María Lucrecia Barquera: The Third Wife of William S. Burroughs

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Three Wives of Queer William S. Burroughs, by Thomas Antonic (Beatdom Books, 2026).

The Discovery

In my book Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37, I dedicated ten pages to Burroughs’ first wife Ilse Herzfeld (also known as Ilse Klapper and Ilse Burroughs). That book was published in 2020 and since then I have continued researching the biography of Herzfeld and also explored Joan Vollmer’s life, with the goal of writing a book about the two women. In the course of the investigation, I tried to determine when Burroughs and Herzfeld exactly got a divorce because the information provided in previous Burroughs biographies is vague. Barry Miles, for example, writes in Call Me Burroughs that Burroughs and Herzfeld divorced in St. Louis in October 1946 (cf. Miles, 155), referring to Burroughs’ letter to Allen Ginsberg from October 10, 1946, stating that he is planning to travel from Texas to St. Louis to get a divorce before coming to New York by the end of the month. James Grauerholz quotes Joan Vollmer’s letter to Edie Kerouac from December 29, 1946, in which she writes, “Bill got a divorce, but I haven’t yet” (Grauerholz 2023a, 18), though he does not mention whether there are actual documents that can substantiate this claim.

The fact that this divorce did occur in St. Louis, in October 1946, could be confirmed relatively quickly. The archives of the St. Louis Circuit Clerk’s Office contain a file note which states that on October 18th, Burroughs and Herzfeld were “hereby absolutely divorced from the bonds of matrimony existing between them,” (N.N. 1946) after nine years of marriage. This evidence seemed to settle the matter. However, the question remained: Why did Ted Morgan claim, in Literary Outlaw, that Burroughs used a short stay in Mexico with his friend Kells Elvins in the summer of 1946 “to get a Mexican divorce from Ilse Klapper Burroughs.” (Morgan, 130) This version of the story is repeated by Michael Spann in his essay “Unforgettable Characters” (cf. Spann, 2).

I decided to do some further research and described the case to my colleague Natascha Gangl, who regularly spends a good part of her time in Mexico. She put me in touch with Emiliano Pardo, one of her acquaintances in Mexico City. He agreed to do a quick search among the archives of the Dirección General del Registro Civil del Distrito Federal, the Civil Registry Archive of Mexico City, to see if there were any documents relating to Burroughs. A few days later Pardo sent me the scan of a document. It was not a divorce document and had nothing to do with Ilse Herzfeld, but Burroughs’ name appeared on it. To say that this result astonished me would be a massive understatement. The truth is that I stared at the screen for a few minutes with my mouth open in disbelief, trying to organize my thoughts.

The document is dated November 23, 1949. It is a marriage certificate. The bride’s name is María Lucrecia Barquera. The groom is a certain William Burroughs Lee. To date, not a single book about Burroughs, nor biography, academic essay, or newspaper article, mentions a woman named María Lucrecia Barquera, let alone a marriage between the two in Mexico City. Burroughs does not mention Barquera in any text, nor in interviews, in recorded conversations, or in his letters to friends. No one who knew him closely ever mentioned the name María Lucrecia Barquera or even mentioned in passing—at least not in any known written document or in any other form on record—that Burroughs had married a Mexican woman. I am unable to fathom this digitized facsimile. My first thought, to make sense of the discovery, was that Burroughs had a namesake who married in Mexico City in 1949 while our budding writer was also living in the city.

The groom’s name, William Burroughs Lee, suggests such a possibility, but it would be an astonishing coincidence if he had the maiden name of the mother of our Burroughs as his second surname. Of course, Lee was also the name that Burroughs chose as his pseudonym for the first publication of Junky and the name he gave to the (semi)autobiographical protagonist of his texts. However, a closer inspection of the document shows that it is not a namesake, but in fact the one and only William S. Burroughs.

The marriage certificate is clearly legible and provides the following information. On November 23, 1949, at 1:30 pm, William Burroughs Lee and María Lucrecia Barquera were married in Mexico City before the registrar, Próspero Olivares Sosa. The necessary documents for the marriage ceremony had been submitted the day before. The groom is thirty-five years old, a farmer by profession, lives at Calle Orizaba 17, and his marital status is listed as single. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a US citizen; his parents’ names are Mortimer Perry Burroughs and—according to the Mexican spelling—Laura Lee de Burroughs. Thus, there can be no doubt that this is the William S. Burroughs. The signature on the marriage certificate is also clearly recognizable. One can compare it, for example, with Burroughs’ 1936 signature on the enrollment form at the University of Vienna, which is printed in Amongst Nazis (cf. Antonic, 65).

