Holly M. Karibo

Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland - The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History Holly M. Karibo

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Commendation Quotes: Dr. Karibo is to be congratulated on what can only be described as a compelling narrative of vice on the borders and the intricate relationships between various borderlands, both real and metaphorical, in the Detroit-Windsor area.--Dan Malleck, Brock University Commendation Quotes: Holly Karibo's lively and engaging "Sin City North" makes a strong contribution to scholarship on urban history and U. S.-Canadian relations. Its investigation of the informal economy of vice in the Motor City and its Canadian sister shows us the underside of the consumer culture of the postwar decades.--Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State University Commendation Quotes: Original, ambitious, and clever, "Sin City North" transposes the story of postwar borderlands vice Tijuana and all that to the Detroit-Windsor region. Taking us beyond Prohibition-era bootleggers, Karibo shows how sex tourism and heroin trafficking flourished in the adjacent cities during the not-so-tranquil 1940s and 1950s, when vice became intertwined with Cold War anxieties and the simmering politics of class, gender, and race.--David T. Courtwright, author of "Dark Paradise" and "Forces of Habit" "Commendation Quotes: "In this original and compelling book, Holly Karibo reorients borderland studies northward. Following smugglers and sex tourists and workers and reformers from Detroit to Windsor and back again, she offers an exciting reappraisal of citizenship, marginality, gender, and race in the twentieth century.--Thomas Sugrue, New York University Publisher Marketing: The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, "Sin City North" explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications. In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland. "