Mexican history and alcohol: an introduction

The history of alcohol on the territory of modern-day Mexico is both a highly political and a complex socioeconomic issue. The longue-durée approach presented here aims at integrating the Mexica or Aztec phase (1428 to 1521), the era of Spanish colonial rule (1521 to 1810/1821), the nineteenth and early twentieth century with its Republican as well as dictatorial (‘Porfirian’) periods, and post-revolutionary Mexico between 1911 and 1940 in respect to the diverse meanings of alcohol policies, production, and use. Geographically, the focus widens from the Mexica Empire’s core regions in Central Mexico to the modern nation-state’s territory.

As in many cultures throughout millennia, the presence of alcohol in Mexico had very pragmatic characteristics based on everyday needs of populations, but also carried weight in regard to political rule, social stratification, or labour organisation. The balance between pragmatism and ideology, survival and ritual, economic interests and environmental realities was volatile, and approaches to keeping it in place or upending it have to be identified based on specifics of time, space, and society over the centuries. Just as societies in general underwent changes, the meanings and importance of alcoholic beverages also changed – or, rather, were changed by a number of different actors. Some of the central questions raised in this text are the following: why did pulque and beer become popular during specific periods of time and with different social strata? What are the main reasons for the ‘demonisation’ or the acceptance of specific alcoholic drinks in Mexico between the early 1500s and the early twentieth century? Which economic, social, or religious arguments and discourses shaped the historical realities in the aforementioned time period? And how did human hierarchies of Mexican society over five centuries influence hierarchies of alcohol (or vice versa)? The decision to include pulque and beer is premised on the idea that both beverages are produced via fermentation, not distillation (like, for example, tequila), and enjoy some kind of positive reputation due to their inherent nutritional qualities.

This study is based on a broad spectrum of secondary literature from disciplines such as history, anthropology, food studies, and medicine; furthermore, it makes use of sources ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Colonial sources always have to be read against the background of specific intellectual, moral or racial ideas (within the context of imperial rule). Works published in the nineteenth or early twentieth century can be used both as secondary literature and as sources, keeping in mind, however, their ambivalent position as providers of meta-perspectives on Mexican traditions as well as expressions of highly politicised and racialised discourses.

Pulque’s history is inevitably linked to the agave plant that supplies the sap from which the alcoholic beverage can be produced. Agaves (maguey) belong to the family of succulents, a diverse group of plants usually characterised by high sap content, prominent phyla, and long leaves; most agaves can live for twelve to fifteen years and, after blooming only once, the plants die.Footnote ¹ According to the interpretation of archaeological findings, agaves have been used by humans in what is now Mexico for at least nine thousand years, with the use of extracted plant sap dating back around 2,300 years.Footnote ² A source of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, but also providing the raw material for clothes or shoes, building materials or even needles, agaves have been identified as a determining factor similar to maize when it comes to the development of Mesoamerican cultures.Footnote ³ Less obvious, but extremely important from an ecological and economic perspective, is the fact that, in Mexico’s widespread terrace agriculture, the roots of maguey served as stabilising elements, protecting against soil erosion.Footnote ⁴ Currently, at least 135 varieties of agave exist within the borders of Mexico, the economically most important being A. tequilana, A. salmiana, A. angustifolia, and A. americana. Footnote ⁵

The general characteristics of the pulque-making process have remained basically unaltered for many generations. The agave is ‘castrated’ by cutting its stem and scraping out a bowl-like opening; after the tlachiquero worker has regularly scraped the plant’s inside to stimulate the flow of its sap (aguamiel), the fluid can be siphoned off over the next months before the agave dies; a healthy plant can provide up to a thousand litres of non-alcoholic aguamiel that can be fermented into pulque.Footnote ⁶ Historically, the fermentation process took place in wood or clay vessels – nowadays often replaced by plastic containers – and can either be initiated by microbiota resident in the liquid or by adding pulque produced a little earlier to the sap in the fermentation vessel as a ‘starter inoculum’. Depending on the microclimate, fermentation takes place within twelve to forty-eight hours and results in the production of a viscous beverage with an alcohol concentration of three to 6 per cent.Footnote ⁷

Unlike pulque, beer had a long-standing tradition in Eurasia before the ‘Columbian Exchange’,Footnote ⁸ but became popular in Mexico only about 200 years ago. In this paper, it primarily serves as a counterpoint to the traditions and problems connected with pulque consumption. Comparable to pulque when it comes to nutritional qualities (and its potential characterisation as a foodstuff rather than an alcoholic beverage), beer became interwoven with Mexico’s ‘modernisation’ during the autocratic rule of Porfirio Díaz (Porfiriato or Porfirismo) between 1876 and 1911. Society would experience many changes, however, before a folk song containing the following lines could become popular: ‘We have to forget our sorrows/it’s finally our turn,/let’s go and drink beer,/only then will I forget’ [‘Hay que olvidar las tristezas/al fin ya nos tocaría,/vamos a tomar cerveza,/sólo así me olvidaría’].Footnote ⁹

The technological and ecological characteristics of Mexico’s beer production were not radically different from those of contemporary Europe or the United States. In fact, the rise of Mexican brewing culture has to be understood as part of broader developments that saw a massive influx of foreign know-how as well as ideologies aimed at supporting domestic beer production and replacing pulque as Mexico’s most popular alcoholic beverage. ‘By about 1900,’ Warren Schiff notes, for example, ‘many of the founders of the by then approximately twenty Mexican breweries were of German descent. The industry was based almost entirely on German capital and the ranks of its employees were filled with many Germans and German Americans’.Footnote ¹⁰ Over the next few decades, domestic expertise developed, while demand rose. Escalante et al. have argued that – besides political campaigns decrying pulque consumption and promoting beer – different approaches to the (non-)integration of new methods or technologies could be seen as a central factor in the rise of beer and the demise of pulque from the late 1800s onwards.Footnote ¹¹

The ‘scientific turn’ in the industrialised production of beer had no equivalent in the pulque economy; and, while beer (foreign or domestic) was discursively linked to the future and modernity, pulque was seen as outdated and archaic. After 1900, consumption of pulque (especially by indigenous persons or lower-class Mexicans) was increasingly identified as an individually and socially dangerous vice. On the other hand, modernist ideas of nationhood and capitalism ‘suggested that only the consumption of goods, whether cigarettes or beer, could provide a solution to personal and national crises’Footnote ¹² because they were identified as products of a strong, future-oriented economy based on European ideals and experiences.

