Trying to Make It: The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade

By Rajeev V. Gundur

Trying to Make It is R. V. Gundur's journey from the US-Mexico border to America's heartland, from America's prisons to its streets, in search of the true story of the drug trade and the people who participate in it. The book begins in the Paso del Norte area, encompassing the sister cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, which has been in the public eye as calls for securing the border persist. From there, it moves on to Phoenix, which was infamously associated with the drug trade through a series of kidnappings. Finally, the book goes on to Chicago, which has been a lightning rod of criticism for its gangs and violence.

Gundur highlights the similarities and differences that exist in the American drug trade within the three sites and how they relate to current drug trade narratives in the US. At each stop, the reader is transported to the city's historical and contemporary contexts of the drug trade and introduced to the individuals who have lived them. Drug retailers, street and prison gang members, wholesalers, and the law enforcement personnel who try to stop them offer readers a comprehensive look at how various illicit enterprises work together to supply the drugs that American users demand.

Most importantly, through a combination of macro- and microlevel vantage points, and comparative analysis of three key sites in illicit drug operations, the stories in Trying to Make It remind us that the people involved in the drug trade, for the most part, do not deserve vilification. Far from being a seemingly uniform, widespread threat or an unlimited array of bogeymen and women, they are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, just trying to make it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501764493

Book preview

Cover: Trying To Make It, The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade by R. V. Gundur

TRYING TO MAKE IT

The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade

R. V. Gundur

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Vishwanath, Josephine, Juan el Bueno, and José

Some people deserve to be in prison; but we were never that mean.

—Interview with Bruce, a member of Barrio Azteca, March 2014

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. Home

2. The Southern Border

3. Immigration Court

4. The Santa Fe Street Bridge

5. Business as Usual

6. Father and Son

7. La Carrucha

8. Violence

9. The Street

10. The Oasis

11. Gangs of the Valley

12. Adelita and Calista

13. A Fear of Corners

14. Connections

15. The City by the Lake

16. Gangland

17. Catching Cases

18. Logistics

19. Responding to the Drug Trade

20. Trainspotting

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

What follows is a story of the banalities of the drug trade in America and the struggles many of the people involved face. The story is the result of my observations, court documents, and interviews with 129 people. These people included law enforcement, professionals who worked with marginalized communities, residents of those communities, and current and former participants in the drug trade.

Many of the names of the respondents have been changed to grant them anonymity. Sometimes respondents picked their pseudonyms, but when they elected not to do so I assigned them a name of my own choosing. All people who are presented mononymously have been given pseudonyms. No composite characters appear; each person described is a unique, real individual. All the firsthand events described within did occur; however, the events I observed did not necessarily occur in the order presented. I have done my best to validate the historical events recounted by respondents to ensure accuracy of the claims.

The quotations within this text are either the direct words from recordings with respondents, taken always with their full consent and knowledge, or, in cases where I could not record, reconstructions of conversations from notes written during or made shortly after the events occurred. Recordings were transcribed intelligently, meaning that tics, pauses, and filler phrases were excluded. I have edited some quotes to clarify pronouns and to omit repetition. Where the respondents spoke in dialect, I have kept their speech true to what they said, with most explanations of slang and translations in the notes. The quotations selected are often representative of what other respondents expressed. I have also endeavored to include as wide an array of respondent views as possible. Translations from Spanish to English are mine, as are any errors within the text.

A brief explanation about the terms used to refer to groups that traffic drugs as well as different types of gangs is necessary. The language used to describe these groups varies considerably among law enforcement practitioners, the news media, and the members of such groups. In this text I use a mix of official and colloquial terms, particularly when the latter provides a sense of nuance that the former does not.

Finally, I realize that some readers will bring their own predispositions to the table and flatly reject some or all that I have to say. And I realize that other readers will argue that I have understated, overstated, or misrepresented the problems explored within this work. My goal has been to minimize my own prejudice so that the individuals I interviewed can read what I have written and say that I have understood the kernel of what they were telling me. I did not expect many of the stories within and what I learned often challenged the perspectives I held before conducting my study. I have great respect for the people who kindly gave me their time and their experiences. I have done my best to represent them accurately.

