Alcohol's Indelible Mark on Latin America

Alcohol in the Atlantic
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

History
David Carey Jr.
Subject: Cultural History, Social History
Online Publication Date: Apr 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.32
Summary and Keywords

Dating from the earliest times in Latin America, alcohol has played a crucial social,
economic, political, and cultural role. Often reserved for politico-religious leaders, alcohol
was a conduit through which power flowed in many pre-contact indigenous societies;
indigenous drinkways (production, commerce, and consumption habits) were associated
with communal ritual events and social prestige. Introduced to the Americas by
Europeans, distillation profoundly altered the potency of alcoholic drinks for people who
were accustomed to fermentation. Even as the social and cultural practices of alcohol
consumption changed over time, alcohol continued to have political and economic
implications in the colonial and national periods in Latin America. Fearing that
inebriation bred disorder and recognizing that moonshining undercut their own revenues,
colonial and national governments alike sought to regulate, if not control, the production,
sale, and consumption of alcohol. In nations as diverse as Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, and
Guatemala, indigenous women came to play integral roles in the (oftentimes illicit) sale
and production of alcohol. A cash nexus for moving labor and land and a crucial
component of the economic system by which (often unscrupulous) labor brokers recruited
workers, alcohol was a currency of local economies. As a commodity of local, national,
and international significance, alcohol shaped the fate of nation-states.
Peoples class, ethnic, race, and gender identities all played into their access to alcohol.
Although a persons choice of libation could define their position, some of the more
fascinating histories of alcohol are punctuated with women and men who used alcohol to
disrupt social conventions. Through the consumption of alcohol, rituals and ceremonies
created and reconstituted community both within and across ethnic groups. Imbibing
could also divide people. Even while they sipped their cognacs and brandies, elites
portrayed indigenous people, the poor, and other marginalized people getting drunk on
moonshine to discount and denigrate them. Often associated with (particularly violent)
crime, alcohol was seen as a vice by many and excoriated during temperance movements.
Page 1 of 47
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Yet defendants across Latin America took advantage of judicial systems that considered
alcohol a mitigating circumstance in many crimes. As 20th-century evangelical sects that
preached abstinence as the route to wealth and marital bliss grew to unprecedented
numbers, traditional healers and biomedical practitioners continued to tout alcohols
medicinal value. In short, alcohol was a marker of social position and cultural identity, a
crucial component in community and state building, and a commodity around which
different cultural traditions, healing practices, and policing policies developed and
evolved.
Keywords: alcohol, gender, moonshine, nation-building, colonialism, race and ethnicity, class, health care, labor,
policing practices, religion, ritual
Alcohol has left an indelible mark on Latin America. Examining alcohol drinkways
(production, commerce, and consumption habits) sheds light on Latin Americas social,
economic, and political worlds.1 As much as any other commodity, alcohol shaped the
course of Latin American history. From the women who produced chicha (fermented
beverage generally made from fruits or vegetables) and beer in ancient Mesoamerica and
the Andes to the multinational companies that branded such products as tequila and rum
as national drinks with international appeal, alcohol helped to define people and nations.
Although its role and significance varied depending on historical contexts, alcohols
influence reverberated across the indigenous, colonial, and national periods in Latin
America. Roughly adhering to chronology, this interpretive article explores a few analytic
categories across time: access to alcohol (status, production, regulation, and
consumption), alcohol and power relations, drinking and social structure, and alcohol and
commerce. In contexts that ranged from religious rituals to reciprocal relations, alcohol
was a conduit through which power flowed in many pre-contact indigenous societies.
With the introduction of European technology and resources, the variety and potency of
alcohol expanded. Even as the social and cultural practices of alcohol consumption
changed over time, alcohol continued to have profound economic, social, and political
implications in the colonial and national periods in Latin America. Colonial
administrations and national governments sought to capitalize on the alcohol economy by
regulating and taxing it. Though difficult if not impossible to quantify, clandestine alcohol
production and sales emerged in response to official oversight. The vast resources and
varied personnel dedicated to stamping out that trade speak to its significance. Concerns
about the detrimental effects alcohol consumption had on social order and public health
buttressed authorities battles against moonshiners and bootleggers. In an indication of
how integral a part of the economy alcohol had become, it was both a commodity and a
currency. From midwives to magistrates, compensation regularly included liquor. So
integral had alcohol become to labor brokers strategies for entrapping workers on rural
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estates that according to contemporary observers, plantations would have failed without
alcohol.
As it flowed through local, national, and international economies, alcohol shaped social
relations. In many pre-Columbian societies, inebriation was a privilege reserved for
political and religious leaders. Suggestive archaeological evidence that quotidian
drinking was more prevalent in peripheral communities than those situated close to
capitals demonstrates the attenuation of power in indigenous empires. Access to alcohol
was also an indicator of an individuals class, ethnic, and gender identities. Depending on
the context, alcohol consumption could reinforce or upset social conventions. As often as
it facilitated community cohesion via rituals, customs, and celebrations, imbibing could
separate people (such as elites who were convinced their consumption of foreign liquors
in upscale saloons was far more civilized than the working-class and poor masses who
drank moonshine or frequented pulqueras) and catalyze conflict.
In response to political and intellectual elites concerns about public inebriation,
authorities arrested (mostly lower class) drunks for unruly behavior. Just as frequently,
intoxication enters the public record when defendants deployed it as an extenuating
circumstance. Although such strategies make delineating the connection between alcohol
and crime difficult, most scholars agree a causal relationship seldom emerges in the
empirical data. Assessing alcohols effects on health is also challenging. Whereas
authorities and medical professionals vilified alcohol for causing certain diseases, making
people susceptible to others, and spurring violence, traditional healers and even some
doctors prescribed it. In short, alcohol was a marker of social position and cultural
identity, a crucial component in community and state building, and a commodity around
which different cultural traditions, healing practices, and policing policies developed and
evolved.
Pre-European Alcohol Drinkways and Practices

On the eve of the Spanish and Portuguese invasions, indigenous rulers deployed alcohol
as a governing tool. Some groups used celebratory performances and formalized feasting
and drinking to augment their power. Indigenous alcohols psychoactive (and at times
hallucinatory) properties made it a crucial component for contact with gods in religious
rituals. Using alcohol as a form of taxation, both the Aztecs and Incas sought to regulate
its production, sale, and consumption. In the Andes where maize chicha was a customary
drink, women in the Inca cult of the sun produced it for ceremonies and for profit. The
Inca state also distributed and served alcohol to workers as part its reciprocal relations
with its charges. Within the Aztec and Inca empires, similar varieties of alcoholic
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beverages predominated. Outside their hegemonic reach, local populations produced a

diverse array of alcoholic drinks.
Fermented drinks were derived from available resources. Even into the 20th century,
regional variation abounded with little overlap. So distinct were different communities
concoctions that Henry Bruman could divide ancient Mesoamrica up according to local
preferences for fermented alcohol.2 In central Mexico, maguey (an agave plant) was the
base for pulque (fermented agave juice), the potency of which was enhanced by adding
cuapatle (bark of Acacia angustissima, a digitoxin). Further south Mayas and other
groups used maize, honey, pineapple, peanuts, jocote, coyol palm, molle (a fruit native to
the Andes), and bark from the balch tree to produce chicha, beer, and other libations.
Along the Brazilian coastline, Tupinamb peoples fermented manioc, corn, fruits, and
vegetable saps in a drink called cauim that they consumed during their ritual ceremonies.
Across the Andes in southern Chile, indigenous peoples fermented Calafate berries from
Molle trees and murtilla shrubs with pine nuts from Aruacaria trees.3
Indigenous Consumption Patterns

