Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica 9781477313886

Citation preview

Substance and Seduction

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Substance and Seduction I NGE S T ED COM MODI T I E S I N E A R LY MODER N M E SOA M ER IC A

Edited by Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn E. Sampeck

University of Texas Press

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Austin

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Copyright © 2017 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2017 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). LIBR A RY OF CONGR E SS CATA LOGI NG-I N-PU BLICAT ION DATA Names: Schwartzkopf, Stacey, editor. | Sampeck, Kathryn E., editor. Title: Substance and seduction : ingested commodities in early modern Mesoamerica / edited by Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn E. Sampeck. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017012667| ISBN 978-1-4773-1386-2 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1387-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1388-6 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1389-3 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Mayas—Food. | Mayas—Substance use—Social aspects. | Central America—Social life and customs. | Food consumption— Social aspects—Central America. | Central America—Colonization. | Colonization—Social aspects—Central America. | Consumption (Economics)—Central America. | Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience—Central America. | Ingestion—Central America— Psychological aspects—History. Classification: LCC F1435.3.F7 S83 2017 | DDC 972.81—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012667 doi:10.7560/313862

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Contents

Foreword

vii

Marcy Norton

Preface xv Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn E. Sampeck

INTRODUCTION. Consuming Desires in Mesoamerica

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Kathryn E. Sampeck and Stacey Schwartzkopf

Part I. OLD FLA MES, NEW LOVES CH APTER 1. Sandcastles of the Mind: Hallucinogens and Cultural Memory 27 Martin Nesvig

CH APTER 2. Alcohol and Commodity Succession in Colonial Maya Guatemala: From Mead to Aguardiente 55 Stacey Schwartzkopf

CH APTER 3. Translating Tastes: A Cartography of Chocolate Colonialism 72 Kathryn E. Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn

Part II. SUBSTANTIAL M ATTER S CH APTER 4. Real Tobacco for Real People: Nicotine and Lacandon Maya Trade 103 Joel W. Palka

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CH APTER 5. Health Food and Diabolic Vice: Pulque Discourse in New Spain 128 Joan Bristol

CH APTER 6. “Confites, Melcochas y Otras Golosinas . . . Muy Dañosas”: Sugar, Alcohol, and Biopolitics in Colonial Guatemala 147 Guido Pezzarossi

AFTERWOR D

176

Carla D. Martin

Bibliography 183 Index

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Contents

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Foreword M A RC Y NORTON

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AHUATL SONGS WR ITTEN DOW N IN THE SIXteenth century evoke a place where rapturous gods delight in foaming cacao beverages and fragrant tobacco pipes among swaying rushes and bright green maize plants topped with delicate corn silk, and iridescently green quetzals, roseate spoonbills, and other birds of precious plumage or sweet song, and all manner of flowers scattering petals and scent.¹ This sensuous and sensory paradise was not only part of a Mesoamerican divine imaginary but also “a transformational aspect of the here and now, a sacred aspect of reality that one called into being by manipulating this garden imagery in ritual contexts,” in the words of Louise Burkhart. She has described how people in Mesoamerica and beyond believed they could inhabit this “flowery world” through song and strategic iridescence by employing brilliant feathers and jade and other gemstones.² The verses frequently evoke conditions of body and mind (“intoxicated,” “drunk,” “bliss,” and “pleasure”) and “narcotic” plant materials, such as cacao, tobacco, and dizzyingly aromatic flowers.³ These lyrcs reveal that the purposeful attainment of altered somatic and affective states was as crucial as song and shininess for the instantiation of the flowery world. When the singer declares that a flowery, foaming, cacao beverage has made his “heart drunk” or says that his heart “is savoring it,”4 we hear the echo of a Nahuatl saying: “[Cacao] gladdens one, refreshes one, consoles one, invigorates one. Thus it is said: ‘I take cacao. I wet my lips. I refresh myself.’”5 Mesoamerican ritual consumption was framed in terms of synesthesia. Drinking chocolate thus constituted a flowery immersion: flower (xochitl) additives such as tlilxochitl (vanilla) and mecaxochitl flavored

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cacao and tobacco. The very foam itself evoked flowering, since Nahuatl poetics emphasized the congruence between blooming and foaming. Altered sensory states—particularly those produced by intentional synesthesia that engaged smell, taste, sight, hearing, and movement simultaneously—were fundamental to ritual celebration because they allowed embodied revelers access to a sacred and liminal reality.6 A trace of this flower- and cacao-inflected world is found in canvasses painted in seventeenth-century Spain. Around 1631 the renowned still-life artist of the Madrid court Juan van der Hamen y León finished a painting entirely dedicated to chocolate (figure F.1).7 The composition features two lacquered gourd drinking vessels decorated with flowery-world motifs and other items imported from Mexico that became fundamental to iconographic representations of chocolate. Like the Spanish consumers who imported beautifully crafted gourd cups along with chocolate, van der Hamen y León anchored his composition around the xícaras (as the Spanish called the gourds, Hispanicizing the Nahuatl xicalli). The xícara on the left is draped with a woven textile (likely a paño de chocolate) on which is placed a shiny silver spoon, slyly suggesting foam (the spoon for scooping it, the cloth for wiping it away). The cloth leads to a foam-producing molinillo that connects to a second xícara sitting overturned on a wooden box of chocolate. The craftspeople in Mexico who made these or similar gourd vessels treated them as globes on which, atop a black background (black being a divine color in Mesoamerican aesthetics), they painted a flowery world with a radiating sun, lush vegetation, an iridescent bird (the long tail feathers suggesting a quetzal), and brightly colored flowers, elements also painted by native artists in the sixteenth century on murals in the Malinalco convent. The Mesoamerican sensorium not only survived under colonial rule but traveled, in fragments, to Europe in chocolate, tobacco, and xícaras, as well as manifesting itself in an obsession with foam and floral additives such as vanilla and mecaxochitl.8 I invoke the Mesoamerican flowery world because two of its ingredients, tobacco and cacao, are investigated in this volume and because its defining properties—heightened sensory experience and historical dynamism—characterize this book as well. Like the flowery world, the chapters are a portal to understanding a variety of heightened sensory states. Perhaps most dramatic are those states induced by hallucinogens, such as the mushrooms that, according to an early colonial source, cause one to see “many things which make him afraid, or make him laugh” (in Nesvig, chapter 1). The drunkenness produced by pulque and chicha inspired great comment from paviii

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FIGUR E F.1. Juan van der Hamen y León (attr.), Still Life with Chocolate Service (ca. 1631). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

ternalistic and anxious colonial officials like the missionary Motolinía, who claimed that pulque rendered indigenous people “violently drunk and accordingly more cruel and bestial.” However, another perspective on its effects was that of the 1920s pulque sellers who defended the drink for its ability to allow laborers to “recover their strength[,] raise their spirits, improve and make their work tolerable” (Bristol, chapter  5). And chocolate in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America and Europe was an incredibly complex gustatory experience, with a myriad of possible ingredients—from earthy and smoky achiote and musk to spicy chiles and cinnamon—and a flavor profile that encompassed six notes: spicy, sweet, floral, umami, nutty, and starchy (Sampeck and Thayn, chapter 3). Like the synesthetically playful poems and paintings, this book elaborates on the delectably and sometimes dangerously complex relations among embodied experience, material things, memory, and belief. The affective power of the substances comes not only from their physiological effects but also from the contexts in which they were consumed. Ingestion mediates between the experience of the individual body and collective structures. It is a single body who eats, drinks, swallows, ix

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and smokes. And yet the potency of ritual consumption is also a consequence of shared meanings that a community and culture invest in these substances. In the words of Victor Turner, The drama of ritual action—the singing, dancing, feasting, wearing of bizarre dress, body painting, use of alcohol or hallucinogens, and so on[—]causes an exchange between these poles in which biological referents are ennobled and the normative referents are charged with emotional significance. . . . [F]or symbols, under optimal conditions, may reinforce the will of those exposed to them to obey moral commandments, maintain covenants, repay debts, keep up obligations, avoid illicit behavior.9

Going beyond Turner’s emotional/biological duality, Sampeck and Schwartzkopf point out in their introduction that substances in and of themselves have a “thingyness,” properties of scent, size, color, texture. In other words, the substances have a material agency of their own that evokes responses of memory and desire, something recognized by the Nahua poets long before Proust or Pavlov came to similar conclusions. For the Lancadon Maya, as with the flowery-world revelers in central Mexico, the “emotional significance” of tobacco included its connection to divinity; smoke reached the gods, and the experience of it invited people to share their sensory experience (Palka, chapter 4). For seventeenth-century Maya in Guatemala, the meaning-structuring context could be that of Saint Days; according to the English visitor Thomas Gage, those “reprehended” for drunkenness “will answer that their hearts rejoice with their saint in Heaven, and that they must drink unto him that he may remember them” (in Schwartzkopf, chapter 2). Gage and others also provide evidence for the way alcohol “served as a medium for communities, kin, and friends to gather, away from Spanish surveillance, and rekindle social and economic relationships now strained by colonial control and displacements brought about by new forms of labor organization and resettlement policies” (Pezzarossi, chapter 6). In all these cases, the ritual ingestion of potent substances— whether tobacco or alcohol or something else—creates a nexus where thingy substances allow for embodied sensation that concretizes social and ontological beliefs, and powerful abstractions heighten sensory experience and amplify the perceived properties of things. As the chapters show, a complex concatenation of factors fueled Spanish colonial anxieties about Mesoamerican substances and the ingestion practices of Mesoamericans. One underlying reason for the x

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anxiety, and sometimes enthusiasm, was that Europeans, like the peoples they conquered, were heirs to cultural traditions centered on sensuous substances. If Mesoamericans viewed sensory alteration as fundamental to accessing otherwise unobtainable insight and connectedness to sacred realities, then southern Europeans understood wine not only as an everyday source of nourishment and pleasure but also as a focal point of ritual and theological Christianity. Through the sacrament of the Mass, wine from grapes was transformed into the blood of Jesus Christ.¹0 Since church authorities in the sixteenth century had a tendency to view practices that mimicked Christian rites—including the use of pulque, hallucinogenic mushrooms, or tobacco in a seemingly sacramental way—as evidence of the devil’s wont to imitate and profane the true faith, it is not surprising that they viewed the use of such substances, linked as they were to Mesoamerican religion (or idolatry, from the perspective of Spanish authorities), as fraught. Spanish authorities themselves worried explicitly about the links between “biological” and “normative” referents when they claimed that certain varieties of pulque led Indians to “commit idolatries, make ceremonies, and Gentile sacrifices” (Bristol, chapter 5). In doing so, these authorities, such as the Inquisition officials who banned peyote consumption in 1620 on the grounds that it made people more susceptible to diabolical possession (Nesvig, chapter 1), actually participated in the production of Turner’s “normative” referents. Kathryn Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn, in chapter 3, provocatively suggest that the European consumption of chocolate was a “total solution to the dilemma of colonialism,” asking, “How was it possible to subsume others (their lives, their labor, their substances, their objects) while at the same time hold them apart, as separate entities and tastes?” The chapters by Joan Bristol (5) and Guido Pezzarossi (6) also show how ingestible commodities—in particular, alcohol, sugar, and cacao— served as a lightning rod for the state’s anxieties about social changes within colonial society. Regulations that prohibited “mixed” pulque and encouraged the consumption of “pure,” “white” pulque reflected, according to Bristol, colonial efforts to maintain the “purity” of the Spanish and Indian communities and protect them from “adulteration.” Pezzarossi shows how authorities in seventeenth-century Guatemala likewise deployed a paternalist discourse concerning the safeguarding of native subjects’ health by preventing their exposure to “noxious” imports of foreign cacao and wine, sugar produced in “little sugar mills,” or the homemade chicha of native producers. Conveniently, the prohibition of these imported and native-produced ingestibles would ensure xi

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the maintenance of monopolies on cacao, wine, and sugar economically beneficial to local merchant elites and the state. As the flowery world was brought into the colonial period in Latin America and, fragmented, into Europe, the chapters reveal the entanglement of cultural continuity and transformation. The substances that produced altered states and triggered colonial suspicions were constituents of technologies that entangled Mesoamerican and European inventions. The Mesoamerican technology of chocolate became a vehicle for the Eurasian technology of sugar, and that of tobacco was a conduit for European tool use among the Lacandon Maya.¹¹ Seeming constancy in material or symbolic culture sometimes masks significant change; at the same time, communities’ efforts to maintain tradition can become a catalyst for transformation. Alternatively, apparent innovations can become vehicles for other kinds of continuities. In Stacey Schwartzkopf’s chapter (2), we see that what appears at first to be significant change among Maya groups in Guatemala—the replacement of mead (balché, made from fermented honey) with chicha (from fermented sugar)— was also a significant continuity, as alcohol’s association with sweeteners was maintained, as was its appropriateness as ritual drink used in traditional ceremonies and celebrations. In contrast, Joel Palka (chapter 4) shows how the Lancadon Maya’s ability to produce tobacco in traditional ways became a catalyst for change; tobacco’s desirability as a commodity among outsiders led both to new agricultural practices to meet increased demand and to an accelerated use of metal tools and exogenous plants and animals, all of which changed subsistence practice. Indigenous communities were not the only colonial populations who experienced changes in their practices and beliefs around ingested substances. Chocolate, tobacco, pulque, and even powerful hallucinogens attracted consumers among the Spanish, black, and casta segments of society in New Spain and beyond. Martin Nesvig’s chapter (1) speaks sensitively to the entanglement of change and continuity. He reveals continuity in the use of hallucinogenic substances before and after the Spanish conquest, but he also shows transformations: associated with divine communion in native contexts, hallucinogens were employed for practical purposes—such as using visions to locate lost items—in the multiethnic society of seventeenth-century Mexico. With methodological ingenuity Sampeck and Thayn (chapter 3) investigate the evolution of chocolate as it moved from the beverage’s likely origin in the Izalcos region (El Salvador) to far-flung locales in other parts of the Americas and Europe. Applying sophisticated statistical and mapping tools to historical recipes, they demonstrate Central American origins to the xii

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chocolate beverages consumed thousands of miles away and centuries later but also reveal the capaciousness of “chocolate” as a linguistic and sensory category that could eventually include a nineteenth-century “sham chocolate” in the United States whose ingredients included milk, cinnamon, and sugar but no cacao whatsoever. Exploring what, why, and how people put things into their bodies opens up a rich seam for cultural investigation. It requires us to think about the meeting points between embodied experience and symbolic articulations, between individual practice and collective structures, between state and community, and between consumption and production. In addition, as shown in this volume, the cultural investigation of ingested commodities becomes even more complicated in colonial contexts that feature asymmetrical power relations, the introduction of new materials and technologies, and encounters across divergent sensoria, belief systems, ritual practices, and ontologies.

NOTES 1. John Bierhorst, trans., Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 2. Louise M. Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetic of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 21 (1992): 89. 3. Bierhorst, introduction to Cantares Mexicanos, 26, 40; in the text see, for example, 141, 167, 205, 209, 227, 231, 233, 245, 251, 327. 4. I follow here the translation of Miguel León Portilla, ed. and trans., Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (translation of Trece poetas del mundo azteca, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1967) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 67; also see Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos, 231. 5. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. and ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research; Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1950-1982), vol. 12, bk. 11, p. 119. 6. This and the succeeding paragraph build on evidence and analysis in Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 660–691, and Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). However, I am connecting chocolate to the flowery world for the first time in this foreword. 7. To my knowledge, this is the earliest known still life unequivocally showing chocolate. On the artist, see William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry, xiii

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Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya (London: National Gallery, 1995). William Jordan changed the attribution to van der Hamen y León; “Catalogue Note,” in Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings, catalog, January 2014, lot 265, http:// www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.265.html/2014/old-master -paintings-n09102. 8. Piper amalago has been suggested as candidate for mecaxochitl, but there is no certainty in the identification. 9. Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 55. 10. On the role of wine and the Eucharist in informing European authorities’ responses to tobacco and chocolate, see Norton, Sacred Gifts; on transubstantiation and wine more generally in the colonial encounter, see Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 11. For the advantages of conceptualizing chocolate as well as food and pharmacopeia more broadly as technologies in the context of Atlantic and global history, see Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38.

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Preface S TACE Y SCH WA RT ZKOPF A N D K AT H RY N E . S A M PE C K

I believe in miracles Where you from, you sexy thing? I believe in miracles Since you came along You sexy thing “YOU SEX Y THING,” HOT CHOCOL ATE, 1975

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HIS VOLUME BEGAN WITH SOME QUESTIONS. THE first was posed when we asked each other how our two research projects, one focused on alcohol in Maya Guatemala and the other on chocolate in Central America and the Atlantic, might provide a fruitful area for collaboration. Very quickly we decided that we wanted dialogue with scholars doing similar work on other ingested commodities in the region broadly centered on colonial Mesoamerica. The initial result of those discussions was a double session held at the American Society for Ethnohistory meetings in Indianapolis on October 8–11, 2014. All the contributors to this volume participated in those sessions, and we were also fortunate, then and now, to have two commentators, Marcy Norton and Carla Martin, to provide a deep historical and rich contemporary context. We would like to thank them for their insights, as well as those who attended the sessions. A second question guiding us through organizing the session and planning this volume was fundamental: why ingested commodities? Alcohol and chocolate, tobacco and sugar, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms are taken into the body, yet none is a dietary staple. Collectively (and often individually) they straddle modern conventional divixv

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sions between food and drugs, medicines and ritual objects, frivolous luxuries and daily necessities. A shared focus on these substances not only interrogates such divisions but also opens up new avenues for considering colonial Mesoamerica across other divides: Spanish, African, and indigenous; producer and consumer; and the local and the global. Following the paths of these substances as they intersected across the colonial Mesoamerican world led us to fascinating places we would not have reached working alone. For that we are very grateful to our contributors for their enthusiastic and thoughtful collaboration over the past two years. A last set of questions arose as we moved toward publication and sought to deepen our consideration of the two key concepts of this volume’s title. Through their insightful comments and critiques, Frederick Smith and an anonymous reviewer encouraged us to engage these questions more profoundly: How did these substances seduce? When and how did they come to be desired and then needed, even by those who had never encountered them before? Exploration of these questions across the diverse range of substances, times, places, and peoples represented here reveals how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political constraints. As other scholars have pointed out, it was no simple process of swapping out one substance, such as pulque, for its closest new equivalent, such as wine. Instead, the way they seduced sometimes followed the original sense of the word as “leading astray” from duty or rectitude, by persuading the consumer to ingest as a sensual, personal endeavor. From this viewpoint, the seductiveness of a substance seems to grant a certain degree of agency to the substance itself. This agency may be seen to arise simply from the pharmacological effects of the tobacco, alcohol, hallucinogen, sugar, and so forth. Yet the genesis of desire (as well as its repetition) also involves a certain degree of fetishism, and each of the contributions in this volume directs us toward complicated, fascinating, and illuminating social relations. The act of ingesting is of less significance than its collective results in markets and politics, which were often far-reaching. As the chapters show, seduction was a dynamic process with many moving parts and actors, and people and things did not stay the same. The investigation of the substances discussed in this volume illuminates the colonial Mesoamerican world and, we hope, sheds light on the dynamics of seduction in general. WE AR E GR ATEFUL TO THE R EVIEWER S AND OTHER critical readers for their careful attention to bringing out the relevance xvi

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of our investigations. We owe a debt of gratitude to the staff of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and Gabrielle Vail of the Maya Codices Project for their generous, swift, and skilled aid with crucial illustrations. Janet L. Steins, Associate Librarian for Collections and Research Librarian at the Tozzer Library at Harvard University, gave outstanding guidance and speedy access to vibrant images that only the Tozzer has. The volume is much richer for their help. We would also like to thank Casey Kittrell, Angelica Lopez-Torres, and the rest of the editorial staff of the University of Texas Press for their encouragement and support in making this volume a reality. As John Cheever put it, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.” The same can be said of colleagues and editors; even individual contributions come into being through collective effort. The work of this volume has shown us that the dynamic of seduction is one of increasing knowledge, not as a lonely enterprise but in concert. Both appreciation and knowledge grow when shared. In fact, they are intertwined; as knowledge increases, affection can blossom, and awareness can heighten with deepening enchantment. Seduction makes it imperative to embrace what seems distant and elusive: knowledge must be discovered, interrogated, and understood to bring together what seemed disparate.

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I N T RODUC T ION

Consuming Desires in Mesoamerica K AT H RY N E . S A M PE C K A N D S TACE Y SCH WA RT Z KOPF

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VERY DAY IN THE HIGHL ANDS OF GUATEM AL A, Maya spiritualists make ritual offerings at sacred places in the hills, caves, and ancestral shrines surrounding their communities (figure 0.1). Starting with a cosmogram or a glyph drawn with white sugar and oriented toward the cardinal directions, Maya calendar priests (ajq’ija’) carefully arrange balls of copal—resin from pine, copal (Protium copal, Burseraceae sp.), or other trees—and other types of incense, aromatic herbs and flowers, candles of several colors, disks of chocolate, bread, loaves of brown sugar (panela), loosely wrapped cigars (puros), and very often a sprinkling of rum. Using sticks of pitch pine (ocote), the assembled items are set ablaze, thereby feeding the ancestors, the spirits, and the saints. While the offerings are consumed by fire, petitioners pray for relief from illness, mental distress, and family or marital problems; for success in agriculture, work, or education; and for blessings and guidance from the spiritual forces and beings around them. Conceived as reciprocity and commensality, these offerings link humans to the divine, the living to the dead, and the past to the present. As such, these objects have long played a central role in ethnographic descriptions of Maya ritual life, spirituality, and culture. At the same time, many of these offerings represent other kinds of links that have been traced in history, anthropology, and economics. The sugar used to draw the foundational Maya cosmogram (as well as being found in the offerings of brown sugar and rum) has deep historic ties to transatlantic African slavery, colonialism, and the origins of industrial capitalism.¹ Introduced into Mesoamerica by Europeans by the mid-sixteenth century, sugar plantations and processing mills proliferated in lowland and coastal regions over the remainder of the co1

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FIGUR E 0.1. Highland Maya ceremonial offerings of bread, chocolate, sugar, and incense. Photograph courtesy of Walter Little.

lonial era, as did distilleries. Today sugar represents one of Guatemala’s largest exports, a close second only to coffee. In Mexico, sugar production is much less significant to the overall economy but plays a ubiquitous role in national cultural life, most emblematically in the sugar skulls and other sweets associated with the Day of the Dead. Throughout both countries, people also consume sugar in a wide variety of forms, from homemade brown-sugar loaves sold in traditional markets to highly processed soft drinks whose advertising is emblazoned across storefronts in every small town and neighborhood. Some portion of this sugar is also used to make distilled alcoholic drinks ranging from award-winning commercial rums sipped in luxurious hotel bars to harsh bootleg moonshine downed in local fiestas and cantinas. While few commodities are more closely identified with early modern transformations of the Atlantic World than sugar and rum,² chocolate and tobacco were arguably two of the most important Mesoamerican and New World products in the Columbian Exchange and wrought far-reaching economic and cultural changes across the globe that scholars have begun to explore.³ Domesticated and consumed by Mesoamerican peoples for centuries as a ritual and elite beverage, a food, and 2

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sometimes as a currency, cacao was the first colonial product to experience an economic boom in sixteenth-century Central America.4 The cacao grown on the Pacific slopes of what are today El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Mexican state of Chiapas was highly sought after by a wide, well-established market of indigenous consumers that quickly came to include Spanish and mixed-race (casta) settlers as well. From the late sixteenth century a variety of cacao drinks, increasingly known as chocolate, moved across the Atlantic to Europe, where they were progressively incorporated into consumption patterns, reaching not only the highest levels of society but working classes as well. Over the next two centuries, cultivation expanded in American colonies to meet this rising demand, but in the postcolonial period cacao plantations spread across the tropics. Today the top cacao-producing countries are in Africa and Southeast Asia (Indonesia), with Brazil and Ecuador the leading Latin American producers. Mexico, the largest Mesoamerican producer, has recently been edged out of the top ten. In many rural areas of Mexico and Central America people still make disks of sweetened chocolate to sell at local markets side by side with candy bars mass-produced by multinational corporations. Tobacco, more widely cultivated and ingested across the Americas than cacao, had strong Mesoamerican associations with ritual and medicine.5 First encountered by Europeans in the late fifteenth-century Caribbean, where in typical indigenous fashion it was inhaled as a powder and chewed as well as smoked, tobacco’s spread across the Atlantic was also accompanied by an expanding range of social practices and cultural associations. In a commodity trajectory remarkably similar to that of cacao, tobacco was transformed from an essential element of gift exchange and diplomacy during the early period of indigenous-European contact, overcame its initial association with idolatry and otherness, and eventually was regarded as a more secular (and marketable) vice by the turn of the seventeenth century. As such, tobacco was the subject of one of the earliest and most profitable royal monopolies (estancos) beginning in 1636. Similar monopolies for tobacco and alcoholic beverages were established in many of Spain’s American territories, including New Spain and the Kingdom of Guatemala, over the subsequent two centuries.6 Resting on often-contradictory political, economic, and moral justifications, these monopolies became bulwarks of state financing during the later colonial period and beyond, and in altered form they exist today as a substantial form of tax revenue in many countries. As with cacao, tobacco production has globalized well beyond the region, with Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba the leading Latin American 3

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producers in the early twenty-first century. In Mexico and Guatemala, smoking rates are relatively modest compared to many South American and Caribbean countries, but consumers in those nations can readily find multinational cigarette brands (imported, locally franchised, and smuggled) and a smaller array of locally produced options including puros. As they do, they also encounter small but growing antismoking campaigns that challenge tobacco use for its problematic health effects, a biomedical discourse often tinged with implications of morality. Several other Mesoamerican goods with an equally long history of connection to bodily states, discourses on health, and state efforts at control expanded beyond the region only later and in historically distinct ways but figured prominently in the colonial and national history of Mexico and especially in relations between indigenous and other populations. Pulque (octli) is the fermented juice of certain species of maguey or agave (Agave americana) cultivated across the central Mexican highlands for centuries prior to European arrival.7 By the early sixteenth century pulque was widely consumed within the Aztec empire. According to some sources, only the nobility and the elderly could drink the concoction, as pulque was subject to taxation and regulation designed to control intoxication. Aztecs expressed imperial control with pulque sumptuary laws; nobles in the areas of direct control could enjoy it, while commoners suffered severe punishments for imbibing. At the same time, beyond the fringes of empire, mass community drinking was perhaps an older form of pulque sociability that continued to survive.8 After the Spanish invasion pulque consumption expanded to include not only previously prohibited indigenous individuals but also local Spanish and mixed-race populations. This was especially true in urban centers such as Mexico City, where taverns, inns, and pulque shops (pulquerías) proliferated during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to repeated concerns on the part of colonial and city authorities about drunkenness, rebellion, and social mixing across racial lines. In twentieth-century, postrevolutionary Mexico, pulque was disparaged in favor of beer as the beverage of the working classes but was most clearly displaced as a symbol of national identity by tequila in the latter half of the century.9 Today, pulque is making a comeback among middle-class Mexicans as a nostalgic invocation of the Aztec past. Although never used on as broad a scale as pulque, several indigenous hallucinogens widely used in central and western Mexico, especially peyote and a species of hallucinogenic mushroom (teonanacatl), also provoked deep colonial concerns. In addition to their suspect cul4

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tural hybridity, these were also directly interpreted as examples of idolatry, especially when used for divination, something that brought discovery of their use under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Driven at least partially underground as a result, these drugs continued to be very closely associated with indigenous ritual practice in the postcolonial period, especially among the Huichol of western Mexico, a group with cultural ties to both Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. The Huichol and related groups played a pivotal role in the expansion over the twentieth century of peyote’s use as a sacrament within the Native American Church, which today has several hundred thousand adherents in North America. US Supreme Court decisions have established the constitutional legitimacy of this religious use even within prisons. Today it is also used by some Native Americans in alternative treatments for alcoholism. Hallucinogenic mushrooms were never as systematically incorporated into religious practice but figured prominently in the practice of indigenous ritual specialists and in the later twentieth century were embraced as part of US counterculture. Like peyote (apart from its religious use), psilocybin-containing mushrooms are now considered a Schedule I controlled substance by the US government. Mexican law parallels some of these prohibitions, but enforcement is much more selective, especially with regard to traditional indigenous use. Sugar, rum, chocolate, tobacco, pulque, peyote, and mushrooms have thus individually and collectively played key roles in Mesoamerican history over the entirety of the colonial era down to the present. The current volume sheds new light on this significance by placing these substances in dialogue with one another and in looking outward from colonial Mesoamerica to the Atlantic World and to the present. For the remainder of this introduction, we consider how these substances exemplify a large category of ingested commodities existing at the boundaries of foods, drinks, and drugs.¹0 Considering all of these substances at the same time leads us to insights about the early colonial world and its legacies that are less obvious from the viewpoint of any one place or the dynamics concerning any one substance.