Acknowledgments

Many people made this book possible, and I thank each of them. First and foremost, there were the people who participated in my research. Without their willingness and honesty, I could not have written this book. I’m grateful to the people who have believed in me as a scholar: Maureen Shea and Jimmy Huck at Tulane University, Paul Keal and Andrew Phillips at the Australian National University, and Martin Innes and Michael Levi at Cardiff University. Martin Innes gave me the opportunity of a lifetime when he helped me develop this topic and apply for the Economic and Social Research Council studentship at Cardiff University.

The Economic and Social Research Council paid my fees and funded a generous travel grant, without which I could not have undertaken the research for this book. The late Tom Horlick-Jones helped me through the ethics approval and made sure that I thought about my own safety. Michelle Valencia and Shaun Bauer proofread my Spanish documents so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.

During my fieldwork, I was hosted by many people through Couchsurfing. Octavio, Chuckie, Chris, Laney, Lulu, and Gina helped me adjust quickly to each new place and provided me with a great wealth of local insight. In El Paso, several people helped me hit the ground running. Sandra Garabano, then the director for the Center for Inter-American Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, provided me with a wonderful workspace where I interviewed many of my respondents. Brad Larkin opened his house to me when I needed a change of scenery. Charles Bowden, who died way too soon, plugged me into a network of well-informed individuals, including Bill Conroy, José Raulio Fierro Rivera, and Molly Molloy. And Marcus Felson provided great advice on how to proceed and complete this book.

I was equally fortunate in Juárez. Leobardo Alvarado and Cesar Olivas at the Universidad Autónoma Ciudad Juárez provided me with excellent connections, a sense of safety, and help in finding transcriptionists who did a fantastic job transcribing my notes.

In Phoenix at the Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Cassia Spohn facilitated my stay, and the administrative staff, Linda Bork and Shannon Stewart, made things easy. Scott Decker provided me with invaluable connections including Jeffeory Hynes and Natividad Mendoza, who introduced me to many of my respondents. My many colleagues at Arizona State University made going into the office a pleasure. Mario Cano made me feel welcome from the start, and Rick Moule Jr. challenged me intellectually and supported me after I was burglarized. Many friends—Daniel Alati, Katie Dunn, Molly Arenberg, and Steve Jennings—helped to get me on my feet after that incident.

Mark Coburn put me up in Denver, which allowed me to visit the courts there. José Rivera and his family hosted me for a brief visit in Nebraska, where José provided me with invaluable insight into the birth of Barrio Azteca.

Back in Illinois, I could not have been successful without assistance from David Olson and Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and from Mike Vecchio, who welcomed me to the department. Wesley Skogan and Guadalupe Cruz introduced me to the Violence Interrupters. And Gulnaz Gulu Saiyed and Neema Nazem hosted me in Chicago as I finished my study.

I thank Jim Lance for believing in my book and giving me the opportunity to present my work to a wider audience. I thank those who helped me get to the end: Adriana Chavez for research assistance, Florence Lourme for designing the figures, Denise MacLeod for providing editorial assistance, and Kate Mertes for doing the index. I thank the professionals who helped deliver the book in its final form: Clare Jones and Mary Kate Murphy at Cornell University Press, and Michelle Scott, Kate Gibson, and their team at Westchester Publishing Services. I especially thank Nicola Cockburn for providing feedback on my alt text.

Finally, I thank the people who have read my work, engaged with it, and made it infinitely more readable and accessible: Maya P. Barak, Derek Dalton, Tom Hall, Mark Halsey, Travis K. Henry, Martin Innes, Timothy Lauger, and Michael Levi. A special thanks to those who read complete drafts: William J. Clark, Isobel Scavetta, and the three anonymous reviewers.

Abbreviations

1

HOME

He was named Vishwanath. Wish. Wa. Nut. But it was a name too hard for Westerners. He let people call him whatever made them comfortable. So, his colleagues called him Vish. His patients called him Doc. I called him Dad.

