Chicanonautica: Flying Across the Border, 1928-Style

by Ernest Hogan

In this era of the vanishing bookstore, I find a lot of books in antique stores. That’s where the title Rex Lee On the Border Patrol snagged my eyeballs. I yanked it off the shelf, eager to check out the cover, and was surprised. Instead of the six-guns and somberos pulp art there was a twisted view of a smoking World War One biplane and a guy falling to certain death.

Confused, I turned to the front flap of dust jacket:

“Framed” by Dave Fitzpatrick, the powerful and notorious Texas border criminal, Rex Lee faces disgrace. A quantity of opium, “planted” by Fitzpatrick, has been found in the ship of the intrepid young flyer, and he is accused of being a smuggler. But, Rex’s father is a power in Texas politics and soon strong influence are at work to bear Fitzpatrick and prove the air hero’s innocence.

The book's hooks dug into my curiosity. Copyright date was 1928. And the frontispiece was more like I was expecting: a scene of stiff figures and awkward perspective in which a sombrero was sent flying by the impact of an all-Americano fist.

On the back cover, the publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, touted the author, Thomson Burtis as a real life version of the rootin’-tootin’, rip-roarin’ hero:

All the air lore and thrilling exploits of the author’s own experiences as an army flyer have gone into this red-blooded series of a daredevil young American who became one of the country’s greatest heroes of the sky.

Like a lot of writers, Burtis has a variety of other jobs:  postal clerk, hobo, actor, writer, mutton-chop salesman, preacher, roughneck in the oil fields, newspaperman, flyer, scenario writer in Hollywood and synthetic clown with the Sells Floto circus!

Rex Lee is literally a cowboy with a plane instead of horse, back from the GreatWar, ready to take on the world. The western genre updated for the new century. He was like a lot of other pulp heroes of the time, a brother to the two-fisted heroes in Amazing Stories, that included Buck (called Anthony in the magazine stories) Rogers.

Though essential to the plot, drugs aren’t a big part of the story. The opium planted in Rex’s plane isn’t described. The effects of drugs on people or society aren’t mentioned. It’s like the film La Banda De Carro Rojo, based on Paulino Vargas’ pioneering narcorrido, with Los Tigres del Norte acting as a musical Greek chorus, where the drugs don’t make it on screen. Also like Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly, where Robert Aldrich had no trouble changing Mike Hammer’s adversaries into dealers of radioactive materials rather than heroin.

Drugs are just an excuse for daring-do.

And even though the book has the expected 1928 racism, Mexicans turn out not to be the brains behind the drug smuggling. There’s a stereotypical bandido from whom the hero rescues a pretty white girl -- she's also from a "good" family -- but the illegal operation is run by an Anglo American corrupt business/gangster (is there a difference between the two?) who takes over a border town, and brings in Mexicans to do the heavy lifting and thug-work

As it’s explained to Rex: “It’s a teeny little place, as you can see, but there’s something funny about it. Awful lot o’ spigs here, and hardly a single negro. Pretty rough sort of gang o’ whites and about half of ‘em don’t seem to be doing a thing to justify living.”

Like some folks here in Arizona have explained to me: “We won’t have crime if we just keep the Mexicans out.”

We still have Mexican bad guys, and all these years later, they aren’t evil geniuses. Maybe what 21st century pop culture needs is a Mexican supervillain, like Fu Manchu, who can take on the likes of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. It would be nice if we could be feared for our diabolical brains for a change.

Ernest Hogan is back from a vacation in New Mexico. He’ll now be blogging about it, and working on the new editions of his novels, and his first short fiction collection.

How the U.S. Mafia created Mexican drug violence

Americans tend to look down on "Mexico's drug problems" as something that those poor and dark people deserve, because they're supposedly less civilized or advanced than those in our superior Anglo country. Such Americans simultaneously ignore the guns and arms exported from here to Mexico that equip the drug wars. And they just as quickly will hide their face when anyone mentions that the biggest drug market is inside the U.S.

But as the excerpted article from Frontera NorteSur below explains, these same Americans need to hide their heads in the sands of Mars if they expect to escape from the documented historical truth of who started the Mexican drug culture. You can click here to read the entire article.

Given our country's inability and blindness to learning anything from the past, what and how is the U.S. gov't currently involved in supporting this drug trade? Would someone please ask Obama what of this still goes on?

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Author Juan Alberto Cedillo’s La Costa Nostra en Mexico 1938-1950 (Grijalbo 2011) delves into the largely unknown story of the Mafia’s penetration of his country in the first half of the 20th century. The book chronicles the interactions of US hoodlums, Mexican politicians and policemen and even Hollywood personalities. Finding common ground in vice and leisure, their dealings included bootlegging, gambling, drug trafficking and more.

Names familiar from other places pop up in Cedillo’s account--Lucky Luciano, California boxing promoter Baron Long, Hollywood pioneer and studio czar Joseph M. Schenck and Al Capone, the capo who reportedly gained a Santa Claus reputation by handing out $50 tips to Mexican service industry workers accustomed to earning pennies a day.

The expanded cast of characters includes Mexican Presidents Lazaro Cardenas and Miguel Aleman, Mexican Senator Carlos Serrano and Virginia Hill, the so-called US “Mafia Queen” who maintained a relationship with Serrano and gained access to the highest levels of Mexican power.

