Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History

Introduction

3 Introduction Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui A soldier, a priest, a girl, an old woman, a vagrant, a few country dwellers, and cattle bosses of different ethnicities seemingly have nothing in common that could encourage them to fraternize. But a deeper reading of the painting Interior of a Pulquería (ca. 1850) sheds light on multiple aspects surrounding the presence of alcohol in the history of Latin America (see book cover). The painting shows a scene from a pulquería, a tavern that sells the traditional beverage pulque, fermented sap of the maguey plant. A young woman acts as a bartender while an older one prepares the meals for the male customers at the bottom of the scene. Among the patrons are representatives of different ethnicities, institutions, and locations, such as castas (the racially mixed), the clergy, the army, the countryside, and the city. In depicting a common scene of a tavern, the Mexican artist José Agustín Arrieta (1803–1874) left a testimony of the several ways in which alcohol touched the everyday life of his contemporaries—community bonding, drunkenness, and the reinforcement of socioeconomic and gender hierarchies, among many others—which represent some of the topics of this book. The chapters of this anthology explore how alcohol production , consumption, and regulation have been intertwined with the social and cultural history of Latin America from the pre-Columbian era through the present. Alcohol in Latin American Historiography Research that focuses on the cultural history of alcohol as its central component is fairly new, appearing within the last decade. Some of the first 4 • Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui historical studies that considered intoxicating beverages, beginning in the 1970s, did so less explicitly, usually in connection with the social history of crime and rebellion. For instance, William Taylor examined peasant villages in New Spain and found that after native peoples were conquered by Spain, intoxicants shifted from controlled substances used in preColumbian religious rituals to commercial goods associated with secular socializing and occasional solitary inebriation. He further argued that although the Crown and the Church blamed drunkenness for homicides and rebellions, these were frequently not associated with alcohol, but rather were reactions to perceived threats, such as an adulterous wife or a male who had used “fighting words.”1 In contrast, Lyman Johnson asserted that in late-colonial Buenos Aires, intoxication frequently preceded assaults and homicides, as drunkenness aggravated already tense situations and caused them to escalate to the point of violence.2 Pablo Piccato discovered that Mexican elites during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries insisted that the lower classes and the indigenous imbibed more than other people and fomented crime, while their supposed sloth impeded modernization.3 Around the same time that Taylor published his seminal study, economic historians largely explored alcohol’s profitable aspect by looking at production, sales, and taxation.4 Since then, social historians have drawn on the same sources but have come to different conclusions.5 In his studies on entrepreneurs, John Kicza found that some of the most prestigious families in late colonial Mexico traded pulque because of its steady profitability . They dominated production and retail distribution through their ownership of pulquerías in the large market of Mexico City. To avoid dishonor by running these taverns, to minimize risks, and to maximize profits , these entrepreneurs rented out their pulquerías. However, the government could not impose order in these places of social interaction and crime, because many officials were heavily involved in the trade, which provided considerable tax revenues and personal income.6 Mercedes Garc ía Rodríguez, in her studies on sugarcane production in Cuba, explores the participation of African slaves in the distillation of aguardiente, or rum. The profitability of the beverage mainly consumed by the poor and slaves encouraged some members of the elite and even royal officials who were owners of sugarcane plantations to participate in the trade. Although aguardiente became associated with slave identity, in the late eighteenth century criollos (people of European descent born in the Americas) adopted it as their beverage to flaunt their patriotism.7 Introduction • 5 Since the 1990s, authors influenced by cultural as well as social history have shown how concerns about crime, laziness, and disease, especially among the indigenous, African, and racially mixed masses, led to attempts to reduce alcohol consumption and other vices like gambling, drug abuse, and prostitution.8 As Susan Deans-Smith, Thomas Miller...