Behind the name was a man who had been on both sides, sometimes simultaneously, of a thin line: on one side, Dad was the professional, a psychiatrist who specialized in addiction, and on the other side, he was the patient, a man who struggled with depression and addiction. Like so many in America—immigrant and citizen alike—he was simply trying to make it. He went to work, put in long hours, and did his best to provide. And he chased success, the quintessential but elusive element of the American dream.

When the pressures Dad faced were too much to bear, he drank. A lot. Sometimes, he put down an entire handle in a sitting.¹ Scotch was his favorite, but bourbon would do. And at times it was vodka, which he carried with him in water bottles. He kept working for years before he was finally caught drinking on the job. But his downfall wasn’t his own doing. At least, that’s what he told himself. It was the woman who reported him. Without her, he could have gone on functioning. Without her, he could have kept pursuing his dreams.

Dad was a respected doctor, and his patients loved him. Drunk, sober, it didn’t matter. He could motivate some of them to do the things he himself struggled to do: be honest with themselves, confront their demons, get it together. His work put him in the middle of a world of substance abuse that ran parallel to his own. For most of his career, he saw patients from rural America who struggled with drug misuse. His patients came from all around the country and from all walks of life. Some abused amphetamines made from ingredients available locally. Others abused opioids made overseas, bought from pharmacists or pushers.

Both pharmacists and pushers—if we’re honest—are in the same line of business. They exist on a spectrum of enterprise in which one vendor is legally sanctioned while the other is not.² Both pharmacist and pusher are sellers of mind- and body-altering products that travel along supply chains across the globe. Consumers buy from whichever retailer they can access. The transaction is a simple, banal process that features in the lives of everyday people, including those who button up their starched shirts to go to an office, those who lace up their steel-capped boots to go to a building site, and those who tie the drawstrings on their name-brand sweatpants to go to a college seminar room.

Across campus, the name of a young woman was on everybody’s lips. She had always been popular but now she had suddenly become famous. She wasn’t there, however, to enjoy her moment of fame; fresh to death, her warmth had departed this world. A sophomore in college, she had just turned twenty. The chatter echoed through the quads. Her friends remembered her laugh, her beauty, her spirit. Those who didn’t know her just knew she had taken too much Oxy.³ It was an accident. She came from a good family and had a bright future. God, no, she wasn’t an addict. She wasn’t meant to die so young. It was so very sad.

Then the talk stopped as quickly as it had begun. Everyday students went back to their everyday lives. Some kept using, just as she had done, and most went on to graduate. But even as her name faded from memory, her experience echoed in obituaries throughout the country as America grappled with her story, repeated by others just like her, tens of thousands of times over: ephemeral faces in fleeting spotlights.⁴

And there were the tens of thousands, now long forgotten, who had died before her. They’re the ones who had perished in the shadows of dilapidated apartments or on cold streets in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Baltimore, far from the dormitory where she had died, surrounded by warm, green grass and a future worth living.

Optics make the public care, worry, and demand action.⁵ But the dominant images of the drug trade have long depicted it and the people involved with it as members of a nefarious underworld far from the lives of decent people, such as the folks I grew up with among the corn and soybean fields of middle America.

When I was growing up in 1990s Springfield, a small city of about 120,000 people in central Illinois, drugs and gangs were things I saw mostly on TV or heard about on the radio. Television dramas painted these issues in stark terms, and sometimes the anchors on the WGN-Chicago news would cover stories of violence in the Windy City. Occasionally, my hometown news would cover the presence of drugs in central Illinois when a sporadic meth lab was busted. One story in particular made headlines: some people from one of the rural towns nearby tried to steal anhydrous ammonia from a tank in a farmer’s field.⁶ Their goal was to make crank, a homemade amphetamine that is less pure than crystal meth, but they burned themselves badly in the botched attempt to procure the ammonia and ended up in the hospital. These bungling idiots were a far cry from the slick and organized drug lords of Hollywood dramas. But less clumsy people, otherwise like them, helped keep a number of folks in rural America high.⁷ As a result, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, meth use grew twofold in Illinois before plateauing.⁸

Despite the demand, meth production in central and southern Illinois is largely a homemade affair, outside the control of the notorious drug cartels. The optic that features the Brown faces of violent Mexicans and, before them, malevolent Colombians, which continues to be among the principal images that define the villains of the drug trade, couldn’t be further from the truth. Unseen are the contemporary largely White, small-scale Illinois meth producers who mostly barter their goods not to get rich but instead to feed their habits.⁹ But even so, as it was during my childhood, now those problems were concentrated in the rural counties, hidden from my community, invisible from our consciousness.