Just like a collective term such as alcohol ‘is not necessarily a universally shared folk category, especially among peoples who had/have not been exposed to recent Euro-American demonization and medicalization of drinking’,Footnote ¹³ the (moral) differentiation between beer and pulque economies opens up a discussion on whether both resources could even fit into a framework that treated them equally. Foreign influences (e.g., positivism), however, combined with colonial traditions of patronising indigenous populations, led to the development of discourses highly critical of pulque. ‘Modern’ nations such as France or the United States were identified as examples for societies that promoted moderate drinking while featuring profitable alcohol production and widespread consumption, efficient state administration, good education, and impressive politico-military power at the same time. In Mexico, issues such as public hygiene, increased industrial output, and ethnic questions regarding a common identity for Europeans, indigenous people, and other groups all added to complex socio-political discussions dealing with the role of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ beverages. The result was the demise of pulque as Mexico’s most important alcoholic drink and the rise of large-scale beer, tequila, and mezcal economies – all of them producing beverages lacking a direct connection to the pre-colonial past, but allegedly offering the nation a way into a more modern and better future.

(Un)Godly drink: pulque in the pre-Hispanic and early colonial period (fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries)

Palaeobotanical and archaeological findings from Central Mexico strongly support arguments that pre-Aztec cultures fermented and consumed pulque or pulque-like alcohol; surveys and excavations brought to light the existence of ceramic vessels likely related to fermentation, but also of – sometimes fossilised – bacteria common to the production of pulque.Footnote ¹⁴ In the Aztec (Mexica) Empire, pulque had a central role not only in rituals and ceremonies,Footnote ¹⁵ but also in everyday life as a liquid and source of nutrients. It was given to mothers post-partum for ritual reasons; however, its highly nutritious characteristics offer a more pragmatic reason for this; the same is true for the consumption by Mexica warriors after battles.Footnote ¹⁶ Modern surveys have shown that a low consumption rate has a beneficial effect on mothers during lactation, but (just like other alcoholic beverages) pulque can negatively affect child development if consumed regularly during pregnancy.Footnote ¹⁷ As Jeffrey Pilcher has stated, many sources from the Mexica period (early fifteenth century to 1521) might have been influenced by a rather puritanical perspective on drinking and by a need to promote the idea of state control, while ‘the ease of making pulque and its dietary importance suggest that the beverage was drunk regularly, if covertly’.Footnote ¹⁸ In my opinion, statements such as ‘[p]erhaps no culture in history has ever set up more rigid barriers against this danger [of intoxication]’Footnote ¹⁹ should be taken with a grain of salt, since we cannot assume that Mexica law was enforced in a totalitarian manner or that nutritional benefits were completely ignored. Pulque production and consumption – even now – feature religious and ritualistic elements: the collection of agave sap is often combined with prayers or offerings, and pulque establishments often refer to the Virgin of Guadalupe as patroness.Footnote ²⁰

Pulque contains high amounts of ascorbic acid (approximately 30 milligrams per 0.5 litres), iron (3.5mg), dietary folates, vitamins B-complex, C, D, and E, and minerals.Footnote ²¹ The beverage also features more than fifty different probiotic microorganisms: reducing the number of microbes or cancer-related enzymes and exhibiting curative qualities related to gastritis, kidney infections, or ulcers; they are highly beneficial to the human digestive system.Footnote ²² Since agave plants often grow in regions with little precipitation, both aguamiel and pulque may be used as a substitute for drinking water as well as an alternative source of proteins.Footnote ²³

The word ‘pulque’ cannot be traced back to the most common pre-Hispanic name for Mexico’s agave-based fermented alcohol; in Nahuatl, the dominant term was yztac octli (or simply octli), basically meaning ‘white alcohol’.Footnote ²⁴ ‘Pulque’, however, is derived from the Nahuatl term poliuhqui that is used to denote something spoiled or decomposing.Footnote ²⁵ Again, the ambivalence of this beverage and its perception – even from an Amerindian perspective – becomes clear: pulque was of enormous importance to society, but the drink also had negative characteristics such as a disgusting odour noticeable when fermentation had gone on for too long.Footnote ²⁶ It has also been suggested that Spanish naming practises (favouring the term poliuhqui/‘pulque’) were a political misconstruction focusing on the indigenous beverage’s allegedly ‘primitive’ character.Footnote ²⁷

During the first decades after the invasion, most Europeans remained highly sceptical of indigenous practices – the fact notwithstanding that the Spanish colonial system, to some degree, had to be tolerant of non-European traditions. Many of the sources that remain from the 1500s were written by clergymen and are biased against indigenous customs. Alcohol has been used by many cultures to compensate for a lack of food or the unavailability of clean and adequate water supplies; during Europe’s Middle Ages, people from all age groups and social classes consumed alcoholic beverages on a daily basis, the drinks’ quality or dilution being the main difference.Footnote ²⁸ In Catholicism, wine has a pivotal ritual role in the communion, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious orders would invest heavily in American viticulture.Footnote ²⁹ In the case of pulque, however, it was relatively easy for Europeans to construct the indigenous beverage as problematic, Amerindian drinking habits as barbaric, and the religious and cultural connotations of pulque as a potentially destabilising factor endangering colonial rule. This general approach can be identified in many other colonial territories and regarding a number of non-European beverages. One of the main strategies to discredit pulque (and its consumers) was to point out how much alcohol was consumed by an individual. While it is generally understood that there were rules in Mexica society when it came to alcohol consumption and people might indeed have been executed for violating them, a state of total inebriation was not only accepted, but welcomed – as long as it happened in a legitimate framework.Footnote ³⁰ The loss of control in an inebriated state has to be understood within a larger socio-religious context. The Mexica state was based on agricultural productivity, resulting in an enormous relevance of climatic stability or drought resilience for society as a whole. Unsurprisingly, Mexica religion – with its pantheon of teotl (supernatural entities) – came to hold pulque in high regard.