CONCEPT UAL FR A MEWOR K S This volume rises to the challenge posed by Geoffrey Hunt and Judith C. Barker that all substances taken into the body, whether food, drink, or drug, should be studied under a unified framework of ingested substances.¹¹ Our authors represent distinctive methodologi5

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cal and disciplinary perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, and history. Instead of theoretical uniformity, the goal in presenting these works together is a conceptual unity, the focus on ingestion. The step forward that the contributions of this volume make is to evaluate ingestion in terms both historical and anthropological, to confront directly their material existence and effects, and to evaluate the genesis of desire: who had initial, then sustained engagement with the substance and how interactions with and among different actors failed or thrived. Each chapter in the volume is a kind of three-legged stool, resting upon linked conceptual supports. The first, “substance,” is the particular “thingyness” of each item.¹² In every case, these were agricultural products processed to greater or lesser degrees. They had properties of scent, taste, touch, color, and texture. Second, “seduction,” is the allure of the item; while each substance had tangible effects, it was not always used only for its most notorious purpose—chocolate for eating or drinking, sugar for sweetening; instead, the item and the value people ascribed to it were variably deployed. The third, “ingestion,” connects the first two in a uniquely potent way. While many commodities have qualities that seduce the senses externally, ingestion is a catalyst to other physical, emotional, and social states. It is the most intimate relationship; it can be a metaphor, but consuming is also, invariably, corporeal, a state of self that propagates to and transforms the body politic and economic.

Thingyness The material qualities of each of these substances in many cases were moving targets.¹³ Joan Bristol shows how pulque beverages came in many colors, often associated with particular virtues and vices. Anxiety over mixing the fermentations provoked officials into regulating who prepared it, how it would be consumed, and when that could occur. Stacey Schwartzkopf shows that as alcoholic beverages became stronger and more standardized with distillation, their seductiveness to officials grew as targets of political economic control and revenue. Alcohol was a regular point of state intervention compared to other foods and drinks that might be consumed at a meal or social event. In contrast, the psilocybin mushrooms Martin Nesvig discusses were relatively consistent in quality and form and remained outside legal regulation. Guido Pezzarossi shows that the strategic use of sugar in biopolitics focused less on consumers’ needs than on the means to feed the urge for sweetness. His contribution particularly emphasizes the material evidence of ce6

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ramic vessels for processing sugar—the details of ceramic size, ware, and shape—that stands counter to documentary claims of cacao agriculture. The material requirements of processing, handling, and getting sugar to market invoked another level of gritty grappling with converting the raw into the marketable. Kathryn Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn emphasize the connection of the physical state—a cacao beverage and its iconic scents and flavors—to specific places. It is the conversion of the tobacco cigar to smoke that is perhaps the most dramatic transformation of thingyness, a profound alteration of states of matter that is not just regular but necessary for its most common use, as Joel Palka demonstrates. This physicality of substances adds a provocative element in the genealogy of cultural commodities and material culture studies more broadly: What are the material states of transition in addition to economic and cultural conversions?¹4 These transformations directly and discursively link labor, value, and meaning. How important is it that mushrooms are light in weight and do not have a strong scent, while cacao beans have an earthy aroma and the weight of the bean is a reflection of quality? That sugar is dealt with in large, bulky plants to produce grainy, heavy solids used in large quantities? That alcohol spills and vessels are heavy to transport but then can bathe the user in a way that these other substances do not? And that tobacco smoke infiltrates everything with a powerful scent? The material qualities of these substances were lessons in delayed gratification. The experience of the substance in the initial stage (as a razor-edged giant grass or succulent, a slippery seed with mucilaginous coating, or a leathery, elephantine-leaved plant) could be a far cry from that of the final product, and most substances often required elaborate, stepwise, careful processing to reach a desired state for ingestion. That few of these substances had ready-made thingyness attests to the intensity of desire and the lengths that people were willing to go to have them, including demanding a whole host of willing and forced accomplices in the process. Thingyness involves not just the substance but also people. All ingestibles, in the end, become part of the consumer. The imbiber, eater, or smoker is nourished, transformed, and possessed by belonging, even if this possession is at times coerced by powerful elites, as in the case of psilocybin. This alteration is not just of the individual; rather, the allure lies in the transformation of the individual as a social being. Marcy Norton introduces this idea of sociable phenomenology in a way strongly evocative of Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” such 7

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that consuming, even in solitude, creates or strengthens social bonds.¹5 These substances, by their very effervescent qualities, can help overcome anomie. It is the allure of consumerism that is familiar today: in a diverse society that stretched across continents, a way to unite was through parallel consumption. The unignorably sensory effects of each substance, its mind-altering capacity, whether a fleeting “sugar rush” or a revolutionary hallucinogenic “trip,” relate to thingyness in consumer experience. Norton contends that hyperbolic sociability and extreme, paradigmatic solitariness may be explained by the somatic effects of cacao and tobacco in “heightening alertness, calming agitation, creating well-being—allowed individuals to join together in a shared mood, creating a powerful experience of union. Conversely, the fact that the goods could create a sensory bridge, eliding the distance between individuals, [they] influenced private episodes of consumption, but in these contexts the goods re-formed from bonding agent to desired other, becoming a surrogate companion, offering wholeness and relieving loneliness.”¹6 Whether social or countersocial, all of these substances permit learning through corporeal experience, a bodily knowing. For colonists, imperial agents, and subjects alike, the surest way to learn, to be social— as protest, union, or ambivalence—was to consume. Each chapter, in its own way, contributes to the growing field of the history of the senses,¹7 the substance of human experience.

Seduction Does the corporeal experience always create seduction? Some chapters show that in fact these substances provoked no small degree of horror or revulsion among new observers.¹8 Most required a period of education to learn to appreciate the product as something worthwhile to ingest, and some were never convinced. Individual experiences with substances occurred within economic, political, and social frameworks that made acceptance more or less likely, but repulsion was always a potential outcome. Colonial processes were much more than bricolage, neatly swapping out one for another seemingly equivalent item, as each substance had semantic associations, practices, and economic and political consequences with proportions and energies of its own. Few of the chapters concentrate on immediate, total, or wanton desire, that is, addiction. Instead the authors interrogate bodily states and degrees of dependency.¹9 The focus is on initial curiosity that often grew into a longue durée of stable reliance, a slow seduction. Adopt8

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ing substances was a process of enchantment, a kindling of fascination in which the material, whatever its qualities, enticed a person. Temptation led actors into choices they might not have made if they were not in a state of arousal. The appeal to the senses and sociable phenomenology was liberating, calming fears and freeing actors to embrace objects of desire. The contributions of this volume show, however, that such exchanges were not only or simply hedonistic. Archestratus of Gela, an ancient companion of Alexander the Great, argued that the most adventurous of the senses was taste, and a worldly sensus communis could be created by consuming one another’s foods.²0 The studies in this volume show the daring nature of many senses and how those explorations of substances at the boundaries of food, drink, and drug both subverted and strengthened imperialistic agendas. Seduction tests morality and strength; whether the encounter will be durable and recurring and whether the engagement with the substance will result in reliable outcomes, that commitment will result in the enrichment of living, sometimes through financial impoverishment. To continue on from enchantment to a long-lived commitment required a certain amount of faith that the experience of consuming was safe and comfortable enough to be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually rewarding. Failing these criteria, which many of the authors present for different actors and at different times, results in roadblocks for the substance to pass into acceptability and enduring desire. Addiction—neediness—and seduction can create situations in which demand cancels out benefit. None of the examples stresses increased market share due to addiction per se. Desperation made the mystery of attraction less; with addiction, the question became whether the substance had any merits at all. Instead, a seductive aura comes from the potential for discovery of unimagined benefits. Time then becomes the manner to validate the beauty of the enchantment—more time, more experience, leave the consumer feeling satisfied yet wanting more. Colonial people of different stripes became attracted to that which felt comfortable even if slightly out of reach, fueling the thrill of discovering or maintaining future potentialities. How did the seed of tenuous experimentation mature so that its presence became daily and unremarkable? In some cases, the answer is through time-honored fidelity, re-creating time and again a substance with predictably unpredictable effects, such as psilocybin (Nesvig), or quality, such as tobacco (Palka) or pulque (Bristol). In other cases it was opportunistically managing the exact substance, such as kinds of alcohol, within governmental incentives (Schwartzkopf) or disincen9

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tives (Pezzarossi). That cacao and chocolate were some of the first stable, major consumable imports to Spain, even before tobacco, speaks to a reliance that spread across the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century and later blossomed even further.²¹ Norton points out that the timing of cacao and tobacco’s entrance into a regular and increasingly prominent place in European markets in the late sixteenth century shows that these products were not used as a rare medicine first, as previously thought.²² Rather, the physical form, tools, preparation, and social context of consumption followed American fashion. In this case, the devotion was in the details, as the fluidity of what could be considered chocolate, the array of seasonings and states, varied greatly over space but nevertheless occurred within a rubric that had American forms and methods (Sampeck and Thayn).

Ingestion Were stimulants, hallucinogens, inhalants, intoxicants, sweeteners, and flavored drinks all new experiences for colonists? Certainly not. Hundreds of years of European, African, and Asian exchange and experimentation made a variety of substances such as wormwood, theriac (made from vipers’ skin), spices, herbs, and alcohol in many forms part of common consumption for pleasure and health. The chapters in this volume show the long career that consumables of tobacco, cacao, hallucinogens, and fermented beverages had in indigenous Mesoamerican life. To colonize means to forge a union that had not existed in quite that way before. As Bristol points out, it is the mixing of new substances for familiar ends that is seen as dangerous yet ultimately irresistible. Ingestion, then, is the crucial engagement. Other major commodities such as textiles transformed or situated the self through appearance, but from a European perspective, clothing is on, not of the body. For Mesoamericans, the limits of the self lie not in the body per se but in all the elements seen or unseen that compose the person. Clothing, substances, and forces all are intimately part of being and thus profoundly transformative, making and remaking the self. What is so fraught with danger is that ingestibles make a union that is difficult, if not impossible, to undo. Ingesting is tangible colonialism. The volume’s focus on ingestibles is not the classic target of food studies, for some of the substances discussed have no nutritional value (tobacco) or can be argued to have adverse health effects (hallucinogens, alcohol).²³ In fact, none of these items is a staple, though some, such as

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sugar and alcohol, became substantial sources of calories in the daily diets of laboring people, as Pezzarossi and Schwartzkopf discuss. While our objective in this volume is not to represent every substance, those considered here form a tightly bound group: nonsubsistence ingestibles that became colonial commodities. Coffee, one of the most comparable drug foods also grown in the region, had its greatest impact in postcolonial, late nineteenth-century Mesoamerica. Our substances are also primarily agricultural crops or plant products; intriguing parallels with other ingested substances such as breast milk were less connected to the main political economic and agricultural dimensions analyzed here.²4 Historian Rebecca Earle brilliantly explores the intersections of food and the colonial body. The works in this volume provide a wider context of consumables for her findings that sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury humoral theory and folk theorizing understood phenotypic characteristics, the environment, and particularly food as a dynamic set of relationships that created, maintained, and crafted the corporeal and spiritual self.²5 Early modern European ideas of health were based on the premise that the body contains four humors (fluids): black bile, yellow or red bile, blood, and phlegm. Each humor has its own set of qualities such as cold, hot, wet, or dry. The humor of blood was thought to define the outlines of the person, grant access to the truth, and hold “body and soul together, separate from the external world, but always precariously so.”²6 To be healthy, a person’s bodily humors had to be in balance, yet they were “locked in a constant struggle to dominate the individual body,” and for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans, climate “was but one of a number of forces shaping the individual constitution,” with food “the single most important factor in shaping human health.”²7 Food could alter the balance of the humors and hence one’s constitution. To consume meant to alter one’s being, and health could be maintained by correctly classifying substances according to their humoral qualities. This theory of the body was the foundation for medical treatments that in some cases gave added potency or value to substances from abroad. Asian spices were seen to have hot and dry qualities that balanced the cold and wet European diet and therefore could cure diseases caused by coldness and humidity. Asian spices, because they were thought to have been brought to the earthly world along the four rivers flowing from Paradise, were considered to have marvelous and mysterious healing powers and be much more valuable and effective as medicines than easily procured, cheap, local medicinal ingredients.²8 George

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Foster recounts how Mesoamericans recognized a hot/cold dichotomy wherein foods, medicinal herbs, many nonvegetal remedies, bodily states, events, and various substances were characterized by calidades (qualities) of being “hot” or “cold.” In the Purépecha village of Tzintzuntzan, onions, garlic, chocolate, and unrefined brown sugar were considered hot, and limes, cucumbers, and the herb purslane (verdolaga) were cold, situational classifications that not only varied from region to region but also during the lifetime of an individual.²9 Although humoral theory was a classificatory scheme, it was not a rigid one; rather, it made the limits of the self—rooted in corporeal experience but not bound by the body and potentialities of substances—contingent upon circumstance. Early modern ideas about the fluidity of physical features such as skin tone and mental or psychological abilities such as industriousness found an anchor in food and climate; environmental context and ingestion rather than bloodline generated personal qualities.³0 So, in some ways, European classical humoral theory of the body, self, and health gave rise to a profoundly conservative approach to preserving body and soul amid this struggle for balance. People who wanted to preserve their identities strove to eat what had made them who they were in the first place. From this perspective, people feel enchantment for substances because they have so much to do with who and how they are. The contributions in this book thus complement Earle’s focus on staples, particularly wheat and bread and American maize and tortillas, offering a more complete view of the major if often subterranean colonial disquiet about potential health effects of ingestibles phrased in terms of humoral theory and purity.³¹ Earle shows how food provided necessary humoral opposites to restore constitutional balance: “a change in diet, like a change in environment, could transform an individual. . . . [T]he human body was thus in a state of continual flux. . . . [B]odies, far from being hermetically sealed off from the outside world, were continually open to the impact of their external environment.”³² A food was, therefore, medicine, and medicine, food. Controversy in humoral interpretations may have blurred, then erased the boundaries between food, drink, and medicine. The notorious case is that of chocolate in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Some medical treatises were highly restrictive, advocating the use of chocolate for specific pathological states, while other contemporary, rival treatises advised therapeutic applications of chocolate that extended so broadly that it was a panacea, paving the way for commonplace consumption as a comestible.³³

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Authors interrogate the blurry division, if it even exists at all, between drugs and food. Such distinctions collapse in the focus on ingestion, understood as a place of emotional solace, biological need, and social contract. From medical anthropology, Hunt and Barker were some of the first to issue a call to consider drugs, drinks, and food together analytically.³4 They argue for comparison across substances; attention to social, cultural, and temporal boundaries; a joint focus on production and consumption; and a critical focus on power relations.³5 This analytic framework dovetails with the global study of “cultures of intoxication” and regionally with a more recent call for “a new drug history of Latin America.”³6 Gootenberg and Campos suggest that drugs moved in four directions under colonialism, toward mercantilist commercialization, local commodification, use deemed fully heretical and illicit, and transatlantic expansionist production and distribution springing from and in support of slavery and empire.³7 We see evidence of all of these movements in the substances considered here. A broader, more integrated understanding of satisfying desires of the self and society goes hand in hand with this endeavor to reshape the longer drug history of the region. The contributions gathered here highlight how substances intersected with multiple colonial discourses invoking health, purity, gender, race/ethnicity, and power. Ingesting substances was a way to preserve or corrupt the self. Mary Douglas emphasizes how realms of purity and impurity relate to substances and their qualities, which defined what should be eaten by whom and in whose company.³8 Douglas argues that the structure of affiliation and difference displayed and enacted by consuming in different circumstances was a blueprint of social order. Arguing for the analysis of “culinary complexity” along linguistic lines, Douglas considers how food may be used as a means to derive data about social categories. While authors in this volume are less overtly structuralist, Bristol, Nesvig, and Pezzarossi invoke purity and impurity as tropes to navigate race, class, and indigeneity. The contributions in this volume illustrate that rather than neatly defined structures of relationships created by ingestion, the reality was messy, almost in(di)gestion, with the deep concern for morality at odds with colonist practices of profiting by purveying those potentially dangerous goods. Pezzarossi traces the inversion of the healthfulness argument: sugar and alcohol were decried as damaging, particularly to native populations, but then became a needed “lubricant” good for Indians as state control (and profit from it) became stronger. As Pezzarossi

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recognizes, “practices of the self in the name of morality and its associations with health and life” became a deft strategy to turn the Spanish dagger of moralizing discourses back upon its wielder.

COM MENSAL KNOWLEDGE While each of the chapters shows its own style of the conceptual three-legged stool, the insights gained from gathering them together result in a grander and intellectually rewarding synergy. A few, not nearly all, themes and insights summarized below show the potential for transdisciplinary, summative understanding. Drawing together these different examples and approaches offers the opportunity to explore in terms of scale, from the individual to the empire, to appreciate the multiple forces at work at the same time, currents and countercurrents, and the mosaic of actors and elements, which gives some relative proportion of any one example. It also invites questions that can be addressed by further work. For example, if each substance has a humoral signature, how does the combination of ingestibles show an attempt to approximate a balance of humors? Studying one substance alone will not answer that question, yet the crucial conceptual role of humoral understanding in the early modern period and parallel Mesoamerican historical and contemporary concepts make it an important question to consider. The rich potential of this and other lingering questions shows that the endeavor of this book is to be a first word rather than a last one.

Economies of Ingestibles While economic impacts were felt individually, exchanges form a network of relationships and dynamics that are hard to capture in single instances. So, perhaps even more important than the desire to consume was what people would pay to satisfy that craving. Many of the contributions show that the most widespread appeal was the potential for profit. A factor (mercantile fiduciary) did not have to love chocolate to make money from it, nor did colonial officials have to settle all of their moral qualms over drunkenness before spending alcohol revenues. Of course, the source of profit came from desire for the item by a larger public. In this regard, these works reach beyond (or deeply into) market, antimarket, and the genesis of demand; each chapter provides a slice of consumerism in an era long regarded as precapitalist or mercan14

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tile. The volume as a whole shows how proliferating new uses and users stemming from encounters with these substances led to their working their way into the crevices of the colonial economy all around the minerals and staple grains that seemingly formed its bedrock. As colonial Mesoamericans enjoyed their pulque and rum, their tobacco and sugar, and even their psilocybin-containing mushrooms and peyote, they were also laying the seeds for economic opportunities for others to harvest. As these opportunities and connections were rooted in sociability, hospitality, health, and ritual, they were never easy to dismantle once they became part of the lived experiences of individuals and groups. Overall, the different contributions show that the object of desire took on new meanings and a life of its own in the social world created by colonialism. Chapters thus give intimate views of the construction of the meaningful context and social gamesmanship that the substances catalyzed. These substances did not just enable but were the stuff of social and cultural reproduction. All of our authors trace the trajectories of how different groups over time came to see particular substances as essential to personhood and society and the political economic implications of such reliance.

Constructing Wants and Needs Each chapter presents a facet of the cultural construction of demand at smaller and larger scales. This cultural construction of demand intertwined with the economic organization of production and supply in at times conflicting ways (Pezzarossi) or was a powerful avenue for self-determination (Palka). Implications for power relations around the marketing and state regulation of these items included establishing a legacy of states leveraging desire into revenue at a moral cost; the state recast morality rather than let go of revenue in the case of alcohol (Pezzarossi, Schwartzkopf). This retooling of state policies and the reasons for them was part of the context that led to commodity succession, but the state did not necessarily manage their relevance in people’s lives (Schwartzkopf). The overall impression when looking at all the contributions is of colonial officials trying to keep pace, or more often to catch up with, local dynamics in commodity use and production or new strategies to evade control. Pezzarossi shows that highland Maya were keenly aware of the politics of cacao, but the on-the-ground reality was that sugarcane production gave them more chance for profit beyond the watchful 15

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eye of the state. The temporal and spatial variation of chocolate recipes demonstrates horizontal succession; although most of the recipes had the name “chocolate,” they varied greatly from one region to the next (Sampeck and Thayn). The lexical stability masks succession in ingredients and tastes that defined political and cultural borders. A brief comparison of the timing, market, and use of these different substances shows that boom and bust cycles are at best an incomplete story, as all of the substances have strong symbolic, economic, and social meanings that endure today.³9 Cacao rose meteorically from 1550 to 1580, then declined in price but increased in popularity at a fairly even pace from about 1615 and has only grown since. Sugarcane agriculture arose slightly later, gaining an ever-increasing share of colonial commerce and eclipsing cacao during the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century. Hand in hand with sugar processing was its other half: rum or aguardiente. Rum and sugar became bulwarks of Atlantic commerce, dependent upon and thus fueling the enslavement of Africans. Tobacco had early appeal, though slightly postdating cacao, but the market grew in step with sugar and rum, forming the agricultural commodity triad of Atlantic World commerce. In contrast, the appeal of pulque and Psilocybe mushrooms was their indigeneity, as products of local crafts and consumed not far from their sources. Centers known for these products became a kind of Mecca, so that consumers made the journey to the source rather than the other way around. The chapters show how shifting desires fueled the wide, profitable market. But investment in their allure happened along many paths. The malleable nature, often literally and always figuratively, of these substances opened up possibilities in many contexts—desired by many precisely because they could be tailored to fit circumstances. So, cases of change versus continuity are instructive, as they point toward the inner workings of the project of colonization and maintaining empire. The deep memory that was an intrinsic part of using substances such as hallucinogenic mushrooms (Nesvig) was indigenous memory, from which colonists learned about states of consciousness and sensation, tested the boundaries of social acceptability, and discovered just how diff use those limits could be.40 Hallucinogens and intoxicants were as problematic as food for maintaining differences among colonial actors, yet the logic for colonization demanded such distinctions. The appeal to ancient tradition was at times a strategy to erect boundaries for protecting interests: Schwartzkopf has shown how alcohol’s integration into “custom” was used as a defense against charges of bootlegging.4¹ Yet beyond

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their individual careers, all of these substances reflected the deeper desires and forces that fueled their encounters with users: colonialism.

Gender, Race, and Power Although not every chapter takes identity as a focus of investigation, all of the chapters help fill in the mosaic of colonial social categories and the control of racialized male and female bodies. Often implicitly, gender emerges here as one of the most prominent social dimensions of ingestion and seduction. The preparation of many of these substances was strongly connected with women, though not necessarily the goods’ consumption and distribution.4² From the personification of cacao as a woman to the preference for mushrooms and pulque made by young indigenous women, the transformational qualities of a substance’s existence and shape was within women’s hands. These points support numerous excellent studies that underscore how products intersected with gender and particularly as dangerous products made by or in the hands of women.4³ In general, the chapters of this volume show that anxieties about colonial cultural reproduction were often played out in moral and legal debates over substances. An even more evident source of unease was race and ethnicity, often raised by the perceived indigeneity of the substances. They are mostly cultigens of the Americas with long histories of use and meaning that colonization oftentimes then redirected toward other ends. The imported cultivars, most notably sugar but also wine and many of the seasonings for chocolate equally invoked disquiet about race and ethnicity. By viewing the contributions in concert, the magnitude of multiplying anxiety becomes much more obvious. The origin and the destination of a substance could be cause for concern. The purity of pulque invoked debate about mestizaje (Bristol), and the cultural hybridity and creolization of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms invoked the devil himself (Nesvig). The Lacandon people willfully inhabited the colonial margins through tobacco agriculture and commerce (Palka). This example of tobacco stands in contrast to the bulk of scholarship about the Tidewater region and the US south more generally during the same period, that tobacco plantations and commerce were at the center of the colonial world. Though a colonial import, sugar provided a way for colonial Maya to resist imperial schemes (Pezzarossi) and to perpetuate ancient cultural practices with new substances (Schwartzkopf). Who produced and who consumed each substance also entangled

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class and power relations. It was not so much that different classes consumed these substances—people of all sorts drank alcohol, ate sugar, and stimulated their senses (chocolate, mushrooms)—but that people utilized each substance to cultivate fine distinctions in class: being a well-to-do Spaniard meant having the power to command one’s slaves or servants to be part of a trip on mushrooms; recipes of chocolate with jasmine were the province of Italian royalty. It has taken until fairly recently for some alcohols (pulque, chicha, balché mead) to rise to be a symbol of good taste. Wine becomes crass when overconsumed, and aguardiente remains a drink of the poor.

Symbols, Substances, and Desire The degree to which Mesoamericans maintained the symbolic meaning of substances and colonists took up that same meaning posits ingestibles as pedagogical-social tools of learning through common and marked (ritual, occasional) encounters. This somatic education, however, occurred within a different context than had existed previously. New constellations of people took up these substances, or even if pre-Columbian actors remained relatively similar (curanderos, women, adolescents, adults), public practices became clandestine, beyond the view of watchful eyes. None of the substances was a cultural fossil but had relevance because of its currency. That people considered pulque or chocolate flavorful and refreshing carried with it values of moral substance and potency, semantic weight that redoubled in multiple ways but not in exactly the pre-Columbian manner. Those potentials of meaning became important within a new consumption context. More than an easy bricolage—swapping one metaphor for blood for another—the new symbolic environment of different colonial contexts offered the right set of potentials for a comprehensible though often contradictory deployment of chicha or wine, chocolate or tobacco. The symbolic meanings of these substances, whether seemingly stable or visibly shifting, give a view of dynamic processes of memory, power, and identity. Taken together, the contributions show how these interactions were dynamic with respect to time and place.

ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME The chapters in this volume cover differing spans of time; in addition, some involve the same or adjacent regions, and some even dis18

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cuss the same substances. They do not, that is, follow a strict chronological or geographic order. We have grouped them thematically into two sections, the first emphasizing seduction and the second, substance. Martin Nesvig’s chapter begins the first section, “Old Flames, New Loves.” His chapter orients the volume geographically to Mesoamerica and temporally to the early colonial era yet pushes against the edges of everyday reality in considering the deep cultural memory of hallucinogens, especially peyote and mushrooms, in central and western Mexico. Integrating inquisitorial records with archaeological and ethnographic evidence, he outlines a series of stages of the hallucinogens’ creolization in the first century of colonial rule, prior to the outlawing of peyote in 1620. Despite the ephemeral nature of the dreams and visions invoked by these substances, their effects lingered on the Mexican cultural landscape and the boundaries of perception for later observers to glimpse. After Nesvig’s exploration of cultural memory, Schwartzkopf turns the focus toward Guatemala and the succession of alcoholic commodities. Schwartzkopf asks how highland Maya peoples made the long transition from mead to aguardiente following the European introduction of new beverages and substances, namely wine and sugar, the latter of which provided fermented chicha as well as distilled aguardiente. The succession of these alcoholic commodities involved complex interactions among Maya cultural practices and colonial political economy in which ritual drinking practices tangled with commodification and state monopolies by the eighteenth century, with awkward outcomes in later periods. The last chapter in this section starts in the place of Schwartzkopf’s study, the audiencia (circuit court) of colonial Guatemala, but then ventures widely across the Atlantic World. Sampeck and Thayn’s chapter shows how chocolate became popular in the early modern era as variations of it flourished. Mapping recipes for chocolate, a particular way to consume cacao, they geographically and temporally track a process of cultural translation through bodily experience, as chocolate consumption proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic. Starting from a heartland of production in the Izalcos region in today’s El Salvador, how did chocolate conquer the tastes of Spanish, Italian, French, and American consumers who learned to love it? Sampeck and Thayn argue that the sight, scents, and tastes of chocolate provide a critical frame for investigating the working out of colonial thought and practice. The second section of the volume, “Substantial Matters,” continues to consider the kindling of desire for substances and the quality and 19

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timing of the resulting relationships but especially to engage with social, political, economic, and moral effects of substances. The fourth chapter of the volume and the first in this section is by Joel Palka, who considers tobacco among Lacandon Maya, a group whose historical experiences placed them literally on the edges of colonial rule in a lowland region of what is today the border of the Mexican state of Chiapas with Petén, Guatemala. Unconquered by the Spanish, Lacandon nevertheless interacted with colonizers and colonized, absorbing refugees from other Maya communities and trading to obtain European goods such as iron tools in exchange for a variety of forest and agricultural products. Preeminent among the latter was the high-quality tobacco they had grown for centuries and used for ritual and exchange. Focusing on the intensification of this trade in the later nineteenth century, Palka highlights Lacandon agency in their use of tobacco to serve their own interests, playing on the desires of outsiders to satisfy their own needs, a pattern that continues to the present. Following this discussion of nicotine and authenticity is an examination in the fifth chapter of indigenous agency and colonial health discourses. Joan Bristol moves the discussion from the edges of New Spain’s empire to its very heart and to colonial discourses of health and danger, this time targeting pulque drinking in Mexico City. Here the anxiety explicitly concerned racial mixing in the colonial capital in the aftermath of the 1692 revolt, which came out in contradictory discourses about the purity of the drink and those who drank it. Lurking behind the potentially beneficial health effects of pure “white” pulque used by indigenous peoples in moderation were the dangers of hybridity and corruption in the body politic, namely the possibility of their political integration with castas, mixed-race residents of the city. The volume ends with a discussion of biopolitics, returning us to colonial Guatemala. Pezzarossi interrogates a set of colonial interventions around seventeenth-century sugar production, distribution, and consumption in the coastal and piedmont region of Guatemala. He brings documentary and archaeological evidence to bear on interactions between a colonial biopolitics seeking to control and manage native bodies and the strategies of sugar producers and traders to maintain their livelihoods. Colonial officials’ mobilization of a humoral discourse on the health effects of sugar supported their public (and often private) interests in controlling indigenous labor and the sugar market. Yet Maya traders and producers found ways to counter this discourse at the level of rhetoric and practice, as Pezzarossi shows in his detailed analysis of their petitions and pottery. 20

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FIGUR E 0.2. Principal sixteenth-century cultivation zones for the substances considered in this volume. Map by Kathryn E. Sampeck.

Each of the chapters in this volume addresses one or several substances from particular Mesoamerican places integrating into local and Atlantic colonial world interactions (figure 0.2). The social constellations they form, like the map of where substances were from, is an overlapping collage of place and substance held together by a network of desire. It is a chart that shows us that substance, seduction, and ingestion each instills a moment in time and space, a tangible way to understand the legacy of the past.

NOTES Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the text are those of the individual authors. 1. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). 2. The approach of authors in this volume is complementary to that of Atlantic World history (indicated by capitalization) as developed by the historians David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Joyce Chaplin, David Geggus, Jack Greene, Gordon Wood, and others. 3. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural 21

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Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1987); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts and Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); David Hurst Thomas, ed. Columbian Consequences 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences 3: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 4. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 68–95. 5. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 20. 6. Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui, eds., Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014). 7. Henry J. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000). 8. William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979). 9. Marie Sarita Gaytán, ¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Deborah Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Tequila is a particular variety of mescal distilled from the fermented mash of agave “hearts,” the thickened base of the plant’s leafy stems. 10. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon, 1992). 11. Geoffrey Hunt and Judith C. Barker, “Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Alcohol and Drug Research: Towards a Unified Theory,” Social Science and Medicine 53 (2001): 165–188. 12. We use this form to distinguish the notion from “thingness” as employed in Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. With “thingyness” we confront things that work as much as ones that do not. 13. Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14. Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. 15. Norton, Sacred Gifts; Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a Study in Religious Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1915]). 16. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 199. 17. Thomas  J. Csordas, ed., Embodiment and Experience: The Existential 22

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Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Thomas  J. Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 135–156; Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 18. For a classic example of revulsion, see Girolamo Benzoni, Historia del mondo nuovo (1565), cited in Norton, Sacred Gifts, 8. 19. Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1993). 20. David S. Shields, “The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World” (review), Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 407–409. 21. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 143 table 7.2; Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 131. 22. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 142. 23. Nelson Foster and Linda S. Cordell, eds., Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 24. See David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (1996): 762–775; Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 51–53, 209–211. 25. Earle, Body of the Conquistador. See also the discussion of “personalistic etiologies”—the belief that all misfortune (disease included) is explained in the same way and that illness, religion, and magic are inseparable—by George M. Foster in “Disease Etiologies in Non-Western Medical Systems,” American Anthropologist 78 (1976): 773–782; David Landy, “Role Adaptation: Traditional Curers under the Impact of Western Medicine,” American Ethnologist 1 (1974): 103–127; Edward F. Foulks, “Comment on Foster’s ‘Disease Etiologies in NonWestern Medical Systems,’” American Anthropologist 80, no. 3 (1978): 660–661. 26. Bettina Bildhauer, “Medieval European Conceptions of Blood: Truth and Human Integrity,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013): S57–S76. 27. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 28. 28. Jong Kuk Nam, “Medieval European Medicine and Asian Spices,” Korean Journal of Medical History 23, no. 2 (2014): 319–342. 29. George M. Foster, “Methodological Problems in the Study of Intracultural Variation: The Hot/Cold Dichotomy in Tzintzuntzan,” Human Organization 38, no. 2 (1979): 179–183. 30. Earle, Body of the Conquistador; Trudy Eden, The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). 31. Earle, Body of the Conquistador; see also Norton, Sacred Gifts. 32. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 29. 33. Ken Albala, “The Use and Abuse of Chocolate in 17th Century Medical Theory,” Food and Foodways 15, nos. 1–2 (2007): 53–74. 23

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34. Hunt and Barker, “Socio-Cultural Anthropology,” 165–188. 35. Ibid., 178. 36. Phil Withington and Angela McSchane, eds., Cultures of Intoxication, Past and Present Supplements, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Paul Gootenberg and Isaac Campos, “Toward a New Drug History of Latin America: A Research Frontier at the Center of Debates,” Hispanic American Historical Review 95 (2015): 1–35. 37. Gootenberg and Campos, “Toward a New Drug History,” 6. 38. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 61–81; Mary Douglas, Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984). 39. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 40. Peter T. Furst, ed., Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (New York: Praeger, 1972). 41. Stacey Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 17–41. 42. See ibid., 32, for women and alcohol selling. 43. Alfredo López Austin, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988); Ruth Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Powers: Views from the Mexican Inquisition,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Asunción Lavrin, Latin American Studies series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 178–206; Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: AfroMexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, 1650–1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Irene M. Silverblatt, “The Black Legend and Global Conspiracies: The Spanish Inquisition, Race-Thinking, and the Emerging Modern World,” in Rereading the Black Legend, ed. Margaret Greer and Walter Mignolo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 99–116.

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CH A P T ER ON E

Sandcastles of the Mind: Hallucinogens and Cultural Memory M A RT I N N E S V IG

P

EOPLE IN MEXICO H AVE BEEN EATING H ALLUCInogens—including Psylocibe mushrooms and peyote cactus—for a long time,¹ maybe as long as millennia, the archaeological evidence suggests.² The principal hallucinogens, or “psychodysleptics,” of Mexico, understood as powerful, magical, and associated with ritual practice, were peyote, teonanacatl (the hallucinogenic Psilocybe mushrooms), and ololiuqui (morning glory seeds). Peyote (from the Nahuatl peyotl) use was primarily located in north-central Mexico since the plant, the semi-cactus Lophophora williamsii, is autochthonous to the arid mountains of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, and the lower Rio Grande valley.³ Given the paucity of written sources prior to contact between Spaniards and Mesoamericans, it is difficult to gauge precisely the range of peyote use; its use after contact continued to be mostly limited to the regions where it grows and other regions close by. Archaeological finds have located peyote use possibly as early as 5000 BCE in rock shelters in the Trans-Pecos area.4 In addition to peyote, various other plants were employed for ritual intoxication. Morning glory seeds, ololiuqui, were ground and consumed as a method of sedation and divination. The hallucinogenic mushrooms (genus Psylocibe) known as teonanacatl in Nahuatl, meaning food or flesh of the gods, were consumed for purposes of divination and shamanism, primarily in central Mexico.5 We know very little about pre-Hispanic hallucinogen use except from postcontact sources, archaeological materials depicting hallucinogens, and a kind of reverse historicism based on presumed cultural substrata of ritual peyote and mushroom ingestion. In this chapter I push the boundaries of the possible a little by considering two issues con27

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cerning hallucinogen use. The first is a kind of archaeology of memory, in this case of things that do not get written down—namely, hallucinogenic trips—and the cultural apparatus surrounding hallucinogen consumption. I take epistemological cues from historical anthropology, especially from Greg Dening’s conceptualization of “deep memory” in his analysis of the shared cosmologies of Polynesian societies.6 In the second point of departure I examine how the Mesoamerican custom of consuming hallucinogens began a process of creolization. Neither specifically indigenous nor Catholic or Spanish, by the seventeenth century hallucinogen use by Spaniards and people of mixed ethnicities demonstrated the profound effect Mesoamerican customs would have on Spanish colonials—inverting the dynamic of the colonial equation and reversing the traditional focus on the impact of Spanish rule on indigenous communities, instead assessing the “Indianization” of Spaniards in Mexico.7 I offer first some tentative arguments about pre-Hispanic hallucinogen use in Mexico and then trace the early adaptation of hallucinogen use by nonindigenous people. This is part of a broader study of the ways Spaniards in Mexico adopted Mesoamerican cultural behaviors. I identify three phases of hallucinogen practice in Mexico.8 Phase one is the prehistory of hallucinogen use, or of purely indigenous hallucinogen use prior to 1519, about which we can speculate but for which we have little concrete, explicit evidence. There is suggestive discussion of the precontact ritual quality of hallucinogen use among Spanish chroniclers and in early Inquisition cases against indigenous caciques. The second phase spans roughly 1569 (when the first recorded cases of nonindigenous people consuming hallucinogens appear) to the 1630s and encompasses the early processes of cultural adaptation. Hallucinogen use was adopted by Spaniards and mixed-ethnic people; the resulting cultural practice suggests the adoption of practical uses of hallucinogens with a patina of ritual values. Phase three, in the second half of the seventeenth century, was that of a mature creolized ritual-cultural complex in which peyote in particular was clearly and demonstrably associated with the Virgin of Guadalupe and ritual sacredness of both indigenous pagan and Spanish Catholic values. I focus largely on some of the bedrock cultural rituals associated with phase one and processes of partial acculturation of phase two. In between this century of chronological time and geographical space (ca. 1500–1630), peyote and teonanacatl collapse the degree of separation, closing the gap, leaving us to wonder when exactly the shift to 28

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creolized use came or if the shift was too gradual, ephemeral, and unrecorded to comprehend. Hallucinogens were used originally in ritual contexts. They were employed as means of divining information and as part of shamanistic practices of curanderismo, healing through interpretation of cosmological and spiritual knowledge. Spaniards began to employ hallucinogens for practical purposes such as to find lost items and for sexual magic, as in the pursuit of knowledge about how to enchant. Ultimately, hallucinogen use would be incorporated into a broader hybrid Spanish-indigenous culture, mixing shamanism and Catholicism.

ARCH AEOLOGIES OF MEMORY Hallucinogenic memory exists in a kind of parallel world. Some have attempted to record their experiences, among them Aldous Huxley.9 Mesoamericans, however, left us little indication of the original form of ritual hallucinogen consumption. We have some drawings and pottery. Early postcontact sources describe, from a missionary point of view, the ways that Mesoamericans consumed sacred mushrooms and peyote as divination devices. Mesoamerica, especially central and north central Mexico, is home to a variety of intoxicant plants, often generically referred to as hallucinogens, which prior to Spanish-indigenous contact and in the immediate postcontact period functioned as sacred, magic, ritual, and shamanistic devices. José Luis Díaz explains that such plants “regarded as sacred or magical . . . function as intermediaries between a person and his deity.”¹0 Peyote is the best known of these sacred plants. Many plants autochthonous to Mexico have come into our general knowledge but were originally viewed either with suspicion (nightshades such as tomatoes), as having ritual but also medicinal and gustatory qualities (cacao), or as intoxicants (pulque and tobacco, picietl).¹¹ But other plants were known for their particularly powerful abilities to induce visions, euphoria, ecstasy, disassociation, sensory changes, and panic. This category of plants includes, broadly speaking, peyote, Psylocibe mushrooms (teonanacatl), morning glory seeds (ololiuqui), Datura (toloache, toloatzin), and probably poyomate and pipiltzintzintli (two plants insufficiently identified to this day).¹² Peyote, teonanacatl, ololiuqui, and toloache have been rather conclusively identified in ethnobotanical scholarship.¹³ Díaz argues that the generic term “psychedelic” or “hallucinogen” is inaccurate; he provides an alternative schematic categorization based 29

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on the degree of visionary properties. The salient category here comprises what he calls “visionary psychodysleptics,” which are (properly speaking) the only hallucinogenic plants of Mexico. Such substances include peyote and various species of hallucinogenic mushrooms (teonanacatl); the category would include the synthetic drug LSD.¹4 The “trance-inducing” plants include ololiuqui and are characterized not so much by profound vision as by “producing states of physical lethargy, quietude, apathy, serenity, and abstraction of mind.”¹5 There are some pre-Hispanic, probably Classic or Late Pre-classic, representations of peyote and teonanacatl. The pottery jar in figure 1.1 is from western Mexico (possibly Colima or southern Jalisco) and clearly represents peyote, but we do not know the purpose of such jars. It may have been a simple decorative water jar, or it may have had ritual qualities as a place to store the dried sacred peyote. We also have statue representations of teonanacatl, probably Late Classic, in figure 1.2. Whether such figurines were decorative or viewed as sacred remains a mystery. The individual in figure 1.2 is probably a woman, and the image depicts the living among the dead in a ritual context, which

FIGUR E 1.1. Jar with modeling in the form of peyote. From Museo Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo, Comala, Colima; photograph by Martin Nesvig. 30

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FIGUR E 1.2. Sculpture depicting Psilocybe mushrooms. From Museo Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo, Comala, Colima; photograph by Martin Nesvig.

also suggests a very early ritual adoption of hallucinogenic mushrooms in rituals concerning life, death, and divinity.¹6 In figure 1.3 we find the most profound symbol of a dedicated cult to hallucinogenic plants in the form of an early sixteenth-century statue of Xochipilli, Lord of the Flowers, bearing designs of ololiuqui and teonanacatl. Gordon Wasson took these representations and the blissful, faraway look in the figure’s eyes as evidence of a ritual and religious veneration of hallucinogens. Where Wasson saw divine bliss, others have seen practical medicinal plants in Xochipilli.¹7 In either case Xochipilli reflects the importance of psychotropics in the Mesoamerican world of medicine and ritual practice. The most developed cult of peyote originated among the Huichol, also called Wixárika, from the state of Nayarit in western Mexico. They conceived of peyote as a divine entity closely related to maize and deer and traveled on pilgrimages to the mountains of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí to hunt the divine peyote in its homeland known as Wirikuta, somewhere near Real de Catorce.¹8 Peyote use was evidently quite varied among indigenous groups before any adaptation resulting from Spanish contact. In larger doses the principal alkaloid mescaline produces vertigo as well as sensory hallucinations and can cause vomiting 31

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FIGUR E 1.3. Early sixteenthcentury sculpture of the Nahua deity Xochipilli, Lord of the Flowers, with designs of ololiuqui and teonanacatl. From the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. Image by Anagoria, via Wikimedia Commons, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki /File%3A2013-12-24_Xochipilli _00_anagoria.JPG.

and profound out-of-body sensations. Strict ritual rules, including fasting, bound the peyote eater. Huichols gathered and dried peyote for storage and later use. Other indigenous peoples of central and north central Mexico—primarily the seminomadic groups collectively known as Chichimecas—consumed peyote, but its use expanded to other groups as well. The dried cactus retains much of its properties for some time, so dried peyote buttons were stored and used at later dates. In addition to its use as a ritual hallucinogen, smaller amounts of peyote were ingested as stimulants and appetite suppressants during the long journeys on peyote hunts. While it is impossible to know of a pure Mesoamerican understanding of hallucinogen use prior to Spanish contact, we can safely assume that it was in a communal ritual, a sacred rite of shamanism and curanderismo, associated with divinity and that it represented an attempt to connect with deities. 32

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R EADING H ALLUCINOGEN USE The earliest written discussions of peyote and mushroom use come from missionary histories and pictographic codices of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest depictions of teonanacatl use appears in the Codex Magliabechiano, produced slightly after contact, circa 1528 (figure 1.4). One panel shows a man consuming the mushrooms in front of the deity of the underworld, Mictlantecuthli.¹9 This is an early example of the growing tendency of missionary-friars to associate hallucinogens with the devil and demonic practice. One of the earliest written instances of a Catholic conception of hallucinogens comes from the 1537 trial by bishop-inquisitor Juan de Zumárraga against Andrés Mixcoatl for idolatry and fortunetelling using copal. While Zumárraga would have his commission as inquisitor revoked by the crown for his execution of don Carlos de Texcoco, he nevertheless was vigorous in pursuing ostensibly backsliding leaders of the Nahua world who presumably encouraged Nahuas to reject Christianity and return to the old ways. Andrés Mixcoatl was given a severe sentence, including one hundred lashes, a year of reclusion in the friary of Tulancingo, and confiscation of his property.²0 The case against Andrés Mixcoatl reveals what would form part of

FIGUR E 1.4. One of the earliest depictions of teonanacatl, in the Codex Magliabechiano. Photochromograph of hand-drawn and -colored copy of f. 90r by J. F. Loubat, Codex Magliabecchiano XIII.3, 1904. Image courtesy the Tozzer Library of Anthropology at Harvard University. 33

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the official Church position on hallucinogen use—that it was demonic, upended the ability to assert reason, and was much too linked to preHispanic religious ritual. In addition to divination with pieces of paper and the use of copal incense he was accused of consuming nanactl, “called little mushrooms in their language [Nahuatl].” As part of the investigation the guardian of the Franciscan friary in Tulancingo delivered a summary of depositions he had taken in his capacity as an ecclesiastical investigator for Zumárraga and added a bit of editorializing, noting that the nanactl was a “demonic thing” (cosa endiablada).²¹ Perhaps worse in the minds of Zumárraga and his deputies was that Andrés Mixcoatl used nanactl as a kind of communion (comulgar): Anywhere Andrés goes he has a custom, which is to commune with people and he himself takes communion, and this he does with certain small mushrooms called nanactl, which are diabolical, because one loses one’s sense and sees diabolical visions, whoever eats it. And this is what they call the body of the devil, and it is said that one can see if one is going to die soon or if one will be rich or poor or if some misfortune will befall one.²²

Likewise, nanactl consumption was part and parcel of the general debauchery (bellaquerías) in which Mixcoatl was involved. But there is recognition that nanactl consumption was also a manner of divining the future through the visions it induced. Mixcoatl was reported to eat the nanactl to determine the coming of rain and storms. Here we see early suggestions that hallucinogen use had been a practice intimately associated with ritual intoxication, copal use, divination, and communion with deities. The emergence of the term teonanacatl is a bit obscure. The missionary and accidental ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún refers to the local intoxicating mushrooms as “teonanacatl.” Sahagún elaborates on this mushroom’s use as explicitly linked to the divine, even if he offers unfavorable connotations.²³ As was the case of the notary for Zumárraga, Sahagún employed the simple word nanactl to describe such hallucinogenic mushrooms, noting that the word meant hongos (mushrooms) in Spanish. Sahagún added the prefi x teo-, deriving from teotl, or god, deity, to create the hybrid word teonanacatl, implying both mushroom and divinity, translated as “food of the gods.” Sahagún says of the hallucinogenic mushroom,

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It is called teonanacatl. It grows on the plains, in the grass. The head is small and round, the stem long and slender. It is bitter and burns; it burns the throat. It makes one besotted; it deranges one, troubles one. It is a remedy for fever, for gout. . . . It saddens, depresses, troubles one; it makes one flee, frightens one, makes one hide. He who eats many of them sees many things which make him afraid, or make him laugh. He flees, hangs himself, hurls himself from a cliff, cries out, takes fright. One eats it in honey.²4

Other missionaries also noted nanactl use as related to divination and sacred ritual. Writing in his manual for priests, Jacinto de la Serna explains that indigenous peoples “eat the mushrooms as communion . . . attribute divinity to them, drink them in pulque.”²5 Besides viewing such practices as a perversion of a Catholic sacrament, missionary chroniclers also described hallucinogens as producing visions, delirium, and sensory alteration and linked them to ritual practice and communion with the divine. The Dominican Diego Durán documented Mexica history and religion in a chronicle first published around 1581 that may have relied on a now lost “Chronicle X” that outlined pre-Hispanic society and history. Concerning the coronation of the Mexica tlatoani Tizoc in 1481, Durán discusses teonanacatl consumption: “all the lords and principal men of the provinces rose and, in order to make the festival even more solemn, ate wild mushrooms that are said to make a man lose his senses. In that way they then went out to dance.”²6 Durán describes how the later tlatoani Moctezuma ordered his oracles to eat teonanacatl in order to predict victory or defeat in battle.²7 The Franciscan Toribio Motolinía casually says that the term teonanacatl meant “food of the gods.” Motolinía describes ritual intoxication from mushroom ingestion in his mid-sixteenth-century Historia de los indios de la Nueva España; the mushrooms were “eaten raw and because they are bitter, they eat them with honey; shortly afterward they see a thousand visions, particularly of snakes. . . . [T]hese mushrooms are called, in their language, teunanacatlth, which means flesh of the god, or of the devil whom they worshipped; and in this way, through this bitter delicacy, their cruel god gave them communion.”²8 Peyote use is similarly discussed by missionary chroniclers including Sahagún. The Tlatelolca informants for Sahagún’s work claimed that peyote use was a Chichimec custom and that the Chichimecs revered peyote more than teonanacatl: “the so-called peyote was their [Chichimec] discovery. These, when they ate peyote, esteemed it above wine

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or mushrooms. They assembled together somewhere in the desert; they came together; they danced, they sang all night, all day. And on the morrow, once more they assembled together. They wept; they wept exceedingly.”²9 The Tlatelolca, in short, identified peyote as a Chichimec delicacy (manjar de los chichimeca). But by the seventeenth century friar-missionary depictions of hallucinogens had gone firmly in the direction of deviltry. While Sahagún wrote in generally disparaging tones about hallucinogens, Ruiz de Alarcón and de la Serna had begun to make explicit associations of them with Satan and demons. Indeed, de la Serna’s discussion took place within the context of an extirpation manual—a how-to book on ridding indigenous societies of pre-Hispanic religious rituals. Plants that could alter one’s senses were associated with the demonic by secular writers of the period as well. Juan de Cárdenas, a celebrated physician, wrote the 1591 treatise on Mexican natural history Problemas y secretos marauillosos de las Indias. While he was less exact in his classification of hallucinogens—he lumped “peyote de poyomate” together with ololiuqui—he clearly reached the same conclusions as many clergy. Cárdenas said that Mexico was home to various types of “little apples” (mançanillas), by which he likely meant peyote, though he put ololiuqui into the same category; his doing so is linguistically intriguing, since mançanilla could mean either a diminutive for apple (mançana) or the herb chamomile.³0 In his view, such plants caused one to lose reason, to see “terrifying images that represent the devil.”³¹ He also reiterated the assertion by other writers that the purpose of taking such visioninducing plants was to divine the future, though Cárdenas editorialized that he viewed this claim as a fraud. Hallucinogenic use among Mesoamericans, then, was a ritual practice associated with divination, supernatural communion, and medicine. The colonial context of Mexico offers many opportunities to consider the ways that indigenous cultural practices were adopted and adapted by and in an ethnically hybrid society. Despite the increased demonization of hallucinogen use by Spanish authors and the formal ban on peyote consumption in 1620, peyote, teonanacatl, and ololiuqui consumption was adopted by Spaniards and mixed-ethnicity people in colonial society. Their use may have continued to be associated with knowledge of mysteries and divination, but it ceased to function as a communal activity or explicitly religious practice, becoming a hybrid, uniquely Mexican practice, mixing the quotidian with the sacred and Nahua, Chichimec, African, and European conceptions of divinity, supernatural knowledge, and magic. 36

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MEXICO’S FIR ST SPANISH PEYOTE EATER The first recorded case of a Spaniard being accused of consuming hallucinogens offers a point of entry to consideration of the process of cultural hybridity I am considering here. On August 17, 1570, in Guanajuato, the inquisitor of Michoacán sentenced Catalina de Peraza to one year of exile and a forty-peso fine for sorcery, a pact with the devil, and eating peyote.³² Five months later, the inquisitor convicted and sentenced Peraza’s putative former lover, the once lieutenant alcalde (magistrate) of Guanajuato Andrés de García, for sacrilege.³³ Peraza’s sorcery was allegedly directed at García. By all appearances, what had begun as a lover’s quarrel spilled over into a full-scale public scandal and a jurisdictional and legal war amid charges of Satanism, murder, abuse of power, peyote use, sex magic, and jealous fury. The case itself is salacious enough. Peraza was a granddaughter of the murdered conquistador of La Gomera in the Canaries, Guillén Peraza, “el malo” (the wicked). Born around 1545, Catalina de Peraza came to Mexico City around 1563, probably as part of an economic strategy of the Peraza family. She was accused of homicide in 1566 in Mexico City, though no record of the case before the audiencia (circuit court) appears to be extant.³4 Having moved to Guanajuato after apparent exculpation on the murder charge, she became enamored with García, who rejected her designs and pursued marriage with a different woman. Peraza, before being exiled from Guanajuato and disappearing from the historical record, was accused of a wide range of spells and witchcraft. She was rumored to have mixed her genital bath water into García’s mustard supply, of creating a paste of crushed white worms to coat herself, and of eating peyote to divine García’s romantic intent. On being rejected by him, she vowed to prevent his future marriage. If he succeeded in marriage, Peraza vowed that he would be the most miserable husband in the world.³5 Peraza’s case shows the early path of acculturation of hallucinogen consumption in Mexico. Even if Peraza herself never ingested peyote, the witnesses who provided sworn statements all seemed to have a shared and common understanding of how the ritual of peyote consumption was to take place. The similarity in these statements suggests that Spaniards had developed a cultural construction of hallucinogen use. In this case, there were clear processes. Indigenous people usually generically referred to as Chichimecs obtained the peyote from the desert. Its intended consumer, the communicant, was required to fast for at least a day and to abstain from sexual activity prior to the peyote 37