The right-hand man of President Aleman, Serrano was tagged by the CIA as an individual who was heavily involved in cross-border drug trafficking and other illegal activities. A car belonging to Serrano was once stopped in the US and discovered to contain 60 tins of opium, according to a landmark 2001 book by Mexican researcher and author Sergio Aguayo.

From behind the scenes, Serrano reputedly ran the legendary Federal Security Directorate (DFS), which Cedillo credits for managing Mexico’s illegal drug business. Founded in 1947 and modeled after the FBI, the DFS’ agents received early training from J. Edgar Hoover’s boys. Once up and running, the Mexican political police force then funneled information to Washington about socialist governments. The CIA, Aguayo wrote, knew about DFS involvement in drug trafficking and crime but nevertheless praised the Mexican agency’s officers as “competent and capable.”

Aguayo’s and Cedillo’s depictons of the DFS, which was disbanded following scandals in the mid-1980s, challenge a popular folklore that sometimes romanticizes drug trafficking in narco ballads which sing of clashes between the hated federales and outlaw traffickers. Yet virtually from the very beginning, illegal drug trafficking and smuggling in Mexico was an enterprise managed and manipulated by the state in cahoots with foreigners.

“What the Italian Mafia did represents the genesis of large-scale drug trafficking to the US,” Cedillo recently told the Mexican press. “This is very important in understanding how drug trafficking currently works…. how this business changed at the beginning of the 1990s when we stopped being an exporting country and became a consuming one.”

Cities such as Ciudad Juarez, Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo witnessed the domestic consumption of cocaine soar in the 1,000 percent range by the mid-1990s, Cedillo said.

Cedillo and Aguayo expose other patterns in cross-border relationships, not the least of which was Washington’s propensity to look the other way at corruption and criminal activity in favor of the “higher” goals of winning the Cold War against godless communism.

In his book La Charola, for instance, Aguayo recounted the story of exiled Mexican journalist Rafael Garcia Travesi. A vocal opponent of President Aleman in the late 1940s, Garcia was detained and then deported from Los Angeles in an exercise of US collusion with a determined campaign by the Aleman administration to silence a pesky critic

Both Aguayo and Cedillo relied on official US and Mexican documents in preparing their journalistic works. In a recent on-line chat sponsored by the Mexican daily El Universal, Cedillo said the Mexican Defense Ministry denied access to certain documents, while other US documents containing possible information on Mafia-Mexican government ties still have not been declassified.

A ritzy Tijuana development spearheaded by Hollywood mogul Shenck was perhaps the glittering pinnacle of the Mexico-Mafia saga. Built in 1928 and 1929 for the then-lordly sum of $10 million, the Agua Caliente horse racing track and entertainment complex featured a 500-room hotel, a casino, tropical gardens, an 18-hole golf course, a private radio station and a small airport for the celebrities of the time “jetting” in for revelries across a tolerant border. In the late 1920s, small but action-packed Tijuana (population 20,000) employed an estimated 2,000 prostitutes. Abelardo Rodriguez, the governor of Baja California and future president of Mexico, owned the land on which Agua Caliente was constructed, Cedillo writes.

Concerned that vice was undermining the lofty goals of the 1910 Revolution, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas closed down Agua Caliente in 1935. Nonetheless, the track later reopened and the concession for its operation was eventually awarded to Jorge Hank Rhon, the controversial former mayor of Tijuana who was briefly detained and then released by Mexican federal and state authorities last month in connection with weapons and other charges.

Recent press coverage of the Mexican “drug war” has reported on the seemingly novel diversification of the Mexican cartels. But a semi-state capitalist business model rooted in illegal and legal activities of all sorts was evident back in the 1920s if not sooner.

Practically from its inception, international tourism was one of the promising business ventures eyed by the underworld. For example, Cedillo contends that President Aleman was working with “Murder Inc.” of US Mafia fame to open casinos in Acapulco before the scheme was disrupted by a US government probe of criminal syndicates.

In contemporary times, the narco-tourism connection was highlighted in the fateful career of former Quintana Roo Governor Mario Villaneueva, who wound up extradited to the US on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

While aggressively pursuing large-scale tourism development in Cancun and the Riveria Maya, the politician was allegedly facilitating and protecting shipments of hundreds of tons of cocaine for the Juarez Cartel back in the 1990s.

A US indictment accused Villanueva of laundering almost $19 million in drug proceeds through Lehman Brothers in New York and accounts in Switzerland, the Bahamas, Panama and Mexico, including some under the names of British Virgin Islands shell corporations.

At the time of Villanueva’s 2010 extradition, US Attorney Preet Bharara accused the Mexican politician of turning Quintana Roo into a “virtual narco-state” where state infrastructure and law enforcement were sold to “one of the world’s most dangerous mafia enterprises.”

In a column, Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho wrote how former tourism industry officials told her that nearly half of the massive hotel development in Cancun, the most favored spot of US tourists visiting Mexico, occurred thanks to dirty money.

“The construction and operation of hotels and tourist services, whose purpose is to hide the origin of the illicitly obtained money, as well as the identity of its owner, is a silenced matter,” Cacho wrote. “There is a fine mesh that unites politicians and money launderers who could be involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking and contraband.”

© 2011 Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news

Center for Latin American and Border Studies

New Mexico State Universitym Las Cruces, New Mexico

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