Nevertheless, as a boy I was constantly reminded of the dangers of drugs. As was the experience of many schoolchildren throughout the United States, a local police officer periodically visited my grade school classroom to deliver the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program.¹⁰ He reminded us to resist those naughty peers who might tempt us with drugs, nicotine, and alcohol. The D.A.R.E. officer told us of the harm those substances would do to our bodies and our minds. He showed us videos that warned of the shadowy dealers who would offer these forbidden fruits destined to turn their users into tragic figures destroyed by addiction. The message was clear and unambiguous: drugs were bad, and to use them was unequivocally stupid. As I grew up I knew some kids who smoked weed, obtained from an older sibling, or took Ritalin, scored from kids with ADHD.¹¹ The images of disfigured methamphetamine users and emaciated heroin addicts had no tangible touchstones in my lived experience.

Central Illinois was, of course, no drug-free utopia. There were people who used and abused drugs of all types; my father’s work was evidence of their existence and their need for support. Yet in my neighborhood, people whose lives had been affected by drugs hardly ever talked about their experiences and the impact drugs had on them or their families. Sometimes, there was gossip: a neighbor’s son overdosed on heroin; a local lawyer lost his license for buying cocaine. But the stigma of addiction meant that most people kept those issues as private as possible, since neither help nor empathy was forthcoming. Though drugs existed in small-town America where I lived, the street corner hustle, selling nickel and dime bags to make a buck, evoked in Biggie’s Ten Crack Commandments, Prince Paul’s A Prince among Thieves, and Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury, and the wholesale drug trade, selling kilos to make a million, portrayed by Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, and Denzel Washington in, respectively, Scarface, Blow, and American Gangster, were not part of my youth experience.

In fact, the first time I saw the ’hood was in the spring of 2001. My father was looking for a new job and had interviews far from Springfield. His driver’s license had been suspended, and as a newly minted driver I offered to drive him to his interviews. The first was in East St. Louis, Illinois. All that I knew about the place was that it was impoverished and violent.

After I dropped my dad off at the hospital for his interview, I noticed that the needle on my fuel gauge was pointing to empty. So, I started looking for a gas station. When I went to fill up, there was no credit card reader on the pump—a first for me—so I figured I could just pump my gas and then pay the clerk. I put the nozzle into my fuel tank, selected the fuel grade, and squeezed the handle. Nothing happened. Thinking the pump was broken, I pulled the car around the other side and tried again. Once more, nothing happened. I went inside the gas station to ask the clerk, who was sitting behind a plexiglass window, what was wrong and, if the pump was broken, where the closest gas station would be. Package liquor and cigarettes featured prominently behind and around her.

You ain’t from around here, huh baby? asked the clerk, a bubbly Black woman in her twenties.

No, I’m from Springfield.

What brings you here? she asked me, raising an eyebrow. She seemed surprised that a teenager from upstate was in her gas station.

My dad has an interview at the hospital, and I brought him down. I just wanted to fill up the tank. I tried to, but the gas wouldn’t pump.

"You got to pay first. Then you pump your gas. How much do you want to put in?"

I don’t know; I really wanted to fill it up for the drive home. What do you think? Twenty-five? I had absolutely no idea how much a full tank would cost.

With my twenty-five dollars spent, I checked the fuel gauge again. The tank wasn’t full, but there was enough gas to get home.

With the interview over, my dad and the hospital administrator came out to meet me. I asked the administrator about the violence in East St. Louis. The tales of shootings were all that I knew about the place.

It’s gotten a lot better recently. We’re down to one shooting victim a week. When I got here a few years ago, we had at least one almost every day.