Like libations, patterns of consumption varied by region. Excepting military men, the
elderly, pregnant women, and the infirm, Aztec commoners were not allowed to drink
regularly. Because Aztec leaders considered pulque or octli the cause of all discord and
dissention, laws prohibiting illegal drinking were strict and punishment was severe, as
Prince Cahualtzin learned when he was executed for chronic drunkenness. Within ritual
contexts, however, extreme intoxication among men was permissible.4 Some ritual binge
drinking led to erotic dancing and adultery.
As much as leaders may have wanted to reserve intoxication for themselves, the
archaeological record suggests the practice was widespread. Basing her study on Spanish
chronicles, historian Sonia Corcuera de Mancera insists, The problem of inebriation was
chronic and serious among Aztecs.5 Extensive maguey fields suggest a vibrant pulque
trade; the taxation related to it speaks to mass consumption. In an indication of the limits
of their hegemony, Aztec leaders could do little to curtail the mass community drinking
that predated their rule. Identifying two broad patterns of consumption in pre-Hispanic
Mexicodrinking restricted to nobility in communities controlled by military rulers and
ritual drinking among commoners in communities that enjoyed some autonomyhistorian
William Taylor argues, Few if any totally abstinent communities [existed] in central
Mexico or Oaxaca before the conquest.6 Archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica
(such as the Toltec pulque cups and jugs for transporting liquids in central Mexico) and
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the Andes (where the majority of household pots were dedicated to alcohol) also point to
common consumption.
The many uses to which people put alcohol shed light on why its consumption was
common. Inebriation played a role in the cosmology of many indigenous groups. For
Mesoamerican religious and political leaders, pulque was a ritual drink. In addition to
helping people honor or connect with the gods, alcohol was also a source of nutrition.7
While some people depended on it as a substitute for water, many indigenous healers
praised alcohols curative powers. Aztecs deployed pulque for stomach problems,
constipation, diarrhea, and menstrual cramps.8
A symbolic and material manifestation of generosity and reciprocity, beer was the most
important intoxicant in much of the Andes. In one of the earliest records of the craft beer
industry, 13th-century, Xauxa elites brewed beer in their homes to enrich themselves and
attract others to their community. In other parts of the pre-Inca Andes, breweries
produced beer for large groups. At times tastes more than convenience shaped local
production; despite living at an altitude where maize agriculture was difficult, Tiwanaku
(3001000 CE) leaders imported corn from the valleys to produce their beer of choice.
Cadavers buried with special drinking cups suggest how ubiquitous beer consumption
was among the Tiwanaku. For the Wari (6001000 CE), molle or pepper beer became an
ethnic marker by which they could distinguish themselves from the peoples they
occupied. After the Inca conquest, the beer economy diversified as households shifted
from producing foodstuffs to producing alcohol.9
Widows and pregnant and nursing women notwithstanding, Andean and Mesoamerican
womens limited ability to consume alcohol stood in stark contrast to their central role in
its production. Although the female brewers who spit in corn concoctions to speed
fermentation dominated beer production, they reaped few of its benefits. As the Incas
strengthened patriarchal rule, they reciprocated mens public labor to the state with
alcohol and excluded women from the ceremonies in which men consumed it.10 Credited
with discovering how to extract sap from maguey, Mayahuel was a revered goddess.11 Her
elevated position among the pantheon of Aztec deities speaks to womens crucial
contributions to alcohol drinkways. Because Aztec rulers wanted to regulate production
and consumption, unlike their Andean counterparts, the women who produced pulque
were not allowed to sell it.12 Given womens varied and valuable roles in the Tenochitln
(today Mexico City) and other marketplaces, Aztec rulers may have excluded them from
alcohol commerce to limit their economic power.
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Colonial Consumption
Alcohol played a central role in the conquest and conversion of indigenous peoples. As
evident in the Portuguese soldiers and authorities who used alcohol to establish peaceful
exchanges with otherwise fierce indigenous groups in Brazil,13 the first Europeans to
arrive quickly recognized the social influence of alcohol. Informed by the drinking
traditions in Europe and the Americas, missionaries used alcohol to facilitate the
conversion of natives. To ensure they had a ready supply and to profit from an expanding
market, the Jesuits produced aguardiente, which (among other reasons) often put them at
odds with colonists who too sought to access and control indigenous peoples with
alcohol.14 In many ways, the central role of the Catholic Church in colonization paved the
way for tolerance of alcohol consumption in Latin America.15
Whereas colonists and missionaries alike pushed their own libations, they were
concerned about the influence of indigenous alcohol. With religion so closely tied to
politics in the colonial period, the Crown and Catholic church had an interest in
outlawing libations that strengthened local indigenous governance, community cohesion,
and customs. Such was the case when the Jesuits first encountered Tupinamb peoples
who inhabited much of coastal Brazil. When the missionaries realized that Tupinamb
feasts marked by binge drinking reconstituted their culture and buttressed their
autonomy, they sought to eradicate them. Unlike missionaries elsewhere that deployed
alcohol as a tool of conversion, Brazilian Jesuits preached temperance and abstinence in
an effort to convert Tupinambs and assimilate them into colonial society. The
persistence of Tupinamb cauim feasts into the 21st century hints at those early Jesuits
inefficacy.16 A similar standoff took place in Mexico where missionaries sought to
eradicate indigenous peoples consumption of pulque precisely because of its status as a
divine drink. Even as they preached sobriety as a Christian norm, Augustinian friars
encouraged the consumption of wine.17
With their knowledge of distillation (the process of vaporizing then condensing fermented
solutions to be collected as a purified liquid) and introduction of resources new to the
Americas such as sugarcane and grapes, Europeans dramatically altered the influence of
alcohol. As colonial officials used alcohol revenue to govern, alcohol took on political as
well as economic significance. Without displacing fermented drinks, distilled liquor
introduced new dynamics in the production and consumption of alcohol. Accustomed to
the Mediterranean tradition of drinking wine with meals, European colonists set the
stage for daily drinking. Common consumption spurred taverns and other drinking
establishments, which facilitated socialization that frequently contravened social norms.
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Elite men conversed with the poor and working-class women who served them drinks and
food; African and mulatto drinkers rubbed elbows with Spaniards in cantinas.18
Given that much alcohol was produced from sugarcane, the plantations of which
depended largely on slave labor, alcohol permeated the Atlantic slave trade and the lives
of Africans in Latin America. Brazilian cachaa (sugarcane brandy) played a central role
in the trafficking of slaves from Africa.19 Another by-product of sugar, grappa (a
fermented beverage) appealed to slaves, indigenous people, poor free people, and even
West Indies Company soldiers because it was as intoxicating as (but less expensive than)
wine. In a manifestation of how slaves made the best of their conditions, those who
worked on sugar plantations traded grappa to slaves without access to sugar production
who in turn traded it for foodstuffs. So integral to slave life and diet had aguardente (cane
liquor or rum) become that some governors refused to place any restrictions on its
commerce or consumption. On the other hand, African slaves penchant had for drinking
grappa and cachaa concerned authorities and plantation owners who believed
inebriation led to fights among slaves that frequently resulted in murder.20
For colonial regimes, alcohol was a doubled-edged sword. Governments came to depend
on alcohol revenue to support public works and to maintain social order particularly
during famine and other hardships. Yet as the alleged alcohol abuse among slaves
suggests, alcohol could also disrupt social order and public health. Suffering through a
drought that decimated maize harvests, Guadalajara (Mexico) residents benefited from
their officials ability to draw upon alcohol revenue to purchase and redistribute corn in
1650. Such advantages failed to sway officials and other colonists who were convinced
indigenous peoples were prone to alcohol abuse, which led to crime. The very commodity
that fueled government revenues engendered social ills.
With the exception of some native concoctions hallucinatory effects, distilled alcohol
radically altered the effects alcohol had on indigenous people. Historian David Christian
notes: Distilled drinks were to fermented drinks what guns were to bows and arrows:
instruments of a potency unimaginable in most traditional societies.21 For this and other
reasons in 1757, the Portuguese Crown prohibited colonists from trading aguardente with
indigenous villages.22 Because the beverage led to disorder, the Minas Gerais (Brazil)
government only allowed licensed mills to produce cachaa throughout the 18th century.
As the hundreds of mills in operation there attest, alcohol laws and practice seldom
coincided.23 As one explanation for such regulations, historian Juan Pedro Viqueira Alban
argues that Enlightenment ideas held by colonial elites in New Spain prompted them to
perceive a decline in morality and react to it with new laws aimed at controlling drinking
culture (and public behavior more broadly).24 Informed by a broader discourse that
blamed many social problems on alcohol, European chroniclers and Catholic priests
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tendency to exaggerate the damage caused by alcohol calls into question their
descriptions of indigenous drinking patterns.
Among Europeans and colonists, the association of indigenous people with alcohol abuse
fit into larger colonial narratives that depicted natives as savages who needed to be
civilized through conversion, miscegenation, or acculturation. Some colonial officials
deployed stereotypes about indigeneity, inebriation, and crime to obscure their own
shortcomings. Such was the case in 1692 when instead of admitting that egregious
government policies catalyzed an uprising that resulted in the conflagration of much of
Mexico City, officials blamed the destruction on drunk Indians.25 The ruses success
reveals the extent to which colonists feared that indigenous and African inebriation could
spur rebellion.26 Some research suggests alcohol consumption may have loosened
individuals inhibitions. In his analysis of a pattern of indigenous and mestizo assaults on
Spaniards, Aaron Althouse posits that inebriation emboldened subordinates to act out
their frustration with colonial oppression, exploitation, and disrespect.27 Suggesting a
similar effect in regards to gender hierarchies, most of the women accused of murder in
New Granada were allegedly drunk during the killing.28 As the Spaniards, mestizos,
mulattos, indigenous people, and Africans who shared the notion that inebriation
mitigated responsibility for their transgressions demonstrate, alcohol could liberate
people from social norms and soften punishment.29
Flying in the face of the Spanish Crowns efforts to maintain the separation of races,
Europeans, natives, and Africans shared recipes and drinks. At times, European
introductions replaced local concoctions.30 European reactions to Latin American
beverages ranged from addiction to abhorrence. Firmly rooted in the latter camp, in
1552, Francisco Lpez de Gmara claimed: There are no dead dogs, not a bomb, tha[t]
can clear a path as well as the smell of pulque.31 Withholding his judgment in the 1630s,
the English chronicler Thomas Gage described the Poqomam-Maya recipe for chicha that
included tobacco leaves, roots, and a live toad!32 Many colonial elites considered
indigenous drinks dangerous.33 As the Portuguese merchants who struggled to sell
French wine and brandy in Rio de Janiero learned, Latin Americans did not necessarily
embrace European stock either; for Brazilians, product quality drove demand.34 In turn,
Brazilian wine enjoyed enough popularity in Africa that it spawned a vibrant trade based
out of Luanda.35 Similarly, some Europeans embraced indigenous drinks and shared
taverns with their ethnic and class inferiors. Such was the case in southern Chile where
Spaniards praised indigenous chicha as better than wine.36 Examining the past through
the lens of alcohol demonstrates that Latin Americans frequently associated with each
other in ways that contravened social conventions.
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Economics of Colonial Alcohol

From the beginning, the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns goals were to profit from and
regulate the alcohol economy. To that end, they established alcohol monopolies and
taxes. Such measures almost invariably led to conflict among merchants and
entrepreneurs who were left out of the spoils. Insisting monopolies safeguarded public
health by assuring hygienic production, colonial officials sought to soften images of
government greed.
Royal authorities did not always control monopolies, however. In a move that afforded
governors and municipal officials greater control and Central American merchants
increased profits, in the 1750s, the Santiago de Guatemala Town Council assumed the
Alcohol Monopoly for Central America. By increasing access to the sale and consumption
of alcohol, the Town Council sought to portray itself as representative of broader
socioeconomic groups rather than merely elites. Once granted, however, local autonomy
was hard to uproot. When Spain returned the Alcohol Monopoly to royal agents in 1766,
locals ran the Crowns representative out of town.37
Although royal merchants privileged Spanish and Portuguese wines and liquor in the
Atlantic trade, at times, American libations bested European stock in ways that altered
the course of history. West Africans taste for cachaa dislodged Portuguese wine and
liquor and facilitated Brazilian merchants dominance in Western Africa. Portuguese
efforts to regain their privileged trading position by outlawing the sale of cachaa in
Africa failed. Because interior markets in Africa preferred cachaa, the Portuguese
Crowns attempt to promote European wine by prohibiting the sale of cachaa in Africa
was a lost cause by 1695. Ironically, missionaries aided that preference by deploying
cachaa as a tool to convert Africans.38 Notwithstanding the importance of textiles and
iron in the transatlantic slave trade, the direct trade between Africa and Brazil that
alcohol (and tobacco) facilitated challenges traditional descriptions of a transatlantic
triangle trade. Within the Americas, free trade often depended as much on local politics
as demand. Some governments restricted trade from other colonies, as was the case in
the 17th and 18th centuries when Guatemalan authorities periodically prohibited the
trade of Peruvian alcohol.39
Throughout Latin America, contraband trade may have rivaled and even surpassed
legitimate trade.40 With Maya nobility deploying their knowledge, power, and resources, a
vibrant illicit trade in balch bark used to make the drink by the same name emerged in
the Yucatn during the colonial period. Colombian caciques similarly facilitated the trade
and consumption of ritual alcohol to reinforce their prestige and power.41 Faced with an
informal economy that undercut their income, colonial officials dedicated significant
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resources to repressing bootlegging and moonshining. Just possessing the ingredients to

make home brews could land one in jail; accusations thereof could destroy political
careers.42 Generally government enforcement enjoyed limited success.43 Taylor suggests
that about 250 pulqueras operated without a license in Mexico City in 1639.44
Nearly one hundred years later (1713) at a time when Mexico City only sanctioned thirtysix pulqueras, the Augustinian friar Manuel Prez observed that each block has a
pulquera.45 Given that moonshiners success depended on invisibility, accurate statistics
are elusive. Vexed by the very phenomenon they study, scholars have attempted to
portray the significance of bootlegging in the absence of clear quantitative data.
Seeping its way into most aspects of the colonial economy, alcohol and the tremendous
wealth it produced contributed to what Eduardo Menndez calls alcoholization whereby
powerful individuals, groups, and entities created and maintained a historical structure
that contributed to alcohols mass consumption.46 Even as they regulated the production
and sale of aguardiente and chicha, colonial officials considered the consumption of such
regional homebrewed liquors useful and necessary for the health and life of the
workers.47 The alcohol economy frequently popped up around large economic
enterprises such as landed estates and mining. In Northern Mexico and the Andes where
the mining economy flourished, alcohol was a mainstay among the tertiary economies. At
times the demand for alcohol fueled agriculture. Eager to enrich themselves, Spanish and
Native families dedicated large landed estates and haciendas to the cultivation of maguey
and the production of pulque and mezcal. In addition to replenishing municipal coffers,
the pulque industry was the prime source of revenue for some of the wealthiest (and most
politically powerful) families in Mexico City including the marchioness of Selva Nevada,
Antonia Gmez de Brcena, and Mara Micaela Romero de Terreros, the oldest daughter
of the count of Regla.48 European-introduced agriculture too shaped alcohol production
and consumption. By the mid-16th century, viticulture led to winemaking in Chile and
Argentina.49 Similarly, as one of the cash crops that encouraged Spaniards to settle in
lowland areas, sugarcane facilitated the production of aguardiente. At times, alcohol
production and consumption ameliorated financial downturns. When Caribbean sugar
production lowered the international price of the sweetener, Brazilian sugar mill owners
produced aguardente.50 Historian Warren Dean estimates that there were hundreds if not
thousands of small mills around sugar plantations that met the domestic demand for
cachaa.51
Like government officials, property owners had to balance the pros and cons of alcohol
production, sale, and consumption. Notwithstanding profits and alcohols tendency to
pacify workers, some estate owners feared that intoxicants emboldened laborers and
slaves to revolt, fight, and steal.
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Social Relations
Positing that the type of liquor and the location of its production and consumption shaped
peoples perceptions, Taylor encourages scholars to think about the social meanings of
alcohol. Mesoamerican indigenous groups and Spanish colonists alike generally believed
that alcohol could maintain or alter social identities.52 The beverages one drank helped
to determine their identity.53 In Brazil where certain types of alcohol were associated with
barbarism, the social and ethnic distinctions of alcohol are evident in popular poems
(quadras) that reveal cachaa was shunned by educated whites but embraced by the poor,
indigenous people, and African slaves.54 Despite elite assumptions concerning taste,
cheap liquor fanciers also had standards. Consumers considered the cachaa distilled
directly from cane juice better than that distilled from mill renderings.55 Colonial
authorities sometimes used alcohol to reinforce or rearrange class and ethnic lines. In
Guatemala, Spaniards, mestizos, mulattos, and Negroes, but not Indians, could consume
Spanish and Peruvian alcohol.56 By enforcing the isolation of Indians and allowing the
fraternization of Africans and those of African descent with Europeans, such regulations
both encouraged and upset social hierarchies.
Diverse enough to serve as general stores and lodging houses, drinking establishments
taverns, cantinas, pulqueras, vinateras (wine and liquor shops), and other (often illicit)
establishmentsprovided venues for socializing, gossiping, and other forms of
exchanging information; at times, business and labor arrangements took place in them.
Taverns served important commercial functions. Entrepreneurial women sold food within
them.57 Cash strapped customers could buy drink and food on credit.58 Others pawned
goods for cash. In Chilean pulperas (store-taverns), merchants, muleteers, artisans,
farmers, soldiers and other locals came together to celebrate and commiserate.59 Owned
and operated by indigenous women, African slaves, mulattos, and even Spaniards,
Bolivian chicheras (chicha taverns) were melting pots of sorts where indigenous, African,
and Spanish men and women raised their glasses together.60 In addition to gambling,
dancing, music, and carousing, romantic pursuits were also common.61 For 18th-century
Mexico City, Michael Scardaville notes: The drinking house functioned as a reassuring
institution in a society subject to the anxieties of accelerating corn prices, periodic
epidemics, and job insecurity.62 As sites where ones accountability, vulnerability, power,
and identity, were contested, defended, and reconstituted, saloons had atmospheres that
ranged from happy to hostile. At times drunken excess could turn merriment into
violence, especially if one refused an invitation to drink. In colonial Mexico, such a
rejection was a declaration of superiority or hostility.63
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Even though colonial officials often attributed moral decline to drinking houses and the
loose women and lusty men they attracted, the Crown was too dependent on their
revenue to shut them down. It reluctance to do so can also be attributed to its sporadic
presence in most of its urban let alone rural colonies. In addition to concerns about
inebriation and cross gender socialization, governments feared watering holes were
hotbeds of social unrest.64 Concerned about socializing among indigenous people,
mulattos, and Africans, the Potos (in modern-day Bolivia) town council sought to close
chicharas.65 In the last half of the 18th century, Bourbon reformers in Mexico City
similarly policed pulqueras to circumvent and ideally transform the lives of the poor who
they considered dirty, criminal threats to public order and decency. To discourage
congregation, reformers outlawed seats and benches in pulqueras. To discourage vice,
they required lighting and mandated the removal of walls and thick curtains. That
taverns, pulqueras, and other poor and working-class drinking spaces largely ignored
such regulations and continued to thrive speaks not only to their popularity but also to
popular resistance to Bourbon reforms. Despite the presence of armed guards around it,
besotted individuals peed and defecated against the walls of the viceregal palace in
Mexico City.66
Elite assumptions about poor peoples consumption habits dovetailed with the arguments
of European intellectuals like Henry Fielding whose 1751 book An Enquiry into the
Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers attributed rising crime rates to alcohol abuse.
Convinced alcohol turned the hapless heads of the Indians, making them susceptible to
the most serious crimes, many colonial officials endorsed Fieldings thesis.67 Since
colonial law and courtrooms fueled perceptions of the relationship between alcohol and
crime, determining the causal effect of alcohol and crime is difficult. When drunkenness
became codified as an extenuating circumstance, defendants frequently deployed it to
countervail their culpability and alleviate their sentences. By clouding the premeditation
of a persons transgressions, inebriation served defendants well. Even as Taylor and
historian Victor Uribe-Uran noted a correlation between homicides and alcohol
consumption, they concur that alcohol was not a causal factor in most serious crimes.68
Whereas colonial officials warned against alcohols detrimental effect on crime and public
health, many Latin Americans extolled its curative powers. On many plantations,
Brazilian planters were convinced regular consumption of cachaa kept slaves healthy
and diligent. One Brazilian governor considered aguardente a basic foodstuff that
helped slaves bear with such a great labor, live healthier, and a longer time.69 African
and mulatto healers used alcohol in their curing practices. Like indigenous practitioners,
they were convinced it could restore good health. It could also be used as a purgative.70
Even doctors from the Real Protomedicato de la Nueva Espaa insisted that when used in
moderation, alcohol could be healthy and medicinal.
Page 12 of 47

