It is only fitting that this volume should have had its origins in a round of post-conference drinks following an American Historical Association session. In the acknowledgements to his own chapter, the editor thanks deceased colleagues and friends for their contagious zest for ‘happy hour’ conversations – and even without happy hour reinforcements, this is a read as entertaining as it is enlightening.
Following a brief foreword by William Taylor, whose classic work on Mexico is referenced often within the volume, David Carey provides both an introductory essay and one of its most detailed chapters, on ‘Maya Moonshiners’ in the first half of the twentieth century. Stacey Schwartzkopf contributes a chapter on the role of aguardiente in nineteenth-century Maya society, followed by Rene Reeves with a chapter on women and alcohol production in the same period. Alvis E. Dunn analyses eighteenth-century tavern life and policies in Santiago (today's Antigua), while Frederick Douglas Opie vividly describes alcohol and ‘lowdown culture’ on the Caribbean coast in the railroad and banana era. Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides a concluding essay that explores community drunkenness and representations of Maya in modern Guatemala.
The various contributors make substantial efforts to engage each other's research and findings, and they are quite right to point to Taylor's inexplicably delayed influence in provoking the sort of research offered here. They also invoke the literature on commodity chains as history so in vogue during the 1990s. However, the many strengths, and far fewer weaknesses, of this volume are firmly situated in the local literature, whether the vast corpus of ethnohistorical work on the Maya or the more limited but pioneering work by Ana Carla Ericastilla and Lisbeth Jiménez that squarely positioned Guatemalan women at the centre of both the private and public spheres involved in alcohol production and sale.
Among those many strengths is an engaging prose, best exemplified in Opie's wide-ranging piece that brings to bear comparative insights from the Mississippi Delta to the Florida Everglades, from his deep knowledge of the literature on foodways (which the authors rebaptise here as ‘drinkways’) to the material and social culture of ‘juke joints’ and ‘honky-tonks’. His most basic finding is that African American immigrants who made the decision to stay in Guatemala and seek a Guatemalan mate were often able to prosper, at times spectacularly, while others engaged in the liquor and tavern businesses remained on the margins, subject to highly arbitrary and often violent treatment by both local authorities and their own customers and competitors.
Chapters by Reeves and Carey focus on women's agency within the aguardiente, moonshiner and bootlegger cultures. They are quite successful in eliciting ‘voices from silences’, as called for by Eugenia Rodríguez in her pioneering work on women's history in Central America. While both employ the archival record of criminal cases against moonshiners and bootleggers, women in particular, Carey once again taps his remarkable oral history material with Maya informants to flesh out both context and motives. Their chapters also make it abundantly clear that, before coffee or bananas in Central America, and the federal ‘income tax’ of 1913 in the United States, state formation depended far more on liquor production and tax revenue than we like to remember.
An additional strength of the volume, to which the first (Schwartzkopf) and last (Garrard-Burnett) chapters are central, is the primary focus on Maya Guatemala, as both participant in the cultures of alcohol and object of an often highly racist representation inherent to national state formation. Both of these authors tackle head-on the issue of indigenous alcohol consumption, and argue convincingly that outsiders have long been unreliable interpreters of the shifting meanings associated with alcohol consumption within Maya society. They do not gloss over the catastrophic effects of alcoholism, either individually or collectively, but they rightly shift the focus away from texts based on outsiders’ perceptions of behaviour and towards the contexts and meanings of that behaviour for participants. Their colleagues in this volume also make it very clear that subalterns of all kinds assigned myriad meanings to alcohol consumption and claimed extraordinary agency in pursuing both drink and the income associated with it.
The volume has more than its share of memorable turns of phrase, but perhaps its most arresting and thought-provoking finding is to remind us that, for better or worse, alcohol was one of the very few products or activities in Guatemala that continually forced the crossing of ethnic, gender and regional boundaries. Without it there would have been no state recognisable to most historians, however prone we have been to forgetting to take note of this. Neither free nor coerced labour would have been mobilisable, as without alcohol, coffee's labour recruiters would have had few and poor enticements in the late nineteenth century. Religious and ritual observances would have been unrecognisable – and the laments of both missionaries and anthropologists would have been unintelligible, depriving evangelical Protestantism of a key element of its appeal more recently as well. As someone who grew up on the outskirts of a ‘town’ whose distinguishing features were a single general store, church, primary school and gas station alongside two taverns, I must confess that the very idea of a ‘dry’ social history mystifies. This collection helps to move us beyond the historical literature's odd combination of likely Protestant-inspired ‘temperance’, multicultural seeking not to offend, and the perhaps universal tendency of failing to analyse what simply seems obvious.
Ironically, the very focus on the Maya majority makes it more difficult to divine much in the way of non-Maya, or ladino, drinkways. While the ladino-based essays by Opie and Dunn are fascinating, the latter's contribution is difficult to relate to the others, as a study of the wealthiest site of ladino society (the colonial capital) fully a century or more prior to the other essays. Had there been an essay like Dunn's for a later time period, urban drinkways and their provisioning might well have gained a clarity similar to Maya ones. While we learn a good deal about bootleggers, state repression and licensing of liquor sales, surprisingly little is said about the highest levels of alcohol and politics. The authors explain how popular anger against the estanco de aguardiente helped doom the Conservatives in 1871, how the victorious Liberals very quickly abandoned their promises of ‘free trade’, and in even more detail how the notorious dictatorships of Estrada Cabrera and Ubico relied on alcohol sales for more than a quarter of their total tax revenue well into the twentieth century. However, we learn little about the economic or political roles of the largest sugar producers, whose more expensive liquors were admittedly dominant primarily in ladino and urban settings. There may have been no Guatemalan Bacardi family empire, but elsewhere in Central America major sugar plantations did specialise in liquor production, occasionally even with a multinational clientele, such as with Nicaragua's Flor de Caña brand. The lack of any analysis of this level, given how very successful large-scale Guatemalan sugar producers have become more recently, is yet another reason to lament what might have been added to this already substantial volume.
The illustrations employed here are fascinating, but despite the best efforts of the press, employing some nearly full-page reproductions, resolution is a recurrent problem. Paper and ink images in the digital age seem to invite both greater expectations and disappointment. For those of a certain age, regaled at the kitchen table with Prohibition-era tales and FBI ‘most wanted’ mug shots in our daily stop at the Post Office before choosing which of the two taverns to visit, grainy images of our fabled villains no longer satisfy.