My dad’s second interview was at the state prison in Gary, Indiana, another of the most violent cities in the country. Like East St. Louis, all I knew about Gary was that it was violent and that Michael Jackson was from there. The trip took us past Chicago. On the way home, my dad fell asleep. I had never driven from Gary to Springfield, and with no map or GPS (this was before the ubiquitous presence of smartphones), I was relying on him for directions. I took a wrong exit and ended up driving into the south side of Chicago. It was run-down, and I knew I was in the wrong place. My dad woke up as I stopped for a red light. He looked around and asked me, somewhat panicked, where we were. I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure how to go back.

Why don’t I just pull over and ask for directions, I naively suggested as dusk fell.

No, son. Don’t pull over here. It’s not safe. Just keep going, my dad said, clearly alarmed at the part of town we were in. We eventually hit a street that my father was familiar with and got back on the road home. Like many people who had never been to these communities, my dad viewed them as unequivocally dangerous.

Thirteen years later during another cold and icy winter, I again found myself in parts of Chicago where my father would have been uncomfortable. This time I meant to be there. Chicago was the final stop of my journey that had begun at the Mexican border. It was a journey that started with a desire to learn about how the drug trade worked within the communities that had been demonized by the media. The danger of drugs and the drug trade were topics that had colored my entire life, as officials panicked and spun a narrative to criminalize drugs and protect the public against this violent and pervasive threat.

Indeed, that narrative predated my lifetime and even my parents’ lifetimes. The criminalization of recreational drugs accelerated during the 1930s when Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reported on the harms of marijuana.¹² Subsequently, criminalization of marijuana and certain other mind-altering substances escalated with President Richard Nixon’s declaration of the infamous war on drugs in 1971. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan reemphasized the government’s commitment to the war on drugs, and with this began the antidrug campaigns that came to define drug use as an unmistakable evil in the public consciousness, with one of the most memorable campaigns being First Lady Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No initiative.¹³ The prohibitionist position adopted and universalized by the war on drugs has been the driving force behind most of the drug rhetoric in the United States. Prohibitionists often characterize the drug trade for the American public in a simple, unnuanced way: drugs and the people who sell and use them are bad.¹⁴

Since Nixon’s declaration of a war on drugs, in the United States alone the federal and state governments have spent a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) and counting in a fruitless attempt to win that war.¹⁵ All of this expenditure occurred while opium was being smuggled within Southeast Asia on the Central Intelligence Agency’s airline Air America and onto American shores upon military aircraft in the 1970s.¹⁶ Then in the 1980s the US government, notoriously led by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, armed the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua who, in turn, trafficked Colombian cocaine, supplied by Pablo Escobar’s infamous Medellín Cartel, to the United States.¹⁷ Moreover, US government support extended to propping up Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who likewise trafficked cocaine from Medellín.¹⁸ These images have been brought to the fore of the public consciousness time and again on television and in the movies.

A snow-swept road cuts through the flat plains of central Illinois. There is a car in the distance; the landscape is bleak.

FIGURE 1. Winter in central Illinois.

Photo by R. V. Gundur.

Less visible are the works of investigative journalists, such as Gary Webb, Charles Bowden, and Bill Conroy, who shed light on the hypocrisy of the government’s rhetoric in light of its actions vis-à-vis the war on drugs.¹⁹ Their reporting has been often obscured by the dominant narrative that the mainstream press presents, a narrative in which out-of-control users and evil dealers are juxtaposed against the brave souls who fight against the scourge of drugs to protect the innocent.²⁰ Policymakers, in turn, use such coverage to justify the domestic policies that have contributed to the burgeoning incarceration rate in the United States, particularly of people of color.²¹

The focus on illegal drugs and the people who buy and sell them is not just domestic, given that the provenance of most illegal drugs is outside the United States. The Colombian bogeymen of the 1980s slowly gave way to Mexican drug trafficking organizations—colloquially known as cartels—in the 1990s.²² Various media outlets have claimed that Mexican drug trafficking organizations flood the United States with heroin and fentanyl (among a litany of other drugs), leading to the epidemic of opioid abuse that the country has witnessed since the 2010s, while expanding their organizational apparatus into the United States and taking control of the local drug markets, resulting in violence.²³ Although heroin’s devastating effects on American communities are not new, the violence associated with its wholesale trade is not and never has been significant in the United States. There is no foreign invasion of large organized criminal groups waging guerrilla war to control US retail drug markets. The public discourse insists on naming bigger-than-life villains, and foreign drug cartels fit the bill perfectly, despite a truth running counter to that narrative.

