All Night at the Owl: The Social and Political Relations of Mexicali's Red-Light District, 1913–1925
Regions: Mexico, Baja California, US-Mexico Border
Published in the Journal of the Southwest (Winter 2001), this article examines the Owl Café and Theatre: a massive gambling house, dance hall, bar, and theater occupying half a city block in Mexicali’s red-light district. The Owl could accommodate 3,000 visitors and featured its own barbershop, photography studio, multiple stage musical venues, and floor shows.
Schantz explores how Mexicali’s vice-tourism industry generated revenues and shaped social and political relations along the border. The Owl’s clientele varied along gender, class, ethnic, and racial lines, resembling other segregated vice districts where bourgeois tourists “slummed” with workers and an international cast of hustlers, pimps, and drug dealers.
Key themes
- The political economy of vice tourism on the US-Mexico border
- How Prohibition drove American demand for cross-border entertainment
- Class, race, and gender dynamics within the red-light district
- The relationship between vice economies and local political power
- How border vice tourism shaped American perceptions of Mexico (one Mexican consul lamented in 1920 that “our border cities began to look like red-light districts”)