The Latina/o Studies Workshop would like to invited you to workshop ToniAnn Treviño's paper titled "Narcotics, Family Networks, and State Imposition of Stigma: Policing the Mexican Community in Texas Through Kinship, 1951-1959" in preparation for her upcoming participation at the Newberry Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies.

Abstract:
This paper investigates how federal and local officials viewed Mexican families as potential threats due to kinship networks that allegedly doubled as criminal affiliations. Although U.S. immigration law often privileges the family unit, 1950s initiatives in immigration and narcotics control intersected to investigate kinship networks in Mexican communities as potential criminal connections. Surveillance over Mexican communities investigated unwieldy Mexican masculinities and femininities in criminal families during a racialized, political moment in which Senator Price Daniel and other federal policymakers advocated for heightened minimum sentencing, increased border policing to decrease the flow of Mexican narcotics and criminals, and heightened INS inspection of Mexican bodies. In the context of the drug wars in America, Texas served as a primary space where federal and local actors experimented with methods to apprehend Mexicans who allegedly violated narcotics laws, as well as to apply punitive measures aimed to reduce Mexican crime flows, due to the state’s large Mexican-heritage population and border with Mexico. This work analyzes Texas Senator Price Daniel’s papers, correspondence between U.S. federal officials and the Mexican consulate, Senate Hearing notes, arrest records, and photographs from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s narcotics raids to consider the ways in which state actors created the image of Mexican criminality. Federal lawmakers framed white addicts as victims when compared to the innate, familial inclinations of Mexican crime and addiction. This research asserts that local law enforcement officers documented the Mexican criminal image through photographs of Mexican families at the center of narcotics operations, and the spatial mapping of criminal Mexican homes in the urban geography.