However, Burroughs’ marital status is questionable, and the address Orizaba 17 is unknown to Burroughs researchers. This is due to the fact that when he traveled to Mexico City in September 1949 to avoid his trial in New Orleans—which was scheduled for the end of October and came after the police found marijuana, heroin, and six firearms in his house—he rented an apartment at Calle Río Lerma 26. A little later, he brought Vollmer and the children—Julie and Billy—to Mexico and rented another apartment for himself and the family at Avenida Paseo de la Reforma 210, but also kept the first accommodation. In New Orleans, Burroughs was facing several years in prison. His plan was to spend at least the next five years in Mexico City, until the statute of limitations for his criminal case in the United States went into effect and the case could no longer be prosecuted.

The bride, María Lucrecia Barquera, is forty-seven years old, a housewife, single, Mexican. Her mother is the deceased Longina Barquera, her father’s name is not mentioned and is presumed unknown. Bernabé Jurado, the nefarious lawyer whom Burroughs met soon after his arrival in Mexico City, whose services he used to avoid extradition to the US authorities, and who handled Burroughs’ defense after he killed Joan Vollmer, is named as one of four witnesses to the marriage.

Searching for Clues in Burroughs Biographies

What was this marriage to María Lucrecia Barquera all about? According to Ted Morgan, one of Jurado’s specialties was protecting foreigners from the threat of extradition:

In Mexico City there was an international community of fugitives who were being kept out of jail in their native lands thanks to the efforts of Bernabé Jurado—American numbers racketeers, Peruvian swindlers, Canadian embezzlers. Every time a foreign government tried to extradite one of his clients, Jurado would come up with a doctor’s certificate saying that the client could not be moved, or he would pay off a judge, or he would send the client to a northern province whose governor was prepared to say, “There is no one here by that name.”

(Morgan, 174)

Literary Outlaw does not reveal what measures Jurado intended to take to prevent Burroughs’ extradition to the US. Morgan only reports that even though Burroughs feared extradition, after he failed to appear at his court hearing in New Orleans on October 27, 1949, the US authorities did not pursue him and his defense attorney in New Orleans merely advised him to go into hiding for a while (cf. ibid.). It seems more important to Morgan that Burroughs met a peddler in Jurado’s office, through whom he found a relevant source for heroin in Mexico City, namely María Dolores Estévez Zulueta aka Lola la Chata. The next few pages of Morgan’s biography are devoted to Burroughs’ activities in obtaining and consuming drugs, with nothing more being mentioned about measures against extradition.

Miles repeats this story in Call Me Burroughs, but adds—without citing any sources—some details about Bernabé Jurado, which he seems to have taken from García-Robles’ book The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico (2013; first published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida: William S. Burroughs en México, 1949–1952), and presumably also from James Grauerholz’s essay “The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened?,” which had been circulating on the internet since 2003. However, he also omits some essential information that can be gleaned from García-Robles’ book. As a result, Miles comes up with a somewhat inconclusive explanation of the steps Burroughs took to avoid being extradited or to remain in Mexico. This is what it says in Call Me Burroughs:

Burroughs intended to study at Mexico City College. Most foreign students got one-year student immigrant visas that could easily be renewed, and the college even provided a student registration service, but Burroughs preferred to use Jurado in case the U.S. authorities attempted to extradite him. Jurado immediately filed a petition for Mexican citizenship even though an immigrant must normally live in Mexico for five years before becoming eligible for actual citizenship, and must have an “immigrant” rather than “tourist” visa. […] On November 21, 1949, Burroughs enrolled in the Mexico City College School of Higher Studies in the department of anthropology and archaeology, specializing in Mexican archaeology.

(Miles, 186)

Nothing more can be learned about this matter here. Firstly, there’s no mention of how Burroughs converted his tourist visa into an immigrant one. Secondly, not a word is said about how Jurado could help his client obtain Mexican citizenship, if this could only be obtained after living in Mexico for at least five years. However, since Burroughs was a student at Mexico City College, enrolled November 21—two days before his marriage to María Lucrecia Barquera—it must have been relatively easy for him to obtain a student immigration visa. The fact that it is not possible to obtain Mexican citizenship with a tourist visa is also irrelevant in this context.