Perhaps the most notorious drug trafficking organization of the early part of the twenty-first century has been the Sinaloa Federation, the organization once led by Joaquín Archivaldo El Chapo Guzmán Loera whose net worth was once reported by Forbes to be over US$1 billion.²⁴ Prior to Guzmán’s 2016 arrest and extradition to the United States, law enforcement at several levels primarily blamed the Sinaloa Federation for much of the US drug trade.²⁵ It was a singular focus despite the presence of several drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, where, starting in 2008, competition resulted in years of heavy bloodshed.²⁶ Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has consistently shown that there are several Mexican drug trafficking organizations supplying the various drug markets in the United States and that the cartels that supply different cities and states have not been the same over time.²⁷

The public discourse reflects how conversational entrepreneurs: politicians, talking heads, community leaders, and other public figures, frame problems and propose solutions. In this context, the drug trade is defined by images of violent drug cartels, unauthorized immigrants, gang members, and drug traffickers, who are all agents of the drug trade, working to control the drug markets of various US cities and are destroying innocent American lives. While Mexico has undoubtedly suffered widespread drug-related violence, there is little evidence to indicate that such violence is common in the United States or that Mexican drug trafficking organizations control spaces by using violence to maintain their presence in US drug marketplaces.

Nonetheless, when I started this project in 2012, many American politicians and commentators—particularly those who didn’t live near the US-Mexican border—seemed alarmed that some of the safest cities in the United States were only a bridge crossing or a pedestrian checkpoint away from cities plagued by the worst of Mexico’s violence. There was fear that a border city such as El Paso, Texas, could fall into chaos, since only a bridge separated it from Juárez, Chihuahua. At the time, Juárez was one of the most violent cities in the world. The drug-related violence, characterized by beheadings and other grisly acts, shocked viewers globally.²⁸ Policymakers and politicians publicly worried that the narco violence would spill over and that the casualties suffered in Mexico would soon become commonplace in the United States.²⁹ That never happened.

Those worries were founded in a set of images taken from analysts who all too often looked down at the violence of Mexico from a perch far away. That view from above obscured the everyday existence of the drug trade in America, ignoring the people and the enterprises that underwrite it. What follows is a history from below, constructed from conversations with people who have participated in, policed, or simply been around the drug trade.³⁰ This is a history drawn from the voices of people in Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Phoenix, and Chicago, places that have featured in the optics of the drug trade.

Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s sister city, was a place where drug cartels fought each other for prime point of access to the American market. It was a place where thousands of people had been reported shot, victims of drug trade–related violence. Juárez had one of the highest murder rates in the world at that time. El Paso was on the other side of the border. And although it was a place where large quantities of illicit drugs passed through, El Paso was conspicuously absent of violence.

Phoenix, the largest city in Arizona, had made the news as a place where drug traffickers were supposedly breaking into people’s homes, tying them up, and robbing them—a narrative that was later disproven. Nonetheless, Phoenix had also become the epicenter of a political discourse that focused on unauthorized immigrants, associating them with criminality.³¹

And Chicago was Chicago. A place that for the past century has been a social laboratory. A place with a long-standing history of drugs and gangs that sell them. A place where violence is conducted by those gangs to the point that it attracts national attention.

My journey through these communities, separated by hundreds of miles but united by the public scrutiny of their roles in the drug trade, provided me with a better understanding of the drug trade in the United States and the knowledge that informs this book. It was a journey that had certain obstacles. I was not from nor had I ever lived in any of these cities. And I didn’t have the time (or the money) to develop the relationships and confianza—trust—necessary to conduct the long-term, embedded ethnographic studies that other researchers had undertaken.³² Nonetheless, I did my best to blend into each community as quickly as possible, to give myself a chance to get to know the communities that had often been demonized by the optics of the drug trade and build relationships with people who knew how the drug trade impacted those communities and could provide an account uncolored by the sensationalism needed to sell a story.