The main character related to pulque’s religious meaning is Mayahuel, a mythical creature with four hundred breasts, representing the idea of abundance. Her veneration was of central importance to agricultural, human, and animal fertility. She was regularly depicted close to an agave, suckling children or fish, and squatting in a birth-related position; this clearly points to Mayahuel’s relevance for growth and productivity.Footnote ³¹ A connection to alcohol can be deduced from the fact that she was said to be lactating pure pulque.Footnote ³² Mayahuel’s story is also closely related to the folk hero Quetzalcoatl, and some authors even identified her as his avatar.Footnote ³³ More often, however, Mayahuel is said to have come to Earth to dance and sing with Quetzalcoatl. Her demon-like grandmother killed the runaway Mayahuel, but Quetzalcoatl survived and buried her remains where afterwards the first agave would grow.Footnote ³⁴

While Mexica culture features many other characters related to pulque, the ambivalence of this beverage might be illustrated best in the myth of the ‘four hundred rabbits’ (centzon totochtin) who are usually identified as Mayahuel’s children.Footnote ³⁵ Keeping in mind the relevance of agaves and pulque in the context of fertility, combining Mayahuel (as mother, maize, agave, and pulque ‘deity’) with the symbolism of the notoriously fertile rabbit makes sense. Early modern chroniclers, however, also characterized the centzon totochtin as beings related to allegedly unproductive and excessive forms of alcohol consumption that – from a Catholic point of view – seemed inappropriate, and even identified them as the deities of drunkenness.Footnote ³⁶ It is unclear, however, if the link between the seemingly unrestrained behaviour of rabbits and pulque consumption was really based on Mexica traditions or rather (re-)constructed to serve European political goals. Arnold Carlos Vento has criticized the ‘pulque-rabbit-inebriation’ complex, pointing out European traditions of misconstruing characteristics of other cultures; he argued for understanding the centzon totochtin as manifestations of planting, growth, and (positive) fertility instead.Footnote ³⁷ It seems reasonable to understand European perspectives as a result of both deliberate misconstruction as well as misunderstandings. Even if Mexica society saw ‘unrestrained’ alcohol consumption, it was likely rooted in a cohesive system based less on ‘moral’ issues common to Christianity than on necessary interaction of humans, supernatural beings, and nature; terms such as ‘excessive’ are themselves problematic because of their close association to European value systems that differed strongly from pre-colonial indigenous worldviews.

In the end, it has to remain unclear – at least to some degree – whether descriptions of observers such as Bernardino de Sahagún and his indigenous collaborators, in the Codex Florentinus, are accepted as historical reality or not. Sahagún mentioned, for example, the izcalli ritual (representing transition from infancy to another phase of childhood) which included heavy pulque consumption from drinking vessels specifically for children as well as the piercing of ears.Footnote ³⁸ Both inebriation and ritual bloodletting would have been seen as remnants of a ‘pagan’ past, making the Catholic mission civilisatrice even more necessary. Friar Toribio de Benavente wrote about the aforementioned Quetzalcoatl, a renowned leader, who was offered pulque as a medicine by the deity Tezcatlipoca, got drunk, seduced his sister, abdicated in shame, and left his homeland – a story that underlines the destabilising effects of uncontrolled alcohol consumption.Footnote ³⁹ During the early colonial phase, clerics were often at the centre of opposition against the use of pulque, criticising its offering to non-Christian idols during communal ceremonies and even commissioning colourful murals in attempts to teach locals the connection between pulque consumption and demonic influence.Footnote ⁴⁰

Vices, cures, taxes: pulque in New Spain (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)

If there were obvious reasons to criticise Amerindian consumption of pulque because of its inebriating effects and connections to non-Christian rites, then why did this beverage become one of New Spain’s most important economic resources, with regional consumption rates in late-nineteenth century Mexico, dwarfing, for example, those of beer in Germany by a factor of more than two-to-one?Footnote ⁴¹ There is no monocausal explanation, but, with the onset of the colonial period, pulque undoubtedly became a sort of commodity and lost some of its sacred characteristics.Footnote ⁴² However, this neither means that the colonial setting provided an unregulated, ‘free-for-all’ economy nor that market-oriented practices completely wiped out pulque’s traditional meanings. It is highly relevant who drinks what, for what reason, and in which specific group context;Footnote ⁴³ in colonial settings, the use of specific food or beverages might have been even more relevant for the construction of social identities. It seems unlikely that pulque became (more) popular because of elite criticism, even though some people might have consumed it to undermine the colonial system and reaffirm a specific non-European identity. European criticism of pulque, on the other hand, cannot simply be explained by the beverage’s popularity alone. It was the combination of pulque being both quantitatively popular and a potential marker of non-European (anti-colonial?) beliefs that resulted in its problematisation. However, popularity among Mexico’s masses was also the basis for a positive Spanish interest in the agave alcohol.

For Spain, there was much to gain from taxing pulque sales due to enormous demand and the pragmatic need to consume the nutritious beverage. In the early 1700s, famed Italian traveller Giovanni Gemelli Carreri noted the financial relevance of this ‘liquor, taken from a plant’ [‘licore, che tolto da una pianta’] and Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor echoed his assessment, noting that its consumption was ‘contributing to His Majesty, through the asiento […], seventy-five thousand Pesos each’[‘contribuyen à su Magestad, por Asiento […], à setenta y cinco mil Pesos’].Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1785, Spain’s official tax revenue related to pulque would rise more than tenfold to no less than 946,000 pesos annually, with intellectuals such as Antonio de Alcedo confirming pulque’s financial importance during this era.Footnote ⁴⁵

Over time, a growing number of Europeans also pointed out the medical qualities of pulque. The 1552 Libellus Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Small Book of the Medical Herbs of the Indians) named it as helpful against mange, oedema or ‘melancholy’ and, though being more sceptical, Francisco Hernández, who led the first scientific expedition to New Spain in the 1570s, included ‘wine’ in his list of products made from agaves.Footnote ⁴⁶ This links directly to issues of state control over pulque production, for it could be very pragmatic and beneficial (for individuals, entire settlements, but also the state) to plant agaves; on the other hand, it was almost impossible to control which agave-based resource was used by the local populace. As mentioned in Gregorio López’ Treasury of Medicines, pulque could also serve to cure burning or numb feet; it was, however, not to be ingested, but to be used to wash the affected extremitiesFootnote ⁴⁷ – a recommendation further complicating the control of alcohol consumption. The eighteenth century saw a heightened interest in the qualities of non-European colonial resources, and pulque was no exception. Italian cleric Ilarione da Bergamo, writing about his journeys in New Spain during the 1760s, stated that people from all social groups were drinking this beverage and that doctors were using it as a remedy for a number of illnesses, especially diarrhoea.Footnote ⁴⁸ Doctor José Ignacio Bartolache echoed this positive assessment, adding potential benefits as a remedy against tuberculosis or some forms of scurvy.Footnote ⁴⁹ Towards the end of the century, the use of pulque against diarrhoea was mentioned by Francisco Clavijero in his History of Mexico – which also points to the diuretic nature of pulque – as well as a medical compendium published by Juan Manuel Venegas prescribing a specific pulque diet.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Gazeta de México, in 1797, referred to a sweat treatment for smallpox based on white pulque, tomato puree, chicaquilitl (Sonchus oleraceus), and sugar.Footnote ⁵¹