As a social lubricant, alcohol helped rituals and celebrations to create community both
within and across ethnic groups. In the Andes, alcohol imbued personal relations with
notions of reciprocity, obligation, generosity, and trust.71 Long offered as a ceremonial
gift, alcohol reinforced and reshaped local knowledge, culture, and tradition.72 Carefully
choreographed and organized, many indigenous drinking rituals enhanced the social
prestige and political power of the elites who hosted them;73 they also catalyzed
communal drinking binges. Ritualized balch consumption helped Yucatec Mayas and
Lacandons to maintain their social and religious autonomy, particularly because
Spaniards (especially priests) considered the practice to be that of savages.74
As much as alcohol connected people, it could also divide them by catalyzing ethnic and
class stratifications and poisoning social relations. Spaniards who refused to drink beer
with Incas foreshadowed an ominous colonial enterprise and reflected European
prejudices about indigenous consumption. Alcohol did not simply fall along a European/
American divide, however. In colonial Mexico, indigenous residents of San Miguel
denigrated hacienda workers there who drank regularly.75 Such observations hint at the
rich potential for researchers interested in alcohols effect on social relations.
Gender and Women

The increasing role women played in the production and sale of alcohol was one
manifestation of its intertwined social and economic contours. While a few communities
prohibited women from the production process, in many societies, they were crucial to
alcohol production before the European invasions. Thereafter women in the Andes,
Brazil, and Mesoamerica parlayed skills gained as petty commodity producers, market
vendors, and tributaries into profitable enterprises in the alcohol economy.76 Barred from
selling pulque during Aztec rule, indigenous women began selling it in the new capital
within a few years of the Spanish invasion. Because it offered an economic opportunity
that complemented their domestic labor, women increasingly turned to alcohol
production and sale to advance their interests.
Although few colonial officials publicly recognized womens crucial role in the alcohol
economy, some mandates such as the 1608 order by the Crown that only one
respectable old woman be licensed to sell pulque for every one hundred Indians,
betrayed it.77 Selling alcohol provided an avenue for female survival and sometimes
success. Known as pulperas in Chile, taverns and general stores afforded some women
(particularly widows) social mobility. Recognizing their struggle, at times colonial
regimes allowed such women to operate taverns without paying taxes.78 Other women
avoided taxes by opening pulperas illicitly in their homes. To the chagrin of licensed
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pulperas (female tavern owners) who complained that unregulated competition was
unfair, Chilean colonial authorities responded to the growing informal alcohol economy
by dramatically reducing taxes to encourage all alcohol entrepreneurs to attain official
status. For women largely confined to the home and assumed by law to be incapable of
making commercial decisions, the opportunity to own and run a pulpera allowed them to
demonstrate their business acumen and advance their emancipation.79
Although women generally had greater freedom to drink after the Spanish invasions,
restrictions on their consumption circumscribed their behavior. In colonial Mexico, for
example, if a husband was drunk, his wife was expected to be sober. In turn, officials and
husbands punished wives who drank without their husbands consent. Even absent free
reign to drink, the expansion of public consumption as manifested in the florescence of
taverns (the entrance to which often was separated by gender) gave women greater
access to members of the community.80
Post-Independence Drinkways and National

Libations
Alcohol played an integral role in forging newly independent nations.81 Many of the
British, Scottish, and Irish soldiers who participated in the early 19th-century South
American Independence battles were conscripted in an inebriated state. In contrast to his
counterpart Simn Bolvar who only drank sparingly, the Argentine patriot who liberated
Chile, Jos de San Martn, consumed enough brandy (and opium) to erode his mental
faculties.82 Specific types of alcohol were often at the heart of national movements and
identities. Like rum in Cuba, as part of elite notions about independence, cachaa became
a symbol of national pride in Brazil. Formerly associated with lower class inebriation,
elites, authorities, military officers and others agitating for independence in the early
19th century framed cachaa as a patriotic drink.83 In a similar trope aimed at domestic
and international audiences, beginning in the 1850s, the Argentinean author and
statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento sought to develop viticulture as an economic,
political, and social symbol of the nations transition from colonialism to modernization.
He believed vineyards run by white elite men could help shape a modern nation. By the
late 1860s, Argentina was becoming internationally recognized for its wines.84 In other
contexts, however, elites sought to distinguish themselves in their new nations by
patronizing European beverages, including Spanish wines, German beers, and U.S.
liquors.
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As the case of Brazilian cachaa demonstrates, alcohol identities changed over time.
Argentinean wine offers another example of this process. As European migration erupted
from the second half of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, the
wine industry enjoyed a robust domestic market. Since many families considered wine a
staple, like bread and meat, price and quantity were more important than taste.
Appreciative of its high alcohol content, heavy color, and viscosity, most consumers
diluted their wine with water to economize. PostWorld War II urbanization further
fueled the domestic wine market. So crucial to working-class life had cheap wine become
that the populist government of Juan and Eva Pern (and some of their successors)
advocated for and passed tax laws favorable to its provision. With the emphasis on mass
consumption, quality never emerged as a priority. Consumers used ice and soda water to
make wine more palatable. When the domestic market shifted to beer and other alcoholic
drinks in the 1960s and 1970s, wine producers faced a crisis.85 Many responded by hiring
foreign wine experts and investing in technology and such quality controls as oak barrels
for aging. Instead of mass production, vineyards adjusted to produce diverse high quality
wines. By the 1990s, Argentinean wines had gained an international reputation for
excellence. Even though Argentineans consumed 80 percent of nationally produced
wines, producers and consumers alike basked in the foreign affirmation of their products.
Investing heavily in advertising and other media, wine producers jettisoned the workingclass associations of wine to portray it as an elite beverage.86
Elsewhere in Latin America, some companies refashioned traditional drinks to embrace a
European or at least Hispanic identity. Such was the case with the Sauza Tequila Import
Company. Three generations of Sauza owners worked to distinguish tequila from pulque
and contrast the former as a drink of upper- and middle-class Hispanics with the latter as
one of poor and working-class Indians. That distinction informed their marketing strategy
in the United States and Europe too.87 Claiming tequila (and by extension its consumers)
best represented lo Mexicano, or being Mexican, was but one manifestation of what Tim
Mitchell calls patriotic alcoholization, which has deep historical roots in Latin America
where alcohol producers linked their products to nationalism.88
When entrepreneurs eager to follow the liberal economic model of export production
began looking to foreign markets, the international component of the alcohol trade
became more pronounced. In 1873, for example, the founder of the Sauza Tequila Import
Company, Cenobio Sauza (18731909) began exporting tequila from Mexico to the United
States.89 Like many of his counterparts, he considered foreign consumers crucial to
expanding profits. As neoliberal economics took hold in the second half of the 20th
century, international marketing campaigns eclipsed domestic advertising and put many
drinks out of reach of the poor and working classes.90 Even when economic systems
changed dramatically, alcohol companies continued to shape their nations. Bacardi Rum
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in Cuba offers one example of a company nimble enough to survive the transition from
capitalism to communism (among other machinations, the company advanced legislation
to cripple its main competitor Havana Club Rum and funneled CIA funds to paramilitary
mercenaries intent on overthrowing Fidel Castro) and powerful enough to influence
Cuban society and foreigners perceptions of the island nation.91 Of course, local
unregulated drinks too were part of international trade as the 19th-century Guatemalan
highland Mayas who transported and consumed comiteco (a type of aguardiente) from
Chiapas, Mexico, demonstrate. Taken as a whole, the globalization of Latin American
alcohol shaped national development and social relations.92
Government greed for alcohol revenue undermined political stability.93 As the Mexico
case demonstrates, alcohol entrepreneurs were formidable protagonists. Notwithstanding
the devastating economic effects of civil wars and foreign invasions, the very political
instability that contributed to the Mexican governments reliance on alcohol revenues
often compelled it to repeal alcohol taxes. As influential as the Sauza family and other
tequila producers had become, pulquera owners too enjoyed significant lobbying power,
which they wielded to mitigate or forestall government regulations. Even against the
backdrop of media campaigns aimed at discounting pulque, it remained a major player up
until World War II when beer became the fermented beverage of choice.94 An attempt to
counteract that preference in the 1960s by canning pulque for wide distribution failed. As
pulquera owners began catering to younger clientele in the 21st century, pulque has
made a comeback among educated middle- and upper-class Mexico City residents, who
have reappropriated it as a symbol of their rebellion against and embracement of
nationalism.95
Alcoholic Leverages
Strategies for controlling the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol varied over
time and by region. Though persistent in Central America, the colonial penchant for
establishing alcohol monopolies gave way to stamp taxes and tax farming in other parts
of Latin America as the 19th century wore on. In Venezuela, the government sold the
right to collect taxes to private individuals who could then keep the proceeds.96 A
different form of indirect taxation emerged in Mexico where the government
implemented a stamp tax on alcoholic beverages. Producers were taxed on an increasing
scale based on the percentage of alcohol content in their libations. In many nations,
fragmented geographies and heterogenous producers made collecting taxes difficult. As
historian Graciela Mrquez argues, Mexicos post-revolution reforms were aimed at
reducing the cost of collection by increasing tax efficiency and rationalizing the tax
burden.97
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In addition to generating revenue, alcohol lubricated labor systems, particularly debt