In each location, I visited the low-income neighborhoods that the press and sometimes local authorities identified as problematic; the immigration courts, given the narratives surrounding the criminality of unauthorized immigrants; and the spaces that the people I interviewed felt were important to the drug trade either at that time or historically. I spoke with members of the community, law enforcement, and academics who could help me, an undertaking that produced limited but helpful contacts that gave me access to journalists, members of law enforcement, field-workers, and community leaders who helped me understand the communities and the issues from a straightforward, even-keel, local perspective. But I wanted to go beyond these contacts and meet people who had been involved, so I did what a lot of Millennials who are looking for stuff do: I placed ads on Craigslist.³³

The ads were bilingual, given that when I first placed them I was in El Paso, where I heard Spanish everywhere I went. The ads solicited people who had been convicted of crimes related to the drug trade. People started calling a few hours after I posted the initial ad. But after a couple of days the calls stopped, so I placed another ad. I did this in each place, and I found people who, at some point in their lives, had been involved with the drug trade. The forty people who responded to the ads included former drug users who had crossed into Juárez to score dope directly from shooting galleries and individuals who identified themselves as either current or former prison gang members.³⁴ I was able to substantiate people’s stories from the gang tattoos they showed me; the track marks on their arms, indicating intravenous drug use; or the intimate knowledge of the operations of gang or prison life that was remarkably consistent, thereby allowing me to develop confidence in the narratives that I heard.

But why would anyone want to talk to me? By listening, I gave people an opportunity to be heard or, as many said, an opportunity to contribute to society in a positive way. Many of my respondents wanted me to know what was true and what was not. Much like the people whom anthropologist Philippe Bourgois encountered in Spanish Harlem, my respondents would remind me, You know, twenty dollars ain’t shit. I’m doing this to help you out, man, because somebody needs to be doing what you’re doing.³⁵

These vivid conversations transported me to their lived experiences. I didn’t need to see my respondents in their native environment. I treated the people I studied who shared their knowledge of the drug trade with me as my equals and received them as my guests. With that approach we were comfortable with each other, and they spoke openly as I listened. One respondent named Breeze, a man in his early fifties, told me that he had been interviewed once back in the 1980s while he was incarcerated by someone interested in prisons and drugs. That guy was a real jerk. It seemed like his mind was already made up, that prisoners couldn’t be fixed. His questions were real pointed. He wasn’t at all like you. You just sit and listen to what I have to say. It’s real open here.

Various people had told me to never trust gang members. They exaggerate everything, one gang intelligence officer offered as I attended a capital murder trial of a Barrio Azteca gang member.³⁶ I heard this advice again from José Rivera, the man who founded the Barrio Azteca prison gang. Nonetheless, I seldom felt as if I was being spun a tall tale, particularly by those who had any time behind them. Mature gang members and former gang members were not boisterous and fanciful. Many respondents pointed out where others might exaggerate their claims, referred to the fantastical portrayals of gang life in popular media, and presented their actions in undramatic, matter-of-fact ways.

Some might suspect that the respondents were engaging in impression management, that they presented their histories in such a way as to make themselves appear favorably, but this notion should be dispelled given the degree of self-reflection that my respondents with criminal histories often expressed in tandem with their accounts of prison life or roles in the drug trade.³⁷ Moreover, I was a nobody to them. They had little to gain by impressing me; my respondents did not likely believe that I could garner them an audience or further their ambitions, be it a signal to competitors or a story to impress the general public. With me, respondents expressed the evolution of their views and behaviors toward prison and criminal life. And where the drug trade was concerned, respondents contextualized their accounts, pointing out and detailing why fantastic accounts as portrayed in the media were unrealistic or implausible, an experience consistent with sociologist Rebecca Trammell’s interviews with former prisoners.³⁸ Such context helped to create a relative sense of what actors in these communities deemed to be serious.