Grauerholz explains the situation in a little more detail:

Jurado told Burroughs he would file a petition for Mexican citizenship, or something similar. Normally an immigrant must live five years in Mexico before becoming eligible for actual citizenship, and he must first obtain a change in immigration status from “tourist” to “immigrant.” But a student immigrant visa would be valid for one year, and could easily be renewed, according to a student-advice item in the Mexico City College Collegian of April 12, 1951. M[exico] C[ity] C[ollege] even furnished the services of a “go-between,” named Mr. Lozano, who would facilitate the required registration of student visas within 30 days of entry. But Burroughs preferred to place his faith in Bernabé Jurado.

(Grauerholz 2023a, 11)

Nevertheless, these explanations also prove unsatisfactory. After all, what does “or something similar” mean in the context of citizenship? And what relevance does the conversion of the tourist visa into an immigrant one have in regards to citizenship, for which you have to wait five years, after all? The meaning behind “Burroughs preferred to place his faith in Bernabé Jurado” is also not delved into any further. And in Morgan, Miles, and Grauerholz, Jurado does not appear again as a defense attorney until two years later, after Burroughs had shot his common-law wife Joan Vollmer.

The newly discovered marriage certificate might explain how Jurado wanted to help his client obtain Mexican citizenship: namely, by marrying a Mexican woman. It’s certainly no coincidence that this marriage took place just two days after Burroughs enrolled at Mexico City College. But why did Burroughs conceal this marriage from his biographer Ted Morgan and everyone else? Twenty years after its first online publication, Grauerholz’s essay appeared in book form in 2023, verbatim, with no revisions or additions. I asked him, via email, whether there had been any new discoveries on this topic since 2003. His short answer: “I still have nothing new to add.” (Grauerholz 2023b) So, did Burroughs not mention, to his long-term partner, this marriage to María Lucrecia Barquera? Or did Grauerholz conceal it? Regardless of whether the former or the latter is the case, the question arises in both cases: Why?

María Lucrecia Barquera in Burroughs’ Writings

García-Robles writes that Burroughs wanted to obtain Mexican citizenship not so much because he feared extradition, but because he was toying with the idea of acquiring farmland in Mexico or opening a bar near the border to the United States, which was only possible through citizenship (cf. García-Robles, 37). Burroughs mentions this in his preface to the first publication of Queer in 1985, “I thought I might go into farming, or perhaps open a bar on the American border.” (Burroughs 2010) According to García-Robles, this was also the reason why he was looking for a lawyer, which he found in Bernabé Jurado (cf. García-Robles, 44).

Since Burroughs was always quite frank with his biographers about his life, did not leave unpleasant episodes unmentioned, and wrote about every conceivable detail both to his correspondents (especially Ginsberg and Kerouac) and in his literary texts, it is a complete mystery why no one seems to know about this marriage. In fact, there are very few references in Burroughs’ texts. In the preface to Queer, Burroughs vividly describes the atmosphere of Mexico City when he moved there in 1949, and he writes about the matter of citizenship without going into much detail: “I knew that under the statute of limitations I could not return to the United States for five years, so I applied for Mexican citizenship and enrolled in some courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College.” (Burroughs 2010)

A little later in the text, he recounts a memorable scene when an “inspector from Immigration” knocked on his door one morning and he opened it, still in his pajamas: “‘Get your clothes on. You’re under arrest.’ It seemed the woman next door had turned in a long report on my drunk and disorderly behavior, and also there was something wrong with my papers and where was the Mexican wife I was supposed to have?” (Ibid., my italics) Without further context, Burroughs’ account of the situation reads as if the inspector had invented the “Mexican wife” so that he would have a reason to harass the American in order to receive bribes to leave him alone. “The immigration officers were all set to throw me in jail to await deportation as an undesirable alien. Of course, everything could be straightened out with some money, but my interviewer was the head of the deporting department and he wouldn’t go for peanuts. I finally had to get off of two hundred dollars.” (Ibid.) Here it seems that deportation due to Burroughs’ behavior was a greater danger than an expulsion at the request of the US authorities, especially if he refused to pay bribes. The question also arises as to which of Burroughs’ papers were not in order. Was it the marriage certificate referenced here? Was it the incorrect address, Orizaba 17, where he was supposed to live with María Lucrecia Barquera, according to the document? Had he given a different address, the “correct” one, Avenida Paseo de la Reforma 210, where he lived with Joan Vollmer and the two children, to obtain his immigration visa form, and was that the reason for the officials’ complaint?