servitude. In the 19th and 20th centuries, labor brokers in the Yucatn and Guatemala
used alcohol to lure Mayas into signing labor contracts that entrapped them on
plantations.98 One elder recalled how landowners secured laborers in early 20th-century
Yucatan: They gave kids aguardiente when they were very young; then, when they
reached their tenth birthday, they wanted to drink but didn't have the money. The tatich
was there to lend it, and thats how they came by many of their servants.99 Further
facilitating debt peonage and contributing to the company stores crucial role in
controlling labor, some owners paid their laborers in alcohol.100 Alcohol was a currency of
local economies throughout Latin America. Everyone from midwives to magistrates were
paid with aguardiente. In some regions, defendants could pay their fines with it.101
Convinced it would suppress labor organization or rebellion, some hacendados
distributed alcohol to workers.102 Labor organizers recognized that alcoholism was an
obstacle to labor organization, as one delegate to the 1906 labor congress in Brazil
noted.103
As during the colonial period, alcohol consumption continued to cut many ways. Though
it could indebt workers and make them more docile, as historians Allen Wells and Gilbert
Joseph point out, alcohol could also embolden the oppressed to rebel.104 For some
laborers, alcohol abuse was a form of resistance. Workers inebriation (or feigning
thereof) allowed them to slow if not altogether escape daily labors.105
Given the impoverished conditions in which many poor and working-class peoples lived, it
is not surprising that they turned to alcohol as a means of amusement and escape.
Brazils urban poor consumed enough cachaa in the late 19th century to capture the
attention of foreign travelers. By the turn of the century, alcohol had become even more
popular among the urban classes, some of whom believed cachaa gave them strength to
finish their work. Shots of it were sold at kiosks in Rio de Janeiro.106
Moonshine and Bootlegging

As is true of most illegal activity, the informal alcohol economy was the subject of highly
public, morally and financially charged policy debates. Even though government attempts
to curtail clandestine production provoked unrest and at times rebellion, administrations
so desperately needed the revenues generated from the alcohol economy that they
refused to divest from it.107 Since moonshining cut into their profits, legal producers too
had a stake in the battle against moonshiners and bootleggers. Throughout Latin
America, individual functionaries and hired henchmen pursued moonshine convictions
with great zeal; at times they received a percentage of the regulatory payments or fines.
To buttress their private monopoly on alcohol production and sale in Chiapas, for
example, the powerful Pedreros family paid 25 pesos to anyone who reported a
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clandestine still.108 Some producers and vendors operated in both the formal and informal
economies.
Even as the historical record (particularly oral histories) offers hints as to how wily
bootleggers avoided detection, the extent to which clandestine alcohol sales fed into
regional economic systems led to some ambiguity in the persecution of bootleggers. To
cut off the production and sale of moonshine would have eradicated an important source
of revenue flow and labor recruitment in local economies. The local collaboration and
complicity that ranged from corrupt authorities looking the other way to officials
establishing their own illicit operations was as much driven by personal interest as this
knowledge. In many areas, enforcement was spotty by design.
Whereas some communities such as the Tzoltils and Tzeltals of Chiapas (Mexico)
convinced local officials to permit the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol for
ritual uses, the pleas of others such as 19th-century Mayas in Western Guatemala fell on
deaf ears.109 Successful petitions were generally short lived and subject to political
manipulation. The Tzoltil and Tzeltal concession lasted only five years. When the state
reestablished an alcohol monopoly in 1949, the uprising was so virulent, it became known
as Posh [aguardiente] War. Stephen Lewiss analysis of it holds true for many parts of
Latin America where the culture of alcohol was so important: that any attempt to limit
its production and distribution had grave social consequences and promoted clandestine
production.110 Mayas too resisted government monopolies.111 One Guatemalan
governments attempt to regulate alcohol production and sale in the 1830s contributed to
an uprising that led to its downfall. Though wars related to alcohol were the exception,
the vibrant bootlegging and moonshining enterprises throughout the region stand as a
testament to the many ways people resisted states attempts to control the alcohol
economy. So interrelated were the legal and illegal alcohol economies that an increase in
the price of legal alcohol could stimulate clandestine production and sale.112
Whether motivated by sympathy, corruption, or personal interest, many politicians turned
a blind eye toward violations; some sold or consumed alcohol illegally. One such instance
was the great still in the town of Tecpn, Guatemala, rumored to be so large that it was
considered an urban legend by law enforcement, until they discovered just why it was
referred to as La Municipalidad in May 1931. Owned and operated by Tecpns town
council, the illegal still was discovered on the mayors land! Collusion between elected
officials, moonshiners, and locals was not uncommon. While some politicians used alcohol
to enrich themselves, others used it to buy votes. In an indication of how government
officials upset the state-building process, corrupt municipal and judicial officials in 20thcentury Mexico regularly flouted alcohol laws.113 Alcohol seeped into politics.
Page 18 of 47

Even as their intensity and efficacy varied by time and place, campaigns against
bootlegging were nearly universal in Latin America. By outlawing moonshine, the state
altered definitions of crime. By maintaining that cottage industry, bootleggers challenged
definitions of deviant behavior. To portray an image of efficacy, police gazettes and other
official sources celebrated successful raids.
Although a few moonshiners claimed they were unaware producing and selling alcohol
without a license was illegal, most defendants revealed knowledge of the law in their
savvy testimonies. Once arrested, moonshiners and bootleggers tended to reference their
poverty to explain if not excuse their transgression. Female defendants often deployed
the gendered language of vulnerability or motherhood in their defenses. Neither
destitution nor motherhood were extenuating circumstances in legal codes, but litigants
were wise to cite them. Judicial officials regularly reduced penalties for women whose
poverty was noteworthy. Widows raising children especially enjoyed success in
mitigating sentences and fines.114
Temperance Movements
Unlike moonshine campaigns, temperance movements gained little traction in Latin
Americas predominantly Catholic countries. Widespread lower-class consumption of
distilled alcohol (particularly moonshine because of its low price and allure of illegality)
sparked fledgling temperance movements. In nations with large indigenous populations,
efforts to curb alcohol consumption were linked to race. When the overtly Catholic
Ecuadorean administration of Gabriel Garca Moreno (18601875) discouraged excessive
alcohol consumption, it subtly associated inebriation with indigeneity. By suggesting that
the normally timid, cowardly indigenous people become violent savages with alcohol,
authorities portrayed indigenous people as unworthy of citizenship. Framing alcohol as
the root of all immoral behavior allowed Garca Moreno to deploy temperance policies
against priests, officials, and even entire regions critical of his centralized regime. If they
were known to have a penchant for inebriation, the government could purge impious
priests and authorities who did not fall in line.115 Not surprisingly, temperance movements
were pitted against alcohol producers. In late 19th-century Uruguay, a burgeoning winemaking industry marketed their product against the backdrop of Temperance Legions
informed by a combination of medical and moralistic critiques of alcohol.116 In contrast to
the fertile ground Protestantism provided for temperance in the United States (where
teetotalers like Neal Dow, who was known as the Napoleon of Temperance, decried that:
Portlands wharves groaned beneath the burden of West India rum), Catholicism
generally heralded a lenient attitude toward consumption. Of course, not all temperance
zealots were Protestant. Yet even as the Catholic Church warned against the dangers of
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alcoholism, the religious, ritual, and cultural uses of alcohol tended to buttress its
legitimacy and acceptance.117
In Mexico, early nationalist efforts to reduce alcohol consumption by prohibiting music,
gambling, or other entertainment that might encourage lingering in drinking
establishments mirrored those of the colonial period.118 By the turn of the century,
temperance campaigns emerged in response to reformers who warned: Alcoholism and
venereal disease represented the greatest evils.119 After the overthrow of Porfirio Daz in
1910, Mexican revolutionaries believed they could eradicate poverty, laziness, and
backwardness by controlling alcohol consumption.120 Decrying the domestic damage that
alcohol caused, women were frequently on the front lines of anti-alcohol campaigns,
which in Mexico was decidedly anti-clerical. Mexican anti-alcohol activists decried
Catholic festivals that encouraged people to drink.121 Encouraged by paternalistic
reformers who confined womens contributions to their traditional gender roles, women
pressured local leaders to shut down neighborhood cantinas and convinced their
husbands to abstain from drinking. Even though their husbands and local leaders often
resisted womens mobilization and few women assumed leadership roles in anti-alcohol
campaigns, many women embraced the opportunity to become public political activists.122
Warning that alcoholism was Among the greatest enemies of the race and future of
Mexico [because it] undermines the physical and moral forces of our men, disturbs
conjugal happiness, and destroys, with degenerate children, all possibility of future
greatness for the fatherland, Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil launched the National
Committee for the Struggle Against Alcohol in 1929.123 Perhaps because Gil and his
successors portrayed indigenous and poor men as particularly prone to alcoholism, some
rural communities in Chiapas declared themselves dry; a few even posted guards to keep
aguardiente out. Because they were overwhelmed with the various revolutionary
programs they were charged with implementing (and more than a few of them were
chronic drinkers), teachers enjoyed little success in convincing youths and other rural
Mexicans to abstain from drinking. As politically astute and sophisticated as they became
through the process, women in anti-alcohol committees were equally ineffective.124 Few
anti-alcohol advocates sought to tackle such socioeconomic factors surrounding
alcoholism as poverty, unclean drinking water, unemployment, and workplace abuse,
however. More popular than government efforts, Protestant evangelical sects that
preached abstinence as a path to increased wealth and improved domestic relations
caught on in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in Brazil and Guatemala.
Indeed, the number of converts swelled as a result of alcohol remediation programs.
Only sporadically applied, liquor laws had little effect. In most countries, states
dependence on alcohol revenues and corrupt officials undermined legislative initiatives.125
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Even when temperance measures were enforced, locals found ways to circumvent them.
When Merida officials shut down cantinas, working-class homes became the destination
of choice, which facilitated the participation of women. With the sale of alcohol prohibited
on Sundays, San Lunes or Holy Monday became the preferred day for inebriation and
disorder in the Yucatn.126 Paternalistic in the effort to free workers from alcohols grip,
liquor laws in Mexico were part of the broader goal of establishing a capitalist ethic. Even
where the goal was socialism, as historians William French and Barry Carr point out,
progress required the elimination of alcoholism.127
In addition to consumers opposition, producers and vendors complained temperance
movements threatened their livelihoods. If judicial records are any indication, many Latin
Americans produced and sold alcohol to escape poverty. As Gretchen Pierce and Aurea
Toxqui demonstrate, when including those who transported, sold, and served beer,
tequila, pulque, and other drinks, the number of people who stood to lose their jobs was
well over half a million.128 Because they were more nimble and mobile, smaller operations
found it easier to continue to produce through anti-alcohol campaigns than larger
operations such as the Sonora Brewery, which folded because of prohibition. The
increased unemployment and other reverberations from the Sonora Brewery closing its
does provided a cautionary tale about the negative intended and unintended
consequences that prohibition and temperance campaigns set in motion. For the smaller
illicit Mexican operations along the border, however, U.S. prohibition was a boon. For the
same reason authorities pursued moonshiners, many officials refrained from enforcing
temperance: the licit alcohol economy was too lucrative to allow anything to undercut
it.129
Social Cohesion and Unrest