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trip. Peyote and other hallucinogen use was associated with sexual abstinence and purity. A young, virgin girl had to prepare the peyote and present it to the person who wished to consume it. Witnesses in Peraza’s trial all agreed that a virgin girl was called to handle peyote before delivering it to Peraza. But did Catalina de Peraza eat peyote? The answer is irrelevant for this discussion. If these Spaniards did not engage in hallucinogen rituals, then a lot of people just like them seemed to know how one was to go about eating peyote, nanactl, and ololiuqui. Within the statements given by witnesses one sees commonly understood cultural explanations for hallucinogen consumption and affective magic. During the course of the investigation, details emerged about the scandal and Peraza’s various incantations and ceremonial activities. Much has been made of the presumed duplicitous nature of inquisitional testimonies—the ways people in small towns in the early modern world used denunciations to settle personal scores. This clearly did take place. In one infamous case in Celaya in 1614, a series of Spanish men and women came before the inquisitional deputy to denounce a poor widow who did not seem to have any family network to protect her.³6 Widows and especially women perceived as geographic outsiders, sexually promiscuous, or working-class with no extended family were the most common victims of false or exaggerated claims of witchcraft and sorcery. This may very well have been the case with Peraza. She was an outsider on multiple levels: she was originally from the Canaries, a Spanish woman, and not a citizen or permanent resident of Guanajuato. She does not seem to have had any family members in Guanajuato. Indeed, one of the witnesses who testified against her was a Spanish woman, Isabel de Hojeda, who had come to live in Guanajuato and stayed for a few months in Peraza’s house, devoid as it was of any family members. So Peraza, by her mere presence—a divorced woman accused of murder in Mexico City and an outsider with no local network of family support—seems to fit the profile of a woman accused of sorcery. But there are important differences from that profile as well. She was clearly wealthy. She owned two domestic slaves, Catalina and Ursula, and she employed a free mulata, María, as a domestic servant. When Peraza was first accused of sorcery and devil worship by the inquisitor Yepes, she was able to hire a seemingly high-powered attorney, Juan de Salazar. He defended her in the case and demanded a copy of her hidalguía (highstatus genealogy) as the daughter of the count of Gomera that had been

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drawn up during her 1566 murder trial to be presented before the high court in Mexico City.³7 Her lawyer’s demand to produce a copy of the hidalguía was to argue before the audiencia that she should be given house arrest as a courtesy to a woman with her high birth. But even if we assume that witnesses against Peraza lied under oath, the stories they told about peyote consumption reveal just how integrated knowledge of the peyote ritual had become among a wide range of people—Spaniards, mulatas, and non-Nahua indigenous people. The Spanish woman Isabel de Hojeda was among the first to tell the story. Hojeda’s slave Vitoria, identified as “color morena” (which implies some kind of mixed ethnic background and may suggest nonAfrican background), testified in Spanish. The mestiza Ana Hernández, a twenty-year-old woman, and her mestizo husband, the twenty-fiveyear-old tailor Juan Quintero, also testified. Two other mulata women testified, Francisca Rengel and María, Peraza’s servant. A free black man, Juan Catalán, offered some discussion but not concerning peyote. And finally a non-Spanish-speaking indigenous woman, Catalina, testified via a mestizo bilingual interpreter. The ethnic variety of the witnesses reveals the high levels of ethnic mixture typical of frontier regions in New Spain and underscores the unlikeliness of a concerted conspiracy. The statements they made show no inconsistency in the basic narrative, though some witnesses, like Hojeda, offered more details than others. Peraza, it seems, had fallen in love with García but was unsure of his intentions. She determined that she would take peyote to discover his feelings. Here we see the early signs of a kind of adaptation of religious practice. While pre-Hispanic use seems to have been ritualized and related to the divine, it was also clearly related to a kind of revelation, a knowledge that could not be found in the ordinary world. Peyote was thus a key to unlocking divine secrets, a mystical union with deities and the supernatural. Peraza seems to have understood this underlying concept but applied it, as would many nonindigenous people in the colonial era, to more practical ends. Witnesses said that Peraza had been seen with various roots that no one could identify. Witnesses all agreed that Peraza explained to others that the roots were peyote and that she intended to eat them in order to find out if García intended to marry another woman. Peraza had claimed that whoever ate peyote would be able to know anything they wanted to know. She had obtained the peyote from the mulata Francisca Rengel by way of some indigenous people who knew how to find

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the cactus. No one was willing to admit to having found the peyote for her, but all agreed that she had indeed taken the peyote. The exception to this was that Peraza never admitted to ingesting peyote. Again, elements of the ritualized behavior for taking peyote were repeated and adapted. The Huichols insisted on strict fasting before taking peyote. The eating of mushrooms similarly was preceded by fasting and the avoidance of sexual intercourse, sometimes for several days prior. Peraza had in this case specifically employed eight-year-old Catalina Cervantes to grind the peyote into a paste for consumption. When asked about this, according to witnesses, Peraza had explained that for the peyote to work it had to be prepared by a virgin. This is consistent with a postcontact religious hybridism. In other cases of individuals accused of taking peyote in the seventeenth century, witnesses claimed that it perforce had to be ground and prepared by a virgin.³8 Witnesses in the Peraza case also insisted that one had to fast the entire day prior to consuming peyote. Failure to observe these precautions to ensure the purity of the peyote ritual would invalidate its potency. Had Peraza, like other Spaniards later accused of peyote use, learned this behavior from Chichimecs or even Huichols? There is no explicit evidence, but it seems unlikely that such ritualized observance was Spanish in origin. Peyote came to be known by a variety of Catholic saint names including Santa María, Santa Rosa María, Niño Jesús, Niño de Atocha, and the Holy Trinity.³9 But peyote use would be frequently employed in other cases of love and sex magic.40 Peraza apparently enjoined Isabel de Hojeda to accompany her during her peyote experience—perhaps as a safeguard against the dangers of powerful hallucinations. It is not clear if Hojeda did accompany her. Others claimed that Peraza’s slave Ursula took peyote with her. If this were true, it was more in line with the hybrid nature of peyote use in the colonial period. Mulata and slave women were often employed as cultural go-betweens in the search for peyote. In 1570 peyote use was not strictly illegal or regulated by Inquisition or royal officials. Missionaries had railed against its use and that of teonanacatl, ololiuqui, and pulque for some time. But they had, as yet, been unsuccessful in turning peyote use into an inquisitional crime. But the use of incantations was very much considered within the bailiwick of the Inquisition. While Spanish inquisitors were generally skeptical about the real harm of folk medicine and generally did not believe in witchcraft, practices of invoking the devil or pre-Hispanic deities and mixing the sacred with the profane were all viewed as very serious threats to Cathol40

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icism. In Peraza’s case, she was not explicitly charged with peyote use, since it had not been declared illegal. But that claim aroused suspicion that she was a sorceress. Peraza herself consistently denied having ingested peyote. As was the case with many other women accused of peyote consumption, Peraza was said to have accompanied her peyote use with incantations and various forms of divination as folk magic. She had ordered her slaves to bury chicken manure beneath the doorway to García’s house as a way of preventing the entry of rival women. This may have been European folk magic. She had also bathed in a mixture of water and pulverized toasted worms. Most damning in the inquisitor’s eyes was the accusation that Peraza had performed incantations. On this point we see that peyote use was viewed as relatively benign. Peraza hotly contested the claims by some witnesses that she had called on the devil in the name of Barrabas, Lucifer, and Satan to help her in her quest to “make García the most miserable married man alive” once she had determined that he had rejected her and intended to marry a different woman.4¹ The Peraza case highlights some of the early acculturation of peyote and hallucinogen use. But as Catholic authorities from missionaries to jurists became ever more suspicious of peyote use, it would eventually be banned. That peyote was singled out suggests that it was the most widely consumed hallucinogen—or that it was the hallucinogen most feared by inquisitors. In June 1620 the Mexican Inquisition issued a formal ban on peyote consumption.4² Its use was criminalized, and the prosecution of its consumption was restricted to the inquisitional court. The edict itself stressed that peyote consumption, in addition to the plant’s rumored demonic quality, stripped one of reason and therefore left one more susceptible to the seduction of Satan. Nevertheless, there are very few actual trials that inquisitors took up against individuals for peyote use in and of itself. In most cases, individuals denounced to local deputies of the Inquisition were not prosecuted. Others were prosecuted for idolatry, sorcery, or witchcraft, with peyote use being among the various forms of divination employed. Following the formal ban in June 1620 there was a brief flurry of denunciations and confessions of peyote and teonanacatl use—presumably because this was the first formal expression of inquisitional condemnation.4³ One supposes that even though teonanacatl was not expressly named, in the popular consciousness all hallucinogens belonged to an epistemic category of bad things that made people lose their minds. These denunciations came earliest—in 1620, 1621, and 1622— 41

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in the diocesan capital cities of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Puebla, which is a good indicator of the way formal inquisitional edicts were read in decreasing frequency the farther from urban centers one traveled. Denunciations came in Mexico City almost immediately, but it would not be until a decade later that such denunciations would come in Taximaroa, in the mountains of eastern Michoacán,44 and then in New Mexico.45 Yet there is some suggestion that even by the 1610s peyote use had become suspicious in the collective mentality. Individuals often reported others to the Inquisition as a means of settling personal scores, and some denounced women viewed as immoral, sexually promiscuous, or socially vulnerable; in many case such women were denounced for having employed herbs, potions, powders, and sexual magic. In 1614 the mulata Magdalena from Cuautla (in the current-day state of Morelos) was denounced for having taken peyote to determine if she was pregnant.46 In November 1615 a Spanish citizen (vecina) of Mexico City, doña Catalina de Castañeda, appeared before inquisitors to make a criminal charge against a suitor of her daughter. Castañeda accused the man of attempting to defame her by claiming publicly that she had taken peyote in order to divine her daughter’s marital prospects.47 In 1618 Isabel Bonilla was denounced to the comisario (inquisitional deputy) of Zacatecas for using peyote as a form of seduction.48 In the same year, the free mulata Luisa de Estrada was accused of taking peyote.49 The ban on peyote may simply have come as a result of increasing inquisitional concern that peyote, along with other uses of plant remedies, was a kind of sorcery linked with the devil. Yet in keeping with inquisitors’ relative skepticism about the reality of witchcraft, prosecution for peyote use per se remained rare. Indeed, of all the denunciations concerning peyote use in 1621 and 1622 (as well as those preceding the 1620 ban), not a single case resulted in prosecution. Moreover, immediately after the ban on peyote use many inquisitional officials came forward to ask whether they could make exceptions to the ban or could be empowered to absolve peyote consumption use, thus obviating a trial. In 1621 the inquisitional censor of Valladolid, Augustinian friar Martín de Vergara, wrote to the inquisitors to ask if peyote use could be excused if it was strictly used for medicinal purposes.50 Ten years later, on March 25, 1631, the friar Rodrigo Alonso Barrena, an inquisitional censor residing in Texcoco, wrote to the inquisitors.5¹ He explained that a young girl came to him to confess to having prepared peyote. According to the censor, the young girl had been persuaded by two men to grind and prepare peyote because she 42

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was a virgin, and as such, her sexual purity would ensure its potency. When she confessed this to her ordinary priest during Lent, the priest explained that it was a sin reserved to inquisitional authority and sent her to confess before Barrena, who, as an inquisitional authority, might have authority to hear the case. The friar wrote to the inquisitors, who promptly instructed him to absolve the girl. No trial ensued. As was the case with witness statements in the 1569–1570 Peraza investigation, one sees the continued association of peyote with purity and sexual virginity. But if pre-Hispanic hallucinogen use originated in a ritual context and was communally ingested and viewed with reverence, the communal aspect would disappear in the creole world of Mexico. The reverence and awe would remain, but it would cease to be a large community ritual, instead becoming more private. New aspects of hallucinogen use would be integrated into the creolized ritual; divination would remain a key component, but Catholic saints would become associated with various plants. In some cases this meant tying the Virgin to nanactl and peyote. At the same time, hallucinogens would remain part of both curanderismo and affective magic, in which multiple practices were mixed. Divination with corn kernels in jars of water remained common, as did practices of mixing menstrual blood with chocolate and ground-up toasted worms, animal brains, or toloache with food to tame husbands and seduce lovers. In some instances copal incense and corn-kernel divination appear to have been primarily Mesoamerican in origin, while affective magic had European and African origins as well. Door magic was common in Italy. The concept of ground substances taking on special power if mixed into food and fed to someone a person wished to affect appears in western and central Africa to some degree.5² These kinds of affective magic often went hand in hand with hallucinogen use. In May 1630 the Franciscan and inquisitional deputy Cristóbal Báez had gone to Taximaroa, a relatively remote town in the mountains between the Toluca Valley and the meseta tarasca, to deliver the Edict of the Faith during Lent. Taximaroa had no resident priest, and it had been some time since anyone had delivered the edict.5³ Shortly after Báez pronounced the edict, stories emerged about magical events in the rural town: worms appeared from nothing and crawled out of cherries; snakes offered knowledge to those who could commune with the divine; ground-up toasted worms and menstrual blood placed in a man’s wine would tame him and prevent violence.54 Gonzalo Pérez, a young criollo rancher, had been married to “his first love,” Inés Martín. Gonzalo and his father, Pedro Pérez de Garfías, 43

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worked together as “labradores” and did not claim vecino (citizen) status in Taximaroa, though Pedro Pérez’s wife, Catalina de Olivares, had two nieces in town married to vecinos; one of these nieces, Mariana de la Cruz, owned a black ladina slave. One suspects that the Pérez and Olivares families were creole and the less wealthy relatives of the de la Cruz family. We know nothing of Inés Martín’s background, though she is not named as a mestiza or mulata, which may imply either creole ethnicity or vaguely mixed mestiza background. Inés had left Gonzalo Pérez for some days. Had he been abusing her? Or had she gone to look for a new man? We cannot know. Gonzalo was distraught. He went to speak with a local indigenous man, Josephillo, his father’s servant, who knew of the sacred nanacate. The Nahuatl term nanacate bled into the Spanish lexicon, untranslated for the Spanish notary don Gerónimo Padilla, who apparently did not ask for a clarification of the term. Spanish witnesses in the case (Gonzalo and Pedro Pérez; Gonzalo’s mother, Catalina de Olivares; Catalina’s sister Anna de Olivares; Mariana de la Cruz) all offered nanacate as a commonly understood word in their depositions, making clear its broad acceptance. The ladina slave of Mariana de la Cruz, María, also offered the term nanacate in creolized Nahuatl form. Only the young Spanish woman Gertrudis Dávila signaled a clarification of nanacate as being “by another name, mushrooms [hongos]”.55 Gonzalo Pérez along with his extended family seemed to know that Josephillo was an adept in hallucinogen consumption; at the least the man knew where to find such plants. Gonzalo was, by his own admission, desperate to find his wife, who had left him for several days. Gonzalo took two small pieces of nanacate the first time and discovered nothing. Perhaps the nanacate was not strong enough. He returned to Josephillo, accusing him of being a fraud and a sorcerer. Josephillo gave him five mushrooms this time; these seemed to do the trick. It started slowly, mild nausea, a sense that time was slowing down. Distances were far, then near, alternately immense yet painfully close. Perched safely at the base of the mountain, Gonzalo bundled himself up in the cool evening. The bitter aftertaste of the nanacate lingered. The greens of the Taximaroa mountains were almost too much to bear; he could hear the ants crawling along a distant log; calls of magpies a mile away sounded as if they were only feet away. Suddenly, a snake appeared—not an ordinary snake, but a snake who spoke Spanish. The snake undulated, pulsing as if the shape were breathing like a grotesque lung. The snake asked Gonzalo what he wanted to know; Gonzalo wept; he loved his young bride and missed 44

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her. The snake said, “Look around, and you will find her.”56 Gonzalo did as the snake instructed. His mind flew; through canyons and up and around hills he soared, collapsing geographic space through the power of the nanactl. At a distance of a couple of miles, his mind flying through the space, he saw his wife sitting beneath an apple tree, combing her hair. Gonzalo was relieved but terrified; his mind-body returned to the village, walking down the slope of the hill, having returned from his flight. He begged his mother to retrieve his wife from the glen two miles away. His mother recoiled, fearing that her son had been bewitched. “What is wrong with you, my son?” she asked. Gonzalo replied, “Nothing.” She placed a rosary around his neck; he looked down. The rosary became a swirling centipede; he snatched it off his neck and hurled it to the ground, terrified of the creature.57 Catalina de Olivares did, in fact, find her daughter-in-law in the very place her son said he had seen her, half a league away in an orchard near the house of her niece. Olivares suspected the work of the devil. Yet no one reported this to a priest (as there was no resident priest), and it was only when Báez came to announce the Edict of the Faith in the town that it was recorded. No one was quite sure if nanacate was the work of the devil, but they were certain that someone would find out. An ounce of political precaution threw the young man to the comisario’s questioning. The inquisitors, on hearing the report, did not indicate any particular concern; no trial record is extant. Pérez was the only one to be explicitly identified as using nanacate in the Taximaroa case, but the area was home to numerous practitioners of peyote use and affective magic as divination. The notary’s wife, doña Hierónima Verdugo, confessed that fourteen years prior she had fed her abusive husband a variety of substances to stop his violence: groundup, toasted white worms (likely agave worms) and menstrual blood in his wine. The mulata Petrona Baptista was reported to have frequently consumed peyote to obtain knowledge. In one case her brother had several mules stolen and she ate peyote to discover the identity of the thief; in other cases Baptista suspected her husband, Juan de León, of adultery. Baptista’s niece, María de Val de Cañas, visited her aunt in 1626 on León’s ranch, El Monte, and spoke with her cousin Mariana, the daughter of Baptista and León. Mariana explained to María that she knew of a powerful herb. If women placed this herb in their breasts, “men would chase after [them] like dogs after bitches.”58 The herb was not identified, but herbs were often employed as a device to attract or subdue men.59 The Taximaroa stories blend the thread of a creolized Nahuatl word 45

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and creolized hallucinogen consumption utilized in the same communities and often by the same individuals who employed other forms of affective magic. Nanacate had been adopted as a commonly understood term to refer to hallucinogenic mushrooms. And hallucinogens were employed not for communion with deities or saints but as a tool for discovery. Practicality overruled a concern for the devil or a desire for holiness. Many cases in which individuals were investigated by the Inquisition for peyote or nanactl consumption turned on the motif of hallucinogen consumption as a divination tool for more practical uses. In 1624 in Chiautla in the southern part of Puebla, the prior reported to inquisitors that an indigenous woman had left her indigenous commoner (macehual) husband. He took peyote to discover where she might have gone and was instructed in a vision to seek her out in Izúcar. He traveled there but did not find her; on return he did discover her, but dead from an apparent suicide.60 If such use became a kind of stock cultural motif by the mid-seventeenth century, we can trace its development in explicitly documented cases from at least the 1560s. In an early manifestation of this use, in 1569 in Minas de San Martín, outside of Sombrerete, a mulata widow, Barbola de Zamora, was prosecuted by the local vicar for having given peyote to a Chichimec for the purpose of divination.6¹ As with Rengel and Peraza, a mulata woman acted as a cultural go-between, speaking Nahuatl, by then a kind of lingua franca, with the Chichimec who could understand Nahuatl.6² Zamora’s ability to speak Nahuatl seems to have allowed her some access to those indigenous Chichimecs who also spoke Nahuatl and in turn communicated with non-Nahuatl-speaking indigenous people. Some people consumed hallucinogens to find stolen items or to exculpate themselves from accusations of theft. In 1628 in San Luis Potosí, Juan González confessed that he took peyote in order to find a mine and strike it rich; at the same time the black slave María confessed to taking peyote to find a golden crucifix that had belonged to her mother.6³ In 1631 a bilingual indigenous man was accused of taking peyote to find a stolen hatchet in Celaya.64 The same year in Zacatecas a Spanish woman, doña Leonor de Avila, was accused of forcing an indigenous man to take peyote so he could find her escaped servant.65 Other individuals consumed peyote to discover the true culprits when they had been wrongly accused of thefts. The black slave Juan Ramírez confessed in March 1622 to the inquisitional comisario in Tepotzlan that he had taken peyote on the advice of some indigenous men after

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someone had stolen something from his owner’s house and as a slave he was automatically blamed. Ramírez confessed to peyote use because he had heard the recent Edict of the Faith that announced the new prohibition on peyote use.66 While divination remained a common cultural explanation for peyote use, hallucinogens were conceived as possessing truly incredible power beyond simple location of lost things or people. On December 8, 1622, the Dominican friar Antonio de Amaia came before the inquisitor Gutiérrez Flores in his chambers to reveal that he had received deathbed confessions from three men awaiting execution in the Mexico City royal jail. According to Amaia, the men were condemned to die the next day and had confessed that they had facilitated peyote and ololiuqui consumption in the jail. The inquisitor commissioned his notary, Juan de la Peraya, to go to the jail and hear the confessions, which could not be absolved by a regular priest.67 The notary was quickly dispatched, and jailers brought in the three men awaiting execution. Their stories are all remarkably similar. They were awaiting execution by orders of the civil authority (it is unclear if they had been condemned by the audiencia or the alcalde of Mexico) and could not be exonerated by the Inquisition. Their confessions show that even in prison peyote could be obtained. Miguel Rodríguez had been in jail for a few months; two months before that a “fat mestizo” from Querétaro, Jorge Cardosso, was sent to jail and placed in the same dungeon as Rodríguez. Cardosso told Rodríguez that if they took peyote together they would be able to escape the dungeon. This would be accomplished with the magical power of a book for which Cardosso would send, but without the book, only peyote would provide them with the power to know their fate or to escape from jail. Rodríguez did not confess to having eaten peyote himself but described an atmosphere where others, like the mulato Francisco Ramírez, consumed a drink called “banque” that made him speak in unintelligible ways; this may be a rendering of balché or b’alche’ (Mayan for “wild animal”). Balché is a drink made from fermenting the bark of the Lonchocarpus tree in a honey-water mixture, producing an alcoholic beverage associated with idolatry. Balché use was prosecuted by diocesan authorities in Yucatán, though one does not see its use or prohibition in central Mexico. Generally exclusive to Yucatán, balché consumption was an adapted Mayan practice intended to seduce the object of one’s affection.68 In the case of the jailed mulato, there may be some generalized adoption of the term balché or banque to refer to fermented

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drinks, or it may refer explicitly to the Mayan drink, here transplanted to the Mexico City jail, though one may suppose that the mulato was raised in Yucatán and learned the practice there. The story was repeated in slightly different form when the inquisitional notary heard the statement from the Spanish man Pedro de Mendoza, also twenty-five years old. Mendoza explained that another man, Silva, had enjoined Mendoza to help remove the shackles from the mestizo Cardosso so that he could eat ololiuqui—here recorded, with no translation or indication of its origin, simply as “ololuque.”69 The goal was to determine the day and time Cardosso’s sister would arrive with a book that would allow them to escape from prison. Cardosso then prayed before an Ecce Homo and on a different night explained to Mendoza that he had employed a potion (bebedizo) of ololiuqui in the mountains in Querétaro to discover the location of mines. Mendoza also explained that it was commonly known that the mulato Ramírez and an indigenous man named Joaquín frequently consumed peyote in the prison. Finally, Gabriel Moreno of Spain confessed that he knew that Cardosso, the mulato Ramírez, and the indio Joaquín had all intended to eat peyote and that on some occasions Ramírez would babble uncontrollably. Peyote, ololiuqui, or exotic ointments—their power to predict was accepted, but their power to render one immune to incarceration meant even greater power. So, too, Felipa, a black slave in Valladolid, had argued to prisoners in the city jail in 1625.70 The criollo Pedro Ponce, in Valladolid’s city jail, confessed to the comisario Çafra that Felipa told him she could help him pass through the air if he anointed himself with an ointment made in a new casserole dish with oil and the herb Santa María. He did not specifically mention the term peyote, but this would hardly be the only time peyote was called Santa María.7¹ The mulato Francisco Pizarro (not the conquistador of the same name) told the same story—that such an ointment was offered to him by Felipa as a means to escape. Thus far into the 1620s most cases of nonindigenous people consuming hallucinogens indicate some cultural hybridity. Spaniards adopted Mesoamerican practices of consuming hallucinogens and employed them for practical purposes like divination, love magic, and the location of lost or stolen items. Even in Peraza’s case, there is considerable adoption of the circumstantial behavior of peyote consumption—the need for purity through fasting and employing a virgin girl in preparation of the cactus. Hallucinogen consumption was transformed as a cultural prac48

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tice from the fifteenth century, when it was a sacred communal ritual, through the early seventeenth century, when it had become part of a multiethnic Mexican society. The memory of its original use is as transient as its effects on one’s mind. Peyote and nanactl may profoundly alter one’s consciousness, but the effect is temporary. The visions seen and revelations experienced while under the spell of the sacred mushroom or peyote are fleeting. One attempts to capture them as one would the stream of water that is never the same. The experience dissipates. An archaeology of this elusive memory is much like recalling the star constellations—something Greg Dening evokes in describing the deep time of Fenua’enata—or in the temporality of a good surf break.7² Despite the hindrances in re-creating this hallucinogenic memory, we see how consumption of peyote and nanactl would become a kind of creolized cultural phenomenon. By the time inquisitors outlawed peyote use in 1620, it was too late to prevent its inscription on the cultural consciousness of multiethnic Mexico. It had become as much a part of the cultural landscape as chocolate, pulque, and chiles. Granted, hallucinogen use was still relatively rare in the general population, but it was no longer entirely alien. Instead, it became a sort of socioethnic reflection of the integration of indigenous custom into the everyday life of creoles, mestizos, and mulatos. No pronouncement or law could erase its memory—and, in the final jurisprudential irony, its legal prohibition would lead to the permanent inscription of those fleeting hallucinations into a fixed artifact of epistemology: the inquisitional record.

