Unearthing Latine Histories in the US War on Drugs

This article recovers largely overlooked histories of the domestic impacts of the U.S. war on drugs within urban Latine communities, demonstrating how state actors leveraged regional reports of urban Latine traffickers, dealers, and users to justify the expansion of racialized policing practices across the midcentury period. Through three brief case studies—San Antonio, New York City, and Miami—spanning the 1950s through the 1980s, the article argues that local and federal officials, law enforcement, and the media persistently portrayed Latine urban residents, regardless of citizenship or generational roots in the U.S., as simultaneously foreign infiltrators and local “problem” populations. These narratives recast cities as “Latinized” spaces overrun by transnational narcotics flows, fueling demands for intensified urban policing, harsher sentencing, and anti-Latine campaigns that extended beyond immigration and deportation. Drawing attention to ground-level stories from Latine communities complicates the temporal and regional narratives surrounding U.S. urban drug policing, demonstrating that the stigmatization of Latine populations was in motion decades before the 1970s and 1980s, when durable representations of Latine crime became ingrained in the public imaginary. The long history of drug policing in urban Latine neighborhoods, in turn, adds texture to scholarly understandings of how racial scripts surrounding drug-related crime took root.