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Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort

2011; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1416999

1527-1900

Robert Buffington,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reading Satan’s Playground, Paul Vanderwood’s latest history of the San Diego– Tijuana borderlands, I was struck by its unexpected resonances with Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), one of the foundational texts of postmodern geography. City of Quartz offered up provocative readings of the great early twentieth-century southern California mythmakers — boosters, noirs, mercenaries, exiles, etc. — and the often toxic legacy they left behind. For Davis, the Los Angeles produced by these mythmakers “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism” (p. 18). While Vanderwood shows little interest in “excavating the future” in San Diego– Tijuana, he shares Davis’s fascination with the glamour, hype, sleaze, and violence that have marked southern California culture since the great westward migrations of the 1920s brought a combustible mix of dreamers, scammers, entrepreneurs, and (what Davis calls) Midwestern “Babbittry” to the Pacific coast. The brilliance of City of Quartz lies in its broad historical sweep and acerbic social critique, while Satan’s Playground treats us to layer upon layer of “thick description” and a playful (at times nostalgic) style that situates the people and events it chronicles securely in the not-so-distant past. The authorial intent in these two remarkable books couldn’t be more different, and yet both ring true on the troublesome subject of California dreaming.In his previous borderlands histories, The Power of God against the Guns of Government (Stanford University Press, 1998) and Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Duke University Press, 2004), Vanderwood revealed a gift for storytelling that set him apart from more conventional social historians who would disguise their “art” (or lack of it) behind the neutral prose, data sets, and rigid chronologies of social “science.” That gift is very much in evidence in Satan’s Playground. Like any good gangster tale, the story begins with a heist, shoot-out, and getaway; it follows the police, press, and private detectives as they close in on the culprits; and it ends with the robbers dead or behind bars. Along the way, Vanderwood supplies us with an extraordinarily rich history of the wheelers and dealers that shaped the San Diego– Tijuana nexus in the boom and bust years between the world wars. He surrounds his principal protagonists — the self-made Border Barons (James Crofton, Baron Long, Wirt Bowman), Baja California governors Esteban Cantú and Abelardo Rodríguez, and the world-renowned Agua Caliente resort in Tijuana — with a dizzying cast of minor characters including Hollywood celebrities, world-class sports figures (human and equine), transplanted Chicago gangsters, petty criminals, bootleggers, unsavory politicians, hardworking (if occasionally corrupt) policemen, sensation-seeking newspaper men, self-righteous moral reformers, and the hordes of tourists who flocked to southern California beaches and Tijuana casinos in search of drink and diversion.Most historians despair of achieving the proper density for “thick description” of the sort envisioned by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which seeks to explain the political, economic, and social context behind gestures as fleeting as a wink at a cockfight. But this book comes awfully close. And if Vanderwood sometimes sacrifices his narrative to an irresistible tangent, the overall effect more than compensates for any temporary loss of continuity. The poorly digested minutia of local history can make tedious reading for outsiders, but in the hands of this master storyteller seemingly random historical details are stitched together with a carefully crafted “tone” — a sly cross between the archness of The Sting and sarcasm of classic noir — that reveals unexpected connections among the most disparate of anecdotes, connections that a more conventional method would never have uncovered. So while the book dispenses with the formal thesis and argumentative style so beloved of the disciplinarians of history, and draws no contemporary lessons from its subject matter à la City of Quartz, Vanderwood’s adroit use of literary ambience and the generic conventions of the crime story provides more than enough coherence, at least for this reader.Satan’s Playground is remarkable in another important way as well. Doing history on two sides of an international boundary is no simple thing, especially in the face of persistent major economic, social, and cultural asymmetries. As a consequence, US-Mexico borderlands histories tend to favor one side or the other, most often (but not always) the United States. In contrast, Vanderwood crosses and re-crosses the border with apparent ease, despite the obvious logistical and archival challenges. This enviable facility allows him to track the Border Barons as they work both sides of the line (San Diego/Tijuana, Sacramento/Mexicali, Washington/Mexico City) to their considerable profit, to expose the subtle (and not so subtle) transnational machinations of powerful politicians like Baja governor (later president) Abelardo Rodríguez, and tease out the often contradictory histories of a complex international phenomenon like the Agua Caliente resort. The result is borderlands history as its transnational best.This short review can only hint at the wealth of historical detail and literary craft that make Satan’s Playground such a great read. It will no doubt be a mainstay of undergraduate and graduate classes on California, Western, and borderlands history for years to come. And like Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard University Press, 1999) — another great borderlands history structured around a crime — it should be a big hit with history lovers everywhere.