Consumption cut many ways as drinking patterns differed by region, ethnicity, culture,
class, and gender. Alcohol mediated rather than dictated relationships that ranged from
romance and business to family feuds and community tensions. Contemporary residents
of Mexico City insisted that they enjoyed more freedom to decline a beverage than their
rural counterparts for whom doing so could convey an insult.130 As indicated in the many
vibrant indigenous rituals that include drinking, where alcohol consumption was part of
ritual and tradition, it was hard to extirpate. Balch was such a crucial component to
Lacandn and Yucatec Maya religious rituals that neither colonial nor national
prohibitions succeeded in eradicating it.131 Like alcohol consumption, alcohol production
brought people together. In southern Chile, communities gathered to harvest apples and
produce chicha in a tradition that reinforced reciprocity among locals.132
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Often grounded in European, urban elite lifestyles, cultural values informed observations
about alcoholic drinkways.133 Whereas Sarmiento portrayed Argentinean gauchos or
cowboys as prone to alcoholism and violence, 19th- and early-20th-century U.S. travelers
attributed Mexican laziness and stupidity and lack of ambition to alcohol
consumption.134 Foreign travelers who ventured into indigenous areas and tried local
libations were often shocked and dismayed. Exploring the Guatemalan highlands in the
1830s, John L. Stephens came upon a marriage being celebrated with dancing and
aguardiente that he characterized as an exhibition of disgusting revelry.135 Some forty
years later in 1874, Gilbert Haven described pulque as a disgustingly smelling and
tasting substance Rotten eggs are fragrant to its odor, and pigs swill sweet to its
taste.136
While many national and foreign elites denigrated working class drinkways, by the
mid-19th century Mexican authorities and intellectuals portrayed cafes where elites
enjoyed imported wines and liquors in the company of art or artists as sophisticated and
civilized. Such contrasts speak to the ways morality and enlightenment were linked to
class. In light of the disorder and dissipation in cafes and convivial atmosphere in
pulqueras, distinctions between drinking spaces were often more imagined than real.137
Discourses about class, race, criminality and alcoholism focused elite efforts on what they
perceived to be challenges to establishing order and progress. Such depictions contrast
sharply with that of the prominent 19th-century Mexican writer, poet, and liberal
politician Guillermo Prieto who portrayed suburban pulqueras as havens of shared
sociability among different social classes.138 The persistence of some pulqueras in cities
and the proliferation of others in suburban locales when urban regulations persecuted
them speaks to how important they were for poor and working-class clientele who
patronized them. In addition to contributing to the urbanization of rural areas,
pulqeueras provided a venue where traditional rural and often indigenous men and
women experienced the modernizing influences of urban life including capitalism,
liberalism, and industrialization.139 As the aforementioned distinct perceptions
demonstrate, competing perceptions of alcohol consumption and drinking spaces figured
prominently in nation building.
Like the church, governments were concerned about alcohols role in challenging
hegemonic notions and structures. Their addiction to alcohol revenue can be discerned in
the extent to which they pursued it despite the social problems associated with drinking.
Alcohol frequently left a wake that undermined politicians efforts to portray order and
progress in their nations. Scandalously drunk men and women evoked a sense of
disorder. Many politicians and authorities were convinced alcohol abuse contributed to
crime. In 1866, one group of Mexico City businessmen complained about pulqueras near
their shops because: premises next to the pulquera were invaded by many drunkards
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[who] wanted to hide from the police.140 Turn-of-the-century Mexican intellectuals

asserted pulqueras and other lower-class drinking houses bred crime. Widely endorsed
by contemporary criminologists, such claims informed authorities approaches to drinking
and crime, which made inebriation a risky endeavor. When done publicly, drinking put
consumers at risk. In nations with strict anti-alcohol laws, abuse was met with
incarceration and labor or military conscription. Drunk and disorderly hacienda workers
in rural Mexico frequently slept off their inebriation in a jail cell.141 Some Mexican
administrations were rumored to have executed drunks.
As part of a discourse of state formation, Latin American intellectuals and authorities in
countries with significant indigenous populations cultivated images of indigenous people
as backward and drunk.142 The case of the Mexican temperance movement from 1910 to
1940 whereby reformers focused more on class than race notwithstanding, claims in
nations like Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala that delinquents were predominantly
Indian and that indigenous people were prone to alcohol abuse cemented connections
between race, alcohol, and crime. In rural Yucatn, henequen estate owners and
managers generally considered their workers stupid, drunken Indians.143 Associations of
alcohol and ethnicity, geography, class, and gender continued to reverberate into the
20th century. Referring to a rural indigenous family living in Mexico City in the 1990s,
one informant told urban anthropologist Matthew Gutmann, The guys are a bunch of
lazy bums who make their women go out and work while they stay home and get
drunk.144
As much as disparaging portrayals were related to racism, other factors also contributed
to links between ethnicity, alcoholism, and crime. As was true during the colonial period,
Latin American laws recognition of inebriation as an extenuating circumstance
encouraged defendants to exaggerate its use. Even after some nations suspended that
exception, defendants continued to deploy it to suggest their crime was not
premeditated.145 Such testimonial deceptions aside, drinking was associated with some
crimes. Although his study conducted in the late 20th century debunks many myths about
Mexican men and alcohol, Gutmann found that male drinking often did indeed end in
violence: domestic and otherwise.146
Alcohol became a powerful trope that cut both ways during Latin Americas civil wars
during the second half of the 20th century. Even as rural indigenous peoples feigned or
embraced regular inebriation as a way to avoid being conscripted into the military or
recruited into insurgent groups, for example, the Guatemalan National Police used
drunkenness as a euphemism for suspected subversive activity; many of the alleged
drunks they arrested were never seen again.147
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Gendered Drinking
The gendered, class, and ethnic aspects of alcohol offer windows into the social and
economic history of Latin America. As historian Heidi Tinsman points out, in addition to
conquering women and highlighting male camaraderie, drinking was a central component
of masculinity.148 Many men bonded over beverages in ways that enhanced their trust in
and intimacy with one another and opposition to their superiors. So engrained had
perceptions of alcohol consumption and inebriation become as part of mine workers
identities that social reformers in Chile considered eradicating alcoholism as crucial to
establishing more robust and stable male-headed families. Ignoring the dry law and
police vigilance, some miners consumed clandestinely. For some, drinking asserted their
manliness and opposition to the companys regulations and rules.149 Some anti-alcohol
advocates sought to disassociate drinking from masculinity. In late-19th-century Ecuador,
the Garca Moreno administration portrayed excessive alcohol consumption as a sign of
mens failings and weakness. Framed as a blow to their masculinity, men who diverted
money toward booze and beat their wives and children while drunk instead of providing
for and protecting them surrendered their patriarchal rights and privileges.150 Similarly,
anti-alcohol activists in Mexico framed sobriety as masculine; manly men were sober.151
As historians and anthropologists have proven, the gendered history of alcohol
consumption is varied. Matthew Gutmanns study of machismo in Mexico City
demonstrates that many men abstained from drinking and many others generally drank
far more responsibly than the: celebrated image of the Mexican proletarian male with a
bottle of tequila in his hand and a silly, satisfied grin on his lips.152 In contrast to the way
that men who drank together reconstituted masculine solidarity in colonial Mexico, the
increasing frequency with which men drank with women in bars and in their homes over
the course of the 20th century calls into question the assumption that drinking and
drunkenness are essential elements of Mexican masculinity.153 One 1923 study found that
80 percent of the girls as compared to only 70 percent of the boys between the ages of
eight and fifteen consumed alcohol.154 The growing corpus of studies of alcohol in Latin
America has contributed to what Gutmann calls degendering alcohol consumption.155
Although not necessarily to the extent of their male counterparts, women too consumed
alcohol and got drunk.156 According to Mexican criminologists, women who drank became
jealous, immoral, and bore illegitimate babies. For poor women the consequences were
allegedly even worse: prostitution, abortion, and venereal diseases.157 Such ominous
claims notwithstanding, over time women expanded the contexts in which they could
drink and imbibed in ways that increased their social mobility and satisfaction.158
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Widespread popular perceptions of men dominating alcohol consumption do not hold up

against gendered historical and ethnographic analysis.
Women also carved out spaces for themselves within the alcohol economy. Given their
demanding and place-bound labor, many poor women took to selling and producing
alcohol because they could do so within the parameters of their domestic responsibilities.
Although they had to be careful not to jeopardize their reputations, women could
transition to the alcohol trade without dramatically disrupting their daily lives. In a
fascinating study of the intersections of foodways and drinkways in 19th-century Mexico,
urea Toxqui demonstrates womens varied participation in the alcohol economy from the
white elite women who owned agave plantations and thereby controlled the production
and sale of pulque in pulqueras to the poor indigenous and mestizo women who sold food
in and around taverns to makes ends meet.159 Like Bolivian chicheras (corn-beer
producers and vendors), Mexican womens positions as vendors of alcohol and other
goods where alcohol was served facilitated the social mixing of poor indigenous and
mestizo women with elite men. Some vendors developed connections with wealthy men
that served them well.160 Throughout Latin America, womens crucial role in the licit and
illicit alcohol trade both adhered to and disrupted social conventions.
Vulnerable to the threats and insults of inebriated clients, female bartenders and their
counterparts were at once marginalized and empowered. They enjoyed more physical
mobility and social freedom than many of their social superiors. Assumed by many
patrons to be prostitutes or thieves, chicheras used the information and gossip they heard
as they served alcohol to their advantage. Among them were women who became
powerful in local politics, enjoyed social mobility (moving from the lower to middle class),
and ultimately helped to shape national identity.161 Their particular public presence and
increased income afforded them respected positions.
Public Health and Alcohol

As science and knowledge advanced in the 19th and 20th centuries, alcohols relationship
to public health and health care became more complicated. Two documents from the
Archivo General de Guatemala demonstrate how officials recognized the public health
benefits and dangers that alcohol posed. In 1923, the Guatemalan Minister of Finance
circulated a memo to governors throughout the country in which he reminded them of the
age-old custom of using alcohol as medicine. Four years later one of his counterparts in
the capital similarly circulated a memo to governors stressing the importance of assuring
distilling apparatuses were clean so as not to jeopardize consumers health.162 Although
it never trumped their financial motives, governments sought to mitigate alcohols
Page 25 of 47

detrimental health effects; inspectors who examined distilling equipment and serving
conditions did much to improve public health.
For teetotalers, anything short of prohibition and abstinence was futile. Late-19th century
Brazilian doctors considered the abuse of alcohol beverages a true calamity
particularly among the lower classes.163 Mexican health officials decried alcohol as a vice
leading to cirrhosis, syphilis, tuberculosis, and other diseases.164 Deployed to help states
rule, statistics demonstrated alarming associations between alcohol and public health. To
cite a contemporary example, cirrhosis is one of Mexicos top five health problems
today.165 Alcohol consumption also had indirect effects on public health. Oral histories,
judicial records, and ethnographic studies suggest a relationship between intoxication
and domestic violence. Breadwinners who spent money on alcohol instead of the home
were especially hard on families living in poverty.
Alcohol also could contribute to health care and public health. Latin American indigenous
peoples routinely prescribed alcohol to cure fevers and other ills.166 Consumed as an
anesthesia, alcohol also could be a potent antidote for those dealing with the stress of
poverty or the trauma of war and violence. Given the reality of many rural Mexicans,
tequila producers claims that their libation was healthy and hygienic were not
necessarily hyperbolic.167 Even into the 21st century, some families depended on
fermented beverages as a substitute for water (since theirs was not potable), food, and
medicine.168
Conclusion
Alcohol and the people who produced, sold, and consumed it helped to shape
communities, colonies and nations in Latin America. Early archaeological evidence
suggests the intertwined nature of institutional and social structures relating to alcohol
during the indigenous era were even more apparent in the colonial and national periods.
Throughout those periods, the bonding agents that connected institutions and people
were power and its mirror expression, autonomy. Given that neither the Aztec nor Inca
empires could eradicate local consumption and production patterns, the survival of some
variation of those patterns into the colonial and national periods is not surprising. As
ritual consumption and production customs demonstrate, alcohol drinkways reconstituted
and revived communities under indigenous, colonial, and national rule. Alcohol
consumption could unite people (when, for example, different ethnicities, classes, and
genders frequented the same drinking establishments) or divide them (when, for
example, marketing campaigns targeted specific classes and racesand implicitly
Page 26 of 47

excluded othersfor their products). Ranging from a social lubricant to medicine and a
substitute for potable water, alcohol served many functions.
A crucial contributor to formal and informal commerce, alcohol revenue fueled national
budgets and local economies. With sugarcane harvested by African slaves providing the
primary ingredient for rum, alcohol flowed through many aspects of the colonial (and
national in Brazil where slavery continued after independence) economy. Whether as
payment or a recruitment tool, alcohol was intimately tied to other forms of labor. In
addition to shedding light on the way companies such as Bacardi Rum and Sauza Tequila
Import have shaped national trajectories, the study of alcohol reveals how lower-class
men and women improved their lot via the alcohol economylegal or otherwise.
Historical studies of clandestine alcohol enterprises offer insight into the attenuation of
state power and autonomy of marginalized people. Similarly, studying prohibition reveals
the countervailing gendered interests of women who produced and sold moonshine on
the one hand and those who emerged as the rank and file of prohibition movements on
the other. The moonshiners who pled poverty or vulnerability as exculpatory, the
perpetrators of violent acts who claimed they were drunk to mitigate their sentences, and
those arrested (legitimately or otherwise) for drunk and disorderly conduct are but a few
manifestations of the complex concatenations of alcohol and the law. As a commodity,
currency, and cultural icon, alcohol influenced Latin Americas past and historical
reconstructions. Still in its nascent stages, the historiography of alcohol is one of the
most exciting fields in Latin America.
Discussion of the Literature