García-Robles consulted many previously unknown sources for his book. He went to archives and conducted interviews with several people who knew Burroughs during his time in Mexico, from 1949 to 1952, and who were able to provide information about Bernabé Jurado and Lola la Chata. None of these people are likely to have known anything about María Lucrecia Barquera; otherwise, she would probably have appeared in García-Robles’ essay. He also traveled to Lawrence, Kansas, several times from 1990 onwards to conduct interviews with Burroughs. In his foreword to the English-language edition, García-Robles writes, “I asked him questions related to his time in Mexico and I realized he was avoiding the subject, especially when it came to personal matters.” (García-Robles, XIII)

However, during a stay in Lawrence, García-Robles persuaded Burroughs to write a short text about Bernabé Jurado for the book, which was also reprinted in full in La bala perdida and The Stray Bullet under the title “My Most Unforgettable Character” (and republished in 2001 in the slim volume Unforgettable Characters [see Burroughs 2001, 53–56]). In it, Burroughs describes how he met Jurado and quotes Jurado’s suggestion for gaining citizenship: “I will marry you with a Mexican woman. The gentlemen from Peru bear witness.” (Qtd. in García-Robles, 46) But what happened next is not mentioned here either. Burroughs fails to mention that Jurado actually put this plan into action. So why did he mention the “Mexican woman” at all? And why did he also lay a trail a few years earlier in the preface to Queer? A trail that no biographer nor any scholar picked up?

When reading through Burroughs’ entire oeuvre for references to María Lucrecia Barquera, only one other passage catches the eye. It is a dream recorded in the Retreat Diaries (1976) and dated August 17, 1975. In the dream, Burroughs is in Spain while Franco is being assassinated (Franco actually died three months later of heart failure, given as the official cause of death). Burroughs is taken by police officers to the “Madrid police station,” where he protests, “I say ‘Wait a minute. We are the victims, not the criminals …’” He compares the Spanish police to the Gestapo (of which many in the circle around Burroughs’ first wife Ilse Herzfeld were persecuted in the 1930s). Every thirty seconds, for example, one of the suspects is arbitrarily beaten by a policeman at the sound of a bell.

“Finally I am called to give my statement,” Burroughs dreams, “A lieutenant in the Identification Dep[artmen]t receives me politely […]. He types statement and takes picture, informs me that my luggage and passport will be returned and I am free to go after a visit to the American Embassy and an intimate visit to the Marquisa de Dentura.” (Burroughs 1976, np; also Burroughs 1984, 199). If one does not know about María Lucrecia Barquera, one might think that the Marquisa de Dentura stands for Dr. John Dent, whom Burroughs visited in London in 1956 to get his heroin addiction under control with the Apomorphine cure developed by Dent, in a typically dream-distorted form. But the deletion of “qu” and “s” in the aristocratic title “Marquisa,” which leads to “María,” as well as the same number of syllables, the emphasis on the second syllable “era,” as well as the same ending of the name “Dentura” compared to “Barquera” is more than obvious. As if that were not enough, Burroughs adds the following explanation to the sentence: “This woman is remote relation of mine by marriage.” (Ibid.)

I consider this one too many parallels between the dream and Burroughs’ past to be mere coincidence, even if he immediately insists, “I have never seen her and have no reason to visit her or to think she would welcome a visit from me.” (Ibid.) Far be it from me to undertake a Freudian interpretation of dreams here; however, the transcript of the further course of this dream contains a few key words that immediately catch the eye when reading and should at least be mentioned here. In his dream, after leaving the police station, Burroughs visits the Mar(qu)i(s)a, who hands him a letter (marriage certificate?). In the conversation with the Marquisa, the following sentence is uttered: “Those Yugoslavian Royalists. Why don’t they just run a pig farm like their king.” Again, it is probably more than a coincidence that an association with Ilse Herzfeld arises here with Yugoslavia. Burroughs never dreams of Yugoslavia, let alone of Yugoslav monarchists. So why in this dream, of all dreams, which is set in Spain? Probably because it combines information associated with his two wives: firstly, Ilse Herzfeld, who lived in Yugoslavia when he met her in 1936 and 1937, and secondly, the Spanish-speaking María Lucrecia Barquera. Towards the end of the dream, Nazis appear again, former Nazis who now work for Interpol, the criminal police organization that searches for criminals internationally, across borders. But whether this motif is the manifestation of an unconscious fear on Burroughs’ part that his secret marriage to María Lucrecia Barquera could still be discovered decades later and that this could also have consequences outside Mexico, I don’t dare say.

