Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History

Introduction: Writing a History of Alcohol in Guatemala

Introduction Writing a History of Alcohol in Guatemala David Carey Jr. Despite its persistence and prevalence in the lives of most Central Americans , alcohol has received relatively little attention in Central American historiography. As a commodity that was produced and consumed locally (and often illicitly), aguardiente (distilled sugarcane liquor or rum) was frequently at the center of economic, political, and social conflicts within and between local communities and between communities and the state. The proceeds from alcohol manufacturing filled government coffers, fueled local economies, and fortified family livelihoods. Yet in a region where historians have emphasized the impact of such export and subsistence commodities as coffee, bananas, and corn, scholars have neglected the crucial role of alcohol. With an eye toward shedding new light on ethnic, gender, class, and state-subaltern relations, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol deconstructs alcohol drinkways (production, commerce, and consumption habits) and the ways the state legislated and policed alcohol sales and consumption during Guatemala’s colonial and national history. Comparisons with other Latin American locales inform the interpretations of alcohol drinkways in Guatemala and how 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 and policing policies developed and evolved. In contrast to the rich corpus of literature on Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, Latin American historiography addressing alcohol is relatively sparse. In Central America and Mexico, for example, extant 2 · David Carey Jr. studies tend to be anthropological, not historical.1 Like recent U.S. historiography that situates the production and consumption of alcohol within larger economic, political, and social contexts,2 this volume uses the study of alcohol as an entrée into the seat of Spanish colonial power in Central America and a window into the tumultuous process of nation building in Guatemala thereafter. With its indigenous, European, African, and Asian influences and diverse mix of peoples—Mayas, Garifunas, creoles (Hispanic elites), and ladinos (nonindigenous Guatemalans)—Guatemala presents an excellent case study to examine how the alcohol economy provided a site of critical social interaction among the contested categories of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. Distilling the Influence of Alcohol fits squarely in the broader literature of Atlantic history that uses commodities, such as sugar and chocolate, as prisms through which to view social, political, and economic trends.3 Often these studies focus on commodity chains—the effect these commodities had in Europe even when they were produced in the Americas and the linkages the commodity exchanges formed between the Old World and the New. In contrast, the authors in this volume are most concerned with understanding what alcohol—its production, sale, and consumption— meant to the servants, peasants, workers, professionals, and elites who lived in the locales where it was produced. How did it affect their lives and the formation of their communities, colony, and finally nation? Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, the contributors to this volume attempt to uncover subalterns’ knowledges regarding the use of alcohol. African American immigrants living in the Caribbean coastal regions of Guatemala, for example, understood alcohol consumption differently than their indigenous counterparts in the western highlands. In contrast to creole and ladino portrayals of “indios’” inebriation as a manifestation and cause of their backwardness, Mayas often articulated the crucial ceremonial and ritual roles that alcohol played in their communities.4 Studying alcohol in Guatemala offers an opportunity to examine closely the give and take between power brokers and subordinates. As Tom Gjelten suggests in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, alcohol played an integral role in forging nations.5 Such was the case with aguardiente in Guatemala, as these chapters show. By exploring how accommodation, defiance, and resistance shaped Guatemala, this study builds on the burgeoning historiography of nation-state formation. As historian Florencia Mallon argues in her seminal work Peasant and Nation, to understand Introduction: Writing a History of Alcohol in Guatemala · 3 the consolidation of nation-states, scholars must take peasants’ alternative nationalisms seriously.6 Applying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals to the ordinary men and women whose contact with the state often occurred under extraordinary circumstances, such as when the police persecuted them for the illicit production, sale, and consumption of alcohol, reveals their economic and political influence.7 Although creole and ladino leaders in Guatemala defined citizenship in ways that excluded Mayas throughout much of...