In a region where historians have emphasized the impact of such export and subsistence
commodities as coffee, bananas, and corn, they largely have neglected the crucial role of
alcohol. A few exceptions notwithstanding, until recently alcohol has seldom been the
primary topic of research in Latin American historiography. Although it pales in
comparison to the rich corpus of literature on Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States,
the burgeoning field of the history of alcohol in Latin America is ripe with the potential of
understanding Latin Americas past in innovative and original ways.
The seminal work on alcohol in Latin American history is Bill Taylors Drinking, Homicide,
and Rebellion in Colonial Mexico Villages published in 1979. A few years prior to Taylors
book Jos Jess Hernndez Palomo explored how sugarcane rum shaped 18th-century
Mexico in El aguardiente de caa en Mxico, 17241810. His subsequent book La renta
de pulque en Nueva Espaa, 16631810 came out the same year as Taylors and focused
Page 27 of 47

primarily on economics, specifically the production, sale, and taxation of pulque. Among
the first to study governments contradictory goals of controlling inebriation and profiting
from the alcohol economy, Taylor demonstrated the complex roles that alcohol played in
colonial Mexico. Even as indigenous consumers turned to alcohol to temporarily escape
their plight and privations, they also played upon Spaniards assumptions about their
penchant for alcoholism to mitigate their sentences in the courtroom and subvert colonial
rule beyond it. As he explores indigenous peoples shift from consuming alcohol primarily
in ritual contexts during the pre-Hispanic period to more widespread imbibing during the
colonial period, Taylor encourages scholars to examine the social meanings of alcohol.
Although Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexico Villages spawned rich
historiographical veins in the areas of violence, resistance, and rebellion, few historians
picked up the mantle of alcohol. Most historians who explored the role of alcohol did so
as part of broader social and cultural histories. Not until the turn of the 21st century did
historians begin to analyze alcohol as a primary subject of their research.
Building on Taylors work, Kendall Brown studied how alcohol shaped Bourbon rule in
Peru. Bourbons and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth-Century Arequipa explores
how the sale and consumption of both imported and domestic alcohol influenced colonial
society in Arequipa. Ultimately, like their predecessors, Bourbons depended on alcohol
revenue to run the government even as they lamented and at times tried to pass
legislation to mitigate alcohols deleterious effects. In their anthology about Bourbon
rule, Jordana Dym and Christoph Belaurbe offer insight into how alcohol shaped late
colonial Central America. Bourbon attempts to control alcohol monopolies and other
aspects of the alcohol economy often were met with severe resistance.
In a study that offers rich descriptions of tavern life and the crucial role such watering
holes played in late colonial Mexican society and economy, Michael Scardaville
documented popular and proprietor resistance to Bourbon alcohol reforms in late colonial
Mexico. His article encouraged others to approach taverns as more than simply social
gathering places to reveal the complex social and economic relations that occurred in and
reverberated beyond them. urea Toxqui frames taverns as incubators of popular culture.
As much as governments wanted to regulate if not reform those spaces of socialization,
inebriation, and vice, they also depended on them as sources of revenue.
Alcohol was a double-edged sword for Latin American governments and entrepreneurs
alike. Many of Mexicos most successful colonial entrepreneurs engaged in pulque
production, trade, and sale though they refrained from running pulqueras themselves as
John Kizca demonstrates. Fearing a drop in productivity and obeisance, many large
businesses mirrored government regulations that sought to limit and in some cases
prohibit the consumption of alcohol (among their workforce).
Page 28 of 47

Spanning the colonial and modern eras, Frederick Smith demonstrates how integral rum
was to economic, political, and social relations in the Caribbean. Narrowing the
geographic focus, Tom Gjeltsen provides a journalistic exploration of how Bacardi Rum
shaped Cuban development and nationalism.
By the mid-20th century social scientistsparticularly anthropologists and sociologists
were turning their attention to alcohol. One of the first anthropologists to study alcohol
consumption in Latin America was Ruth Bunzel. Her pioneering article informed such
successors as Christine Eber who contrasted the social and ritual uses of rum with its
ability to facilitate the economic and political exploitation of indigenous groups.169 With
his research among Camba peoples in Bolivia, anthropologist Dwight Heath led the
charge to dispel the myth that Amerindians were extremely susceptible to alcohol and
alcoholism. By the 1960s, he and others pointed out that alcohol consumption generally
accompanied local culture and custom but seldom to the point where indigenous men and
women were consumed by or addicted to it. More recently, Barbara Butler explores how
Quechua speakers continued to gain some satisfaction and agency even as they shifted
from consuming alcohol mainly for ritual purposes to drinking it daily to escape povertys
privations.
With the postmodern and social history turn in the last decades of the 20th century,
scholars have used alcohol drinkways as a lens through which to examine gender, ethnic,
class, and race relations. Since the 1970s, the field of womens history has shed a bright
light on womens role in the production, sale, and to a lesser extent consumption of
alcohol. With few other options that allowed them to stay within the confines of their
gender roles, many working-class and some elite women turned to alcohol as a way to
support themselves and expand their mobility. Focusing on ethnicity and race, Pablo
Piccato and Virginia Garrard Burnett found that turn of the 20th-century elites in Mexico
and Guatemala associated indigenous and lower-class people with alcohol consumption
and crime. Such rhetoric contributed to policing practices that targeted indigenous
people and the poor for alcohol and other crimes. And yet a few exceptions
notwithstanding (most notably Lyman Johnsons study of honor and violence in colonial
Buenos Aires), most historians agree the evidence linking alcohol consumption to crime is
tenuous at best.
More recently a few edited collections have brought together scholars to examine what
alcohol tells us about subjectivity, power, hegemony, resistance, ethics, economics,
politics, and culture. Some authors like Jose C. Curto, who demonstrates the critical role
Brazilian wines played in Africas alcohol trade, explore how Latin American drinks have
shaped histories abroad.
Page 29 of 47

What makes studying alcohol challenging is that its social meaning (particularly in
indigenous communities) and economic significance are often elusive. With moonshining,
bootlegging, and corrupt officials, determining the extent to which alcohol lubricated
local economies and undermined national ones is difficult. To be sure, alcohol profits
contributed to national treasuries, but the extent to which it influenced state formation is
hard to pinpoint.
In this burgeoning field, a number of areas are ripe for future scholars. For example, the
role that local vendors and community leaders played in making alcohol readily available
demands closer examination as does the study of how integral and essential alcohol was
to indigenous and Afro-Latin American life. These and other topics promise to be rich
lines of inquiry.
Further Reading
Brown, Kendall W. Bourbons and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth-Century
Arequipa. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
Bruman, Henry J. Alcohol in Ancient Mexico. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
2000.
Bunzel, Ruth. The Role of Alcoholism in Two Central American Cultures. Psychiatry 3
(1940): 361387.
Butler, Barbara. Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation: Alcohol among Quichua
Speakers in Otavolo, Ecuador. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
Carey, David, Jr., ed. Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan
History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.
Curto, Jos C. Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and
Its Hinterland, c. 15501830. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004.
Eber, Christine. Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of
Sorrow. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Indians Are Drunks and Drunks Are Indians: Alcohol and
Indigenismo in Guatemala, 18901940. Bulletin of Latin American Research 19.3 (July
2000): 341356.
Gjelten, Tom. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause. New York:
Viking, 2008.
Page 30 of 47

Hames, Gina. Maize-Beer, Gossip, and Slander: Female Tavern Proprietors and Urban,
Ethnic Cultural Elaboration in Bolivia, 18701930. Journal of Social History 37.2 (2003):
351364.
Heath, Dwight B. Drinking Patterns of the Bolivian Camba. Quarterly Journal of Studies
on Alcohol 19 (1958): 491508.
Heath, Dwight B. Alcohol Use in Latin America: Cultural Realities and Policy Implications.
Providence, RI: Center for Latin American Studies, Brown University, 1987.
Heath, Dwight B. Historical and Cultural Factors Affecting Alcohol Availability (and
Consumption) in Latin America. In Legislative Approaches to Prevention of AlcoholRelated Problems: An Inter-American Workshop. Edited by Alan K. Kaplan, 127188.
Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, 1982.
Hernndez Palomo, Jos Jess. El aguardiente de caa en Mxico, 17241810. Seville:
Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1974.
Hernndez Palomo, Jos Jess. La renta de pulque en Nueva Espaa, 16631810. Seville:
Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1979.
Jennings, Justin, and Brenda J. Bowser, eds. Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.
Kizca, John. The Pulque Trade in Late Colonial Mexico City. The Americas 37.2 (1980):
193221.
Lacoste, Pablo. Wine and Women: Grape Growers and Pulperas in Mendoza, 1561
1852. Hispanic American Historical Review 88.3 (August 2008): 361391.
Mateu, Ana Mara, and Steve Stein, eds. El vino y sus revoluciones: Una antologa
histrica sobre el desarrollo de la industria vitivincola argentina. Mendoza, Argentina:
Editorial de al Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 2008.
Mitchell, Tim. Intoxicated Identities: Alcohols Power in Mexican History and Culture.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Piccato, Pablo. El paso de Venus por el disco del sol: Criminality and Alcoholism in the
Late Porfiriato. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11.2 (Summer 1995), 203241.
Pierce, Gretchen, and urea Toxqui, eds. Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural
History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014.
Page 31 of 47

Snchez Santir, Ernest, ed. Cruda realidad: Produccin, consumo y fiscalidad de las
bebidas alcohlicas en Mxico y Amrica Latina, siglos XVIIXX. Mexico City: Instituto
Mora, 2007.
Scardaville, Michael C. Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial Mexico City.
Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (1980): 643671.
Smith, Frederick H. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2005.
Taylor, William B. Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979.
Toxqui, urea. Taverns and Their Influence on the Suburban Culture of Latin
Nineteenth-Century Mexico City. In The Growth of Non-Western Cities: Primary and
Secondary Networking, c. 9001900. Edited by Kenneth R. Hall, 241269. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2011.
Notes:
(1.) A special thanks to Karen Racine for suggesting I write this piece and for her helpful
feedback on it. I also want to thank Bill Taylor, Tom Pergman, and the two reviewers for
Oxford University Press whose comments and critiques on early drafts of this essay
greatly improved this version. While this essay focuses on consumption, alcohol was also
used for fuel. See for example, Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The
Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 294, 298.
(2.) Henry J. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
2000).
(3.) Anton Daughters, Of Chicha, Majas, and Mingas: Hard Apple Cider and Local
Solidarity in Twenty-First-Century Rural Southern Chile, in Gretchen Pierce and urea
Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2014), 243.
(4.) William Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 2833; Sonia Corcuera de Mancera,
Entre gula y templanza: Un aspecto de la historia Mexicana (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Econmica, 1990), 61.
(5.) Corcuera de Mancera, Entre gula y templanza, 62.
Page 32 of 47

(6.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, 30 (quote), 3334.

