Elaine Carey

Historian whose Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime (University of New Mexico Press, 2014) is the foundational historical work on gender and the drug trade. Using diplomatic documents, trial transcripts, medical records, and prison files, Carey reconstructs the roles of women as bosses, business partners, money launderers, confidantes, and couriers from the early twentieth century onward — roles rarely acknowledged in earlier histories that treated women primarily as addicts, mules, or victims.

Her work on figures like Lola la Chata (the “White Lady of Mexico City”) and La Nacha of Juárez provides the archival grounding for what is now a rapidly growing subfield. US Customs agents stationed in Mexicali–Calexico in the 1920s estimated that women were responsible for 60 percent of the drug flow across the border — a statistic Carey uses to insist on the centrality, not marginality, of women in the transnational drug economy.