“You won’t make a mistake visiting Mexico … everything I have seen so far has been much to my liking,” wrote William S. Burroughs to Jack Kerouac in 1949. Burroughs had just fled south of the border with his wife Joan and their two young children to avoid standing trial on drug charges in Louisiana. Still years away from publishing the books that would establish him as a major voice of the post-World War II avant-garde, Burroughs delighted in the freedoms of his new home. Mexico City, a place where “anyone who feels like it carries a gun … needles and syringes can be bought anywhere … [and] people simply don’t care what anyone else does,” suited his criminal tendencies and caginess alike.

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