Criticism did not disappear, but rather changed from being morality-dominated to focusing on (alleged) scientific knowledge and reason. During the 1700s, writers like Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero identified pulque as a danger because of its alleged role as a ‘gateway drug’ leading to the ‘abominable use of counterfeited spirits’ [‘abominable uso de los Aguardientes contrahechos’].Footnote ⁵² Pedro Estala, in 1799, focused on pulque-related violence, stating that despite ‘the government’s great vigilance, a number of excesses are committed, with men and women mixing, getting drunk, resulting in fights, and sometimes deaths’ [‘de la grande vigilancia del Gobierno, se cometen varios excesos, estando mezclados hombres y mujeres, embriagándose y resultando riñas, y á veces muertes’].Footnote ⁵³ One has to keep in mind, however, which cultural specifics, social and ethnic groups were targeted. ‘No doubt the low price of pulque was hard to resist, even by those who liked to think of themselves as Spaniards, and even as they condemned pulque for its disgusting and low-life qualities’,Footnote ⁵⁴ a criticism closely linked to non-Europeans and lower social strata.

In 1529, the Spanish colonial administration had officially legalised the sale and the consumption of pulque for the first time. It was made clear, however, that this act only referred to white pulque that had not been mixed with fruits or the infamous ocpatli or cuapatle roots. This underlined the official approach that allowed for the consumption of the agave alcohol, but was extremely wary of colonial subjects becoming inebriated.Footnote ⁵⁵ Different Mexica and colonial sources stated that pulque was often not consumed pure (as yztac octli), but instead combined with additional ingredients to change its taste, prolong the timespan of its drinkability, or to simply make the beverage much stronger (as in the case of ocpatli, the roots of Acacia angustissima).Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1636, Antonio de León Pinelo stated that ocpatli led to hallucinations, with drunk people ‘committing countless stupidities’ – thus warranting official sanctions against mixed pulque.Footnote ⁵⁷

The first official recognition of pulque occurred during an era replete with legal actions aimed at prohibiting indigenous alcohol use and characterised by discussions about the mise en valeur of America’s resources.Footnote ⁵⁸ It did not, however, signal the beginning of a linear development towards the total acceptance of this beverage or the existence of a Spanish ‘master plan’. Many inhabitants of New Spain needed to consume either aguamiel or pulque in order to cover their calorie requirements. Amerindians getting drunk, on the other hand, became an important colonial topos and doctors regularly criticised excessive alcohol use.Footnote ⁵⁹ Michael Scardaville strongly argued against a ‘simplistic Black Legend view of exploited and demoralized inebriated native peoples’.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, not only poor, demoralised Amerindians were seen as a destabilising element: in 1553, the Tlaxcala city council complained that the economic boom related to cochineal dye production led to widespread drunkenness among (economically successful) indigenous people.Footnote ⁶¹

Pulque was not per se demonised; European discourses mainly centred around the topic of responsible consumption and differentiating acceptable from unacceptable pulque variants. The fermented sap was, in the words of an eighteenth-century traveller, an alcohol of New Spain well-suited for simply getting inebriated.Footnote ⁶² This characterisation leads back to wider discussions among elites about whether Amerindians or lower-class Europeans, Africans, and castas would be able to reasonably deal with the dangers of drunkenness. This resulted in a series of prohibitions: A viceregal ordenanza, in 1576, for example, banned the sale of pulque in indigenous settlements.Footnote ⁶³ Interestingly, six years prior, viceroy Martín Enríquez had completely banned the production and sale in the territories under his jurisdiction.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ocpatli use was outlawed in 1588, shortly after the state had licensed new alcohol businesses in Ciudad de México, but also strictly regulated the consumption of unadulterated pulque.Footnote ⁶⁵

It became obvious, however, that bans were both unpopular and impossible to enforce. The colonial state started to issue a number of licenses to Amerindian women, allowing for the production and sale of aguamiel or pulque in the markets and squares of the capital.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1608, a new ordenanza finally decreed the re-legalisation of white pulque in New Spain; in fact, this was the first time that pulque blanco was officially designated as the one acceptable beverage variant.Footnote ⁶⁷ The sale of pulque was to be conducted only by indigenous women; for every hundred indigenous persons, one native woman was to be selected as seller, and Spaniards were not allowed to partake.Footnote ⁶⁸ Natasha Bailey interpreted this exclusively indigenous nature ‘as a way to limit interracial interactions’ and ‘a method of downsizing the trade’Footnote ⁶⁹ in general. This perspective aligns with ongoing scepticism towards indigenous alcohol use and the widespread obsession of Europeans with the alleged dangers of uncontrolled ‘race mixing’ (mestizaje). The consumption of beverages such as pulque was seen as endangering an artificial social hierarchy theoretically based on ethnic and class divisions. Spatial and biological mixing of Amerindians, Africans or Europeans – combined with inebriation – was seen as potentially opening the floodgates for the breaking of racial barriers or even revolution. European elites regularly accused middle- and lower-class individuals of social destabilization by fraternising and drinking with ‘non-whites’.Footnote ⁷⁰ So, while the physician Juan de Cárdenas, in 1591, simply noted that many indigenous people were used to consuming aguamiel and pulque in their daily lives,Footnote ⁷¹ there were also lingering fears of the masses living idle lives or plotting against the state. Mestizaje could be constructed as a phenomenon based on the intercourse of men and women drunk on pulque, and while this miscegenation clearly had political implications, there was also an explicit medical side to it: just like Amerindians, lower-class subjects were said to be prone to alcoholism, resulting in a higher number of alcoholics within colonial society who, in turn, would have more lower-class children, creating a vicious circle of unwanted behaviour, chaotic miscegenation, and questionable hygiene. While the Inquisition issued blood purity certificates, these were not indefinitely valid, showcasing the enormous importance of behaviour. Footnote ⁷² Drunk inhabitants of Ciudad de México, on their way home from pulque establishments (pulquerías), regularly urinated and defecated in public, and intellectual discourses not only identified them as primitive, but turned them into ‘the stereotyped germs of the viceroyalty’s moral degradation’.Footnote ⁷³