(7.) urea Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs?: Womens Involvement in the
Pulquera World of Mexico City, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America,
106.
(8.) Tim Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities: Alcohols Power in Mexican History and Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 13; Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico; Sonia Corcuera de
Mancera, Pulque y evangelacin. El caso de fray Manuel Prez (1713), in Janet Long,
ed., Consecuencias del encuentro de dos mundos (Mexico City: Universidad Autnoma de
Mxico, 1996), 413414.
(9.) Justin Jennings, A Glass for the Gods and a Gift to My Neighbor: The Importance of
Alcohol in the Pre-Columbian Andes, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin
America, 30.
(10.) Jennings, A Glass for the Gods, 30.
(11.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs? 106
(12.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs? 106
(13.) John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of Brazilian Indians (Chatham, Canada:
Papermac, 1995); Joo Azevedo Fernandes, Cauinagens e Bebedeiras: Os ndios e o
lcool na histria do Brasil, Revista Anthropolgicas 13.2 (2002): 3959.
(14.) Joo Azevedo Fernandes, Liquid Fire: Alcohol, Identity, and Social Hierarchy in
Colonial Brazil, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 5556.
(15.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 65, 9295, 104105; Sonia Corcuera de
Mancera, El fraile, el indio, y el pulque: Evangelizacin y embriaguez en la Nueva Espaa
(15231548) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1997); Corcuera de Mancera,
Pulque y evangelacin.
(16.) Joo Azevedo Fernandes, Feast and Sin: Catholic Missionaries and Native
Celebrations in Early Colonial Brazil, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23.2 (2009),
111127; Susana de M. Viegas, Nojo, Prazer e Persistncia: Beber fermentado entre os
Tupinamb de Olivena (Bahia), Revista de Histria 154 (2006), 151188; Joo Azevedo
Fernandes. Selvagens Bebedeiras: lcool, embriaguez e contatos culturais no Brasil
colonial (Sculos XVI-XVII) (So Paolo, Brazil: Alameda, 2011)
(17.) Corcuera de Mancera, Pulque y evangelacin.
Page 33 of 47

(18.) Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2008), 640; David T. Courtright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and
the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 930.
(19.) Jos C. Curto, lcool e Escravos: O comrcio luso-brasileiro de lcool em Mpinda,
Luanda e Benguela durante o trfico atlnticode escravos (c. 14801830) e seu impacto
nas sociedades da frica Central Ocidental (Lisbon, Portugal: Vulgata, 2002); Azevedo
Fernandes, Liquid Fire, 46; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and
the Angolan Slave Trade, 17301830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Luiz
Felipe de Alencastro, O Trato dos Viventes: Formao do Brasil no Atlntico SulSculos
XVI e XVII (So Paolo, Brazil: Compahnia das Letras, 2000), 307325.
(20.) Azevedo Fernandes, Liquid Fire, 4849, 52.
(21.) David Christian, Alcohol and Primitive Accumulation in Tsarist Russia, in Erik
Aerts, Louis M. Cullen, and Richard G. Wilson, eds., Production, Marketing and
Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages since the Late Middle Ages (Leuven, Belgium:
Leuven University Press, 1990), 33.
(22.) Azevedo Fernandes, Liquid Fire, 57.
(23.) Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, 174.
(24.) Juan Pedro Viqueira Albn, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans.
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources,
1999)
(25.) William F. Connell, Because I Was Drunk and the Devil Had Tricked Me: Pulque,
Pulqueras, and Violence in the Mexico City Uprising of 1692, Colonial Latin American
Historical Review 14.4 (2005), 369401.
(26.) John Chuchiak, It Is Their Drinking that Hinders Them: Balch and the Use of
Ritual Intoxicants Among the Colonial Yucatec Maya, 15501780, Estudios de Cultura
Maya 24 (2003), 154.
(27.) Aaron P. Althouse, Drunkenness and Violence in Colonial Michoacn, in Pierce
and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 82.
(28.) Victor Uribe-Uran, Colonial Baracunatanas and Their Nasty Men: Spousal
Homicides and the Law in Late Colonial New Granada, Journal of Social History (Fall
2001), 51.
Page 34 of 47

(29.) Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2013), 241.
(30.) Daughters, Of Chicha, Majas, and Mingas, 248.
(31.) Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico, 71.
(32.) Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies, (London: A. Clark, 1677), 93.
(33.) Jos Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 1873
1970, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 189.
(34.) Bill Donovan, The Aores and Commerce to Brazil as Viewed Through the
Correspondence of Francisco Pinheiro, in Avalino de Freitas de Meneses, ed., Portos,
escalas e ilhus no relacionamento entre o ocidente e o oriente: Actas do congress
internacional comemorativeo do regress de Vasco da Gama a Portugal (Ponta Delgada,
Portugal: Comisso Nacional para as Comemoraes dos Descobrimentos Portugueses e
Universidade dos Aores, 2001), 290292.
(35.) Jos C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda
and Its Hinterland, c. 15501830 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004).
(36.) Daughters, Of Chicha, Majas, and Mingas, 243.
(37.) Christophe Balaubre and Jordana Dym, Introduction, in Jordana Dym and
Christophe Balaubre, eds., Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America,
17591821(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), 7; Jordana Dym, Bourbon
Reforms and City Government in Central America, 17591808, in ibid., 85; Miles
Wortman, Government and Society in Central America 16801840 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 144.
(38.) Curto, lcool e Escravos, 103104, 123200; Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in
Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 143144.
(39.) Alvis Dunn, A Sponge Soaking up all the Money: Alcohol, Taverns, Vinateras, and
the Bourbon Reforms in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Santiago de los Caballeros, Guatemala,
in David Carey Jr., ed., Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan
History(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 7195.
(40.) Wortman, Government and Society, 2122.
Page 35 of 47

(41.) Francisco de Santiago, Teogena indgena mosca. Autos en razn de prohibir a los
caciques de Fontibn, Ubaque y otros no hagan las fiestas, borracheras y sacrificios de su
gentilidad. Ao de 1563, Revista del Archivo Nacional 6.6869 (December 1945), 323
330; Chuchiak, It Is Their Drinking that Harms Them, 142143.
(42.) Chuchiak, It Is Their Drinking that Harms Them, 139.
(43.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 38, 53, 55, 56, 68; Michael C.
Scardaville, Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial Mexico City, Hispanic
American Historical Review 60 (1980), 646647, 651, 653, 654, 669; Pablo Lacoste, Wine
and Women: Grape Growers and Pulperas in Mendoza, 15611852, Hispanic American
Historical Review 88.3 (August 2008), 377.
(44.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 38.
(45.) Corcuera de Mancera, Pulque y evangelacin, 417.
(46.) Eduardo Menndez, Alcoholismo y proceso de alcoholizacin: La construccin de
una propuesta antropolgica, in Eduardo Menndez, ed., Antropologa del alcoholism en
Mxico: Los lmites culturales de la economa poltica 19301979 (Mexico City: Centro de
Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologa Social, 1991), 29. See also
Eduardo Menndez, Morir de alcohol: Saber y hegemona mdica (Mexico City: Alianza
Editorial Mexicana, 1990).
(47.) Ana Carla Ericastilla y Liseth Jimnez, Las clandestinistas de aguardiente en
Guatemala a fines del siglo XIX, in Eugenia Rodrguez Senz, ed., Mujeres, gnero e
historia en Amrica Central durante los siglos XVIII, XIX, XX (Burlington, VT: Plumsock
Mesoamerican Studies, 2002), 14.
(48.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs?, 106109, 112.
(49.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, 68; Nancy Hanway, Wine Country: The
Vineyards as National Space in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, in Pierce and Toxqui,
eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 90.
(52.) Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 18731970,
189.
Page 36 of 47

(53.) Christopher Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 15411773: City, Caste and Colonial
Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
(56.) Dunn, A Sponge Soaking up all the Money.
(57.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs? 106109, 112.
(58.) Carlos Mayo, Pulperos y pulperas in Buenos Aires; Mangan, Trading Roles, 69.
(59.) LaCoste, Wine and Women, 374.
(60.) Mangan, Trading Roles, 69, 83, 9092, 104.
(61.) Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, & Power in Late Colonial
Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 267; Gina Hames, MaizeBeer, Gossip, and Slander: Female Tavern Proprietors and Urban, Ethnic Cultural
Elaboration in Bolivia, 18701930, Journal of Social History 37, no.2 (2003), 357, 361;
John Kizca, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City
(Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1983), 118120.
(62.) Scardaville, Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial Mexico City, 656
657.
(63.) Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 173174.
(64.) Kendall W. Brown, Bourbons and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth-Century
Arequipa (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); Jorge H. Gonzlez Alzate,
State Reform, Popular Resistance, and Negotiation of Rule in late Bourbon Guatemala:
The Quetzaltenango Aguardiente Monopoly, 17851807, in Jordana Dym and Christophe
Belaubre, eds., Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 17591821,
129155 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007); Connell, Because I was Drunk
and the Devil Had Tricked Me; Lacoste, Wine and Women.
(65.) Mangan, Trading Roles, 104.
(66.) Pamela Voekel, Peeing on the Palace: Bodily Resistance to Bourbon Reforms in
Mexico City, Journal of Historical Sociology 5.2 (June 1992), 183208.
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(67.) Connell, Because I Was Drunk and the Devil Had Tricked Me, 369401; Jeffrey
M. Pilcher, !Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 8384.
(68.) Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides,
the Punishment of Indians and the Law in Colonial Mexico, 17401820s, Journal of Latin
American Studies 38 (2006), 807, 817818, 820; Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and
Rebellion, 4445, 65, 156.
(69.) Azevedo Fernandes, Liquid Fire, 52.
(71.) Carmen Salazar, et al., Borrachera y memoria: La experiencia de los sagrado en los
Andes (Lima: Instituto Francs de Estuidos Andinos, 1993).
(72.) Ben Fallaw, Dry Law, Wet Politics: Drinking and Prohibition in Post-Revolutionary
Yucatn, 19151935, Latin American Research Review 37.2 (2001): 3764; Oliver La
Farge and Douglas Byers, The Year-Bearers People (New Orleans: Tulane University,
1931); Oliver La Farge, Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatn Indian Town
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947); June Nash, In the Eyes of the Ancestors:
Belief and Behavior in a Mayan Community (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1970),
186; Carlos Enrique Reiche, Estudio sobre el patrn de embriaguez en la regin rural
altaverapacense, Guatemala Indgena 5 (1970): 103127; Ruth Bunzel, The Role of
Alcoholism in Two Central American Cultures, Psychiatry 3 (1940), 384; Stephen Lewis,
La guerra del posh, 19511954: Un conflicto decisivo entre el Instituto Nacional
Indigenista, el monopolio del alcohol y el gobierno del estado de Chiapas, Mesoamrica
46 (enero-diciembre 2004): 111134.
(74.) Chuchiak, It Is Their Drinking that Harms Them, 152, 156.
(75.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, 41.
(76.) Christine Eber, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope,
Water of Sorrow (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 22; Hames, Maize-Beer,
Gossip, and Slander, 352, 358; Lacoste, Wine and Women, 361391.
(77.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 3738.
Page 38 of 47

(78.) Raquel Rebolledo, Pcaras y pulperas: Las otras mujeres de la Colonia, Cyber
Humanitatis 19 (Winter 2001).
(79.) LaCoste, Wine and Women, 391 (quote), 364, 377, 386; Hames, Maize-Beer,
Gossip, and Slander.
(80.) Taylor, Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion, 5758, 62.
(81.) Tom Gjelten, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (New
York: Viking, 2008).
(82.) Karen Racine, Rum, Recruitment, and Revolution: Alcohol and the British and Irish
Legions in Colombias War for Independence, 18171823, Irish Migration Studies in
Latin America 4.2 (March 2006), 47, 49.
(84.) Hamway, Wine Country, 8990; Matas Bruera, La Argentina Fermentada: vino,
alimentacin, y cultura (Buenos Aires: Paids, 2006), 5556.
(85.) Jorge Aldo Perone, Identidad o masificacin: Una encrucijada en la industria
vitivincola Argentina (Mendoza, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de
Ciencias Econmicas, 1985); Steve Stein, Essence and Identity: Transformations in
Argentine Wine, 18802010, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 210
241.
(86.) Stein, Essence and Identity.
(87.) Jos Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 1873
1970, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 185209.
(88.) Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities, 5.
(89.) Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 187188.
(90.) Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 187188.
(91.) Gjelten, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba; Peter Foster, Family Spirits: The
Bacardi Saga (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1990); Hernando Calvo Espina,
Bacardi: The Hidden War (Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2002)
(92.) Stacey Schwartzkopf, Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in
Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala, in Carey, ed., Distilling the Influence of Alcohol,
1741.
Page 39 of 47

(93.) David McCreery, Rural Guatemala 17601940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1994), 8788, 176177; Ren Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians:
Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in the Making of Guatemala (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006), 104, 116, 227n47; Jorge H. Gonzlez Alzate, History
of Los Altos, Guatemala: A Study of Regional Conflict and National Integration, 1750
1885, (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1994), 141148; Bunzel, The Role of Alcoholism,
363, 386; Lowell Gudmundson, Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamens Christmas Eve in
San Gernimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892, Hispanic American Historical Review 84.2 (2004),
25455n30; Hazel Ingersoll, The War of the Mountain: A Study of Reactionary Peasant
Insurgency in Guatemala, 18371873, (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University,
1972); Stacey Schwartzkopf, Maya Power and State Culture: Community, Indigenous
Politics, and State Formation in Northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 1800
1871, (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 2008); Magda Leticia Gonzlez Sandoval, El
estanco de bebidas embriagantes en Guatemala, 17531860, (MA diss., Universidad del
Valle, Guatemala City, 1990).
(94.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs? 115116; James Alex Garza, The
Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2007), 24.
(95.) Gretchen Pierce, Holy, Hated, or Hip?: The Circuitious History of Mexicos Pulque,
Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (May 12, 2012),
(96.) Graciela Mrquez, The Stamp Tax on Alcoholic Beverages: Continuities and
Discontinuities of Indirect Taxation in Mexico, 18751930, Paper prepared for the Latin
American History Workshop, DRCLAS. Harvard University, November 2005; Doug
Yarrington, Romn Crdenas, the Liquor Tax, and Fiscal Modernity, 19131935, Paper
presented at the Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American Studies, Flagstaff, AZ,
2008.
(97.) Mrquez, The Stamp Tax on Alcoholic Beverages, 14.
(98.) Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 146147; Fallaw, Dry Law, Wet Politics.
(99.) Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, Summer of Discontent: Elite Politics and Rural
Insurgency in Yucatn, 18761915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 209.
(100.) Wells and Joseph, Summer of Discontent, 159.
(101.) David Carey Jr., Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and
Conduits of the Past, 18751970 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 39; Lewis, La guerra del
posh, 19511954.
Page 40 of 47