Furthermore, drawing on the expertise of my transcriptionists, I am confident that I was successful in getting respondents to be comfortable and to be mostly truthful. Two women transcribed my interviews: Lois, who transcribes for police departments throughout the United States, particularly ones in California that deal with gang issues, and Ruby, who worked in a police department following her conviction and incarceration for selling crack cocaine. Lois remarked that she felt that the cops were as straight with you as they could be within the limits of what they could share, even anonymously.

Lois further remarked that when I was interviewing cops, even the ones who were the most defensive with me at the start of an interview, I saw what I always see. The cops make you fight for their trust at the beginning. That’s normal. As you went on with the interviews, the trust level got deeper. I felt they were honest with you; you know, as a transcriptionist, we hear so many tapes. You definitely hear some recordings where you just feel like the speaker isn’t telling the truth. Ruby would often note in the transcripts that the content rang true based on her experiences in the drug world and that most, though not all, of the events described seemed to be within the realm of possibility.

My experiences with the online respondents, coupled with my increasing familiarity with each place over time, quickly gave me the confidence I needed to venture off into the communities I was studying. I learned how to occupy space inconspicuously and engage the denizens of those spaces without making them uncomfortable with me. By managing my role in a new space properly, by appearing as if I belonged, I was able to take advantage of spontaneous opportunities. This gonzo research emerged from pure luck and was not systematically cultivated; nevertheless, it depended on my being immersed and engaged in the communities that feature in this book.³⁹

These principles proved useful in both formal and informal spaces. For instance, I gained atypical access to members of immigration and criminal courts. During my time in the Southwest, I attended several immigration court hearings and the murder trial of a Barrio Azteca gang member. By showing up and becoming part of the fabric, I could speak to lawyers, judges, court clerks, journalists, and others in the court setting. I also learned from people who were part of my normal routine: my neighbors and members of the community. These spontaneous conversations allowed me to visualize the world that many had told me about. They put faces onto people and facades onto buildings, setting the scenes in the stories that my respondents recounted to me and indicating what was plausible and what was not. Sometimes, these opportunities presented insights that I never would have been able to get had I been looking.

Hanging out at the Tap, an El Paso institution, and striking up a conversation with a guy who was enjoying his last night out before beginning a prison sentence resulted in my learning about the margins of the drug trade and the role of prison gangs in the eastern part of Texas. On another occasion, accepting my participants’ invitations to ride along and see what they considered the real side of what I was studying took me around El Paso and helped me understand the paucity of overt gang activity. In Juárez, even within the limits I placed on myself, opportunities presented themselves, and I ended up in shooting galleries and brothels.

Phoenix gave me the chance to participate directly in the lives of former gang members. Initially, my contact was skeptical of my work but was swayed to give me access when I offered something he needed more than money: my skills as a teacher. Next thing I knew, I was teaching basic job skills to people who were associated with gangs. When a student’s brother was murdered, helping the family raise money through the funeral car wash gained me credibility within the community. Open ears allowed me to learn about different players in the principal gang and to conduct better interviews later. In Chicago, an unexpected invitation by a member of the Violence Interrupters—a team of former gang members who work within the community to stop gang retaliations—to shadow him as he went about his job granted me access to several people who played different roles within their street gang.

This gonzo research exposed me to knowledge that I never imagined I would access and allowed me to meet several marginal and integral people of the drug economy and learn how that economy is socially organized. The lessons were many, but one constant was present: the drug trade that existed in El Paso, Phoenix, and Chicago was part of an unremarkable, everyday existence and had little to do with the salacious portrayals associated with the people and organizations most often held responsible for the presence of illicit drugs in America. There is no archetypical person who sells or traffics drugs, just as there is no archetypical person who buys and uses drugs. There were no illicit corporations controlling the drug trade throughout the United States and dictating the retail trade. For most people involved in the drug trade, it is a small business that functions like many others: people buy and sell products in search of income or pleasure. Most are ordinary folks just trying to make it from one day to the next.

2

THE SOUTHERN BORDER

A day after leaving Springfield in the red pickup, I found myself cruising down the highway, westbound past Dallas and then through the vast emptiness of Texas. Daylight illuminated the unending plains and oil fields that the highway cut through. It wasn’t my first time in the state—I was born there—but I left as an infant and only returned for brief visits. As I drove south