Benjamin Smith

Despite their college educations, most U.S. smugglers did not speak Spanish.

The drug trade was bumping up against those emerging signifiers of consumer capitalism—choice and status.

But others turned to drug growing. It was—and still is—the opposite of white-collar weed smuggling. It was not a choice; it was a necessity. And perhaps even more than guerrilla insurgency or mass outmigration, it would shape Mexican peasant relations with the outside world for the next fifty years.

Unlike dying in abject poverty, it attracted the attention of the Mexican and U.S. governments.