NOTES 1. There is relatively little historical discussion of hallucinogen use and most of the literature is ethnographic in focus. For an excellent recent discussion of peyote and the Huichols in historical context, especially in the nineteenth century, see Michele Stephens, “Under the Eyes of God: Huichols and the Mexican State, 1810–1910” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2011). Also see Fernando Benítez, En la tierra mágica del peyote (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1968); José Luis Díaz, “Ethnopharmacology of Sacred Psychoactive Plants Used by the Indians of Mexico,” Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology 17 (1977); Roger Heim, Les champignons toxiques et hallucinogènes (Paris: N. Boubée, 1963); Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (New York: Bantam, 1992); Jonathan Ott, Hallucinogenic Plants of North America (Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1976); R. Gordon Wasson, The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980). 2. For good overviews see Stacy B. Schaefer and Peter T. Furst, eds., People 49

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of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Peter T. Furst, Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams: Explorations in the Huichol Universe (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006). 3. For overviews see Benítez, En la tierra mágica; Furst, Rock Crystals; Schaefer and Furst, People of the Peyote; Stephens, “Under the Eyes of God.” One of the earliest ethnographic studies of the Huichol was by Norwegian anthropologist Carl G. Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 3 (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1900); the series was published under the general editorship of Franz Boas. 4. Furst, Rock Crystals, 173. 5. See Fernando Benítez, Los hongos alucinantes (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1969); Wasson, Wondrous Mushroom. 6. See, for example, Dening’s provocative study of the Marquesas and Polynesia more generally, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), in which he argues for an excavation of shared cultural memory. 7. There is little discussion of this cultural process, but some suggestive work has been done, especially by Solange Alberro in two books on the influence of Mexica culture on creole society in Mexico: El águila y la cruz: Orígenes religiosos de la conciencia criolla: México, siglos XVI–XVII (Mexico City: Colegio de México; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999) and Del gachupín al criollo: O de cómo los españoles de México dejaron de serlo (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1992). 8. The tripartite trajectory is partly inspired by James Lockhart’s understanding of Nahuatl language development, as in his Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), though I have obviously upended the model to discuss acculturation of Spaniards, not of Nahuas or Nahuatl language. 9. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954). 10. Díaz, “Ethnopharmacology,” 647. 11. For good discussion see Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 12. Díaz, “Ethnopharmacology.” 13. For peyote, see Manuel Urbina, “Peyote, datos para su studio,” Anales del Instituto de Médico Nacional de México 2 (1899): 203–214, and “El peyote (Historia, botánica, composición química, acción fisiológica, efectos terapeúticos),” Anales del Instituto de Médico Nacional de México 12 (1914): 183–243; Richard Evans Schultes, “Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and Plants Confused with It,” Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets 5 (1937): 61–88. For mushrooms, see Heim, 50

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Les champignons; Richard Evans Schultes, “Plantae Mexicanae II: The Identification of Teonanáctl, a Narcotic Basidiomycete of the Aztecs,” Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets 7 (1939): 37–54; and Richard Evans Schultes, “Teonanacatl: The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs,” American Anthropologist 42 (1940): 429–443. For ololiuqui, see Humphry Osmond, “Ololiuqui: The Ancient Aztec Narcotic,” British Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1955): 526–536; Manuel Urbina, “El peyote y el ololiuhqui,” Anales del Museo Nacional de México 7 (1903): 25–48. Also see Gordon Wasson, “Notes on the Present Status of Ololiuhqui and Other Hallucinogens of Mexico,” Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets 20 (1963): 161– 193; A. Hofmann, “The Active Principles of the Seeds of Rivea corymbosa and Ipomoea violacea,” Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets 20 (1963): 194–212; Richard Evans Schultes, A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Rivea corymbosa: The Ancient Narcotic Ololiuqui of the Aztecs (Cambridge, MA: Botanical Museum of Harvard University, 1941). For toloache, see W.  E. Safford, “Narcotic Plants and Stimulants of the Ancient Americas,” Smithsonian Report (1916): 387–424. 14. Díaz, “Ethnopharmacology,” 655. 15. Ibid., 656. 16. See, for example, Christopher S. Beekman, “The Correspondence of Regional Patterns and Local Strategies in Formative to Classic Period West Mexico,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19 (2000): 385–412; Christopher S. Beekman, “Political Boundaries and Political Structure: The Limits of the Teuchitlan Tradition,” Ancient Mesoamerica 7 (1996): 135–147; Michael Kan, Clement Meighan, and H. B. Nicholson, Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico, Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima: A Catalogue of the Proctor Stafford Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Michael S. Foster and Phil C. Weigand, eds., The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mesoamerica (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985). 17. Xavier Lozoya, “Sobre la investigación de las plantas psicotrópicas en las antiguas culturas de México,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 16 (1983): 193–206. 18. Benítez, En la tierra mágica; Furst, Rock Crystals; Stephens, “Under the Eyes of God.” 19. Codex Magliabechiano, CL. XIII. 3 (B.R. 232), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1970); the image is reproduced in Wasson, Wondrous Mushroom, 113–114. 20. Luis González Obregón, ed., Procesos de indios idólatras y hechiceros (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1912), 53–78. The original trial document is found in Inquisición (Inq.), vol. 38, expediente (exp.) 7, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN). 21. González Obregón, Procesos de indios idólatras, 58. 22. Ibid.: “Andrés en cualquier parte que va tiene una costumbre, que comulga a la gente y el mismo comulga, y esto hace de unos ciertos honguillos que se llaman nanactl, que es cosa endiablada, por donde de sentido y dizque ven visions endiabladas, cualquiera que lo come, y este es el que dicen cuerpo 51

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del demonio, y dizque allí ven si han de morir presto, o si han de ser ricos o pobres, o si les ha de venir algunas desdichas.” 23. For an overview of Sahagún’s treatment of intoxicants, see Alfredo López Austin, “Descripción de estupefacientes en el Códice Florentino,” Revista de la Universidad de México 19 (1965): 17–18. For overviews on Sahagún in general, see Munro S. Edmonson, ed., Sixteenth-Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974); Miguel León Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: Pionero de la antropología (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999); John F. Schwaller, ed., Sahagún at 500: Essays on the Quincentenary of the Birth of Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún (Berkeley, CA: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2003). 24. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: The General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. and ed. Arthur J.  O. Anderson and Charles Dibble (Santa Fe, NM; Salt Lake City: University of Utah: 1950–1982 [1499-1590]), vol. 11, p. 130. 25. Jacinto de la Serna, Manual de ministros para el conocimiento de idolatrías y extirpación de ellas (Mexico City: Imprenta del Museo Nacional, 1892 [1661]). 26. Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 [ca. 1581]), 307. 27. Ibid., 475. 28. Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Historia de los indios de Nueva España, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2001), 24–25. 29. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 10, chap. 29, sect. 2. 30. Sebastián Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellano o española (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611), 535–536; electronic copy in the author’s possession. 31. Juan de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos marauillosos de las Indias (Mexico City: Pedro Ocharte, 1591), 3. 32. Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, folio (f.) 261, AGN. 33. Inq., vol. 72, exp. 12, f. 158, AGN. 34. Inserted into the Inquisition case is a copy of a proof of her high birth that was drawn up by her lawyer in 1566 to secure house arrest while she was awaiting adjudication of the murder charge; Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, ff. 265–266, AGN. Witness statements about her involvement in the murder are in Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, ff. 157–181, 230–241, AGN. Both her own sworn deposition and witness statements indicate she was the daughter of the conde de Gomera, though her mother is not identified. Peraza was an “hija natural” (illegitimate daughter) of the count, who was notorious for having fathered children with several mistresses. 35. Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, f. 105, AGN. Isabel Hojeda claims Peraza had said, “avía de hacer que Andrés García bibiese el más mal casado del mundo aunque le costase quanto tenía” and “que le avía de hacer que aborreciese a la mujer con quien se casase.” 36. See discussions in Solange Alberro, “Inquisición y proceso de cambio social: Delitos de hechicería en Celaya, 1614,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradicio52

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nes Populares 30 (1974); Martin Austin Nesvig, ed. and trans., Forgotten Franciscans: Writings from an Inquisitional Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 80–101. The investigations are in Inq., vol. 278, exp. 2 and 4, and vol. 305, exp. 11, AGN. 37. Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, ff. 265–266, AGN. 38. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y magia: El proceso de aculturación en la estructura colonial (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1963), 311. 39. Ibid., 147. 40. Noemí Quezada, Amor y magia amorosa entre los aztecas: Supervivencia en el México colonial (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1975), 87–88. 41. Inq., vol. 39, exp. 2, ff. 104–105, AGN. 42. Inq., vol. 289, exp. 12, AGN. 43. For example, against Diego de Coca, Guadalajara, 1620, Inq., vol. 486, exp. 10, AGN; Damiana Fuentes, Mexico, against herself in 1622, for taking peyote, Inq., vol. 335, exp. 59, AGN; against Miguel Medina and his wife Inés de los Ángeles, in Mexico, 1622, Inq., vol. 335, exp. 89, AGN; doña María de Soria, self-denounced for eating peyote for divination in 1622 in Mexico, Inq., vol. 335, exp. 96, AGN; against Nicolás Mota in Puebla in 1622 for recommending peyote use, Inq., vol. 335, exp. 104, AGN; against Baltasar de los Reyes, in Oaxaca City, 1621, Inq., vol. 486, exp. 45, AGN. 44. In 1630, Inq., vol. 340, exp. 4, AGN. 45. In 1632, against a mulato Antón, Inq., vol. 304, exp. 26, f. 181, AGN. 46. Inq., vol. 302, exp. 8G, AGN. 47. Inq., vol. 308, exp. 112, AGN. 48. Inq., vol. 317, exp. 68, AGN. 49. Inq., vol. 317, exp. 22, AGN. 50. Inq., vol. 486, part 2, unnumbered exp., f. 417, AGN. 51. Inq., vol. 373, exp. 3, AGN. 52. For Italy, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Maria Sofia Messana, Inquisitori, negromanti e streghe nella Sicilia moderna, 1500–1782 (Palermo, Italy: Sellerio, 2007). For Afro-Mexican magic, see Joan Bristol and Matthew Restall, “Potions and Perils: Love Magic in SeventeenthCentury Afro-Mexico and Afro-Yucatan,” in Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times, ed. Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 159. 53. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 4, ff. 344–345, AGN. 54. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 4, exp. 5, AGN. 55. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 5, f. 356, AGN; “una bebida de nanacate por otro nombre hongos.” 56. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 5, ff. 357–358, AGN. According to Gonzalo Pérez, the snake said to him, “buelue los ojos y berás a tu muger.” 57. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 5, f. 357, AGN. 53

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58. Inq., vol. 340, exp. 5, f. 361, AGN; “una yerba a modo de tres de dos que hera buena para ponerle en el seno las mugeres y que teniéndola andarían los hombres tras de las dichas mugeres como los perros tras las perras.” 59. See, for example, Bristol and Restall, “Potions and Perils”; Noemí Quezada, Enfermedad y maleficio: El curandero en el México colonial (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989) and Sexualidad, amor y erotismo: México prehispánico y México colonial (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996). 60. Inq., vol. 304, unnumbered exp., ff. 61–62, AGN. 61. Inq., vol. 39, exp. 4, AGN. 62. For an overview of some of the issues involved in the adoption of Nahuatl as a lingua franca, see Francisco Solano, ed., Documentos sobre política lingüística en Hispanoamérica (1491–1800) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1991). For the classic account of Nahua society and the evolution of Nahuatl in colonial Mexico, see Lockhart, Nahuas after the Conquest, as well as James Lockhart, Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). For discussion of the prosaic adoption of Nahuatl as the common language between non-Nahuatl native speakers, both indigenous and Spanish, in colonial Mexico by the early seventeenth century, see Andrés Lira, “Pueblos de indios y orden institucional en un vocabulario novohispano del siglo XVII,” paper presented at XIII Reunión de Historiadores de México, Estados Unidos y Canadá, in Querétaro, Mexico, October 2010. 63. Indiferente Virreinal, Inq., caja 5259, exp. 102 and 103, AGN. 64. Indiferente Virreinal, Inq., caja 5259, exp. 80, AGN. 65. Indiferente Virreinal, Inq., caja 6609, exp. 38, AGN. 66. Inq., vol. 342, exp. 10, AGN. 67. Inq., vol. 341, part 1, exp. 4, ff. 321-329 [313–321]; notice given, f. 321, AGN. 68. Bristol and Restall, “Potions and Perils,” 157–163; John F. Chuchiak IV, “‘It Is Their Drinking That Hinders Them’: Balché and the Use of Ritual Intoxicants among the Colonial Yucatec Maya, 1550–1780,” Estudios de Cultura Maya 24 (2003): 137–171. 69. Inq., vol. 341, part 1, exp. 4, f. 325, AGN. 70. Inq., vol. 510, part 1, exp. 23, AGN. 71. Name usage of hallucinogens is analyzed in Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y magia, and Quezada, Amor y magia. 72. Dening, Beach Crossings.

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CH A P T ER T WO

Alcohol and Commodity Succession in Colonial Maya Guatemala: From Mead to Aguardiente S TACE Y SCH WA RT Z KOPF

I

N THIS CH APTER I DEPLOY THE CONCEPT OF COMmodity succession as a framework to consider the history of alcohol production and consumption among Maya peoples in colonial Guatemala. Commodity succession has been used within cultural and political geography to examine agricultural history. In the transition from tobacco to rubber in colonial Sumatra, Stian Rice describes commodity succession as a pattern “in which a pioneering cultivar can create the socioecological spaces, economies, and systems of governance necessary for the next.”¹ Here I broaden the concept substantially to refer to the whole assemblage of relations among successive or overlapping commodities, including consumption and production patterns, and to consider disjunction as well as continuity in the transition from one commodity to another. Applied in this way to the history of alcohol in Maya Guatemala, commodity succession highlights key transitions in the production and consumption of alcoholic commodities during the colonial period. From the Postclassic-era consumption of beverages made with fermented honey (mead) to those distilled from sugar (aguardiente de caña) in the late colonial period, Maya peoples experienced significant rearrangements in the spatial, economic, political, and social dimensions of their alcohol use over three centuries. These shifts were closely connected to the broader transitions of colonialism and the process of commodification but had their own dynamics, which are explored here. In particular I evaluate mead, Spanish wine, chicha, and rum or aguardiente de caña (henceforth simply aguardiente) for their successive impacts on Maya drinking patterns. More generally I examine some implications of this approach for understanding the process of commodification in colonial situations. 55

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ALCOHOLIC BEVER AGES AS INGESTED CULT UR AL COM MODITIES This inquiry starts from three related assumptions about commodities in general and about alcoholic commodities in particular, drawn from the pioneering work of anthropologists and historians investigating the “social life of things” in both ethnographic and historical settings.² The first assumption is that the process of commodification is always incomplete and is embedded within larger cultural frameworks that shape and fill the purportedly empty categories of supply and demand. Stated another way, commodification is a dynamic cultural process that depends upon constantly shifting bases of production, distribution, and consumption that are thoroughly embedded in cultural as well as economic trajectories. One implication of this for the study of alcoholic commodities in Guatemala is that it is critical to investigate the cultural construction of demand as well as the larger political and economic dimensions of the alcohol trade in any given time and place, as I have argued in an earlier work.³ In this respect alcohol, like the other ingested commodities discussed in this volume, provides a rich vein for investigation in its intimate relation to bodily and mental states and ethnoracial, gendered, or class identities.4 Like the foods that people eat or the drugs they consume, alcoholic beverages are dense with cultural meaning among those who take them into their bodies and those who endeavor to supply, control, or manage this consumption.5 My second assumption is that alcoholic beverages, like these other ingested substances,6 are often subject to moralizing and criminalizing discourses that play a key role in the process of commodification, making them liable to special prohibitions and regulations. These discourses, frequently embedded in law and expressed in public debate, provide a window into struggles at the intersection of culture and political economy that often result from tensions between legal or moral codes and everyday practices. Here it is essential to recognize the processes by which particular commodities come to occupy this role in public discourse. In relation to alcoholic beverages, a crucial point to acknowledge is that such discourses can be directed at alcohol in general, at particular beverages (“Demon Rum,” for example), or at the physical and psychological states they may create, namely drunkenness.7 In order to refine the analysis of how specific drinks might be targeted (or ignored) in such discourses, my last assumption relates to the way we might distinguish, at a methodological and theoretical level, among groups of related commodities, in this case a wide variety of al56

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coholic beverages fermented and distilled from a diverse number of bases including honey, sugar, maguey, plums, grapes, maize, and many other fruits and grains. While all of these beverages such as mead, beer, pulque, wine, brandy, rum, and the like can be categorized as alcoholic beverages or commodities, they clearly have had different patterns of production and consumption that developed over time. Despite their distinctiveness, which for this analysis is vital to grasp, they overlapped and influenced one another in such a way that it is equally vital to understand their interaction over time.8 Hence the focus here is on commodity succession as an analytical framework to consider these relationships, a task to which I now turn.

MEAD A MONG THE POSTCLASSIC M AYA IN HIGHLAND GUATEM ALA Based on the current state of research, our picture of alcoholic beverage production and consumption patterns in Postclassic highland Guatemala is very incomplete, but systematic investigation of indigenous language texts and Spanish sources from the sixteenth century point to fermented honey-based mead as the most widely consumed beverage; the same pertains to lowland (Yucatec) Maya groups to the north, where the drink was known as balché.9 References to the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the Popol Wuj and other K’iche’ language texts as well as to individual and collective drunkenness highlight the socially embedded nature of alcohol use and its cultural associations with rulership, sacrifice, and the underworld.¹0 Other sixteenth-century Spanish-language sources such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s account of alcohol use and drunkenness in the Verapaz region confirm these social practices and cultural associations while adding detail to the descriptions of ritual practices involving alcohol.¹¹ Based on these sources, fermented alcoholic beverages appear to have played a key role in social interactions among Postclassic highland Maya populations, especially in relation to marriage alliance and communal celebrations tied to the calendar. They and other sources also affirm a wide range of symbolic associations with alcoholic beverages and drunkenness, including sweetness or flavor, poison, sleepiness/drowsiness, and medicine.¹² Absent from these sources is any direct account of alcoholic beverage production and distribution practices, although there are suggestions that the fermentation process was collective, ritualized, and likely 57

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involved the use of underground ovens or logs, all characteristics of the production of mead among historical and contemporary lowland Maya groups such as the Lacandon and the Maya of Yucatán.¹³ Indirectly, the most concrete evidence relating to distribution and production comes from encomienda (individual grants of tribute and labor) records and relaciones geográficas (survey reports) of the middle to late sixteenth century that describe honey as a regular item of tribute to Postclassic elites.¹4 While there is nothing in these records to indicate how the honey was used, it was delivered in substantial quantities from several geographic locations and climatic zones; it likely included the products of apiculture and honey from wild bees, both of which are described for highland Maya groups.¹5 Given the documentation concerning the elite sponsorship of celebrations involving alcohol consumption, it seems reasonable to conclude that some of this honey may have been used as a base for the fermentation of mead that was then consumed communally. If this chain of inference is correct, then tribute can be seen as a primary mechanism of distribution of alcoholic beverages, or rather for the raw materials required to concoct mead. At the same time, even if this is correct, there is no reason to assume that other mechanisms of production and distribution were not significant as well. In particular, given the ubiquity of honey cultivation and collection and the relative simplicity of fermentation technology, it seems likely that individuals and communities would have had the capability to make mead for their own use. Another missing piece of information is the extent to which sumptuary laws regarding the consumption of alcohol would have applied to drinking outside of elites or communal celebrations and hence whether elites would have exercised any type of state control over alcohol production and distribution. Such laws or codes were a significant dimension of the pulque trade among contemporary groups in central Mexico, where maguey sap was delivered as tribute and elites attempted to exercise a substantial amount of control over alcohol production and consumption.¹6 Their absence here may be simply a reflection of the poverty of our sources, but it may also reflect a real difference in the overall integration of alcohol into the political economy of Postclassic highland Maya states, which appears to have been much looser than in the Aztec empire. In summarizing our (admittedly incomplete) picture of alcohol production and consumption in highland Guatemala just prior to European contact, two crucial points can be made that will guide comparison with successive alcoholic commodities that emerged under Spanish rule. First, the deeply rooted connections among alcoholic beverages, 58

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social interaction, and ritual in Postclassic Maya life made it very likely that alcohol production and consumption would robustly continue in the colonial era, as proved to be the case. Second, existing patterns may have shaped or constrained the adoption of new beverages as these began to be available in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion. Specifically, the practical (and symbolic) association of alcohol with honey as the base for fermentation and the primary sweetener may help explain the rapid adoption of sugar-based drinks, especially those in which molasses supplemented or substituted honey. More broadly, a pattern of local production and distribution loosely controlled by elites may have predisposed Maya peoples to resist greater centralization of alcohol production and tighter state control by colonial elites, something to which any subjugated group would likely be inclined in any event. In turning to the subsequent introduction of new beverages during the colonial era, especially Spanish wine, chicha, and aguardiente, these factors were critical in shaping their development.

SPANISH WINE In almost every particular of its production and distribution, Spanish wine contrasts with Maya mead. Produced in Europe for distribution to the growing New World settler population, wine has been characterized, along with wheat and olive oil, as a critical commodity in the Columbian Exchange for the preservation or re-creation of Spanish life in the Americas.¹7 Because of wine’s essential role in the Church and its perceived necessity as an article of daily consumption, a substantial transatlantic wine trade developed in close conjunction with Spanish settlement across the Americas, including Guatemala. Arriving in ports in Honduras, Mexico (Veracruz), and Panama, wine was moved in regular, if not always sufficient, quantities to Spanish colonial cities, the most important of which in Central America was the capital city Santiago de los Caballeros in Guatemala.¹8 Merchants used mule trains to deliver the product to taverns and other purveyors in this large and multiethnic city that by the mid-sixteenth century had substantial populations of African slaves, mixed-race castas, and relocated indigenous groups in addition to its European inhabitants.¹9 From here smaller-scale vendors sold it, illegally and often fraudulently, to Maya people in the surrounding area, according to the English Dominican priest Thomas Gage, who witnessed the practice in the early seventeenth century: 59

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The Spaniards, knowing this inclination of the Indians to drunkenness, do much abuse and wrong them. There is a strict order against selling wine in an Indian town, with a fine and forfeiture of the wine as punishment. Yet the baser and poorer sort of Spaniard will go out from Guatemala [Santiago] to the towns of Indians about, and carry such wine to sell and inebriate the natives as may be very advantageous to themselves. For of one jar of wine they will make two at least, confectioning it with honey and water, and other strong drugs which are cheap to them, and strongly operative upon the poor and weak Indians’ heads. This they will sell at the price current for Spanish wine, and they use such pint and quart measures as never were allowed by justice order, but were invented by themselves. With such wine they soon intoxicate the poor Indians, and when they have made them drunk, then they will cheat them more, making them pay double for their quart measure; and when they see they can drink no more, then they will cause them to lie down and sleep, and in the meanwhile they will pick their pockets.²0

Based on this account as well as other data from court cases during the early colonial period, it seems clear that Maya people were consuming at least some of the Spanish wine being imported, if only in a diluted or modified form. It is relevant to note that Gage’s reference to the addition of honey and water not only may have represented an attempt to stretch the volume of the wine but perhaps was designed to appeal to indigenous tastes. Gage also describes a similar admixture involved in the creation of sugar chicha fermented by Maya people themselves. Other evidence, this time from indigenous-language sources, makes it clear that at least some Maya people were directly involved in the illicit wine trade as consumers but also as sellers. More specifically, the set of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles or Annals makes explicit reference to the punishment of more than a dozen “wine sellers” (ajk’ay vino) in the town of Sololá in May 1591.²¹ While the account of the events the record relates is somewhat cryptic, the individuals involved were some of the most prominent members of the community,²² and most of them paid a fine to avoid the corporal punishment of whipping. Another account from the same set of documents that likely refers to the same events describes a communal collection in response to a fine assessed “because of drunkenness, because of wine.”²³ Taken together, these might suggest that the wine was being bought and consumed collectively, perhaps as part of a social event sponsored by elite 60

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members of the community. This would be consistent with earlier Postclassic patterns as well as with evidence from elsewhere in Guatemala much later, in the postcolonial period.²4 Yet there are subtle differences in the colonial account that point to the overall shift in the political economy of wine from the Postclassic period. Most importantly, the Kaqchikel term used to identify the individuals involved, ajk’ay, specifically refers to a merchant rather than to another social role. This may be indicating a primarily commercial arrangement in supplying alcohol to the community, which in the case of wine would not have been delivered as tribute but instead would have been purchased or acquired in some fashion from other nonindigenous merchants. Despite these clues, the overall impact of Spanish wine as an alcoholic commodity for colonial Maya populations is hard to assess. To the extent that they suggest continuity in consumption practices, these references highlight the incorporation of wine as a new beverage that, despite its foreign origin, might have fulfilled some of the same social purposes as mead. Other references in the Kaqchikel Chronicles from the same period tend to place drunkenness, without explicitly mentioning wine, in the context of domestic and factional disputes rather than associating it with community ritual.²5 Overall, wine appears to have had much less impact as a new beverage for Maya consumption than those based on sugar. This is likely related to the increasing disparity between the transatlantic supply and expanding local demand among the Spanish and mixed-race population that resulted in the growing but illegal trade in wine from Peru as successful wineries began to be established there by the early seventeenth century.²6 Despite this substitution, explicit references to Maya wine-drinking outside of an urban context are scarce after the seventeenth century; most citations then make clear that the preferred drinks among indigenous people were those based on sugar, either fermented or distilled.

SUGAR CHICH A One of the earliest concrete references to fermented sugar brews being both produced and consumed among Maya people again comes from Thomas Gage, who gives a detailed recipe for the composition of what came to be known as chicha.²7 The key ingredients were water, molasses or honey, and sometimes roots, leaves, or even live toads, all of which were placed in large olive jars and allowed to ferment. Most importantly, in comparison with the lack of clarity re61

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garding the use of wine, Gage details how chicha was integrated within community rituals based on his extensive knowledge of several Poqomam towns. In this passage he specifically refers to preparations for the town fiesta of Santa Catarina Pinula: The Indians of the town have their meetings at night for two or three months beforehand, and prepare for such dances as are most commonly used among them, and in these meetings they drink of both chocolate and chicha. . . . And when the feast cometh, they act publicly for the space of eight days what privately they had practiced before. They are that day well apparelled with silks, fine linen, ribbons, and feathers according to the dance. They begin this in the church, before the saint, or in the churchyard, and thence all the octave, or eight days, they go dancing from house to house, where they have chocolate or some heady drink or chicha given them. All those eight days the town is sure to be full of drunkards. If they be reprehended for it, they will answer that their hearts rejoice with their saint in Heaven, and that they must drink unto him that he may remember them.²8

This account clearly indicates the continuation of Maya significant cultural associations of alcohol consumption with ritual and specifically points to chicha as well as chocolate as key in maintaining traditional rituals (the dances) within the context of the new colonial order (worship of the saints). More concretely, it suggests that by at least the early seventeenth century there was a readily available supply of sugar, or more specifically molasses, for Maya chicha production. In order to understand this development, which is important for the expansion of aguardiente de caña as well, a brief reconstruction of the early sugar industry in Guatemala is critical. Fortunately, a detailed historical account of the sugar industry in Guatemala has been published by Regina Wagner that supplements earlier treatments by Murdo MacLeod and Robert M. Hill.²9 A Guatemalan sugar industry began to develop as early as the late sixteenth century, in particular in the area around the capital of Santiago, where small mills known as trapiches were used to process the sugarcane harvest.³0 The proprietors were primarily individual residents of Santiago, though as early as the sixteenth century religious orders were beginning to be involved in the sugar industry, a development that would expand dramatically in the next century when the Dominican ingenio (a larger, usually water-driven mill) of San Jerónimo in Baja Verapaz eventually became 62

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the largest sugar producer in the colony. By the seventeenth century, sugar production expanded substantially in suitable climatic zones in the central valleys and coastal regions near the capital.³¹ It came to include Maya populations as well, as the late seventeenth-century chronicler Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán (himself a sugar-mill owner) makes clear in his description of Maya sugar mills near the infamous Kaqchikel settlement of Pajuyú in the area of San Juan Sacatepequez, not far from the towns described by Thomas Gage a half century earlier. Notably, Fuentes y Guzmán describes the mills’ primary purpose as the production of chicha and aguardiente, and he outlines their effects on the sugar market and the Maya consumers. But no less noticeable are the great numbers of little sugar mills one sees among the Indians that, although each one does not produce much, the multitude of them make such an overage and superabundance of the stuff as to cause a drop in the price of sugar and other things fabricated from it. . . . But taking up the most important subject, which is the souls of these poor Indians . . . the sugars and shavings they fabricate from the cane are also used in chicha, and the distillation of liquor, which destroys them like a flame to the straw . . . being born of the continuous drunkenness in which they live.³²

The spread of chicha production and consumption among Maya peoples continued over subsequent decades, reaching even distant regions such as Huehuetenango by the eighteenth century.³³ There are two critical points of connection and comparison in linking the rapid expansion of sugar and chicha to the earlier discussion of mead and wine and considering them within the context of commodity succession in the early colonial period. First, on the consumption side, is the extent to which chicha appears to have largely replaced mead as a preferred Maya beverage as early as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, at least in certain regions.³4 Second, on the side of production and distribution, is the corresponding speed with which Maya people became involved in growing and producing their own sugar products (including chicha and eventually aguardiente de caña) in addition to purchasing them within an emerging and expanding market. This trajectory contrasts strongly with wine production and trade, which for basic economic reasons remained largely in the hands of Spanish or other nonindigenous merchants despite the occasional involvement of Maya at the town level. The result of these factors was the emergence 63

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of sugar chicha as the primary alcoholic commodity of the early colonial period. Yet viewed from a longer perspective, chicha itself was a transitional beverage to aguardiente de caña, which initially relied on the same networks of production and distribution, with the additional necessity of distillation technology. Despite this similarity, aguardiente de caña had a very different political economy, primarily because of the attention it received from royal officials in the late colonial period.