If we now think of the Marquisa as María Lucrecia Barquera, Burroughs’ claim that, “I have never seen her,” does not correspond to the facts, but is the construct of his dream. The marriage certificate shows both Burroughs’ and Barquera’s signature (the latter as M. Lucrecia B. de Burroughs). So both were present. Another document found also proves that the marriage certificate was not some kind of hoax set up by Jurado, a fake wedding with a fictitious bride, so to speak.

Biographical Information on María Lucrecia Barquera

No, María Lucrecia Barquera is real. Emiliano Pardo was not only able to locate the marriage certificate of Burroughs and Barquera in the Archivo de Registro Civil del Distrito Federal, but also her birth certificate. According to this document, she was born on November 23, 1902, in the district of Zacahuitzco, Iztacalco. The document refers to her as a “natural child,” as opposed to a “legitimate child,” which means that she was born out of wedlock. The mother’s name is Longina Barquera. The father is unknown.

To find further documents about María Lucrecia Barquera de Burroughs, I joined forces with the Mexican genealogists Roberto and Ramón Parra of Parra Genealogía, who conducted excellent detective work for me in Mexico City. Some government records about María Lucrecia Barquera and many of her relatives were discovered, primarily from the areas of Iztacalco and Iztapalapa, which were rural and poverty-stricken eastern outskirts of Mexico City until the second half of the twentieth century. Coming from a background of poverty and limited education in a country where, at the beginning of that century, most people were illiterate, many of these records contain inconsistencies. While some irregularities are typical for that era, others are notably unusual, likely reflecting not just inefficiency, but also possible dishonesty in declarations and corruption among the authorities (cf. Parra 2024a).

Further documents have been found revealing that María Lucrecia’s mother, Longina Barquera, was previously married in 1894 to Gregorio Valencia (also listed in other documents as Manuel Gregorio Valencia or Angel Gregorio Valencia), and that they had at least four children between 1896 and 1900. According to a death certificate, Gregorio Valencia died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at a construction site in Mexico City (no other circumstances about his death are mentioned) in 1900.

María Lucrecia Barquera also had at least two younger sisters: Margarita Valencia Barquera and Dolores Valencia Barquera. Government records, including Margarita’s birth certificate from 1905 and Dolores’s marriage certificate from 1941, surprisingly list them as the daughters of Longina Barquera and Gregorio Valencia. This is perplexing, as Gregorio Valencia’s death certificate indicates he died in 1900, well before their births. But according to the genealogists it’s probable that their mother, Longina Barquera, registered Margarita and Dolores as the daughters of Gregorio Valencia to avoid their birth certificates labeling them as “natural” (i.e., illegitimate) children, because she might have faced difficulties when Burroughs’ future wife María Lucrecia was born in 1902 as “natural.” Another (less plausible) possibility is that Gregorio Valencia did not actually die in 1900 and was, in fact, the father of both Margarita and Dolores.

Given that María Lucrecia Barquera had two younger sisters who used Valencia as their paternal surname, there was a possibility that María Lucrecia also went by the name María Lucrecia Valencia (or Valencia Barquera). This hypothesis was confirmed by the discovery of the baptism and death certificates of María Lucrecia’s daughter, María Antonieta Valencia, in which María Lucrecia was referred to simply as Lucrecia Valencia. According to the baptism certificate, her daughter María Antonieta Valencia was born on May 2, 1923, in Mexico City. She is listed as the “natural” daughter of Lucrecia Valencia, with no father mentioned. María Antonieta Valencia died of enteritis a year later, on September 23, 1924, in Zacahuitzco, Iztapalapa, Mexico City, as noted in her death certificate, which also lists “Lucrecia Valencia” as her mother. We can be certain that “Lucrecia Valencia” is indeed María Lucrecia Barquera because the person who reported the child’s death was Longina Barquera, María Lucrecia Barquera’s mother and the grandmother of the deceased child.