The 1692 Mexico City riots and beyond: pulque’s political economy

The alleged problematic and violent behaviour of pulque drinkers became the unrivalled focus of attention in the summer of 1692, when riots broke out in Mexico City. According to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a drunken, plebeian mob coming out of the pulquerías marched on the viceregal palace. He identified the rioters as indigenous, Africans, Asians, castas, and Spaniards.Footnote ⁷⁴ Sigüenza chose to omit the real reasons for the civic unrest: a critical shortage and high prices of corn confirmed, for example, by Mexico’s archbishop who, however, also accused inebriated masses of staging a violent revolt.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even though only one confession obtained after the unrest stated that a man had overheard plans for the storming of the government palace two months earlier,Footnote ⁷⁶ pulque, pulquerías, and pulque consumers were singled out as the colonial state’s enemies; Eduardo Menéndez identified this approach as the culmination of a decades-long process focused on the stigmatisation of lower-class alcohol consumption.Footnote ⁷⁷ Viceroy Gaspar de la Cerda, in a January 1693 letter, vowed to exterminate the ‘diabolical beverage’ [‘diabólica bebida’].Footnote ⁷⁸ At that point, he had already outlawed all variants of pulque in New Spain.Footnote ⁷⁹ By the end of July, however, the government, once again, turned around and the sale of pulque blanco was declared acceptable. Due to the enormous tax revenues related to the beverage, and supported by a medical report rejecting the idea of pulque being per se harmful, its production, sale, and consumption in Nueva España were legalised in 1697.Footnote ⁸⁰

The eighteenth century saw a veritable pulque boom based on population growth and economic stability, with the crown earning unprecedented amounts of revenue even though many rural producers would argue that they were only producing for themselves.Footnote ⁸¹ The legal nature of pulque sales was cemented by additional orders such as the necessity of installing plaques identifying the pulquerías; already since 1671, they were required to have one wall, a roof, and three open sides (to facilitate control), with the number of legal establishments in the capital set at thirty-six.Footnote ⁸² Powered by the rise of mining and trade, some important characteristics of the pulque economy changed. Rich families like the Jala, interested in diversified portfolios, started to invest in pulque enterprises. They created large plantations – haciendas pulqueras – that integrated agave raising, pulque production, filling, marketing, and transport operations (with owners often controlling pulquería outlets as well).Footnote ⁸³ Late eighteenth-century pulque production brought greater profits than investments in grain, while favouring large and diverse landholdings of wealthy families.Footnote ⁸⁴

Throughout the century, the drinking of pulque blanco was mostly legal, if not encouraged. The existence of more or less ‘problematic’ forms of mixing is, however, confirmed by a number of sources. In 1701, Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor spoke out against the use of melons and lemons as additional ingredients; and, during the 1790s, Antonio Pineda mentioned, for example, charape (made of white pulque, sugar, cinnamon, clove, and anise) or ojo de gallo (‘eye of the rooster’), composed of pulque, water, honey, chili, pepper, and anise.Footnote ⁸⁵ Cayetano Cabrera, in 1746, decried not only immoderate alcohol consumption, but the mixtures of pulque, while Julián Gutiérrez Dávila criticized the countless illegal pulquerías as spaces of uncontrolled drunkenness.Footnote ⁸⁶ The state regularly decreed prohibitions of pulque vending outside of licensed pulquerías: in 1760, sales in grocery stores or bodegas were outlawed.Footnote ⁸⁷ The increase of the pulque tax in 1771 was explicitly justified by both financial benefits for the crown and attempts to curb excessive consumption.Footnote ⁸⁸ Still, the economic importance of pulque continued to trump all criticisms throughout the Bourbon Era. Between 1763 and 1809, pulque-related state income amounted to an extraordinary thirty-two million pesos; in 1778 alone, the official volume of pulque consumed stood at about forty-five million litres.Footnote ⁸⁹ When Mexico became independent, however, the situation had completely changed – due to political chaos and violence, the economy and agricultural production were severely hampered. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century would bring a last pulque boom. This was closely linked to the development of railroads bringing the rapidly spoiling drink (that could not be bottled due to ongoing fermentation) to consumers further away from production zones.Footnote ⁹⁰

From the late 1800s onwards, pulque would, however, encounter a rival more fierce than scientific criticism or Catholic moral convictions: the idea of a Mexican ‘modernity’. An era of high profits and expansion of agave plantations in the early 1900s, with approximately 140 million agaves used by the pulque industry, came to an end around 1910 to 1914. The revolutionary movement brought instability and, by 1914, haciendas were seized and then split up as part of the constitutional land reform’s ejido system of communal land holding; unlike wealthy hacendado families, the new ejidatarios could seldom afford the long-term investments needed for (sometimes decade-long) agave growing.Footnote ⁹¹ Mexico’s agave-based agroindustry that had produced around nine million litres of maguey alcohol (mostly pulque) annually between 1900 and 1903,Footnote ⁹² never recovered. The beer economy, on the other hand, flourished. As recently stated, beer production and marketing ‘were greatly influenced by foreign input’ during the Porfiriato (the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz between 1876 and 1911), while the following (post-)revolutionary era until 1940 was marked by the attempt ‘to forge a more autonomous path’,Footnote ⁹³ a project strongly supported by the urban middle class, educated mestizos, and the indígenismo movement.

Industrialise this: the rise of beer

Beer is not a beverage native to Mexico, and there are no indications that pre-colonial cultures such as Olmecs, Aztecs, or Maya consumed alcohol in this specific form.Footnote ⁹⁴ Fermented beverages produced and consumed in Latin America before European contact – such as tepache and tesgüino in Mexico or molle and chicha in the Andes – were mostly based on maize, berries, and plant juice.Footnote ⁹⁵ The history of Europe, on the other hand, is closely connected to grain-based agriculture.Footnote ⁹⁶ Grains ‘generated three basic foodstuffs: bread, which occupied a primary place in the diets of both rich and poor; beer; and gruels of various sorts’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The place beer occupied in medicine was often similar to that of pulque. Throughout the Middle Ages, ‘apothecaries often made up medicines in beer, or to be taken with it’,Footnote ⁹⁸ while both ancient and Renaissance writers mentioned a positive role of beer in moderate cooling of the body, provoking urine, and augmenting bodily strength.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was used on eighteenth-century navy ships to prevent or treat scurvy,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and English women brought to North America the tradition of drinking ‘extra beer to help their milk flow’ during breastfeeding.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Many Europeans, even during the 1800s, still faced the problem of polluted water supplies – in a country like Britain, beer was often the only affordable beverage safe enough to drink.Footnote ¹⁰² As stated by Ismael Sarmiento Ramírez with regards to Cuba, beer was initially characterised as diuretic and sold only in pharmacies, before mass imports from Britain culturally transformed it into an enjoyable beverage.Footnote ¹⁰³

