Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History

Chapter Three: Drunkenness and Interpersonal Violence in Colonial Michoacán

67 chapter three Drunkenness and Interpersonal Violence in Colonial Michoacán Aaron P. Althouse The role of alcohol in colonial Mexican rural society has been examined along several related lines of inquiry over the past half-century since Charles Gibson’s trailblazing study of central Mexican indigenous life after the conquest. The general development of research has been well documented elsewhere to the extent that a detailed recounting of such scholarship here is unnecessary, although a brief discussion of this work serves to locate the present chapter in the broader historiographical context . By and large, Gibson’s work placed native village alcohol use squarely in the realm of passive response to the loss of political, ethnic, and religious self-determination owing to Spanish occupation originating in the first half of the sixteenth century. In this light, Gibson portrayed alcohol consumption as indicative of a collectively flagging hope and depression concomitant with diminished native cultural autonomy.1 Written more than a decade after Gibson’s opus, William Taylor’s equally classic work on central and southern Mexican village life analyzed alcohol consumption to arrive at a much different interpretation of colonial native society. Taylor responded to Gibson’s arguments by applying theories of peasant agency and action, contending that, far from “losing” culture and turning to alcohol use as a salve for the collective hopelessness in the face of the dramatic and multifaceted changes that accompanied Spanish colonialism, native peoples in central Mexico and Oaxaca continued preconquest patterns of alcohol consumption in ways that revealed tension between native landholding villages and Hispanic cultural and functional hegemony. In this context, alcohol use and associated violence 68 • Aaron P. Althouse indicated community attempts to preserve, protect, and modify—in native terms—localocentric collective identity and social relations.2 The publication of Taylor’s work in the late 1970s encouraged additional work by scholars curious to learn how native cultural forms were continued, preserved, and modified throughout the colonial period. Significantly , although this research followed in the footsteps of Gibson and Taylor, little of it focused on the role of alcohol in native society, and only recently have scholars employed new approaches in order to revisit the topic of alcohol use in colonial society, with the richest of this recent work examining ritual use of alcohol by various native ethnic groups.3 However, very little research has considered alcohol consumption at the subcollective level and in a context beyond the milpas (communally held fields) that surrounded native villages. In fact, aside from work such as Steve Stern’s on gendered violence in central Mexico, or Michael Scardaville’s on regulation of alcohol production and consumption under the Bourbons , the ways that alcohol use functioned in individual social relations and in society “at large” are starkly absent from the historiography.4 This chapter addresses this situation by examining the role of alcohol consumption in facilitating rural peoples’ willingness to express visions of society along lines they may have been reluctant to share while sober. Specifically, speech associated with instances of drunkenness and interpersonal violence from rural Michoacán recorded from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century reveals patterns of face-to-face contact and conflict that differ significantly from those documented for urban settings. Superficially, many of these allegedly intoxicated encounters appear spontaneous and fueled by little beyond mundane personal grievances. Yet, closer inspection of the details surrounding drunken fights suggests the existence of broadly shared notions of civility in rural areas that were tied to a quasi-egalitarian sense of fair and decent treatment expressed through courteous and expected salutation and nonthreatening posture, rather than more typically urban concerns over the Iberian-inspired honor complex.5 Thus, the instances of drunkenness and interpersonal strife utilized for this study rarely, if at all, contain language indicating preoccupation with lost, damaged, or threatened honor, and instead contain speech regarding “poor” or “unfair” treatment inflicted by one party upon the other, with these breaches of conduct instigating sometimes lethal violence. In addition to drunken speech articulating rural people’s sense of fair treatment at the hands of their fellow country dwellers, some instances of drunken speech also illuminate the intriguing possibility that rural people Drunkenness and Violence in Colonial Michoacán • 69 harbored a highly individualistic streak, which though not representing a direct challenge to Spanish hegemony, nonetheless suggest that, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Spanish...