Today@Sam Article
New Book Explores Myth Of Smuggling
Aug. 20, 2015
SHSU Media Contact: Romney Thomas
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| George Díaz's recent book examines the reality of smuggling contraband across the Texas-Mexico border. During his research, he found that at least one folkloric character existed in real life, and the "character's" story was very different from the myth perpetuated in other media. —Photos by Brian Blalock |
When he was a child, the piles of empty boxes littering the Laredo Walmart parking lot sparked a curiosity in assistant professor of history George Díaz.
“I remember asking my mother about the boxes,” Díaz said. “She told me that they once contained things like shoes, or maybe televisions. People would take those goods out of their boxes and put them in their cars to cross the border and sell them in Mexico.”
The innocence of this smuggling just didn’t match the picture of violence that was associated with the act and reported on the news each night, and it was this disparity that inspired Díaz to unravel the history about border contraband.
For years Díaz conducted interviews and sifted through archives in order to bring the last 100 years of smuggling across the border to light. This research became part of his recently released book, "Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande."
“When I was earning my master’s degree, I remember looking for books about border contraband, a topic that appears in the news nearly constantly; there weren’t any,” Díaz said. “I couldn’t find the book I wanted to read, but I ended up writing it.”
Díaz quickly noticed that there were some major shortcomings to the information he found.
“Mainly, there were newspapers written in English that were supplemented and informed by Texas Ranger memoirs,” Díaz said. “All the information was very one sided. Both the newspapers and the memoirs spoke about Texas Ranger run-ins with the ‘Tequileros,’ or tequila runners, that were so prevalent during the prohibition era in Texas.
“The problem was that all the stories followed the same formula. In every Texas Ranger encounter, they would come across these border smugglers, the smugglers would supposedly initiate violence, and the officers shot back killing or wounding the suspects.” Strangely the officers, although allegedly shot at first, always escaped unscathed.
Although the stories he was researching were intriguing, the content just didn’t seem to reflect the type of smuggling Díaz had witnessed as a child.
“What was different about that type of smuggling was that although the act of smuggling itself was illegal, the items being ferried across the border weren’t,” Díaz said. “And it occurred to me while researching law enforcement memoirs that this less criminal smuggling was more frequent than tequila trafficking during prohibition, and the later drug trade.”
Because of the lack of accounts from the smugglers’ points of view, he turned to folklore in which he found embedded bits of reality.
“One of my classmates mentioned to me the tradition of folk songs and border ballads,” Díaz said. “One of these folk songs mentions a man named Leandro, and as it turned out, his sister still lived in Zapata.
“She was in her 90s, but she remembered when her brother was killed in 1922,” Díaz said. “She told me the story that had been mentioned in the song, of how her brother had been sick and hadn’t wanted to join his friends on the tequila smuggling mission, but he needed the money to support his family. Unfortunately, he and his counterparts were intercepted and killed by Texas Rangers.”
This story helped Díaz begin balancing the accounts he had researched. He began to see that the stories were one-sided and all from the perspective of law enforcement because during that time race relations were especially poor.
“From her story, I was able to take his date of death and research the newspapers from that time,” Díaz said. “Up to that point, nothing really made sense. There were all these Texas Ranger accounts where the smugglers supposedly shot first, but no ranger was ever hit, even less killed. The smugglers were always killed or arrested and the Texas Rangers were lauded as heroes.
“According to the song and the stories Leandro’s sister was able to tell me, it became more apparent that the smugglers were ambushed by the Texas Rangers and Customs agents,” Díaz said. “The smugglers did their best to avoid violence because it was bad for their business, and really aren’t any accounts of the best smugglers because those were the people who didn’t get caught.”
This breakthrough in his research brought Díaz to the meat of what would become his book, and what he believes is the history to smuggling along the border.
“In the 19th century, countries like the U.S. and Mexico earned their money from tariff revenue; this was before the income tax,” Díaz said. “This made everyday items very expensive, and where it was relatively easy in harbors like New York to enforce the tariffs, it was difficult to properly enforce trade along the border between Texas and Mexico because the entire border was a giant zone of trade.” 
What was once local commerce became international trade, and there was very little incentive for people who crossed items across the border to declare their goods and pay the proper taxes.
“Early smuggling, and much of the smuggling that actually goes on today was really just tax evasion,” Díaz said. “It was mainly done by normal people who were just trying to make a living or survive. The majority of smugglers were not gangsters despite what the media would like to have us believe.”
Around the time the income tax was introduced in the U.S. the Mexican Revolution was well underway, and tensions were mounting due to World War I. Customs agents who once worked as tax men on the border transformed to bona fide border guard.
“The American government was very concerned about revolutionaries and spies,” Díaz said. “U.S. Customs agents tried desperately to stop the movement of prohibited goods, and the focus turned from taxed items to banned ones.
“During that time, items like flour, sugar, gasoline and cloth were also being rationed in the U.S., but people in Mexico who were in need from the revolution were starving and needed to eat. There was a lot of money to be made from smuggling these innocuous items across the border.”
In his book, Díaz wanted to focus on how the perception and reality of smuggling across the border has changed in the past century.
“Of course there was violence involved even in the earliest days of smuggling, but I wanted to shift the focus from spectacular stories of violence, and talk about how common smuggling really is,” Díaz said.
A follow up project with a greater focus on contemporary smuggling might be in the works for Díaz, but for now, he’s content with the story that he’s written.
“This is a story that I’ve loved to write,” Díaz said. “Through it, I’ve learned so much about my home and the U.S.-Mexico border in general.
“It’s amazing to me that even in today’s Internet age, where it seems like all knowledge is instantly available, there’s still a lot that we can learn. There are still books to be written. We hear every day about new discoveries in the areas of science and technology, but there are new historical discoveries to be made as well, and that’s really exciting.”
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