Compared to Germany or Austria, the widespread introduction of beer in Spain came at a relatively late point in history.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ ‘It is believed that the brewing tradition began when King Charles I of Spain brought some brewmasters from Flanders to Madrid in 1537. Although several ale beer factories were present in Madrid during the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a scarce and expensive drink, […] craft or semi-craft brewed, with markedly seasonal consumption (summer), and it never reached rural areas. More commonly, “barley water”, which is obtained by boiling malted or toasted grains in water (without fermentation), was consumed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 1562, the profession of brewers was officially recognized by royal orders of Philip II.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In the mid-sixteenth century, Alonso de Herrera was allowed to set up a brewery in Mexico, but the beverage did not become popular.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This could be explained by the relatively small number of potential European consumers (who also might have preferred wine), climatic challenges, technological problems, high prices, and Mexico’s long-standing pulque tradition. Beer brewing, glass, and glass bottle production remained extremely modest economic sectors until the late nineteenth century; an 1857 Mexican census listed only five glass firms.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While the beer industry became a relevant economic sector only later on, already the 1820s had seen ample discussions about the qualities of this beverage. The periodical Aguila Mexicana, for example, stated: ‘Beer is a tonic drink, and particularly good for the stomach, due to the well-known virtues of hops with which it is made’ [‘La cerveza es una bebida tónica, y particularmente amiga del estómago, en razon de las virtudes bien conocidas del lúpulo con que se fabrica’.].Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Beer had been consumed by humans for millennia, but only in the 1800s ‘it was discovered that yeast converts sugar into ethanol (or ethyl alcohol) and carbon dioxide, in the process known as fermentation’Footnote ¹¹⁰; and only in 1876, Louis Pasteur published his Etudes sur la Bière [‘Studies on Beer’], focusing on ‘a method of brewing which would be independent of season and locality and which would not only render unnecessary the use of existing costly methods of cooling beer, but also make possible its indefinite keeping’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In contrast to Mexico, the United States had already built a huge beer economy by that time – this was, of course, helped by the fact that many immigrants came from traditional European ‘beer areas’, while the abundance of barley, hops, and water – especially in the Midwest – has to be factored in as well.Footnote ¹¹² A number of (quasi-)industrialised brewing companies such as Cervecería Toluca y México (1865, Toluca), Cervecería Cuauhtémoc (1892, Monterrey) or Cervecería Moctezuma (1897, Orizaba) had been established in Mexico by the end of the century,Footnote ¹¹³ but bottled beer still was an expensive beverage consumed mostly by expatriates or wealthy Mexicans, individuals often connected to the mining industry and concentrated in the northern parts of the country (e.g., around Monterrey).Footnote ¹¹⁴ National beer production between 1897 and 1901 stood at approximately 300,000 hectolitres – during the same period, Germany produced almost seventy million hectolitres and around 1900, two major US breweries, Anheuser-Busch and Pabst, each accounted for one million hectolitres annually.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Over the next twenty years, however, ‘the newly popular beverage was being marketed aggressively and competitively in all of Mexico’s largest cities. Changing tastes reflected changing attitudes, and as the editors of one Monterrey newspaper suggested, it was beer, not pulque, that brought men “comfort and happiness”’,Footnote ¹¹⁶ opening up new avenues of civilised lifestyles; and while the Cuauhtémoc Brewery had employed 139 workers in 1896, ten years later, this number had risen to 1000.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Since the 1880s, beer industries throughout the world saw important technological changes: improvements in the fermentation and brewing processes, increased mechanisation as well as the use of refrigeration ‘came at the same time as elaborate research on yeast […], with increasing knowledge of how the actual brewing process took place and thanks to the introduction of beer bottles, beer cans and crown corks, it became increasingly possible to control the “stability” of beer once it had been bottled’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ New production methods – such as the Ohio-made Owens automatic glass-blowing machine (1903) – quite rapidly spread to other countries.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this period, Mexico’s railway network (again, especially in the north) allowed for cheaper transportation: between 1873 and 1910, freight rates dropped by more than 70 per cent; trade was also supported by an improved electric power grid, paved roads, and communications systems.Footnote ¹²⁰ More rapid movement of goods and people ‘facilitated national integration, while the mass production of basic consumer goods, such as textiles, shoes, beer, and cigarettes, influenced material culture and patterns of consumption’.Footnote ¹²¹ Both railways and cerveza embodied the country’s modernisation. In 1899, a series of travel reports in La Revista Moderna featured the author, Alberto Leduc, ‘enjoying a cold pint of beer in the Alameda [in Monterrey], the very act a symbol of modernity demonstrated by the industrial production of beverages and their refrigeration’ before he heads towards the railway station.Footnote ¹²² One has to keep in mind, however, that – throughout the Porfirian period – beer prices remained high. ‘Despite a steady increase in the (still small) urban middle class and in the number of men and women employed in modern industries […], a bottle of beer represented the better part of a day’s wage, and thus was likely unaffordable for most of the working population’.Footnote ¹²³

From a nutritional point of view, supplanting pulque with beer has some logic to it. Beer contains a high amount of nutrients, namely carbohydrates, proteins, and sugars. Modern pale or dark lager beer has an average energy value ranging from about 140 to 180 kilojoules per 100 millilitres (compared to about 180 kJ in pulque).Footnote ¹²⁴ The potential dangers of alcohol abuse notwithstanding, beer also has healthy qualities: it promotes oestrogen production and stimulates microbiota, improves blood circulation, can help with the prevention of arteriosclerosis, and has cardio-protective, anti-oxidant and anti-aging effects.Footnote ¹²⁵ Besides containing ‘more protein, vitamins and minerals than unleavened bread’, beer’s ‘low alcohol content kills bacteria that may be present in the unprocessed water’.Footnote ¹²⁶ There is an ongoing discussion, however, about the specific qualities of beer in different eras; it has been argued that a B vitamin such as thiamine is deficient in modern beer, but that this was not always the case. The fact that calorie intake via beer results in less calorie consumption via other foodstuffs could also lead (among other problems) to a vitamin shortage.Footnote ¹²⁷