AGUAR DIENTE DE CAÑA As Fuentes y Guzmán’s description makes clear, Maya consumption of the distilled sugarcane liquor aguardiente de caña began as early as the late seventeenth century.³5 However, references to its widespread commercialization and consumption among Maya people and many segments of the colonial population are most abundant in the eighteenth century. Based on some recent social histories,³6 we know significantly more about the consumption of aguardiente and other alcoholic beverages in taverns in the capital of Santiago (in both of its locations) during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than we do about its ingestion in smaller cities or rural settings, but existing evidence points to its ready availability throughout most of highland Guatemala by at least the mid-1700s.³7 Although aguardiente production and distribution initially followed networks available for chicha, the necessary addition of distillation technology and the drink’s greater potential for storage and shipment eventually led to a more centralized pattern with fewer but larger points of production. In addition to the colony’s largest sugar mill at San Jerónimo, other major suppliers were located in the Valley of Guatemala and adjacent coastal regions and to the west in the area around Comitán, just over the administrative border in Chiapas (then part of the Kingdom of Guatemala).³8 Apart from visits to urban taverns, Maya involvement in the rapidly expanding aguardiente trade during the late colonial period is hard to describe in detail based on existing research. Later evidence from the midnineteenth century indicates that Maya people in highland Guatemala actively participated in transporting and selling aguardiente at the local and regional levels, and it is likely that these patterns developed during the preceding century.³9 Evidence from the nineteenth century also indicates the full incorporation of aguardiente into many of the types of ritual and social practices described by Gage for chicha in the seventeenth century, namely its use in town fiestas and other social obliga64

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tions of community life.40 But it seems clear that Maya peoples’ primary relation to aguardiente was as consumers of this alcoholic commodity, as it was with most of their nonindigenous neighbors. They drove its consumption and the profits from its sale to greater and greater levels during the last century of Spanish rule. It was precisely the perception of this growth in consumption and profits as well as the perception of its related ills, already voiced by commenters such as Fuentes y Guzmán and echoed in the eighteenth century by religious leaders such as Archbishop Pedro Cortes y Larréz,4¹ that led to increasingly vigorous efforts by the crown and its officials to control the aguardiente trade. While specific alcoholic beverages and drunkenness were frequent targets of colonial laws in earlier times, these bans were very unevenly applied against a backdrop of overall tolerance on the part of colonial officials for the indigenous use of fermented beverages. Distilled aguardiente, however, was perceived as more pernicious and dangerous, and its widespread consumption led to the establishment of a royal monopoly, an estanco, on aguardiente in 1753–1754, initially awarded to the municipal government of the capital Santiago for five years but later assumed by the crown.4² The stated goal of the monopoly was to limit consumption and the resulting social ills, but it is also clear that a key factor was the question of who would receive the revenues from alcohol sales, as Alvis Dunn has recently shown.4³ The monopoly was later suppressed and then revived in various forms during the remainder of the colonial period, but it always generated substantial resistance on the part of consumers that in some cases turned violent.44 These conflicts reflect the ongoing tension between the state’s will to regulate behavior and accrue revenue and the desires of many producers, distributors, and consumers for unfettered access to the product. More to the point here, the clashes reflect the colonial state’s project to manage, regulate, and control the growing commodification of aguardiente. While these efforts can be considered a failure in terms of limiting alcohol sales and consumption, they did change the landscape of aguardiente production in a way that ultimately favored larger producers, led to greater criminalization of small-scale producers and consumers, aided in plantation seasonal labor recruitment, and provided a reliable source of state revenue through taxation and the monopoly licensing of alcohol sales in the post-independence period.45 They also led to political tensions that eventually may have played a role in overturning governments in the late nineteenth century, as some authors have suggested.46 Finally, aguardiente contributed to an enduring legacy of contradictions within Maya communities that 65

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continues down to the present, as problematic drinking or alcoholism came to exist alongside traditional ritual and communal patterns of alcohol use.

ALCOHOL, COLONIALISM, AND COM MODIT Y SUCCESSION In reviewing the succession of alcoholic commodities among Maya peoples from the Postclassic through the late colonial period, my goal has not been to provide a detailed or complete history of Maya drinking patterns over three centuries. Rather, by sketching out some of the key elements of each commodity’s production, distribution, and consumption in relation to those of successive commodities, I am most interested here in exploring connections and disjunctions among these alcoholic beverages as each impacted Maya peoples. Based on this sketch, some significant interrelationships appear to have shaped the long transition from mead to aguardiente. Most importantly, the reliance on honey as the principal sweetener and base for fermentation in the Postclassic period evidently played a substantial role in the early adoption of sugar and its by-products to produce chicha. The latter was also appealing in the extent to which Maya peoples could directly control production and supply. These factors appear to have led to a more or less complete integration of chicha into Maya consumption patterns over the first century of Spanish rule. In contrast, Spanish wine, even when laced with honey or other additives that might appeal to indigenous tastes, was less available and perhaps less attractive, as a commodity produced completely outside of Maya control. These limitations help explain wine’s ultimately more marginal position in Maya cultural practices over the long run. The substantial replacement of chicha by aguardiente de caña in Maya consumption patterns by the close of Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century reflect aguardiente’s outgrowth from the production and distribution networks established for chicha; in that respect it most ideally fits the model of commodity succession. Although we know too little about the diffusion of distillation technology among Maya peoples during the colonial period, the most likely scenario regarding this process involved a growing familiarity with the distillation of sugarcane products and a corresponding shift in tastes. The much greater potency of aguardiente compared to fermented brews was potentially more problematic for Maya peoples, not only because of its 66

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heightened physical effects and social consequences but also because of the greater scrutiny it invited from royal officials. This anxiety may in part indicate concerns of Spanish officialdom over creolization and mixing across ethnic lines. In this respect, perhaps one of the key differences of aguardiente from what preceded it was the extent to which its consumption was embraced by many segments of colonial society, and as a result, it was commoditized to a much greater degree than any alcoholic beverage that came before. Despite the enduring (and negative) association of its ingestion with Maya people, available evidence suggests that nonindigenous consumers were just as likely to use and abuse alcohol,47 but it was indigenous alcohol use that most often provided the rhetorical wedge that allowed state officials to engage in more vigorous efforts at control and licensing. The greatest allure of such management, however, was clearly economic and built around the desire to funnel revenue and profits to state coffers and favored individuals. It is therefore paradoxically the extent of rum’s previous commodification that invited the more mercantile approach of a state monopoly, a trend that outlasted the colonial period itself.48 As other works on the Atlantic World have suggested,49 these paradoxes and contradictions draw attention to the awkward linkages between colonialism and the inception of capitalism and highlight the key role of ingested commodities in the creation of the modern world.

NOTES This chapter is the product of a research project aimed at reconstructing Maya alcohol use over the past five centuries. I would like to thank Katie Sampeck, Fred Smith, and an anonymous reviewer for comments that improved this chapter and Hendrix College for supporting this research through a faculty project grant. I would also like to thank my wife, Adrienne Tremblay, for her care and assistance throughout the writing and editing process. 1. Stian A. Rice, “Rubber, Rice, Race, and Space: A Socio-Ecological Approach to the Remaking of Agricultural Space in East Sumatra” (master’s thesis, Kent State University, 2012), 8. The concept clearly draws inspiration from the environmental model of ecological succession. For a critical discussion of the latter within historical ecology, see William Baleé, “The Research Program of Historical Ecology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 2006. 2. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 67

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1986); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Frederick H. Smith, “European Impressions of the Island Carib’s Use of Alcohol in the Early Colonial Period,” Ethnohistory 53, no. 3 (2006): 543– 566; Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); David Carey Jr., ed., Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). 3. Stacey Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 17–41. 4. Pioneering ethnographic works on alcohol in Mesoamerica include Ruth Bunzel, “The Role of Alcoholism in Two Central American Cultures,” Psychiatry 3, no. 3 (1940): 361–387; Philip A. Dennis, “The Role of the Drunk in a Oaxacan Village,” American Anthropologist 77, no. 4 (1975): 856–863; Christine Eber, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of Sorrow, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). For elsewhere in Latin America, see Dwight Heath, “Peasants, Revolution, and Drinking: Interethnic Drinking Patterns in Two Bolivian Communities,” Human Organization 30, no. 2 (1971): 79–186; Barbara Y. Butler, Holy Intoxication to Drunken Dissipation: Alcohol among Quichua Speakers in Otavalo, Ecuador (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 5. For detailed discussion of colonial attempts to control production, see Gilma Mora de Tovar, Aguardiente y conflictos sociales en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1988); José Jesús Hernández Palomo, El aguardiente de caña en México, 1724–1810 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1974). 6. Geoffrey Hunt and Judith C. Barker assert, “First, all substances taken into the body, i.e. all ingested substances, be they alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages, prescription or illicit drugs, tobacco, and even food, should be studied under one general or unified framework, that of the anthropology of ingested substances”; “Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Alcohol and Drug Research: Towards a Unified Theory,” Social Science and Medicine 53 (2001): 178. 7. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “Indians Are Drunks and Drunks Are Indians: Alcohol and Indigenismo in Guatemala, 1890–1940,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 19 (2000): 341–356. 8. Here I draw inspiration from Mintz’s classic treatment of cane sugar, which, Mintz says, despite being “a versatile, one might say protean, substance . . . was not some undifferentiated good.” He elaborates five uses or “functions” of sugar that shaped its consumption in England as spice-condiment, medicine, decoration, sweetener, and preservative; these “did not evolve in any neat

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sequence or progression, but overlapped and intersected”; Sweetness and Power, 77–78. 9. Alfred M. Tozzer, Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan: A Translation (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1941), 198; Henry J. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 91; John F. Chuchiak IV, “‘It Is Their Drinking That Hinders Them’: Balché and the Use of Ritual Intoxicants among the Colonial Yucatec Maya, 1550–1780,” Estudios de Cultura Maya 24 (2003): 137–171. 10. Allen J. Christenson, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 103–104, 178, 265; Robert M. Carmack and James L. Mondloch, Uwujil kulewal aj chwi miq’ina’ = El título de Totonicapán (Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 2007). 11. Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1967), 218–222. 12. Christenson, Popol Vuh, 103; Thomás de Coto and René Acuña, Thesaurus verborum: Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel v[el] guatemalteca; nueuamente hecho y recopilado con summo estudio, trauajo y erudición (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983 [ca. 1656]), 65, 72–73, 172–173. 13. R. Jon McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990); Chuchiak, “‘It Is Their Drinking That Hinders Them.’” 14. Rene Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Guatemala (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982), 87, 127, 141; Lawrence Feldman, A Tumpline Economy: Production and Distribution Systems in Sixteenth-Century Eastern Guatemala (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1985), 78–80. 15. Francisco Ximénez and Francis Gall, Historia natural del Reino de Guatemala (Guatemala City: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1967), 107–118. 16. William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 32. 17. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 70–73; Frederick H. Smith, The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 44–45. 18. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History 1520–1720 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 156, 265–268. 19. Christopher H. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 20. Thomas Gage and J. Eric S. Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels in the New World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958 [1648]), 225–226. Emphasis added.

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21. Judith M. Maxwell and Robert M. Hill II, Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 396–397. 22. Robert M. Hill, personal communication, August 2014. 23. Maxwell and Hill, Kaqchikel Chronicles, 571–575. 24. Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control,” 30–31. 25. Maxwell and Hill, Kaqchikel Chronicles, 337, 411–412, 427–428, 451, 567–568. 26. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 266–268; Alvis E. Dunn, “‘A Sponge Soaking Up All the Money’: Alcohol, Taverns, Vinaterías, and the Bourbon Reforms in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Santiago de los Caballeros, Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 74–76. 27. Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225. As I have noted elsewhere (Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control”), the term chicha was used as a generic term throughout Spanish America to refer to fermented beverages in contrast to distilled aguardiente. In other places and contexts it refers to drinks made from fermented maize, fruit, and other bases. But in colonial Guatemala it typically referred to a sugar-based drink. 28. Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 243. 29. Regina Wagner, Historia del azúcar en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Asociación de Azucareros de Guatemala, 2007); MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 302–304; Robert M. Hill II, Colonial Cakchiquels: Highland Maya Adaptations to Spanish Rule, 1600–1700 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). 30. Wagner, Historia del azúcar, 33. 31. Ibid., 34–46. 32. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán and Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María, Obras históricas de don Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán (Madrid: Atlas, 1969), 1:316, cited in Hill, Colonial Cakchiquels, 122. 33. Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control,” 24–26. 34. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico, 93. 35. Fuentes y Guzmán and Sáenz de Santa María, Obras históricas, 1:316. 36. Dunn, “‘A Sponge Soaking Up All the Money’”; Catherine Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 159–164. 37. Alvis E. Dunn, “Aguardiente and Identity: the Holy Week Riot of 1786 in Quezaltenango, Guatemala” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1999); Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 38. Lowell Gudmundson, “Negotiating Rights under Slavery: The Slaves of San Geronimo (Baja Verapaz, Guatemala) Confront Their Dominican Masters in 1810,” The Americas 60, no. 1 (2003): 109–114; Wagner, Historia del azúcar, 49; Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 39. René Reeves, “From Household to Nation: The Economic and Political Impact of Women and Alcohol in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David 70

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Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 42–70; Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 40. Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 41. Pedro Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral de la Diocesis de Goathemala (Guatemala City: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1958). 42. Magda Leticia González Sandoval, “El estanco de bebidas embriagantes en Guatemala, 1753–1860,” thesis, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, 1990, 14–15. 43. Dunn, “‘A Sponge Soaking Up All the Money.’” 44. González Sandoval, “El estanco de bebidas,” 91–94; Dunn, “Aguardiente and Identity”; Jorge González Alzate, “State Reform, Popular Resistance, and Negotiation of Rule in Late-Bourbon Guatemala: The Quetzaltenango Aguardiente Monopoly, 1785–1807,” in Politics, Economy and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821, ed. Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), 129–155. 45. Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 46. Daniele Pompejano, La crisis del antiguo régimen en Guatemala (1839– 1871) (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1997) 47. Dunn, “Aguardiente and Identity” and “‘A Sponge Soaking Up All the Money’”; David Carey Jr., “Drunks and Dictators: Inebriation’s Gendered, Ethnic, and Class Components in Guatemala, 1898–1944,” in Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History, ed. Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 131–157. 48. Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control.” 49. Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Norton, Sacred Gifts; Smith, Caribbean Rum; Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr L. Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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CH A P T ER T H R EE

Translating Tastes: A Cartography of Chocolate Colonialism K AT H RY N E . S A M PE C K A N D JONAT H A N T H AY N

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H AT DOES CHOCOL ATE TASTE LIK E? THIS SEEMS a ridiculous question—chocolate is a taste like no other, a taste so alluring people overindulge in it, flavoring candies and all kinds of desserts, beverages, breakfast foods, and some savory foods. Although “chocolate” implies a flavor, the nuances of that flavor are a result of decisions in each stage of a complex series of steps in harvesting and processing cacao as well as selecting the kinds and proportions of other inclusions to create the final product, all known by the name “chocolate.” The importance of the human ecology of production is also evident with other substances, such as the contentious environment of pulque that Bristol describes in chapter 5 as well as other forms of alcohol recounted by Schwartzkopf in chapter 2 and by Pezzarossi in chapter 6 and even tobacco, discussed by Palka in chapter 4; yet chocolate stands apart because it can occur in so many forms that tread the boundaries between food, drink, medicine, and flavoring. The scale and range of chocolate eating make it a good case study of the Americanization of the world palate. The transcontinental diffusion of chocolate recipes, blends of cacao with other substances, started in the sixteenth century and continues today, offering an opportunity to scrutinize how colonizers came to terms with a strange substance and the degree to which that process of learning and modifying involved transforming native understandings and experience as well. Examining the ingredients of historical cacao-based beverage recipes by tracking their association over time and space using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) modeling allows us to assess in a rigorous manner where and when chocolate tastes might have varied. The resulting GIS map of flavors across the Atlantic World shows how much regional 72

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concoctions varied geographically and over time.¹ Our results show that whether intended as a pleasurable indulgence or healthy dose of medicine, mixes of substances created geographically distinctive tastes and surprising transatlantic connections. Part of chocolate’s allure was not just that it stimulates pleasurable sensations but that its ingestion is so highly malleable, observable in the array of consumption practices. While the mind-altering effect of substances such as peyote or psilocybin-bearing mushrooms was undoubtedly much greater than the stimulant theobromine in cacao, we suggest that conversely, chocolate is mind-altered: preparing cacao in their own ways, through their own creativity and according to their own preferences, gave people a chance to go on the trip they wanted, whether drug, drink, or food.² This unusual transformational ability of cacao’s thingyness to liquid, solid, scent, and flavor makes it a colonial superingestible in ways less often done with alcohol, sugar, tobacco, and hallucinogens. As a result of this malleability, multivalent and sometimes contradictory forces of social, cultural, and natural environments connected but also distinguished place by taste. Consuming specific tastes, creating flavor, also was a superfeat: subsuming and separating were the same, simultaneous, inseparable act. Taste offered a way to create distinction between colonizers and colonized and between colonial powers. The dilemma of colonial consumption within a humoral medical context made this act fraught with danger yet also, because of the assemblage of elements, full of possibility for remedy. As Rebecca Earle has shown, early modern ideas of selfhood, including phenotypic characteristics as well as health and morality, envisioned the environment and particularly ingestibles as a dynamic set of relationships that created, maintained, and crafted both the corporeal and spiritual self.³ By putting the trajectory of taste-making in its historical context, a cartography of chocolate reveals these larger dynamics at work and emphasizes contradictory but simultaneous processes of disjuncture (separation) and incorporation. The difficulties of colonization—its paradoxes, anxieties, and often contrary, partial nature—are manifest in chocolate recipes because they were part and parcel, were in fact the doing of colonialism. While outstanding acts of colonization happened on paper through laws and treaties and through dramatic, pivotal battles, the everyday practice of colonialism happened through the senses to craft a new mode of how to be in the world that was immediate, recurring, visceral, sometimes explicitly contemplated and other times a common, unremarkable part of life. In this way, colonialism operated akin to an institution whose 73

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bureaucratic effort was to regulate environments. Chocolate’s history offers an opportunity to examine the inner workings of the colonial process and how ingestion in particular related to ways that colonial projects resembled what Erving Goffman called a “total institution,” characterized by Brendan Kelly as “explicit rules, desirable behaviours, unspoken absolutes, recognized hierarchies, and myriad underworlds intermittently accessible to overlapping sub-groups.”4 Chocolate was the taste of colonialism as an institution, so in this manner standard, yet its changeling thingyness made chocolate an alluring experiment to satisfy deep somatic, social, and economic desires within and beyond such frameworks.

BIOLOGICAL, CULT UR AL, AND ECONOMIC EN VIRONMENTS OF CACAO The starting point for this analysis is the homeland of chocolate. People make chocolate from the seed of different varieties and species of a tropical tree, genus Theobroma. A number of archaeological and linguistic analyses indicate that people domesticated Theobroma species first in the Americas, probably lowland South America.5 Several species of cacao exist today that also had ancient and colonial uses, including T. pentagona, T. leiocarpa, and T. grandiflorum.6 T. bicolor is known as pataxte, “jaguar cacao.” Pataxte is the wild species, with fruit having a milder flavor and less of the stimulant theobromine, but it is a hardier plant and reportedly has better qualities for creating a foamed drink than T. cacao L., the most common cultivar.7 Other varieties of T. cacao were developed much more recently and widely adopted for their hardiness or their high-volume production. While cacao trees grow in many parts of tropical America, ancient Mesoamericans developed hardy cultivars that yield high-quality, abundant fruit.8 This attention to cacao agriculture is in proportion to the importance that cacao has had in many facets of Mesoamerican life. For millennia, people in Central America and Mexico linked cacao and vital cosmological forces. These associations made cacao the proper offering in rituals related to fertility, health, and travel as well as to consecrating social unions such as marriages. This ritual association also related cacao to particular days in the calendrical cycle. Diego García de Palacio, a sixteenth-century circuit court judge (oidor) in the audiencia (circuit court) of Guatemala recorded activities that associated cacao with a local fertility ritual in which celebrants preserved the best grains for four 74

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FIGUR E 3.1. High-yield cacao regions in the early colonial period. Map by Kathryn E. Sampeck.

nights, until the full moon. Under the full moon, celebrants planted seeds, first cacao, then human.9 García de Palacio recorded a ritual in Asunción Mitá that linked cacao, war, and regeneration. War captives destined to be sacrificial victims wore necklaces of cacao seeds.¹0 The sense is that this was more than casual adornment; cacao was important for making the human offering proper. Cacao was one of the most unusual substances in Mesoamerican life because it was not just a comestible but also a wealth item and given as tribute, eventually becoming a token of currency.¹¹ In almost every way, cacao was a substance like no other. Cacao cultivation was widespread in Mesoamerica, but intensive cacao production zones were few because the tree thrives best within narrow environmental parameters of shade, moisture, and rich soils. By the Late Postclassic (1200–1520 CE), southern Nahua, people linguistically and culturally affiliated with Nahuas of central Mexico including 75

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FIGUR E 3.2. Heartland of the Izalcos region and principal Izalcos settlements in the Río Ceniza valley. Data are from an administrative map by NordNordWest, with relief created from SRTM-3 relief data by Carport, via Wikimedia Commons, http://bit.ly/2hdAIyv.

those who became known as the Aztec, appear to have had control of three of the most prolific zones of cacao production: the Izalcos region of today’s western El Salvador, the gulf coastal region of Tabasco, and the Soconusco region in the area of today’s border of Mexico and Guatemala near the Pacific coast (figure 3.1). Another high-yield region was Suchitepequez in eastern Guatemala. Compared to other regions, the Izalcos was much smaller in geographic area, yet its production was as great or even greater; the Izalcos was a superproducer. The Río Ceniza valley of today’s western El Salvador was the heartland of the Izalcos polity (figure 3.2). The people who lived in this area called themselves Pipil and spoke Nahuat, from the same language family as Nahuatl of the Aztecs, and upheld Nahua social and political institutions.¹² The earliest colonial documents consistently describe the Izalcos as a place of fantastic wealth in cacao, where money literally grew on trees.¹³ Did the unusual role of the Izalcos in cacao agriculture relate to distinctive ways of using cacao? These questions require a little more discussion of how Mesoamericans experienced cacao.

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SENSORY EXPER IENCES OF CACAO Preparing and consuming cacao beverages were sensory experiences that stood cacao apart from other foods and drinks. For a very long time, three objects have been diagnostic for preparing and consuming cacao beverages: the molinillo (mill, a kind of stirring stick), the spouted pot, and the (often lidded) steep-sided serving cup. A molinillo was the way to froth cacao-laden liquids by vigorous whisking. The fats in the liquid gained volume with whisking, creating a foam. The amount of foam could be increased by pouring already frothed liquid through narrow, long spouts from a height. The steep-sided cups helped conserve the foam volume. Each of these objects is visually distinctive in terms of size, form, and use, and as such their use created an experience different from those of other beverages. The sounds of the molinillo whisking, the motions and sounds of pouring from a height, the look and feel of the foam all set the drink apart. Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría has pointed out that adopting indigenous material practices held great allure to colonists as a tool in negotiating power relations.¹4 Rather than merely the substance of cacao itself, the manner of preparing and serving it were crucial in the experience of cacao beverages; one could even enjoy “chocolate” without any cacao whatsoever. The emphasis on cacao practices left a great deal of room for variation in cacao tastes. The recipes and flavors of pre-Columbian cacao beverages were not standardized but rather set one region apart from another. As early as the Late Classic (500–800 CE), Maya texts on bespoke ceramic vessels show how individual nobles named specific kinds of cacao preparations.¹5 The particular taste, scent, and appearance—the recipes for what seasonings, the degree of ripeness, processing, and variety of cacao—were regionally distinct. Inscriptions, depictions, and archaeological remains indicate that cacao flavored different kinds of foods and drinks. In the 1577 Florentine Codex, Bernadino de Sahagún describes a myriad of cacao preparations, all served after dining: And in finishing eating, next was set out many kinds of cacao, made very delicately, like these: xoxouhqui cacaocintli [bluegreen cacao pod], cacao made with the tender cacao pod, and is very tasty to drink. Quauhnecvio [mature/great honey] cacao, cacao made with honey from bees. Xochio [flower] cacao, cacao made with vej nacaztli [aromatic herbs]. Xoxouhqui [blue-green]

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vanilla, cacao made with tender vanilla. Chichiltic [chile-red, light red] cacao, prepared cacao, made red. Vej tecul [ripe] cacao, cacao made ripe red. Suchipal [fruity (peach, apricot)] cacao, prepared cacao, and light orange. Tliltic [black] cacao, prepared cacao, and black. Yztac [white] prepared cacao, and white. They serve it in some jícaras [cups], from which they drink, and [the vessels] are of many kinds.¹6

The beverage “chocolate” was but one of many kinds of cacao drinks; beverages with other blends of seasonings and varieties of cacao had other names. All pre-Columbian and most early colonial texts refer to various recipes as cacao drinks, cacao beverages, or by beverage names.