Therefore, for at least some period of her life, María Lucrecia Barquera went by the name Lucrecia Valencia. However, at the time of her marriage to William S. Burroughs, she used her original name, María Lucrecia Barquera. This was likely because, as stated at the beginning of their marriage certificate, they had to submit supporting documents along with their application to marry, and these documents probably listed her as María Lucrecia Barquera (and not Valencia).

Roberto and Ramón Parra were also able to uncover María Lucrecia Barquera’s death certificate. She passed away on March 24, 1974, at the age of 71 in Mexico City. The cause of death was cardiac failure. Her residential address at the time of death was Obraje 15 in the historic center of Mexico City. No other records or documents have been found about the woman who, according to the discovered marriage certificate, married William S. Burroughs in November 1949 in Mexico City. Whether she ever married again or had any other children is unknown.

Having been unable to find additional documents or information about María Lucrecia Barquera, the next important objective was to locate a close relative or descendant who could potentially be interviewed to share her story. To this end, records of more than forty of her relatives have been discovered, including descendants spanning two generations.

(Note: Information about these relatives will be shared in my upcoming book The Three Wives of Queer William S. Burroughs but would diverge from the subject too much in this online chapter preview. The same goes for Celedonio Díaz Violante, Plácido Fernández Viñas and Neftalí Luna Hernández, the three witnesses on the marriage certificate besides Jurado, and the registrar Próspero Olivares Sosa, who was the civil registry judge who officiated the marriage and is known for presiding over many notable marriages and divorces in Mexico City during the 1940s and 1950s.)

Juridical Questions

Further questions arise which Roberto and Ramón Parra can answer. For example, whether Burroughs possibly signed the marriage certificate with William Burroughs Lee so that it would not be discovered so quickly that he was living with his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, at a different address under the name William S. Burroughs. The answer to this:

Mexican naming conventions include using two surnames, first the paternal and then the maternal. […] It was and still is common for foreigners in Mexico to adopt these naming conventions in this type of documents. Since Lee was the maiden name of Burroughs’s mother (mentioned in the same document), it is perfectly natural to see his last name in this document as “Burroughs Lee,” and not using his middle name (Seward) is not uncommon either.

(Parra 2024b)

The use of the name “William Burroughs Lee” was therefore not a cover-up tactic. Another question was whether Burroughs was guilty of the offense of bigamy if he only entered into a “common-law marriage” with Joan Vollmer, but never married her in a civil or church ceremony, i.e. “officially.” Roberto Parra answers my question:

I don’t believe Mexican authorities would have been very interested in investigating this type of cases, unless there was any particular additional reason from the government to investigate that person. My feeling, sincerely, is that probably Bernabé Jurado and William Burroughs were not worried about this at all and thought there was no problem at all even if they used different (perhaps false) addresses in each document as needed. And probably they were right.

(Ibid.)

The beginning of a serious relationship between Burroughs and Joan Vollmer can be dated to October 1946, after the latter was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York, and the former left his farm in Texas about three weeks later to pick her up, after which she moved with him to the south. Vollmer is usually described in Burroughs biographies as the “common-law wife” of the writer and Burroughs often calls her his “wife.” Occasionally, she is even referred to as Joan Vollmer Burroughs, and she even called herself “Mrs. W. S. Burroughs” in a letter to Edie Parker from late December 1946, despite still being married to Paul Adams at that time. The facts of the “common-law marriage” between Burroughs and Vollmer have, so far, repeatedly been reproduced without comment by Burroughs scholars.

(Note: In one of the chapters on Vollmer in my upcoming book, I will discuss in detail the meaning of the term “common-law marriage,” based on the knowledge of experts with legal background, but I omit this information here to avoid digression. In the United States, the legal situation of this construct varied from state to state. Today, it is only legally recognized in seven states and Washington D.C.)

