, Sadie Stock, and Molly Maria Wendt’s growing successes
brought attention from officials in Mexico, the United States and
Canada,” she wrote in her proposal to the Fulbright organization.
“Their crimes further complicated the narratives of nation,
deviancy, and gender since these women were morally reprehensible
but with tremendously powerful friends.”
Delving further into the topic, Carey researched U. S. Drug
Enforcement Agency files where she learned about other female drug
traffickers with transnational drug syndicates. One in particular,
she discovered, supplied the entire U.S. Pacific Northwest with
Mexican brown heroin. She also learned that both Mexican and
American women were involved in all levels of the drug trade:
“supplying, smuggling and peddling.”
In her book, the St. John’s researcher intends to address how
the women, “who built crime networks and phenomenal wealth” were
“disappeared from the history of narcotics trade.” That
disappearance, she points out, “ensures a continued distortion of
socio-economic realities in Mexico and the United States and the
role of gender, family, and informal economic networks that
continue the illicit trade.”
While in Mexico, Carey will not just be hunkered down amid fusty
tomes in the archives (which happens to be housed in an old 1800s
prison). “As I have in the past, I’ll give various talks to advance
English students at Autonomous University of Hidalgo (UAH),” she
says. She also intends to speak to students in the upper school of
the American School in Pachuca, Hidalgo, a “bedroom community of
Mexico City,” and to high school students at Tecnologico de
Monterrey, Mexico’s MIT, at the campus in Pachuca.
She is also bringing a variety of St. John’s University
materials to distribute to colleagues and potential St. John’s
students.
The Latin America scholar anticipates having a completed
manuscript at the end of her sabbatical, which ends in Fall 2010.
She’s confident it will attract a wide audience. “Because I examine
the connection between narcotic enterprises on both the east and
west coasts and on both sides of the border from 1900 to 1970, it
will appeal to those student and scholars of contemporary United
States and Mexican history. More specifically, this study will
contribute to the growing historiography of gender, family, crime,
law, medicine, society, and transnational studies of North
America.”
For more information on Elaine Carey’s research and interests,
visit her website on Latin American Studies at http://www.researchlatinamerica.info/.