DIVER SE CHOCOLATE FLAVOR S IN A WOR LD OF CACAO PR EPAR ATIONS Several lines of evidence point toward a single locale for the origin of the special drink “chocolate.” Both “cacao” and “chocolate” are names that come from Mesoamerican languages. Some linguists have reconstructed “cacao” to proto-Mixe-Zoque, while others claim that it is a Nahuatl word.¹7 What is clear is that “cacao,” which in some cases was modified as “cocoa” in some Indo-European languages, is an ancient word, thousands of years old. In contrast, “chocolat” is much younger. Historical linguistic studies hotly debate the etymology of “chocolat.” Several scholars concur that “chocolat” is a Nahua word and has its origin in peripheral Nahua dialects of southern Mesoamerica, including Pipil (southern Nahuat), spoken in the Izalcos.¹8 Because it is a word from Nahuat, a language distinct from the Nahuatl of central Mexico in part because it does not usually have the unvoiced aspirate /tl/ absolutive noun suffi x, its spelling as “chocolatl” is not accurate until the sixteenth century, when the word is borrowed into the classical Nahuatl of central Mexico and “nahuatlized.” Both “cacao” and “chocolat” are among the few American food words that were not translated, unlike “maize” versus “corn” or “tlixochitl” versus “vanilla.” People every day and across the world speak a little southern Nahuat when they ask for chocolate. Given the long-standing regional nature of cacao beverage recipes, one would expect that chocolate would be associated with a specific place and have a distinct recipe. As Michael Swanton, Alejandro de Ávila, and Bas van Doesburg have shown, the recipe for “chocolate” 78

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is a blend of cacao and achiote, a recipe that occurs in a letter written by the Jesuit Pedro de Morales in 1579. The letter describes an allegoric arch that personified Guatemala as a woman holding a branch of the cacao tree and a drinking cup. The arch included a dedication poem that read, “De lo ques mi propio dote / Le traygo en un tecomate; / Que es cacao y achiote / Para hacer chocolate” (From my very dowry, I bring you in a gourd, that is cacao and achiote, to make chocolate).¹9 The 1579 Relación geográfica de Zapotitlán of Guatemala refers to chocolate as an indigenous concoction from the area and its use as a base in which to mix other medicinal ingredients.²0 Morales states explicitly that this drink was invented in Guatemala, a point made by numerous other sixteenth-century chroniclers. Why does the word “chocolate” travel from the colonial audiencia of Guatemala and become the canonical way to refer to cacao? The Izalcos was the preeminent producer of cacao just when it became the first agricultural product to boom in the colonial economy. The word “chocolate” first appears in central Mexican and Spanish documents just as the Izalcos reached its peak of production and the price of cacao ascended to an astronomical high around 1580.²¹ The word for a special recipe for a cacao drink from the region of phenomenal cacao production started to become the name for the commodity when it became a source of fantastic wealth; to put it more succinctly, chocolate was hot because cacao made money, and a kind of branding took root in the sixteenth century so strongly that it endures today. These dynamics between products and consumers show that in many ways, Norton is exactly right, that “Spaniards learned to like chocolate because of their continued material dependence on Indians.”²² The transatlantic marketplace was critically important in crafting meanings and uses of chocolate, patterns that carried through the eighteenth century and beyond. The evidence from the Izalcos and the overall career of cacao commerce shows that Europeans embraced indigenous commodities such as chocolate with increasing enthusiasm. The experience of chocolate was powerful socially and somatically, while the substance itself (cacao) as well as subtle to dramatic variations in blends of ingredients in cacao preparations offered possibilities for improving health and defining difference—part colonial panacea, part Pandora’s box. Chocolate was alluring because it could satisfy so many needs—social, political, sensual—at once, and the romance with chocolate deepened over time because it could be crafted for needs of the moment and place, an agile substance with moral, social, and political heft. In terms of many of the sensory experiences of chocolate, to para79

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phrase Norton, colonial neophytes embraced chocolate in the Mesoamerican manner and then spent time coming up with alternative ways to think and feel about it.²³ Although in some ways the where and why of chocolate as opposed to other cacao beverages is clear enough; chocolate begins as a local specialty from Pacific Guatemala that gains preeminence in the first tidal wave of colonial commerce. Exactly what chocolate was once it was adopted in an increasingly wide world gets fuzzy as early as the end of the sixteenth century. For example, Juan de Cárdenas observes in his 1591 book Problemas y secretos marauillosos de las Indias that “although it is true that every lady boasts of making her new invention and way of chocolate, with all this, generally the most common in all of the Indies is the one formed in tablets, which took its origin with the Guatemalan ladies, and this same one is the one that is dissolved with hot water and a touch of sweet, which gives it great charm.”²4 Cárdenas describes the practice of experimenting with chocolate recipes to show that the real thing came from Guatemala. In other words, chocolate had numerous recipes and forms, and it seems to have been fashionable to tinker to create one’s own version of it. If this account by Cárdenas is accurate, it offers the chance to investigate the pace and degree of variation in recipes to see the extent to which they formed communities of taste. Comparing chocolate and cacao beverage recipes can track whether colonial tastes traveled across the Atlantic and alterations may have occurred so far from its place of origin. How similar were colonial Mesoamerican recipes? European? Did the tastes translate, so to speak, from one region to another? Norton has argued that chocolate was taken up by colonizers in a generally Mesoamerican way, both in flavorings and manner of preparation, with gradual changes over time.²5 We revisit this question with a slightly longer timeline and French, British, and Anglo-American examples and apply GIS modeling to see in a systematic and comprehensive manner how place and time relate to questions of colonial change and the genesis of taste.

FIR ST STEPS IN TR ACK ING R ECIPES WITH GIS Because the questions about chocolate recipe changes involve time, place, and ingredients, they can be addressed by using spatial data analysis techniques. GIS is a powerful tool for organizing and displaying spatial data and linking it to other kinds of information. In our study, we input sources for recipes that state their origin (for example, “choco80

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late made in Peru has . . .”). The suite of ingredients stated for each cacao beverage is then linked in the GIS database to its geographic location. The cacao beverage recipe database grows daily, and we plan to continue to evaluate the patterning that is so vivid in these preliminary results. For this study, the first step in our analysis was compiling recipes. The results presented here are of a preliminary set of recipes from sources such as the materiae medicae of Francisco Hernández, Augustín Farfán, and Cárdenas and letters, cookbooks, and treatises devoted at least in part to chocolate, such as Antonio León Pinelo’s seventeenthcentury text debating whether chocolate broke the ecclesiastical fast.²6 Sorting the recipes was a rather tricky business, as most do not read as one encounters recipes today, neat lists of ingredients followed by directions for preparation. Instead, these medical and social treatises describe cacao beverage concoctions in terms of the health, moral, or cultural properties of ingredients. So, when a source like Farfán lists variations of a beverage, such as honey instead of sugar, with or without atole, we have treated each as a separate recipe. Sources present these substitutions as exclusive propositions—if one added honey, one would not add sugar also. Some sources also clearly state that the recipe needed to be tailored to the medical needs of the imbiber, so the “hot” humoral qualities of one ingredient were only appropriate in certain conditions; again, many ingredients have exclusive properties. Furthermore, “taste” is taken in its literal, substantive sense—that amalgams of substances would evoke different sensations. Whether food, drink, or medicine, as overlapping categories, these blends had the potential to effect different encounters with human taste buds capable of sensing sweet, sour, bitter, and so on.

FLAVOR PROFILES This initial gathering of data allows a first look at just what flavors dominated colonial American versus European cacao beverage recipes. In most, the beverages were called “chocolate.” The two overall flavor profiles are clearly different in terms of individual ingredients but similar in the way they attest several categories of flavors.

American Flavors The most common American ingredients were chile (Capsicum sp.), vanilla (tlilxochitl, Vanilla sp.), achiote (Bixa orellana), and some 81

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FIGUR E 3.3. Ingredients of cacao beverages attributed to American places.

flowers such as xochinacaztli (“ear flower,” Cymbopetalum penduliflorum), with sugar a common sweetener (figure 3.3). Sweetness is found in pre-Columbian recipes and carries through the colonial period. In fact, colonists might have learned to like sweetness and cacao from Mesoamerican concoctions. In chapter 2, Schwartzkopf tells us that indigenous citizens sweetened Maya mead and Spanish wine to accommodate indigenous tastes. This sweetening included honey and other sweeteners, such as fruit, and likely took advantage of cacao’s natural sweetness, which could be enhanced in processing by resting ground cacao and optimally fermenting the seeds. Sweetness itself was not new to Mesoamericans, but cane sugar was. From the evidence of this initial compilation of recipes, Mesoamericans quickly adopted cane sugar as a sweetener. So, the examples should not be taken as pristine native recipes but instead fully as products of colonial interactions. Chiles added a piquant zing to Mesoamerican cacao beverages and were in general a common flavorant for indigenous American foods, much like black pepper (Piper sp.) was for Europeans. The six major commercial spices in medieval Europe were black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove, and saffron.²7 Despite their relative cost, this spicy, pungent array was common in medieval cooking. It is not surprising that Europeans quickly adopted American chile, as the European use of spice was still following these centuries-old flavor preferences.

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The floral flavors in some ways are misleading in that they are not sweetly aromatic, necessarily. Xochinacaztli is described to have a pleasant, spicy odor. Likewise, just because it was a flower does not mean it was a trivial, decorative afterthought, as Marcy Norton so deftly shows in her foreword. Hernández states that nothing else was more common in Indian markets, nor was any other product more highly prized.²8 The Diccionario de San Francisco lists the Yucatec Maya word for orejuela (ear flower, xochinacaztli in Nahuatl, Cymbopetalum penduliflorum) as “Nix tul; xuchit; te u xuchit: orejuelas para chocolate.”²9 Xuchit is simply the Nahuat word for “flower,” here borrowed as a neologism for a flavoring for chocolate. The powerful place of flowers in Mesoamerican symbolic and ritual life was not sentimental, cloying sweetness; the pungent aroma and flavoring of flowers linked to forces of warfare, power, death, and life.³0 Vanilla equally is part of this highly aromatic, pungent complex. Many Mesoamerican sources pair cacao and vanilla. The Bocabulario de Maya Than de Viena defines vanilla as “cijz bic: Vainillas que echan en el chocolate, olorosas [vanillas one puts in chocolate, fragrant]: çijzbic.”³¹ Vanilla, like orejuela, was defined as a flavoring for chocolate. An important difference is that orejuela did not have its own Yucatec name, while vanilla did, but both were strongly associated with chocolate. This culinary pair, cacao and vanilla, also shared agricultural settings. The creole chronicler Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán notes in 1699 that vanilla, a species of orchid, was grown in the cacahuatales (cacao orchards).³² Intercropping would be a more accurate picture of orchard production in the seventeenth century. Agricultural reasons for intercropping include creating a more hospitable environment for tiny insects for cacao pollination, while economic incentives might have been to increase overall yield. A culinary motivation could well have been to be sure to have the most important ingredients for preparations at hand. In contrast to the alluring scents of various flowers, achiote (annatto) strongly colors foods—brilliant reds or yellows, depending on cooking method—but imparts a subtle, slightly smoky and earthy (umami) flavor. In Nomenclatura etnobotanica maya the Yucatec name for achiote is k’uxub or ki’wi’: “se cultiva para obtener de sus semillas un condimento que da color y sabor a ciertos alimentos” (cultivated to get from its seeds a condiment that gives color and flavor to certain foods).³³ This earthiness was reinforced to some degree by European-inspired additions such as ambergris or musk, spiciness by cinnamon, and starchy, nutlike

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flavors by sesame or almond. American recipes took advantage of European complements to chocolate flavor profiles, but these new ingredients are the least common. Cacao, vanilla, and achiote all appear as crucial items in maritime commerce in colonial Guatemala. In a plea in 1683 the ayuntamiento (governing council) of Guatemala asked permission for direct trade with Peru and that Guatemalan merchants only sell agricultural products that consist of fruits of this earth [Guatemala], sending to Mexico cacao, vanilla, annatto, and indigo dye; to Peru tar, dye, and rigging; to Seville and to Cádiz dye, hides, balsam, sarsaparilla, mechoacan [bindweed, a purgative]. . . . [T]here is never in Guatemala clothing from China, but that which is very necessary to purchase, and many years none at all, and in this manner it cannot be carried to the Kingdom of Peru and more during these times, that the Dutch have in trade, and factors with China, as is public, and notorious.³4

This was a plea to lift the ban on intercolony trade so that vanilla, achiote, and cacao could be exported from Guatemala to Mexico, while other Guatemalan products could go to Spain. The evidence from recipes, however, is that all three flavorants made it to Europe as well. Orejuela does not occur in this Guatemalan complaint but appears in early European cacao beverage recipes. Medieval European trade in spices set a precedent for importing sizeable amounts of very costly seasonings; American products became part of that commerce. Some, such as orejuela, so important in American recipes, perhaps suffered in the transition to a richer but blander palate that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Other European seasonings such as galangal, a gingerlike root, once highly popular, eventually became virtually unknown outside of their homelands.³5 Transport costs and difficulties made little difference in the demand and distribution of products Europeans prized; the factor that most affected what was shipped across the Atlantic was a sea change in the market for spicy, pungent tastes. The legacy of medieval palates fostered a different flavor profile for European cacao beverages despite the overall trend toward more bland food in the early modern era. The most important colonial addition to cacao beverages on both sides of the Atlantic was sugar, which eclipsed pre-Columbian sweeteners honey and fruit. In all, the spectrum of colonial American cacao beverage ingredients indicates six flavor notes—spicy, sweet, floral, 84

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FIGUR E 3.4. Percentage frequencies of flavorings in European cacao drink recipes.

umami, nutty, starchy—from an array of mostly Mesoamerican substances but also a few colonial imports. This is an overall view of all combinations and does not mean that every cacao beverage recipe conjured the complete profile. A key to understanding cacao consumption is to see what people in each region selected to emphasize or edit out.

European Flavors Contemporaneous and slightly later European cacao beverage recipes are even more pungently floral and spicy than the American profile (figure 3.4). These English, French, Spanish, and Italian recipes employ an even greater range of spices including American chile but also clove, cardamom, and ginger. Other European-derived flavorants were cinnamon, almonds, anise, ambergris, and musk, with floral elements of orange blossoms, rose water, and jasmine petals to a lesser frequency. The most common individual ingredients were cinnamon and sugar, with vanilla, anise, and ambergris about half as common. While starchy elements such as squash and melon seeds are present, maize or atole was not. The lack of corn, combined with the much greater variety of pungent floral and citrus-flavored ingredients as well as nuts, is decidedly different from the American flavor profile.

A GIS ANALYSIS OF R ELATIONSHIPS A MONG R ECIPES After we compiled the recipes, the crucial part of our analysis was to compare them in a systematic way. Although general impressions 85

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FIGUR E 3.5. Cacao beverage dendrogram showing degrees of similarity and difference among recipes. Image by Jonathan Thayn.

of overall flavor profiles can be helpful, it is very hard to detect subtle patterning in nominal variables such as names of ingredients. We sought a more definitive way to assess the degree of relatedness. We used the Jaccard similarity coefficient, which was originally proposed as a tool for assessing the similarity of species compositions between ecosystems.³6 For our purposes, the Jaccard similarity coefficient is the number of ingredients shared by two given recipes divided by the total number of ingredients in either recipe (for example, the shared ingredients plus the ones unique to either recipe). A Jaccard value of 1 would suggest that the recipes have exactly the same ingredients and so are perfectly similar (only the proportions would differ), while a Jaccard value of 0 would indicate that the two recipes have no shared ingredients and are therefore completely dissimilar. We studied forty-two chocolate recipes, so 861 pairwise comparisons were necessary to compare each recipe against all the others. Thirteen percent of the Jaccard similarity values were equal to 0, while only 0.002 percent of them were equal to 1. The interquartile range spanned from 0.070 to 0.200, with a median similarity value of 0.143. The similarity scores of the recipes have spatial information (the geographic source area for the recipe) and temporal information (when those recipes appeared). The results can be displayed in two ways: as 86

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a dendrogram (figure 3.5) and as a cartographic vector plot (figures 3.6 and 3.7). Although both ways of showing results display exactly the same information, the first prioritizes the family tree of recipes, while the other emphasizes location. Depending on one’s interests, one portrayal might make more sense or be more relevant than the other.

FIGUR E 3.6. Relatedness of regions of American cacao beverage recipes. Image by Jonathan Thayn.

FIGUR E 3.7. Relatedness of European cacao beverage recipes. Image by Jonathan Thayn. 87

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A Chocolate Family Tree We used the Jaccard similarity coefficient to create a family tree dendrogram (figure 3.5). In the dendrogram, height is a visual representation of difference. The graphic clearly shows that two notable branches split the assemblage of recipes into one cluster that is not very diverse and another that is. The two main clusters are dissimilar enough from each other that it takes some height to find their point of commonality. The two branches that have the least height in their branching patterns mostly came from the seventeenth-century source of León Pinelo. Even though this source reported many recipes, the Guatemalan cluster is significantly different from all others. The Peruvian branch also is a relatively homogeneous set, but within the larger cluster on the dendrogram. Within each group, Guatemalan or Peruvian, the recipes are strongly similar. The Guatemalan cluster includes examples for which León Pinelo did not specify a particular region but others he identified as being from Yucatan and Chiapas. The only Mexican example strongly linked to these is a late sixteenth-century recipe from Cárdenas. So, Maya and southern Nahua regions are strongly linked to each other in terms of taste. In contrast, the Peruvian branch is really an isolate, a highly distinct branch. This suggests that these are not just slight differences in tastes but sharply divided lines. Latin America in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries had strongly regional tastes. The non-Guatemalan branch of the dendrogram includes other branches in addition to the highly consistent Peruvian one. These clusters are more variable in the degree to which recipes are similar to each other. One largely European and another largely Mexican cluster are of about the same degree of similarity to each other, with a comparable amount of variability within the cluster itself. It is a fairly symmetrical degree of branching and differences in height. The large European cluster has only one Spanish example, while the Italian and French examples are more affiliated with each other, but an English recipe is part of each sub-branch in the European cluster. The small European sub-branch of the largely Mexican cluster, in contrast, has most of the Spanish examples, with a single French and a few English examples. So, in both clusters, Mexican and European, other European recipes have strong linkages to England. While some of these English sources explicitly discuss the Spanishness of their recipes, they still seem to have developed a distinctly European flavor.

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What is vivid in this dendrogram is that European recipes separate from Latin American ones, and the Anglo-American (early Virginia) recipes are most like British ones. The most influential recipes for chocolate are British. This means that the set of ingredients occurring in British sources acts the most like a base recipe from which other European ones derived. The ingredients most commonly occurring in British recipes are xochinacaztli, chile, anise, mecaxuchil, vanilla/tlilxochitl, Alexandran Roses, cinnamon, almond, hazelnut, sugar, achiote, Jamaica pepper, nutmeg, clove, musk, ambergris, citron, lemon peel, odoriferous aromatic oil, china, sarsa, and saunders. This heady mix of earthy, fragrant, zesty, citrus, nutty, sweet, and floral appears to be trendsetting because it was more diverse than even Spanish examples. British chocolate recipes had more ingredients in common with Spanish American recipes than with other European recipes, and other European recipes had fewer flavor notes than British ones. That is, British chocolate was an influential tastemaker in the family tree of chocolate because it was so rich in pungent flavors. In other places, Italy or France among them, chocolate took up particular pungent flavors as salient ingredients, lending purer notes of specific tastes. If this patterning is viewed as a biological evolutionary model, perhaps the Guatemalan cluster shows the origin event followed by “speciation” in other regions, so to speak. The development of variation and difference seems to have flourished in regions away from the source area for chocolate. The geneticist N. I. Vavilov argued that as a cultigen moved from its area of domestication, selective forces not present in the homeland would make new characteristics favorable.³7 It is an argument for relative stasis in the homeland (assuming stable conditions) and diversification due to several different factors in these new regions. Returning to Cárdenas’s statement, it does not appear that women in Guatemala tinkered a great deal with chocolate recipes or at least that the experimentation did not find its way into print. At the same time, different social, cultural, and economic conditions encouraged experimentation in other regions. Chocolate taste was not “one size fits all,” but instead people fit it to their environments and preferences. The end result was that other regions were more related to each other than to Guatemala and Guatemalan-like recipes. Within a mixed group of American, French, English, and Mesoamerican recipes, the Mesoamerican ones sort out as a set of ingredients that Europeans and AngloAmericans did not copy exactly.

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Distinguishing Place with Chocolate Taste The map version of the results shows the source regions connected by arrows, and the width of the arrow is the strength of similarity. The GIS-based spatial analysis is another way to show that regional American-European differences were in fact notable. What the map highlights, however, is the degree of relatedness of Peruvian recipes to England especially but also to other parts of Europe rather than to Central America or Mexico. For Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, the strongest similarity was with England compared to other European recipes (figure 3.6). Mexico and Peru show a stronger linkage than Mexico and Central America. Pre-Columbian connections that may have existed and were not documented appear to have largely evaporated with colonial reconfiguring of tastes. Within Europe and Anglo-America (early Virginia), the strength of English taste again stands out (figure 3.7). Virginia recipes, however, have nearly equal strength of association among England, France, Italy, and Spain. Again, the colonial context is new, not just a creolized copy of English forms. Perhaps taste is one of the best ways to track the move toward independence.

Temporal Change in Chocolate Tastes If we look at the patterning in the dendrogram according to the publication dates of the recipes, the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury recipes group together, with the exception of the seventeenthcentury Italian example being most similar to French and English recipes from close to one hundred years later. This Grand Duke Cosimo Medici II recipe from a 1685 letter is closest to an eighteenth-century French one, more so than even some contemporaneous seventeenthcentury British ones. The two nineteenth-century examples are quite different from each other, but both cluster with eighteenth-century French recipes generally. So, the branch of the Mesoamerican tree that was most European is also generally later, as is true of the greater European cluster of recipes. Overall, the patterning suggests a chronological shift away from Mesoamerican ingredients, perhaps more gradually from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century as recipes from those periods are not as well differentiated from each other compared to later recipes. By the eighteenth century, the recipes are fairly sharply distinguished from earlier Mesoamerican examples. This analysis indicates that the pace of change 90

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generally agrees with Norton’s suggestion that change occurred gradually, but this was more evident in the first century or so after contact; change from American versions became more rapid in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³8 Two points to take away from this analysis are methodological and substantive. This fairly simple way to look at nominal data such as recipe ingredients seems to work well for making patterning easier to see and interpret. The second point is that two groups do sort out. Europeans made substantial enough changes to cacao beverage recipes that they do not fall into the same group as Latin American recipes. Furthermore, regional Latin American tastes are dissimilar; even Mexico and Guatemala are distinct from each other.

TR ANSLATING TASTES AND COLONIAL PROCESS One way to think of these regional and temporal differences is in terms of translation. The frequencies of different ingredients, dendrogram, and maps of strength of similarities in ingredient profiles show that what “chocolate” was at any point in time was a shifting target. The matter becomes even muddier when “chocolate” started to refer to a solid or powdered state of cacao, as some eighteenth-century recipes called for solid chocolate rather than cacao to make the chocolate beverage. Even though Europeans and Anglo-Americans did not translate the Nahuat word “chocolat,” they did alter the inclusions in chocolate concoctions enough to make something new yet similar enough to be a kind of icon for chocolateness. In the Peircian approach to signs, an icon is a pattern that physically resembles what it “stands for.”³9 The variations of chocolate across the Atlantic World resembled the Guatemalan original yet were something different from the original and even from one region to the next. In contrast to icons, symbols can be completely arbitrary. The utterance of a word, a symbol—in this case, the word “chocolate”—very rarely correlates with the thing it refers to because words (symbols) in any language are vastly more complex and sophisticated than icons. So from Pipil “chocolat,” a particular recipe, Europeans created concoctions, recipes that had a pattern that referred to the pre-Columbian preparation but were not that thing itself exactly. In this linguistic sense, the European recipes were iconic. For example, Hannah Glasse’s recipe for “Sham Chocolate” is an icon of chocolateness in that it calls for no cacao whatsoever: “Take a 91

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pint of milk, boil it over a slow fire, with some whole cinnamon, and sweeten it with Lisbon sugar; beat up the yolks of three eggs, throw all together into a chocolate pot, and mill it one way, or it will turn. Serve it up in chocolate cups.”40 What makes this concoction chocolate? The preparation and serving of the beverage. The sweet and cinnamon created the flavor profile evocative of chocolate, while the eggs thickened the liquid to the expected consistency. The chocolate pot permitted the milling that created the frothy consistency that was the hallmark of chocolate. To see the cacao-free frothy beverage in a chocolate cup was not a travesty. The allure of chocolate was to many senses and satisfied through movement and a set of actions; chocolate was a participatory experience as much as a thing and in fact involved many objects and substances. Probably inevitably bound up in the making of icons was elevation of the complexity and sophistication of the symbol, the word “chocolate,” so that it referred to a broad class of states, flavors, and colors by one, untranslated term. What had a highly specific pre-Columbian meaning, one distinct enough that other Mesoamericans used their own names for other kinds of cacao beverages, then morphed into a covering term. Few loans have served as vast a number of languages as neologisms that refer to such a contradictory and varied array of states and meanings. The closest contender is Nahuatl “tomatl,” or tomato, but Italian and a few other languages transform the word into “pomodoro” or a cognate, while those same languages use a minimally modified form of “chocolate” (such as “cioccolato”). In some ways, and as part of the colonial project, chocolate was never meant to be familiar. This incomplete translation was seductive as it maintained some mystery of unknown but discoverable potential. At the same time, as Norton has recognized, Europeans maintained the sensory experience of chocolate—sweetness, spices, a simulation of the taste—an embodiment by colonists of Mesoamerican values but framed within the vicissitudes of the humoral scheme.4¹ Through action and substance, chocolate enchanted by producing and reproducing the self, the intimately familiar but incompletely known. Chocolate was the epitome of the discordant core of colonialism. When does ingesting chocolate become so commonplace that it lost all traces of exoticism or colonial affect? One answer is that it never really does. In multiple ways, pre-Columbian Mesoamericans used cacao to connect with the divine and distinguish themselves, to unite with the almost unimaginable and also divide the well known. The ready adoption of chocolate culture by colonists and colonial powers nour92

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ished conflicting dynamics as well; part of the allure of chocolate was its strangeness crafted with familiarity and that it could be ingested in so many states (solid, liquid, scent, flavor) and through all the senses. The discordant core of chocolate never evaporated, it grew. Consuming chocolate in 1812, however, was part of a vastly changed political geography in which centers of cacao production had shifted from places of indigenous production in Mesoamerica such as the Izalcos to plantations employing coerced or enslaved labor in other parts of Central America (particularly Costa Rica), in tropical South America (especially Venezuela and Ecuador), and by the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia and West and Central Africa. As the system of slavery unraveled, European powers worked to increase cacao production in other places with suitable climates and inexpensive labor sources, such as São Tomé and Príncipe, West Africa’s Gold Coast, and Indonesia.4² Even after the abolition of slavery, exploitative labor practices continued in cacao agriculture. In the early 1900s, slavery was notorious on cacao plantations in Fernando Pó (now known as Bioko) and in Cameroon.4³ The spread of cacao agriculture produced massive amounts to supply consumers with what had quickly become a daily need. So, that cup of chocolate in 1812 was everyday and unremarkable because the supply was steady and expectations of what chocolate should look and taste like more predictable, but the experience and creation of chocolate was still tangled in colonial dynamics of making a tropical product local. Eating and drinking what eventually was called chocolate was not just a symbolic act of colonial power; ingestion, and particularly the way people experienced consumption, was a total solution to the dilemma of colonialism. A problem of the humoral scheme was the fluid nature of existence and boundaries of the self that did not end at the limits of an individual’s body; climate and particularly food composed a person, all elements in constant inconsistency because of dynamic change. The colonial project likewise made the boundaries of empire slippery but at the same time operated under a directive to create and maintain hierarchies of power. How was it possible to subsume others (their lives, their labor, their substances, their objects) while at the same time hold them apart, as separate entities and tastes? To unite and divide at the same time implies a comprehensive or total scope and method to embrace order and messiness. One way to conceptualize the colonial project is as an effort at forming an institution in part as a physical territory but also as a system of rules, regulations, and proscriptions that attempted to regulate people and their behavior. 93

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Erving Goffman defines a “total institution” to be “a place where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”44 Goffman discusses the concept of the total institution in relation to people separated from wider society because of incapacity, disadvantage, or dangerousness (orphanages, mental hospitals, and prisons) or by their work (barracks and monasteries), where they form complete subsystems embedded within a larger society. The colonial condition of separation was in part challengingly physical, an experience for colonizers and colonized alike. Colonists left their homelands, and the colonial process removed indigenous peoples from theirs, if not bodily then through new rules and procedures that divested them to greater and lesser degrees from pre-Columbian practices. Separation was integral to the colonial experience. Although Goffman focused on buildings and imposing physical environments to form this break from the rest of society, more recent analyses emphasize how separation can be imposed socially, especially through violence, creating boundaries well beyond any physical walls. This is a fluid notion of a total institution as a seemingly invisible background of control aimed particularly at those on the fringes of oversight and regulation, such as the homeless.45 The total institution, then, is an effort of corporeal control and order created through habits that become unremarkable because they are regular. The “key fact” of a total institution, John Adlam and Christopher Scanlon assert, relates “not to the primary task of the institution itself but to the bureaucratic management of those subject to its authority.” This bureaucracy regulates a “formally administered round of life.”46 In Goffman’s total institution, the subject individual is profoundly betrayed, regulated, absolutely confined, and deeply disempowered, and power lies with the administrators of those regulations. Consumption, then, is “total” in that it is the process of taking in, of creating that enclosure and integration that were required for colonization to happen. Taste, however, offered the way to create distinction between colonizers and colonized and between colonial powers. Together, consuming particular tastes, crafting flavor, accomplished what was so difficult otherwise: subsuming and separating as the same act. The difficulties of colonization, its paradoxes, anxieties, and often contradictory, partial nature are manifest in chocolate recipes because they were part and parcel, were in fact the doing of colonialism, a working out of colonial order (and disorder) in a regular, daily, even banal way. The daily acts of ingesting to nourish the body invoked critical and 94