Pulque’s Nemesis: beer in Porfirian and post-revolutionary Mexico

One of the main reasons for beer becoming Mexico’s most popular alcoholic beverage was, however, political in nature. If it was to be successful, the idea of national modernisation, in the minds of political elites, had to permeate all aspects of life, and the masses had to be ‘whitened’ in a cultural way.Footnote ¹²⁸ In a biological sense, the ethnic identity of a person was not something seen as interchangeable. There were, however, possibilities to culturally transform individuals – based on their behaviour, language or consumption patterns, people could raise their social status and ‘better’ themselves. This, of course, entailed the acceptance of imported lifestyles and character traits by ‘non-whites’, not an adherence to indigenous traditions by people of European descent. European notions of hygiene and civilisation adopted by the Mexican government prominently featured connections between poverty, lack of sanitation, illiteracy, morbidity, and alcoholism; transforming Mexican society thus made it necessary to tackle a broad range of socioeconomic issues.Footnote ¹²⁹ In 1910, Mexico City, following cities such as London or Budapest, hosted a ‘Popular Hygiene Exhibition’; besides a notable focus on epidemic diseases, the issue of alcoholism featured very prominently in this exhibition that was visited by almost 100,000 people.Footnote ¹³⁰

Based on foreign perspectives on health and nutrition, reformers saw Mexican lower-class traditions of eating and drinking as a menace to society: ‘Francisco Bulnes attributed Indian backwardness to the supposed inadequacy of maize-based diets. Psychologist Julio Guerrero went further, stating that criminal behavior resulted from the “abominable” foods eaten by the lower classes’.Footnote ¹³¹ In 1901, Guerrero pointed out the enormous quantities of alcohol consumed as part of Mexican party culture, mentioning pulque, tequila, and mezcal, but also beer and champagne; alcohol, in his opinion, was most dangerous to lower-class (pulque-consuming) individuals ‘for, transformed into hereditary information, it led to growing physiological and mental degradation’, which, in turn, threatened Mexico’s social development.Footnote ¹³² The paper La Naturaleza claimed that earlier attempts to exterminate pulque had failed because of its central role in Mexico’s widespread alcoholism.Footnote ¹³³ In 1892, an American traveller – ‘A. Gringo’ – stated that pulquerías were filled with poor Mexicans and that, while pulque allegedly had some wholesome qualities, excessive consumption led to ‘a stupid drunkenness’.Footnote ¹³⁴ A Madrid newspaper, in 1910, alleged that the ‘terrible intoxication’ caused by pulque was responsible for a large percentage of homicides among Mexico’s lower classes.Footnote ¹³⁵ In 1913, Luis Urbina decried the fact that (uneducated) parents continued to introduce children to this drink, placing ‘into their brains, still unaware, the first desire to find joy in drunkenness’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Smear campaigns, often financed by breweries or foreign entrepreneurs interested in opening new markets for alcohol, and supported by Mexican elites interested in foreign currency investment, targeted pulque; state-run ‘hygiene campaigns’ – with their goal of supplanting Amerindian traditions in the name of modern nationhood – did the same.Footnote ¹³⁷ For example, pulque was said to be traditionally fermented using cow dung or human excrement and generally dangerous for consumers as well as the public order, while press reports were often replete with terms such as ‘dirty’, ‘filthy’, or ‘pestilent’ when discussing pulque establishments.Footnote ¹³⁸

In general, Mexico’s elites were strongly influenced by the ideas of positivism. Disciplines such as criminology or physiology were seen as potentially capable of identifying, curing or preventing ‘problematic’ behaviour.Footnote ¹³⁹ Looking at the history of New Spain or Mexico, the (allegedly) close link between inebriation and ‘deviant’ practices such as incest, rape or homosexuality had long been established by the early twentieth century. Consumption of beer or European liquors, on the other hand, practically linked persons and social groups to Mexico’s modernity, while consumers of pulque were seen as obstructing national development.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As stated by Luis Guadarrama Domínguez, Porfirian-era advertisements for beer regularly included women: sometimes, beer was hailed as a ‘family-environment’ drink or as perfectly suited for mothers and wet nurses, while other advertisements combined the male appetite for beer with that for a European-style femme fatale. Footnote ¹⁴¹ In these contexts, (responsible) drinking was not seen as problematic, but rather as the epitome of progressive society; ‘the Porfirian upper classes could not pretend to be alien to collective drinking. Well-to-do customers spent a considerable part of their social life crowding into cantinas’.Footnote ¹⁴² Who drank in which kind of setting and company, however, mattered at least as much as the specific type of alcohol consumed, while, at the same time, the same beverage could have a different reputation based on its place of production. While persons of European descent or mestizos/mestizas could allegedly be trusted in their ways of alcohol consumption, other social and ethnic groups embodied all the vices related to drinking.

Keeping in mind the relatively high price for beer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the fact that bottled cerveza ‘would have been entirely out of reach for the majority of Mexicans who worked in rural agriculture’,Footnote ¹⁴³ it seems obvious that getting drunk on beer was not an option for most of the population – beer contained too little alcohol for too high a price! If the goal of drinking an alcoholic beverage was inebriation, cheaper pulque or distilled drinks with high alcohol content were much more attractive. For a government and elites aiming at ‘modernisation’ through the replacement of unacceptable behaviour and consumption patterns, a popular, cheap, and indigenous drink such as pulque made an ideal scapegoat for a whole number of social problems. Beer was consumed in lower quantities by fewer people from higher social strata; therefore, it could represent modernity, combining the entertainment of socialising and consuming alcohol with a decreased risk of problematic results. ‘The ideology of the day linked beer consumption, nationalism, and progress, a bond vividly forged by brewers in public celebrations and entertainments. Beer represented a civilized beverage renowned for its healthful influences […]. Drinking beer allowed the gente decente both to differentiate itself from the lower classes and to offer them a moral example of how to build a stronger, more progressive nation’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Proponents of this idea included positivist intellectuals (científicos) aiming at the modernisation of public administration as well as the business elites of Ciudad de México with their cosmopolitan culture based on upper-class and urban European lifestyles – later on, both groups also shared economic interests in the real estate, infrastructural or agricultural sectors.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