It is also a relevant question whether Mexican authorities recognized a US common-law marriage or not. In this respect, a marriage certificate mentioned by Grauerholz for two Mexico City College students, Frank Jeffries (a friend of Hal Chase) and Alice Hartmann, dated December 9, 1950, on which Joan Vollmer appears as a witness, also caused brief confusion. Her marital status is given as divorciada (divorced). Grauerholz suggests that this could be connected to the Cuernavaca episode: In August 1950 Vollmer allegedly went to this small town in the south of Mexico City to file for divorce from Burroughs—according to other versions they went to Cuernavaca together—but soon after she withdrew the divorce petition. Grauerholz writes that it is more likely that the divorciada refers to her divorce from Paul Adams (cf. Grauerholz 2023a, 51). However, if the latter is the case, it would mean that the common-law marriage between Vollmer and Burroughs played no role for the Mexican authorities and that they were not officially married, but lived as an unmarried couple under one roof, as boyfriend and girlfriend—or more precisely, after the newly discovered document, as a married man with his mistress.

It is also certain that if Burroughs and Vollmer’s common-law marriage had been recognized by the Mexican authorities, as Morgan claims (cf. Morgan, 176), Burroughs would have been guilty of bigamy by marrying Barquera—an offense that carries a prison sentence of several years in most countries of the Western hemisphere. Is this perhaps one of the reasons why Burroughs and Vollmer wanted to divorce in Cuernavaca in 1950, and not in Mexico City, where the marriage between Burroughs and Barquera would have exposed Burroughs’ bigamy? Was that what was wrong with Burroughs’ naturalization papers? Did he want the divorce from Vollmer to avoid this conflict with the law in order to become a Mexican citizen without further problems? It seems plausible. But then why was the plan to divorce ultimately abandoned?

Another question that arises in my mind is what would have happened to Joan Vollmer if she had not been killed in September 1951? Burroughs had obviously married María Lucrecia Barquera in order to obtain Mexican citizenship for himself. Joan Vollmer would either have had to marry a Mexican herself or wait five years to become a Mexican citizen (if that is what she was seeking). Or, was it Burroughs’ plan to divorce María Lucrecia Barquera as soon as he became a Mexican citizen and then officially marry Joan Vollmer in Mexico to allow her to become a citizen as well? Another possibility is that she was not privy to Burroughs’ plans and would have been expelled from the country at some point after her tourist visa expired. However, “As was and still is usual in Mexico for a foreigner, she would have been kicked out only if her visa expired and she got in trouble with the authorities,” Roberto and Ramón Parra reply. “Many foreigners, especially Americans, could live for many years in Mexico with an expired visa and usually not have any trouble at all with the government, except perhaps an occasional mordida (bribe) to a police officer when necessary.” (Parra 2024b)

The last question I address to Roberto and Ramón Parra is also a legal one: Based on the dramatic events of the years 1951 and 1952, Jurado’s disappearance from Mexico after fatally shooting a 16-year-old boy in late 1952, and Burroughs fleeing the country soon after, it can be assumed that Burroughs and María Lucrecia Barquera never divorced. What consequences would this have, for example, in terms of inheritance? Roberto Parra comments: “Yes, this is interesting. It would have consequences in regard of inheritance if their marriage was never dissolved.” (Ibid.)

END OF PREVIEW

Further information on the upcoming book The Three Wives of Queer William S. Burroughs

The discovery of the marriage between William S. Burroughs and María Lucrecia Barquera is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my research for The Three Wives Queer of William S. Burroughs. I collected a large amount of unknown information, not only regarding Ilse Herzfeld, Joan Vollmer, and María Lucrecia Barquera, but also facts about Burroughs that no one has ever heard of before. Facts that were just sitting in archives for many decades, waiting to be excavated. The investigation led me to the uncovering of documents in archives of the United States, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, and France. It was, for example, very fascinating to find a work of fiction from 1937 by a German author who was friends with Ilse Herzfeld, in which Burroughs (along with Herzfeld) appears as a fictional character, in all likelihood for the first time ever in literary history. Another example is the excavation of evidence that Burroughs not only helped Ilse Herzfeld to escape the Nazis by marrying her in 1937, so she could emigrate to the United States, but he also supported other exiles who fled Nazi Germany and assisted them in their precarious situation and resistance. One day he even visited a foster home of eighteen German children who got away from Berlin with their caretakers and had settled down temporarily outside of Dubrovnik.