(102.) Gretchen Pierce, Pulqueros, Cerveceros, and Mezcaleros: Small Producers and
Popular Resistance to Mexicos Anti-Alcohol Campaigns, 19101940, in Pierce and
Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America, 164.
(103.) June D. Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 18701920
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 215.
(105.) Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation:
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1994), 145.
(106.) Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 33, 214.
(107.) Justin Wolfe, The Everyday Nation State: Community & Ethnicity in NineteenthCentury Nicaragua (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 4579; Reeves, Ladinos
with Ladinos, 115135, 171183; Lewis, La guerra del posh, 19511954, 115.
(108.) Lewis, La Guerra del Posh, 19511954, 130.
(109.) Jan Rus, The Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional: The Subversion of Native
Government in Highland Chiapas, 19361968, in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday
Forms of State Formation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 280;
Schwartzkopf, Consumption, Custom, and Control.
(110.) Lewis, La Guerra del Posh, 19511954, 115. Translation by the author.
(111.) Eber, Women & Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, 31.
(112.) Lewis, La Guerra del Posh, 19511954, 128.
(113.) Fallaw, Dry Law, Wet Politics, 4849; Ben Fallaw, Crdenas Compromised: The
Failure of Reform in Revolutionary Yucatn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001),
93, 103104; Stephen E. Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in
Chiapas, 19101945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 102, 104105,
115; Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 145, 154; Gretchen Kristine Pierce, Sobering the
Revolution: Mexicos Anti-Alcohol Campaigns and the Process of State-Building, 1910
1949, (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2008); Mitchell, Por la liberacin integral de la
mujer, 5.
(114.) Carey, I Ask for Justice, 7885; Pierce, Pulqueros, Cerveceros, and Mezcaleros.
Page 41 of 47

(115.) Erin OConnor, Helpless Children or Undeserving Patriarchs?: Gender Ideologies,

the State and Indian Men in Late Nineteenth-Century Ecuador, in Kim Clark and Marc
Becker, eds., Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 5671; Derek Williams, The Making of Ecuadors Pueblo
Catlico, 18611875, in Nils Jacobson and Cristbal Alvojn de Losada, eds., Political
Cultures in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 218, 222223.
(116.) Daniela Bouret, El consumo de vinos en Uruguay del novecientos. El desarrollo de
la industria vitivincola vrs. campaas antialcohlicas, Boletn Americanista 59 (2009):
155176.
(117.) David Carey Jr., Comunidad escondida: Latin American Influences in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Portland, in Joseph Conforti, ed., Creating Portland: History and
Place in Northern New England (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005),
93 (quote). In an important exception, when supporters linked prohibition to patriotism
and morality, Puerto Ricans supported it in a 1917 referendum; enforcement, however,
was less forthcoming, see Truman R. Clark, Prohibition in Puerto Rico, 19171933,
Journal of Latin American Studies 27.1 (1995): 7797; scar Ivn Calvo Isaza and Marta
Saade Granados, La ciudad en cuarentena: Chicha, patologa social y profilaxis (Bogot:
Ministerio de Cultura, 2002).
(118.) Anne Staples, Polica y Buen Gobierno, in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English
Martin, and William E. French. eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public
Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1994), 120;
Gretchen Pierce, Fighting Bacteria, the Bible, and the Bottle, in William H. Beezley, ed.,
A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, Marlton, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 508.
(120.) Alan Knight, Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 19101940,
Hispanic American Historical Review 74.3 (1994): 393397.
(121.) Fallaw, Dry Law, Wet Politics, 46; Marjorie Becker, Torching La Pursima,
Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacn, 1934
1940, in Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation, 247264;
Katherine Bliss, For the Health of the Nation: Gender and the Cultural Politics of Social
Hygiene in Revolutionary Mexico in Mary Kay Vaughn and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The
Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 19201949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 202203; Pierce, Fighting Bacteria, the Bible, and the
Bottle, 506; Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico 75.
Page 42 of 47

(122.) Pierce, Sobering the Revolution; Stephanie Mitchell, Por la liberacin de la

mujer: Women and the Anti-Alcohol Campaign, in Stephanie Mitchell and Patience
Schell, eds., The Womens Revolution in Mexico, 19101953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2007), 151185; Pierce, Fighting Bacteria, the Bible, and the Bottle, 505,
511; Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolutionary Mexico; Gretchen Pierce,
Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive Legislation: Mexicos National Anti-Alcohol Campaign
and the Process of State-Building, 19341940, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23.2
(2009).
(123.) Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution, 100101.
(124.) Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution, 38, 86, 89, 101109, 115; Mitchell, Por la
liberacin de la mujer. Pierce, Fighting Bacteria, the Bible, and the Bottle, 510; Robert
Buffington, Prohibition in the Borderlands: National Government-Border Community
Relations, Pacific Historical Review 63.1 (1994): 1938; Bliss, For the Health of the
Nation, 209210; Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 3839, 74
75.
(125.) Buffington, Prohibition in the Borderlands, 25, 26, 28; Wells and Joseph, Summer
of Discontent, 125; David Carey Jr., Drunks and Dictators: Inebriations Gendered,
Ethnic, and Class Components in Guatemala, 18981944, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds.,
Alcohol in Latin America; Pierce, Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive Legislation, 158.
(127.) William E. French, Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work and the Family
in Porfirian Mexico, Hispanic American Historical Review 72.4 (November 1992), 541;
Barry Carr, The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State: Marxisms
Contribution to the Construction of the Great Arch, in Joseph and Nugent, eds.,
Everyday Forms of State Formation, 336; Thomas Miller Klubock, Working-Class
Masculinity, Middle-Class Morality, and Labor Politics in the Chilean Mines, Journal of
Social History 30.2 (1996); Klubock, Contested Communities; Marcos Fernndez Labb,
Las comunidades de la sobriedad: La instalacin de zonas secas como mtodo de control
de beber inmoderado en Chile, 1910-1930, Scripta Nova 9, 194 (August 2005); Michael
Snodgrass, We Are all Mexicans Here, in Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen Lewis, eds.,
The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 19201940 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 314334.
(128.) Gretchen Pierce and urea Toxqui, Introduction, in Pierce and Toxqui, eds.,
Alcohol in Latin America, 320.
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(129.) Pierce, Pulqueros, Cerveceros, and Mezcaleros; David Carey Jr., Distilling
Perceptions of Crime: Maya Moonshiners and the Guatemalan State, 18981944, in
Carey, ed., Distilling the Influence of Alcohol; Erin OConnor, Helpless Children or
Undeserving Patriarchs? ; scar Ivn Calvo Isaza and Marta Saade Granados, La ciudad
en cuarentena: Chicha, patologa social y profilazis (Bogot: Ministerio de Cultura, 2002);
Buffington, Prohibition in the Borderlands; Staples, Polica y Buen Gobierno, 124;
Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution; Bliss, For the Health of the Nation, 212213; Derek
Williams, The Making of Ecuadors Pueblo Catlico, in Nils Jacobson and Cristbal
Alvojn de Losada, eds., Political Culture in the Andes, 17501950 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005); Bouret, El consumo de vinos en Uruguay del novecientos;
Pierce, Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive Legislation; Clark, Prohibition in Puerto
Rico, 19171933.
(130.) Matthew Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 184187.
(131.) Chuchiak, It Is Their Drinking that Hinders Them, 138.
(132.) Daughters, Of Chicha, Majas, and Mingas.
(133.) Pablo Piccato, El paso de Venus por el disco del sol: Criminality and Alcoholism
in the Late Porfiriato, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11.2 (Summer 1995), 235.
(134.) W. E. Carson, Mexico: The Wonderland of the South (New York: Macmillan, 1909),
104.
(135.) John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan,
Vols. 12 (New York: Dover, 1969), 145.
(136.) Gilbert Haven, Our Next Door Neighbor: A Winter in Mexico (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1875), 8182.
(137.) Piccato, El Paso de Venus por el Disco del sol, 211212, 218220; Deborah
Toner, Everything in its Right Place, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 25 (2011),
241, 243.
(138.) Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos (Mexico City: Editorial Porra, 1985),
48.
(139.) urea Toxqui, Taverns and Their Influence on the Suburban Culture of Late
Nineteenth-Century Mexico City, in Kenneth R. Hall, ed., The Growth of Non-Western
Page 44 of 47

Cities: Primary and Secondary Urban Networking, c. 9001900 (Lanham, MD: Lexington,
2011), 243 (quote), 260261
(140.) Toxqui, Taverns and Their Influence on the Suburban Culture of Late NineteenthCentury Mexico City, 257.
(142.) Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Indians Are Drunks and Drunks Are Indians, Bulletin of
Latin American Research 19.3 (July 2000), 341356; Robert Burkitt, Explorations in the
Highlands of Western Guatemala, The Museum Journal 21.1 (1930), 540; Connell,
Because I Was Drunk and the Devil Had Tricked Me; Lacoste, Wine and Women;
Piccato, El paso de Venus por el disco del sol, 203241.
(144.) Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, 39.
(145.) Wells and Joseph, Summer of Discontent, 170; OConnor, Helpless Children or
Undeserving Patriarchs? 68; Carey, I Ask for Justice, 125, 127, 151.
(147.) Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 169.
(148.) Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in
the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 19501973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 66.
(149.) Klubock, Working-Class Masculinity, Middle-Class Morality, and Labor Politics in
the Chilean Mines,437438, 448449, 451, 456 (quote 438); Thomas Miller Klubock,
Contested Communities, 11, 4547, 60, 122, 155159, 207.
(150.) OConnor, Helpless Children or Undeserving Patriarchs?
(151.) Pierce, Fighting Bacteria, the Bible, and the Bottle, 505, 511512.
(153.) Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 173.
(154.) Pierce, Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive Legislation, 153.
(155.) Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, 17, 177178, 190193, 245246.
Page 45 of 47

(156.) Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, 174, 177178, 190193.

(157.) Piccato, El Paso de Venus por el disco del sol, 228.
(158.) Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, 174, 177178, 190193.
(159.) Toxqui, Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs?
(160.) Hames, Maize-Beer, Gossip, and Slander, 357.
(161.) Hames, Maize-Beer, Gossip, and Slander, 357
(162.) Archivo General de Centro Amrica, Jefetura Politca de Sacatepquez,
Administracin de Rentas a Jefe Politco, January 3, 1923.
(163.) Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 33.
(164.) Pierce, Pulqueros, Cerveceros, and Mezcaleros, 164.
(165.) Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities, 3.
(166.) Carey, Drunks and Dictators; Pierce, Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive
Legislation, 154.
(167.) Orozco, Tequila Suaza and the Redemption of Mexicos Vital Fluids, 195;
Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities, 6.
(168.) Pierce, Pulqueros, Cerveceros, and Mezcaleros, 166.
(169.) Eber, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, 244, 246.
David Carey Jr.
Department of History, Loyola University
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Page 47 of 47


Alcohol's Indelible Mark on Latin America

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

Online Publication Date: Apr 2015

Summary and Keywords

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

Pre-European Alcohol Drinkways and Practices

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beverages predominated. Outside their hegemonic reach, local populations produced a

Indigenous Consumption Patterns

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

Economics of Colonial Alcohol

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

resources to repressing bootlegging and moonshining. Just possessing the ingredients to

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Gender and Women

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Post-Independence Drinkways and National

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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In addition to generating revenue, alcohol lubricated labor systems, particularly debt

Moonshine and Bootlegging

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Social Cohesion and Unrest

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[who] wanted to hide from the police.140 Turn-of-the-century Mexican intellectuals

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Alcohol in the Atlantic

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Alcohol in the Atlantic