5. Is the Word Marijuana Racist? And Other Questions of Nomenclature
Citations:
In my view, the true origins of the term “marihuana” (or “mariguana”) surely reside in Mexico. In Chapter Two of my book (pp. 74-77) I consider a number of theories on the question and offer some further speculation. More recently, Chris Duvall has argued that the word’s origins are African. I’m not convinced, as by far the earliest evidence (1842) of the use of this word to refer to cannabis comes from Mexico, and Mexico appears to have been the source of its diffusion to the rest of the region (it certainly was to the United States as I demonstrate in Ch. 9 of my book). Just for comparison’s sake, I recently searched Readex’s first series of newspapers from Latin America that includes newspapers from all over the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If you search the words “marihuana” and "mariguana” there, the database returns 745 total hits. Of those, 737, or 99%, are from Mexico. There are four from Argentina, and four from Panama. And that’s it. And while there are more Mexican newspapers in the collection than any other country, there are still tens of thousands of available issues from the rest of the region. Furthermore, there is just no sign at all of an African connection to cannabis in Mexico. However if you are interested in this question, Duvall’s work is certainly worth your consideration.
As we searched for stories on intoxicant cannabis and then counted up the numbers, we did exclude some advertisements that we did not believe particularly relevant to our purpose here. For example, in San Antonio, Texas, there were sometimes advertisements from Mexican products distributors that would include “marihuana” as a medicinal herb within a long list of other products. The same advertisement would be published day after day in the same paper for weeks, so including each of these ads would have produced a much larger number of “marihuana” references. But, again, these ads had the word “marihuana” embedded in long lists of medicinal or herbal products with no description or any other information. Thus they were having essentially zero impact on the development of the discourse in the U.S.. For that reason, we only counted the ads once, the first time it was published in a given run, and then excluded the rest as “outliers” in our database. Something similar occurred with a series of repeated stories on an “Indian hemp” display in a museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The story was repeated nearly a dozen times but simply stated that there was an “Indian hemp” specimen, with no further description or explanation. We thus only counted this story once and labeled the rest as “outliers.”
“The Argus Daily Short Story,” Rock Island Argus, August 5, 1910, p 4.
“Some New Books at the Albuquerque Public Library,” The Evening Herald, April 4, 1914, p 7.
“Iltar’s Marriage Rug,” The Oakes Times (Oakes, ND), November 26, 1914, p 7.
“The Pool of Flame,” Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, D.C.), December 23, 1911, p 6.
“Effects of Drugs,” Perth Amboy Evening News (Perth Amboy, NJ), January 4, 1910, p 5.
“English Officers Use Drug,” The Salt Lake Tribune, January 30, 1910, p 45.
“Cullen’s Weekly New York Letter,” Evening Star, May 22, 1910, p 50. For a couple of other examples, see: “Blood and Brain Thinkers,” Los Angeles Herald, July 17, 1910, p 6. ; and “Political Gossip,” The Topeka State Journal, December 5, 1910, p 7.
Note that if a single incident was reported multiple times, we only counted the incident once. This contrasts with our treatment of purely discursive questions where a single story repeated multiple times would be seeding the discourse across the country, or reinforcing it repeatedly in a certain location. For example, let’s imagine that a story used the word “marihuana” when describing an arrest in El Paso, and in the process it described marijuana as a drug that causes madness, and then that story was reprinted either in the same newspaper or in a few others. The initial incident would only be counted once in our visualizations, where as the reference to the drug producing “madness” would count every time it appeared.
For a few examples, see: “Una Fuerte Campaña Contra la Marihuana,” La Prensa, April 8, 1919, p 1; “Drug Traffic Grows Across the Border,” The Sun, November 3, 1919, p 12. “Marihuana May Not Be Grown in this City,” Arizona Republican, May 17, 1917, p 7.
“Smoking that Maddens,” The Cairo Bulletin (Cairo, IL), October 8, 1910, p 5.
“Crazed by a Weed, Man Murders,” El Paso Herald, January 2, 1913, p 1.
“The Sheriff’s Office,” Arizona Sentinel, April 18, 1912, p 1. “Wanted a Prisoner to See the Blue Monkeys,” “Prisoner Tries to Destroy a Cell in the City Jail,” El Paso Herald, July 29, 1913, p 5.
“Marihuana Raid Made by Police,” El Paso Herald, November 2, 1913, p 2. ; “Policeman Lassoes a Drug Crazed Mexican,” El Paso Herald, January 28, 1914, p 4. ; “News Brevities,” El Paso Herald, October 9, 1915, p 15. “Town Topics,” Arizona Republican, May 22, 1917, p 6. “Many Arrests for Drunk and Disorderly,” Arizona Republican, August 3, 1917, p 3.
“Causes Much of Recent Crime Along the Border,” Perth Amboy Evening News (Perth Amboy, NJ), August 10, 1915, p 8. This story also appeared in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. “New Source of Narcotic,” Perth Amboy Evening News (Perth Amboy, NJ), September 16, 1915, p 4. which was reprinted at least sixteen times in various locations.
“Picoteando,” La Prensa, July 31, 1913, p 3. “A los Mexicanos Indiferentes en la Heroica Lucha contra las Infamias Inferidas a la Patria,” La Prensa, September 18, 1913, p 5. On “La Cucaracha,” See my Home Grown, 162-63.
“Marihuana Smokers Shut off From Their ‘Makins’’,” El Paso Herald, September 13, 1917, p 6.
“Character of the Mexican Proper and Improper,” The Sun, May 17, 1914, p 37.
“Answers to Beauty Queries,” The San Francisco Call, February 13, 1910, p 11. ; “Habit-Forming Agents - the Poisons we use to ‘Dope’ our Babies,” The Spokane Press, May 30, 1910, p 11.
“Supreme Court Holds Manufacture of Non-Intoxicating Malts Wrong,” The Evening Times, January 7, 1910, p 5. ; “Painless Death Given Helpless,” The Sun, November 12, 1917, p 1.
“Hasheesh,” Wallowa County Chieftain (Enterprise, OR), January 27, 1910, p 4. ; “New Phases of the Drug Crusade,” The Sun, July 30, 1914, p 6.
“Tales of Secret Egypt,” Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), December 20, 1919, p 11.
“Colics of Horses and Mules,” The Watchman and Southron, July 13, 1910, p 8.
“Mexican Hemp Taken by Police in a Raid,” El Paso Herald, November 17, 1916, p 14; “Society News,” The Bottineau Courant (Bottineau, ND), March 23, 1916, p 8.
“Hemp Tree’s Many Products,” Free Trader-Journal (Ottowa, IL), October 12, 1918, p 6.