The first part of the book is about Ilse Herzfeld (1900–1982), who has been largely neglected in previous Burroughs biographies and scholarship, and unjustifiably so. Herzfeld was a visual artist and already a published poet in Germany when William Burroughs was only six years old. She was friends with many key artists and intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, among them some of the founders of Dada such as Richard Huelsenbeck (in the US also known as Charles R. Hulbeck), novelist Klaus Mann (the son of Nobel Laureate in Literature Thomas Mann), philosopher Ernst Bloch, and painter George Grosz. There is strong evidence that Herzfeld and her first husband Heinrich Klapper made young Burroughs familiar with Dadaism, of which traces can be found in his fiction.

The second part of The Three Wives of Queer William S. Burroughs deals with Burroughs’ alleged “common-law wife,” Joan Vollmer (1923–1951, also known as Joan Vollmer Adams and other variants). Vollmer’s killing, by Burroughs’ hand, in the fall of 1951 can be seen as probably the most consequential experience in the author’s life. It partly led to his decision to become a serious writer, as he claims in the often-quoted foreword to his second novel Queer—which contributed to myth-making and led to many misconceptions, unfortunately also in recent biographical essays on Vollmer. By a shift of perspective in the narrative, through which Vollmer moves to the center of her life with Burroughs, and by counterchecking the many contradictory claims made in respect to Vollmer’s biography, I try to untie the knots and deliver the most plausible version of the events that took place.

María Lucrecia Barquera (1902–1974) is the subject of the final chapter of my book. She is the third wife of William S. Burroughs, and she has been completely unnoticed by Burroughs biographers and scholars for decades. The account of my investigation to uncover details of Barquera’s life can only be considered as the first steps of a more thorough research on this truly “invisible woman”—el mujer invisible.

The book will go on sale via Beatdom Books in early 2026. You can pre-order it below. Otherwise, consider following Beatdom on Substack or Facebook to be notified when it is released.

Acknowledgements

The chapter on María Lucrecia Barquera could not have been completed without the help of Sarah Earheart, who provided me with important input in countless discussions and whose detective flair proved invaluable; Natascha Gangl for helpful suggestions and establishing connections to Mexico; Mark Kanak, writer and translator in Berlin who helped me improve this text (and my English); Peggy Pacini, my Beat Studies colleague from the University of Cergy Pontoise in Paris, who advised me to keep my discovery of María Lucrecia Barquera secret until the book’s completion; Emiliano Pardo for research in Mexico City; Roberto and Ramón Parra of Parra Genealogía in Mexico City and Cancún, Mexico, for their genealogical research and information on the legal situation in Mexico; George Scrivani, Beat expert in San Francisco, who advised me on legal issues; Tate Swindell, archivist, Beat expert, poet and artist in San Francisco, who gave me important advice on many of the topics covered in the book, did research for me in Mexico City, made contacts, strongly supported the project as a whole, and agreed to be a proofreader of the manuscript; Bobby Yarra for secret research in Mexico City; and last but not least the staff of the archives of the Dirección General del Registro Civil in Mexico City.

Works Cited

Antonic, Thomas. Amongst Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna 1936/37. Schönebeck: Moloko, 2020.

Burroughs, William S. The Retreat Diaries. New York: The City Moon, 1976.

––– The Burroughs File. San Francisco: City Lights, 1984. 

–––. Unforgettable Characters. Brisbane: Xochi, 2001.

–––. Queer. 25th Anniversary Edition. Ed. and Intr. Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin, 2010. [ePub]

García-Robles, Jorge. The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico. Transl. Daniel C. Schlechter. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Grauerholz, James. The Death of Joan Vollmer: What Really Happened? Schönebeck: Moloko, 2023 (a).

–––. “Re: ilse burroughs continued.” Unpublished email to Thomas Antonic, October 6, 2023 (b).

N.N. Unpublished file note, October 18, 1946. Archive of the St. Louis Circuit Clerk’s Office.

Parra, Roberto, u. Ramón Parra. “Research Report on Lucrecia Barquera and Her Connection to William S. Burroughs and the Beat Generation.” Commissioned by Thomas Antonic. Unpublished. (2024a)

–––. “A partial report.” Unpublished email to Thomas Antonic, April 16, 2024 (b).

Spann, Michael. “Unforgettable Characters.” William S. Burroughs: Unforgettable Characters: Lola “La Chata” & Bernabé Jurado. Las Vegas: Inkblot, 2013.