"Contrabandista Communities:
States and Smugglers along the Lower Rio Grande Borderlands, 1849-1982

Díaz’s dissertation examines the evolution and persistence of illicit trade along the lower Rio Grande borderlands from its creation as an international boundary to the current era of persistent drug smuggling.  Although nightly news reports and popular culture fill viewers with the image of the U.S./Mexico border as a place of smuggling related violence, the history of illicit trade along the border remains under-examined and poorly understood.  Díaz sheds light on this phenomenon by examining how U.S. and Mexican national laws inadvertently pushed illegal activities to the border and made many aspects of everyday trade illicit by placing international regulations on what had once been local commerce.  Despite what federal laws said, border people formed their own ethics of what was and was not illicit trade.   The dissertation focuses on how border people negotiated local ethics on smuggling with U.S. and Mexican international law.  Moreover, Díaz furthers the concept of the borderlands as a “fugitive landscape” of illusive state control by taking the historiographic approach well into the twentieth century. 

For more information about George Díaz, click here.