In a revealing scene of El Compadre Mendoza (1936), Fernando Fuentes's classic film about the Mexican Revolution, a corrupt landowner named Mendoza tries to push expensive cognac on Eufemio Zapata, who declines and offers it instead to a well-dressed clerk sitting next to him. Mendoza reaches across the table and takes the glass away, telling the secretary that he's only allowed to drink mezcal. As far as Mendoza is concerned, mezcal is for underlings and cognac for VIPs, but the revolutionary general thinks differently: mezcal is a sign of virility, “a man's drink.” Chastened by Zapata's words, and eager to stay on his good side, Mendoza pours him a mezcal and meekly offers to join him. The scene shows how the drinking of alcohol, and the classification of different kinds of drinks, are culturally and historically determined. Deborah Toner's well-researched, interdisciplinary monograph explores these kinds of cultural politics in detail.

Toner examines the representation of alcohol and drinking in major works of nineteenth-century Mexican literature, contextualizing them within the social and cultural history of drinking in Mexico City, as well as in relation to European discourses about drunkenness and alcoholism. Although Toner is mindful of periodization, she organizes the four chapters of her study conceptually, rather than chronologically, to tease out the variety of ways that alcohol and its consumption illustrate the broader workings of liberalism and nationalism. The book's big themes are urban planning, drinking as a form of elite and working-class male bonding, political theories of drunkenness, and the grafting of different kinds of alcohol onto debates about modernization. Through her discussion of novels, stories, scientific discourse, and journalism, Toner highlights the push and pull between a will to discipline, control, and shape society and the disruption, contradiction, or incompleteness of this impetus. Socially prescriptive discourses aspire to be absolute, but sometimes they crack under their own weight or when they collide with a competing proposition.

Toner shows that in the first half of the nineteenth century, key authors used Enlightenment and liberal discourses to tame the unruly bodies of drunks. Unlike what happened during the Porfiriato, when drunkenness was embedded in deterministic theories of degeneration, this is a period in which the failure or triumph of the body is located in the political ideology of liberalism, with all of its attendant prescriptions for molding family life and education as drivers of stability and social progress. Writers like José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and Nicolás Pizarro Suárez criticized institutions, customs, foreign invaders, and elites because drunk bodies were a symptom of structural and historical problems, rather than individualistic or ethnic ones. The delineation of the dangers of drinking in this context is necessarily different from what we see at the dawn of the twentieth century, when scientific discourses about social problems emphasized heredity in fatalistic ways.

Pulque in particular appears throughout Toner's study, charged with its low-class associations and its ability to trigger cultural anxieties among the intelligentsia. In the first chapter, we learn how urban planners and nationalist thinkers tried to segregate and contain pulquerías in the name of maintaining class hierarchies and social hygiene. Then, at the end of the book, Toner explores how pulque became enmeshed in scientific disagreements over the relative harmfulness of distilled drinks versus fermented ones. European science argued that distilled drinks were more harmful, but Mexican critics, conditioned by their own taste and repulsed by the lower classes who consumed pulque, demonized the Mexican beverage as more dangerous than other types of alcohol. Some commentators, however, argued that pulque was relatively benign and even salutary on medical grounds in comparison to distilled drinks of foreign origin. In this way, Toner shows how questions about alcohol could be overlaid with competing ideas about modernization and national identity.

The variety of archival sources Toner has explored, as well as the ambitious, conceptual scope of her study, are impressive. Although the focus is on literature, Toner offers substantial discussions about urban planning and city life that historians and literary scholars will find useful. The discussion of major works of literature, as well as of journalism, shows us how alcohol and drunkenness are revealing focal points for understanding how liberals interpreted bodies, gender, and power relations. Alcohol and drunkenness are deserving topics in their own right, but here they also become devices for telling a bigger story about the ideology of nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism.