Ken Burns, whose 1990 television series on the U.S. Civil War changed the way documentaries were perceived, presented a five-and-a-half-hour production, “Prohibition,” on the PBS network last week. Many readers may have heard vivid tales of that 1919-1933 period. Older relatives have told children and grandchildren those stories for decades, a history that has been passed down. It was called a “disastrous experiment,” one that numerous cultural analysts and journalists are noting is clearly pertinent today. Many refer to philosopher George Santayana’s admonition about “learning from past or being condemned to repeat it.”
Mexico’s border towns became fleetingly known throughout the United States during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. A more thorough education came with the 1910-1929 Mexican Revolution. Popularity arrived in 1919.
Many of these towns were “new,” founded after the 1846-48 War, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It gave the United States, for 15 million dollars, about a fifth of Mexico, including Alta California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and much more. That treaty and the Gadsden Purchase five years later created a “frontier” between the two nations. Today, territory once viewed by Mexican officials as mostly “barren, sparsely populated, plagued by savages,” has 42 official border crossing towns. Following the Gadsden Purchase, the Mexican government offered its citizens free land to settle along the new frontier. An inducement was needed because of the territory’s rough history. “The Comanche Indians (operating primarily out of central Texas and farther north) stopped cold the northward advance of the Spanish Empire in the 18th century — an empire that had, up to that point, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent,” wrote one historian. The Spaniard Don Juan de Oñate, who first identified the Apaches in 1598, brought with him thousands of cattle and horses. Horses quickly fell into the hands of raiding Apaches and Comanches, initiating the great horse culture of the North American Plains. The Apaches, out of what we know as Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas, quickly became known for being even more brutal than Spanish conquerors — though not as savage as the Comanches. Mounted, able to live off the desert and accustomed to thirst, they “raided white and Indian settlements, extending their depredations as far southward as Jalisco.” The two tribes, “never numbering more than a few thousand ... were instrumental in halting the final Spanish advance along the Rio Bravo (the Rio Grande).”
Jittery settlers, if they lasted, soon engaged in activities considered normal on the border but eventually labeled “crimes”: smuggling of all kinds, especially weapons, producing illegal (untaxed) liquor and prostitution.
By 1919, there were a string of Mexican border pueblos lacing the 1,969-mile frontier. With prohibition, they abruptly experienced waves of visitors — and bootlegging operations, both Mexican and American — and a surge of Mexican citizens seeking work or ready to chance starting some kind of border business. A gaudy template for such places were Tijuana, Mexico’s western-most city, and Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.
Juarez was founded at El Paso Norte in 1659, and split in two by the post-Mexican-American War agreements, then renamed in 1888. Tijuana, originally part of a vast cattle ranch, adopted the name Rancho de la Tia Juana when founded July 11, 1889. The 1800s California land-boom had produced an earlier, short-lived wave of “excursionists.” Interest in southern California was prompted by the famously sentimental novel, “Ramona,” by Helen Hunt Jackson. Such spurts of U.S. tourism were dwarfed by the prohibition-spurred avalanche of newcomers to all border communities (new and long-established) in the wake of the 18th Amendment. In the 1920s, the still modest-sized village of Tijuana grew as old cantinas, cenadurias, fondas and restaurants were enlarged to welcome hordes of new clients.
TJ, as it was quickly called, just as quickly offended decorous supporters of prohibition, who termed it — and all border towns — “Satan’s Playground.” Yet one prim observer conceded that “these border towns (had already) housed prostitution, drugs and gambling; but liquor became the one vice that had the greatest impact.” Yet in the early 1950s, visitors crowding Tijuana and places like San Luis (across from Yuma) and Juarez clearly could get all the booze they wanted at home. Some came for la corrida, the bullfight, but even after corrida season ended, such places were jammed with visitors wishing to carouse in a freer clime, seeking gambling and other diversions.
In TJ, Americans in the 1920s (not a few of them gangsters) built race tracks, casinos, night clubs, bars, brothels, ran bootlegging and binational prostitution rings. Such activities needed the permission of Baja California’s governor. In June 1928, the Agua Caliente Casino and Hotel opened just south of town. At a cost to 2.5 million dollars, the soon world-famous Agua Caliente race track, dog-racing track, private airport, casino and spa, owned in part by Abelardo Rodriguez, military commander and governor of the state — and future president of Mexico — plus three American investors known as gangsters, opened in 1929. These operations attracted international attention as Hollywood and mob celebrities flew in to play. Internationally famous matadors fought bulls on Sunday afternoons. U.S. entertainers employed by the Agua Caliente Casino, or who began their careers there, included Charlie Chaplin, Oliver and Hardy, Tom Mix, Jimmy Durante, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Rita Hayworth, a dancer too young to work in the U.S., was discovered at the Agua Cliente Club by Hollywood.
Even after prohibition was repealed, not much changed. Reform-minded TJ burghers, who seemed to remain much out of sight, wanting to shed an “image of hedonism and lawlessness” had once renamed the town Zaragoza. That effort died quickly. Between 1940 and 1950, the population went from 21,971 to 65,364. Even in the 1960s, you could stroll back and forth across the border in a thousands places, even at the edge of a town boasting an immigration and customs post.
The newly-formed U.S. Prohibition Bureau of Internal Revenue, faced a monumental task of patrolling the 1,969 miles of borderland with just 1,500 enforcement agents. That was approximately 12 miles of border for each agent’s jurisdiction. In town, the center of the action was Avenida Revolucion, with casinos, immensely long bars, the Hotel Caesar (where Caesar salad was created) and the Foreign Club, popular with famous bullfighters and U.S. film celebrities. Even in the late 1950s, after TJ had been “closed down” — the Agua Caliente complex was shuttered by Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas in 1935 — it was a cherished playground for the exuberant and the adventurous, where anything could be enjoyed and/or purchased. Boisterous reputations and engaging activities tend to be hard to banish.