During the Porfiriato, Mexican entrepreneurs ‘were favored by a market protected through high tariffs, tax exemptions, and duty-free imports of modern machinery, which facilitated a wide variety of manufacturing plants, including textiles, metal products, beer, paper, tobacco, cement, and chemicals’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For decades, beer imports from the United States were subject to import duties that added up to 75 per cent to a bottle’s regular price.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Based on the state’s economic policies, imported beer could be gradually replaced by domestic cerveza; the decision of the Cervecería de Sonora to name its lager beer High Life (in English, not Spanish) shows, however, the ambivalence of this new ‘Mexicanness’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As contemporary descriptions show, elites in cosmopolitan environments such as the southern port city of Tehuantepec consumed domestic and imported beer side by side in 1909: ‘At every hour, in restaurants and cantinas at small tables along the sidewalk, people drank beer from Monterrey or from Germany’ [‘En los restaurantes y cantinas, en mesillas al borde de la acera, se bebía a toda hora cerveza de Monterrey o de Alemania’.].Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Rosemary Thorp has also questioned the idea of ‘integrated’ national markets in the period around 1900, presenting an example related to beer consumption: Yucatán ‘had no rail connection with the rest of the country and traded principally with the United States. When a thirsty customer ordered a “foreign” beer in Mérida he was sold a glass of Dos Equis – from Orizaba’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Still, the economic rise of Mexico’s beer industry during this period cannot be doubted; this process was supported by newspapers and periodicals regularly featuring advertisements. El Tiempo Ilustrado (1891 to 1912) prominently advertised furniture or machinery; the most intensively promoted Mexican goods by far, however, were cigars and beer.Footnote ¹⁵¹ A traveller in the 1890s recalled many persons of both sexes and all ages running about with Cerveza Toluca ‘at the railway station, offering it for sale, and even the pulque vendors are not more energetic in their attempts to secure a market’.Footnote ¹⁵² By 1910, Cuauhtémoc had secured the top spot in Mexico’s beer industry, its production alone being twenty-five times higher than the volume of nationwide beer imports.Footnote ¹⁵³ This enterprise can indeed be seen as a Mexican one; others, such as the Moctezuma Brewery from Orizaba, also produced in Mexico, but were controlled by foreign capital.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In the late Porfiriato, areas other than northern and central Mexico also saw increased beer production; for example, entrepreneurs in Oaxaca bought the old La Mascota Brewery in 1903, formed the Compañía Cervecera de Oaxaca, and introduced modern and efficient production methods.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As the United States Department of Commerce stated in 1925, by then, beer was definitely seen as one of the goods Mexico produced in quantities that could supply a large percentage or the entirety of domestic consumption (together with shoes or wool blankets).Footnote ¹⁵⁶

After the Mexican Revolution, not only indigenous people, but also a ‘degenerate’ proletariat of drunkards (i.e., pulque consumers), criminals, gamblers, and prostitutes, was said to embody Mexico’s ‘social diseases’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ While the country did not experience many relevant temperance movements during the decades following its independence,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ anti-alcohol policies became more common after the end of the Porfiriato. Campaigns against pulque were part of a power struggle and ‘everything that represented the old regime had to be attacked’ [‘todo lo que representara al viejo regimen debía ser atacado’] – this included the ‘pulque aristocracy’ allied with Díaz as well as the beverage itself.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Land reforms and reduced alcohol consumption were said to support the revolutionary state and its utopian goals (while, at the same time, reducing the influence of the Catholic Church that was criticized for its alleged encouragement of drinking) as well as marginalized groups such as women and the poor – strata that were identified as the primary victims of exploitation, alcohol-related illnesses or domestic violence.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The provisional government of Eulalio Gutiérrez in 1915, for example, raised taxes on domestic beer and wine by 20 per cent; pulque taxes were raised by 10 per cent, tequila and mezcal taxes by 50 per cent.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In the same year, a radical prohibition decree was passed in Yucatán: it outlawed liquor and ordered the closing of all cantinas; only non-distilled alcoholic beverages (up to 5 per cent alcohol) remained legal.Footnote ¹⁶² Besides standing in the way of Mexico’s improvement as a society, drunkenness was also seen as an economic problem. A banana planter stated in 1918 that ‘their “predilection for strong drink” was the greatest cause of inefficiency among his workers. […] His employees “took a certain pride in becoming intoxicated, and conceived that it was a part of manliness to become drunk.”’Footnote ¹⁶³ While post-revolutionary Mexico can be characterised by an ideological turn towards its pre-colonial past, it still favoured a modernistic approach based on European or North American ideas of progress. Intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos (minister of public education from 1921 to 1924) saw mestizo identity as the central ethno-social pillar of Mexico’s future; this did not mean, however, that the cultural ‘whitening’ of the population had lost its importance. ‘The thinker constantly affirmed that the active role for indigenous subjects in ushering in a utopian humanity would be their sacrifice of both body and culture to the national cause by procreating a mixed-race state’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ A society based on mixed-race (mestizaje) culture, in my opinion, should not be seen as opposite to the abovementioned ‘whitening’ approach of the Porfirian era, but as its specific variant – a biologically mixed-race population living according to culturally ‘white’ standards. Vasconcelos also harshly criticised contemporary views identifying pulque as a form of food (instead of alcohol) due to its nutritional qualities; for him, this was happening ‘in the name of a false science’ [‘en nombre de una falsa ciencia’], alleging that the beverage did not have a bad influence on the indigenous population or the country.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ ‘With its archaic methods of production and insalubrious reputation, pulque (and its consumers) embodied the anxieties of backwardness […]’, while drinking beer gave affluent Mexicans an ‘opportunity to illustrate their sophisticated taste and highlight their avant-garde values’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Around 1930, the Mexican beer economy was dominated by three companies: Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, Cervecería Moctezuma, and Cervecería Modelo; all of them, however, ‘served regional markets. As the twentieth century progressed, all three took advantage of technological improvements and expanded to serve the national market. The prohibition period in the U.S. (1920–1933) created an excellent opportunity […] as Americans crossed the border to enjoy Mexican beer’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ During the 1920s, for example, the business levels of Cervecería Azteca and Cervecería Mexicali in Tijuana (San Diego’s ‘sister city’ in Mexico) quadrupled as northern consumers swarmed the town renowned for its entertainment culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ National beer output increased from around 720,000 hectolitres in 1930 to almost 1,8 million hl ten years later.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In a parallel development, the estimated number of agave plants in Mexico dropped by 75 per cent.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Following the replacement of many maguey plants with barley, more strict regulations and even prohibitions, pulque lost its position as Mexico’s most-consumed alcoholic beverage by 1945, and, in 1950, production stood at only 6.8 per cent of the volume made in 1900.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Although contemporary observers lamented the difficulties of suppressing pulque and identified it as both historically important as well as the alimentary basis (together with maize) of rural populations,Footnote ¹⁷² the ‘golden age’ of pulque had undoubtedly come to an end.