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recursive social, political, and economic relations. As Norton notes, “Chocolate-drinking habits drew attention to the paradoxes and tensions within the colonial project,” one consequence of which was for Europeans to retool chocolate as an agent of moral and corporeal health.47 The smell, look, and feel of chocolate and the ideas about it were an uneasy fit with Spanish ideologies of conquest because the source of inspiration, the stuff itself and how to make it consumable, came from subjects rather than colonizers. Chocolate was seductive because people could operate both within the institutional boundaries of order and hierarchy, of subsuming and distinguishing, but at the same time leave wiggle room for experimentation that went above, beyond, and even subversive to that very order. The temptation to assume sensory continuities, in this case, what chocolate tastes, smells, sounds, and feels like, flattens or glosses over multivalent relationships of experience and meaning. We rob chocolate of its flavor by letting present experiences overdetermine how we understand it in the past. Changes in just what chocolate was at home and abroad show that “chocolate” was a vehicle for defining new relations with the colonial economy, tastes of the body politic, and colors of changing social realms. NOTES We are deeply grateful for the support of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University for Sampeck’s long-term fellowship, when much of this research was conducted. Rebecca Earle and Barbara Ketcham Wheaton gave cogent advice at crucial junctures. Carla Martin is an inspiration in all things chocolate, as is David Bolles in all things Yucatec. The final work on this chapter was completed when Sampeck was the Central America Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. The fellowship gave her the time and opportunity to devote her attention to the project and a luxury of resources and enthusiastic guidance from staff of  the  Tozzer Library, especially Janet Steins, Linda Carter, Susan Gillman, and Cynthia Hinds. Most of all, we wish to thank Stacey Schwartzkopf for his diligence and good humor in all the events that culminated in putting this volume together. 1. Although the Americas were and are a meeting place of Atlantic (Europe, Africa) and Pacific (especially China) exchange networks, the greatest amount of evidence of colonial cacao recipes comes from either the Americas or Europe. No Asian or Pacific Island evidence is included in this study. 2. For the relationship of cultural expectations and somatic, pharmacological effects, see Howard S. Becker, “History, Culture, and Subjective Experi95

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ence: An Exploration of the Social Bases of Drug-Induced Experiences.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 8, no. 3 (1967): 163-176. 3. Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4. Brendan D. Kelly, “Erving Goffman’s Asylums 50 Years after Publication: The Perspective of a Consultant Psychiatrist,” in “Perspectives on Erving Goffman’s ‘Asylums’ Fift y Years On,” special issue, Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2013): 610. 5. Nisao Ogata, Arturo Gómez-Pompa, and Karl A. Taube, “The Domestication and Distribution of Theobroma cacao L. in the Neotropics,” in Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao, ed. Cameron L. McNeil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 69–89. 6. Nathaniel Bletter and Douglas C. Daly, “Cacao and Its Relatives in South America: An Overview of Taxonomy, Ecology, Biogeography, Chemistry, and Ethnobotany,” in Chocolate in Mesoamerica, ed. Cameron L. McNeil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 31–68; John S. Henderson and Rosemary A. Joyce, “Brewing Distinction: The Development of Cacao Beverages in Formative Mesoamerica,” in Chocolate in Mesoamerica, ed. Cameron L. McNeil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 140–153. 7. Johanna Kufer and Cameron L. McNeil, “The Jaguar Tree (Theobroma bicolor Bonpl.),” in Chocolate in Mesoamerica, ed. Cameron L. McNeil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 90–104. 8. Allen M. Young, The Chocolate Tree: A Natural History of Cacao, rev. ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). 9. Diego García de Palacio, Letter to the King of Spain: being a description of the ancient provinces of Guazacapán, Izalco, Cuscatlán, and Chiquimula, in the Audiencia of Guatemala, with an account of the languages, customs, and religion of their aboriginal inhabitants, and a description of the ruins of Copan, trans. Ephraim G. Squier, ed. Alexander von Franzius and Frank E. Comparato, (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1985 [1576]). 10. Ibid., 40. 11. René Millon, When Money Grew on Trees: A Study of Cacao in Ancient Mesoamerica (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1974). 12. See William R. Fowler’s works “Cacao, Indigo, and Coffee: Cash Crops in the History of El Salvador,” Research in Economic Anthropology 8 (1987): 139– 167; “Cacao Production, Tribute, and Wealth in Sixteenth-Century Izalcos, El Salvador,” in Chocolate in Mesoamerica, ed. Cameron L. McNeil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 307–321; The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); “The Political Economy of Indian Survival in Sixteenth Century Izalco, El Salvador,” in Columbian Consequences, vol. 3: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 187–204; and “La 96

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región de Izalco y la villa de la Santísima Trinidad de Sonsonate,” in Dominación española: Desde la conquista hasta 1700, ed. Jorge Luján Muñoz and Ernesto Chinchilla Aguilar (Guatemala City: Asociación de Amigos del País, Fundación para la Cultura y el Desarollo, 1994), 601–609. 13. Pedro Antonio Escalante Arce, Códice Sonsonate: Crónicas hispánicas (San Salvador: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 1992); Kathryn E. Sampeck, “Pipil Writing: An Archaeology of Prototypes and a Political Economy of Literacy,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 3 (2015): 469–495. 14. Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, “Eating Like an Indian: Negotiating Social Relations in the Spanish Colonies,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (2005): 551–573. 15. Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, “Folk Classification of Classic Maya Pottery,” American Anthropologist 91 (1989): 720–726. 16. Bernadino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, manuscript, Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, 1577, bk. 7, chap. 13, 275r, f. 25; https://www.wdl.org/en/item/10619/view/1/53/. The Nahuatl text reads, “Niman moteca inj cahaltic: ie cauj inj cacaoauh, xoxouhquj cacaoaçintli, quauh necujo cacaoatl, xochio cacaoatl, xoxouhquj tlilxocio, chichiltic cacaoatl, vilztecol cacaoatl, xochipalcacaoatl, tliltic cacaoatl, iztac cacaoatl, injc motecaia cacaoatl.” The Spanish reads, “Y en acabando de comer, luego se sacauan, muchas maneras de cacaos, hechos muy delicadamente, como son estos, xoxouhquj cacaoacintli, cacao hecho de maçorca tierna de cacao, y es muy sabrosa de beuer. quauhnecuio cacaoatl, cacao hecho co¯ miel de auejas. Xochio cacaoatl, cacao hecho con veynacaztli.xoxouhquj tlilxochio, cacao hecho con tlilxochitl tierno, Chichiltic cacaoatl, cacao hecho y colorado. Vitzteculcacaoatl, cacao hecho, y bermejo. Suchipalcacaoatl; cacao hecho, y naranjado. Tliltic cacaoatl: cacao hecho, y negro. Yztac cacaoatl: cacao hecho, y blanco: y dauanlo en vnas xicaras, con que se beuja, y son de muchas maneras.” Transcription of the Spanish and Nahuatl texts and translation from the Spanish text are by Sampeck. 17. Karen Dakin and Søren Wichmann, “Cacao and Chocolate: A UtoAztecan Perspective,” Ancient Mesoamerica 11, no. 1 (2000): 55–75. 18. Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson, “The History of the Word for Cacao in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Ancient Mesoamerica 18 (2007): 193–237. 19. In Beatríz Mariscal Haz, ed., Carta del Padre Pedro de Morales (Mexico City: Colección Biblioteca Novohispana, V. Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios, Colegio de México, 2000 [1579]), 57. 20. René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, 1982), 90. 21. For the economic turns in cacao commerce, see Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: a Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Austin: University of Texas, 2008). 97

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22. Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 677. 23. Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 681. 24. Juan de Cárdenas, Primera parte de los problemas y secretos marauillosos de las Indias (Mexico City: Impresa del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología, 1913 [1591]), 105; “es verdad que cada qual dama se precia hazer su nueva invención, y modo de chocolate, con todo esto el mas vsado generalmente en todas las indias, es el formado en tabletas el qual tomo origen de las damas guatemaltecas y este assi mesmo es aquel que se deshaze con su agua caliente y su puntica de dulce, que le da mucha gracia.” 25. Norton, Sacred Gifts. 26. Francisco Hernández, Qvatro Libros (Mexico City: Casa de la Viuda de Diego Lopez Daualos, 1615); Rervm Medicarvm Novae Hispaniae (Romae: Sumptibus Blasij Deuersini, & Zanobij Masotti bibliopolarum, typis Vitalis Mascardi, 1651); Agustín Farfán, Tratado brebe de medicina y de todas las enfermedades (Mexico City: Pedro Ocharte, 1592); Cárdenas, Primera parte; Antonio León Pinelo, Question moral, si el chocolate quebranta el ayuno eclesiastico (Madrid: La viuda de Juan González, 1636); Mariscal Haz, Carta del Padre Pedro. 27. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 28. Hernández, Rervm Medicarvm Novae Hispaniae, 30. The botanical correlation of xochinacaztli with the Linnean classification system appears in Congressional Series of United States Public Documents, vol. 6305 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1912). 29. C. Hermann Berendt, ed., Diccionario maya-español del Convento de San Francisco en Mérida (Mérida, Mexico, 1870), Berendt-Brinton Linguistic Collection, item 3, Ms. Coll. 700, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, 279. See also Oscar Michelon, Diccionario de San Francisco (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1976). 30. Barry L. Isaac, “The Aztec ‘Flowery War’: A Geopolitical Explanation,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 4 (1983): 415–432. 31. Bocabulario de Maya Than, Garrett-Gates Manuscripts, no. 64, sixteenth or seventeenth century, f. 199r; an image of the single page is in the Garrett-Gates Collection of Princeton University, available at http://libweb5 .princeton.edu/mssimages/Garrett-Gates%20Mesoamerican/garrettgatesmeso 64-f64r.jpg. See also René Acuña, ed., Bocabulario de Maya Than de Viena: Codex Vindobonensis N. S. 3833 (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993). 32. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida (Guatemala City: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1932–1933 [1699]), vol. 2, bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 100. 33. Alfredo Barrera Marín, Nomenclatura etnobotánica maya: Una interpreta-

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ción taxonómica (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Centro Regional del Sureste, 1976), 32. 34. In Escalante Arce, Códice Sonsonate, vol. 2, p. 67; “que conste en frutos de la tierra, remitiendo á México, cacao, vainilla, achiote y tinta añir; al Perú, brea, tinta y jarcias; á Sevilla, y á Cádiz, tinta, corambre, bálsamo zarzaparilla, mechoacán . . . nunca ay en Guatemala ropa de China, si no la muy necesaria para su gasto, y muchos años ninguna, y assi no puede cargarla para el Reino del Perú, y más en estos tiempos, que tienen los Olandeses trato, y factoria con la China, como es público, y notorio.” 35. Freedman, Out of the East, 10-12. 36. Paul Jaccard, “Étude comparative de la distribution forale dans une portion des Alpes et des Jura,” Bulletin de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles 37 (1901): 547–579. 37. N. I. Vavilov, “Studies on the Origin of Cultivated Plants,” Bulletin of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding 16, no. 2 (1926): 1–248. 38. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 105. 39. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined” (1903), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2: 1893–1913, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 289–299. 40. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (Alexandria, VA: Cottom and Stewart, 1812 [1747]). 41. Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 681. 42. Carla Martin and Kathryn E. Sampeck, “The Bitter and Sweet of Chocolate in Europe,” “The Social Meaning of Food,” special edition in English, Socio.hu, no. 3 (2015), doi:10.18030/socio.hu.2015en.37. 43. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914. (London: Routledge, 2000); Lowell J. Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 44. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1961), xiii. 45. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile, 2008); Dominique Moran, “Leaving Behind the ‘Total Institution’? Teeth, Transcarceral Spaces, and (Re)Inscription of the Formerly Incarcerated Body,” Gender, Place, and Culture 21, no. 1 (2014): 35–51; George Ritzer and Allan Liska, “‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’: Complementary Perspectives on Contemoprary Tourism,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), 96–112. 46. John Adlam and Christopher Scanlon, “Beyond These Walls: The ‘Total Institution’ of Homelessness,” “Perspectives on Erving Goffman’s ‘Asylums’ Fift y Years On,” special issue, Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2013): 606. 47. Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 687.

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CH A P T ER FOU R

Real Tobacco for Real People: Nicotine and Lacandon Maya Trade JOEL W. PA L K A

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HILE EXCAVATING NINETEENTH-CENT URY L Acandon Maya settlements in the remote forests of Petén, Guatemala, I was surprised to find such large quantities of foreign goods on house floors. Many of these trade items, including white earthenwares, glass bottles, and metal knives, machetes, and axes, for example, could not have been acquired easily. How did the Lacandon end up with so many trade goods, some expensive and rather hard to obtain, and where did they get them? And what did Lacandon people have that outsiders wanted? After perusing archives and early ethnographies, I found the answers to these questions; written sources state that the Lacandon had excellent, cheap tobacco that they freely exchanged for foreign goods. Importantly, archaeology at Lacandon sites demonstrates that trade was much more intense and influential toward culture change than the documents indicate. The combined information from the material and written records helps reconstruct an indigenous perspective on the cultural and economic aspects of indulgences in postconquest Mesoamerica. My focus here is the development of Lacandon Maya trade in the late nineteenth century when loggers, chicle tappers, ranchers, and explorers entered their lowland territory in greater numbers. The frontier economy of indulgences and domestic goods took off at this time, changing Lacandon society. Theirs was not a prestige economy or one based on tribute and societywide consumption of goods such as fine pottery and bulk foods that archaeologists and ethnohistorians often study. This exchange system also was not controlled by states or managed by elites in urban areas. Lacandon Maya culture contact and econ-

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omy fit into what some authors refer to as peripheral zones in world systems,¹ while others consider them symmetrical exchange networks.² Tobacco was a part of the economy in the frontier of colonial powers that was run by Maya households and involved foreign people living in logging camps who acquired the plant opportunistically. This economy was structured by individuals and families who adjusted to maintain social interactions and acquire what they craved and needed in their daily lives. Furthermore, indigenous people and traders alike were hooked on tobacco, and its social importance, together with its cultivation, preparation, and utilization, helped drive the thriving frontier economy and precipitated Lacandon culture change over the past five hundred years. According to many, nothing beats a good cigar except for a cool, fermented drink, like maize beer, liquid chocolate with chile, or balché, and the Lacandon Maya and their ancestors partook in all of these indulgences before the Spanish conquest. Studies have treated the historical and religious importance of tobacco in the Maya region, but few investigators have focused on the social and economic significance of tobacco in cultural transformation. People become addicted to it, use it for social and medicinal purposes, and seek to obtain it, as they do with alcohol and even chocolate. The economies and politics of alcohol that Schwartzkopf (chapter 2), Bristol (chapter 5), and Pezzarossi (chapter 6) discuss parallel or even compound that of tobacco; facets of the consumption of cacao and chocolate presented by Sampeck and Thayn (chapter 3) and Pezzarossi (chapter 6) are elements in the Lacandon world as well. In the past, Lacandon Maya smoked cigars of native tobacco called hach k’uuts (also spelled jach k’uuts or “real tobacco”; cigarettes are merely k’uuts, “tobacco”), and they extensively cultivated plants that tasted better than other tobaccos. Moreover, they added aromatic tree resins and barks to make it even more enjoyable, such as the sweet-smelling najb’aj.³ Tobacco was offered to Lacandon gods and traded to neighbors of the Lacandon, such as Tzeltal Maya, who used it for ritual purposes. Besides the biological and religious reasons for partaking of tobacco, Lacandon people smoked cigars socially and to enjoy their soothing effects, in addition to sharing them with foreign traders. Many of my evenings have been spent smoking native cigars with Lacandon friends while talking about current events. Tobacco’s history as a Maya indulgence and an important trade item is a long one.

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FIGUR E 4.1. Colonial-period European illustration of a tobacco plant and cigar smoking. “Nicotiana inserta infundibulo ex quo hauriunt fumu˜ Indi & naucleri,” from Stirpium aduersaria noua, perfacilis vestigatio . . . , by Pierre Pena (attr. Matthias de l’Obel), 1571, 252. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

TOBACCO AND THE M AYA In the Americas, tobacco was likely first discovered and cultivated in southern and western South America where the greatest varieties of the plant and its relatives, such as petunias, are found.4 Tiny, round tobacco seeds are reported from Peru around 2500–1800 BCE,5 and investigators have identified nicotine residues in smoking pipes from the Atacama Desert in Chile beginning around 1500 BCE.6 Some varieties of tobacco were also likely domesticated in Mesoamerica. While tobacco remains have not been found in Mesoamerica in such early periods, archaeologists have recovered carbonized tobacco seeds in the southwestern United States dating to 398–169 BCE.7 Certainly tobacco was domesticated and traded in Mesoamerica before this time, and then the plant spread north along exchange routes. Tobacco, a potent stimulant, is in the nightshade family (Solanaceae sp., figure 4.1), which also includes potatoes and eggplants.8 Maya have utilized two main domesticated tobaccos, Nicotiana tabacum, the more common, milder form, and Nicotiana rustica, the stronger and often irri-

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tating variety consumed by seasoned smokers or used in rituals because of its concentrated nicotine content. The large amounts of nicotine in tobacco, roughly 1.5 to 4 percent depending on the species and growing techniques, ensure that the plant’s use is addictive. Tobacco contains other alkaloids similar to nicotine, such as nornicotine and anabasine, that enhance its addictive and pleasurable effects on the human brain.9 Humans helped select the high alkaloid content in tobacco while domesticating it, but the presence of these chemicals and their enjoyment through taste and smell (and even touch and sight) has ensured the survival of the plant. The generation of tobacco smoke uniquely separates this substance from other indulgences.¹0 Furthermore, the soft, smooth, leathery feel of tobacco leaves and cigars adds to the pleasure of smoking. The warm glow of a lighted cigar or pipe is a sign of usable tobacco, and it may have been comforting. At the same time, tobacco’s practical uses as a stimulant, insecticide (for keeping bugs away and removing bot fly larvae from the skin, for example), pain reliever, stress reliever, and appetite suppressor cannot be overstated, especially in the rainforest frontier. Tobacco has been important in religion as well; hence Maya obtained it for use in rituals and as offerings to gods. In Mesoamerica, people enjoyed tobacco through various native technologies, mainly by smoking it in ceramic pipes and tubes or as cigars and corn-husk cigarettes. People also ingested it with powdered lime as a snuff or chewing wad. Social contexts and the plant’s pleasurable effects structured tobacco’s use among Aztec populations such as during feasts, giving of gifts, after meals, and while drinking cacao beverages. Norton notes that tobacco “makes one drunk, it aids one’s digestion, makes one dizzy, and destroys hunger.”¹¹ The adding of cacao, vanilla, mushrooms, and flowers to tobacco by Aztec people, much like cigarillo manufacturers do today (even mango, grape, cherry, and pineapple flavorings are added now), demonstrates that tasty tobacco was a central indulgence.¹² Ch’orti Maya mixed alcohol or molasses in their cigars.¹³ In the Nahuatl language of central Mexico, tobacco, powdered tobacco, and wrapped tobacco leaves were called picietl (pikiyetl or pisiyetl),¹4 which was also the term, or its borrowed approximation, puquiet or pukuiet, used by the Ch’olti’ Lacandon of lowland Chiapas for smoking tubes or wrapped cigars.¹5 The word “tobacco” comes from the Caribbean Taíno, who called the plant, smoking tubes, and cigars tobako. “Cigar” likely comes from the Lacandon Yucatec Mayan term sigal or sikar that describes this form for smoking tobacco leaves; the term’s equivalent is sik’, sig, or sikar in K’iche’ Mayan.¹6 Alternatively, the Mayan term sikar may have been derived from the English cigar or Spanish 106

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FIGUR E 4.2. (a) Small Late Classic Maya ceramic bottle with painted hieroglyphs “u may” (tobacco-lime snuff), drawing by Joel Palka, after Zagorevski and Loughmiller-Newman, “Detection of Nicotine,” 404, fig. 1; (b) Postclassic depiction of Maya god with tobacco leaves identified by the glyphs “tu kuutz” (his tobacco) in upper left corner, Dresden Codex, p. 12, image courtesy of Gabrielle Vail and Christine Hernández, Maya Codices Database, version 4.1 (2013), http://www .mayacodices.org/.

cigarro. Other common Mayan words are k’uuts for tobacco leaves or cigars and may for ground tobacco snuff mixed with powdered lime. Lowland Maya consumed and exchanged tobacco widely before the Spanish conquest. Early evidence of tobacco use can be found in Maya art and the ceramic “poison” or snuff bottles of the Classic Period (ca. 600–800 CE).¹7 Recently, investigators identified the presence of nicotine in a Classic Maya snuff bottle through mass spectrometry (figure 4.2).¹8 Maya used this flask to store tobacco and lime snuff that they likely applied to their mouths with spatulas, as seen on the Classic Period murals at Calakmul,¹9 as well as in the ethnographic record.²0 Maya exchanged this indulgence, as witnessed by the widespread trade of these flasks. Archaeologists recovered tobacco seeds stored in a gourd in a Classic Period household buried in volcanic ash at Joya de Cerén, El Salvador,²¹ that were likely destined to be planted in nearby gardens. Numerous Classic Maya ceramic vessels depict cigar and cigarette smoking. One stone carving from Palenque shows God L (figure 4.3), a 107

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FIGUR E 4.3. Smoking in Maya art: (a) God L with cigar and forehead smoking tube, Classic Period, Temple of the Cross, Palenque. Drawing by Joel Palka, after Robicsek, The Smoking Gods, 116, fig. 131; (b) noble with a cigar, Classic Period, incised shell, drawing by Joel Palka, after Robicsek, 140, fig. 155; (c) Postclassic god with a cigar, Madrid Codex, p. 88, image courtesy of Gabrielle Vail and Christine Hernández, Maya Codices Database, version 4.1 (2013), http://www.mayacodices.org/.

deity associated with commerce (and tobacco trade?), smoking a large cigar or tied tobacco leaves. The Late Postclassic (ca. 1500 CE) Maya codices contain depictions of gods smoking cigars and holding the leaves (figure 4.3) since they too enjoy tobacco (spelled ku-tzi or k’uh-tzi for k’uutz in codices). It is possible that ancient Maya used bone and ceramic tubes (figures 4.4 and 4.5) commonly found in archaeological sites for smoking tobacco.²² These artifacts may be represented as the smoking tube in the forehead of God K (K’awiil) commonly shown in Maya art. The rich iconography supports the social, religious, and economic importance of tobacco for Maya people, especially nobles, before Spanish contact. Tobacco continued to be a major Maya indulgence at the time of the 108

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Spanish conquest. It was either smoked or used as a snuff, as described in historical sources.²³ Spanish conquerors recorded the use of painted tubes of hardened clay to smoke tobacco among the Ch’olti’ Mayanspeaking Lacandon of the town of Sac Bahlam:²4 “they smoked puquittes, which are cigars more than three cuartos (hand spans) in length and as wide as a fat thumb, made of leaves of nance coated with yellow clay and painted in other colors, stuffed with tobacco . . . and [they] made them in quantity for trade.”²5 Spanish documents mention the brisk tobacco trade of unconquered Maya in the lowlands from the 1500s to the end of the colonial period. Interestingly, a human incisor identified by physical anthropologists at a Late Postclassic to early colonial period (ca. 1500–1650 CE) burial shrine in remote Maya territory at Lake Mensabak (near Najá), Chiapas, Mexico,²6 was stained brown from extensive tobacco use (figure 4.5). Ceramic tubes found in adjacent habitation zones may have been used for smoking the tobacco as described above (figure 4.5). The historic and archaeological evidence suggests that tobacco smoking was not confined to Maya elites at the time of conquest.

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FIGUR E 4.4. (a) Ancient Maya bone tube with scroll or smoke designs, drawing by Joel Palka, after Hammond, Cuello, 184, fig. 8.37; (b) Aztec composite smoking tubes, reeds, or pipes, illustration of f. 336r, bk. IX, Florentine Codex, from a collection held by the Tozzer Library, Harvard University, of color plates made by James Cooper Clark of Historia de las cosas de Nueva España; image courtesy of the Tozzer Library, Harvard University. 109

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(a) FIGUR E 4.5. (a) Tobaccostained human tooth from a Maya burial shrine, photograph by Joel Palka; (b) ceramic tube fragment with scrolling, photograph courtesy of Chris Hernández. Both are from Late Postclassic to Historic Period Maya sites at Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico.

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FIGUR E 4.6. Tobacco leaves braided into rope and rolled into bundles for export in nineteenth-century Spanish Puerto Rico. Image reproduced from de Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 360.

When smoking became the craze in Europe in the 1600s, commerce in tobacco boomed (figure 4.6), which reinforced its economic importance.²7 Spanish colonial powers controlled the cultivation of tobacco and the processing of whole and ground leaves to generate extensive revenues for the crown, as occurred with the economies of chocolate and alcohol.²8 People paid taxes in tobacco in the New World, and the colonial and later republican (ca. 1825–1900) governments managed the pricing and distribution of this valuable commodity. Tobacco control was unpopular, however, as seen in 1865 when a tax collector in Petén, Guatemala, attempted to extract money from persons dedicated to growing this cash crop. In reaction to the tax, the angry tobacco farmers killed the intruding official.²9 People were so hooked on smoking the plant and using it for social and medicinal purposes that they sought more of it. Surprisingly, in one estimate gleaned from historic sources, approximately 25,000 mules moved tobacco in late colonial period Mexico in one year, while only 3,500 mules carried silver bars in a year.³0 From 1650 to 1700, officials in Seville registered an impressive 1,333,400 pounds of tobacco from New Spain and Venezuela.³¹ By the early nineteenth century, the government sale of tobacco became the most signif111

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icant source of income for the Spanish crown—it accounted for half of all revenue.³² Wealth from tobacco prompted individuals and municipalities to invest in cultivation of the plant even in remote frontier areas in the nineteenth century.³³ The plant was subsequently grown on a grand scale throughout the New World colonies and in Europe, but still the hidden tobacco trade in the Maya lowland frontier flourished. Lacandon Maya tobacco retained its importance in the local exchange system in remote lowland areas since it was cheap, untaxed, abundant, of high quality, and easy to acquire. The increased desire for and production of the plant helped Lacandon Maya enter the emerging global economy.

LACANDON M AYA AND THE TOBACCO TR ADE Lacandon people (jach winik, “real people”) are descendants of unconquered Maya groups in the lowland frontier of colonial period Petén, Guatemala, and Chiapas, Mexico.³4 At this time, various Maya peoples fleeing the Spanish conquest in Yucatan, highland Chiapas, and central Petén entered the Lacandon forests (figure 4.7). These Maya migrants intermarried with indigenous populations, leading to the ethnogenesis of different Lacandon Maya groups. Over the past 150 years, Lacandon people have lived in single- or extended-family clearings in the forest near their fields. The Lacandon practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and house gardening to grow a large variety of food crops and other plants, especially tobacco. Their settlements, such as Najá and nearby Mensabak, were led by male heads of households who were informal politico-religious leaders and traders. Lacandon religion was based on maintaining balance in the world by giving offerings while praying to spiritual forces. Lacandon men communicated with deities in god houses within their settlements and in caves and Maya ruins for health and bountiful harvests. Social interaction and trade typically took place between Lacandon families within a day’s walk, but Lacandon men occasionally made longer trading expeditions to towns, villages, and logging or chicle camps surrounding their territory; among these stops were Palenque, Ocosingo, and Tenosique in Mexico and Flores and Sayaxche in Petén, Guatemala. Mexican and Guatemalan wood-cutting concessions and land reform in the late nineteenth century opened up the frontier near Lacandon territory for economic development and settlement by outsiders. The influx of foreign people displaced Lacandon families who then 112

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FIGUR E 4.7. Southern Maya lowlands, Lacandon region, archaeological sites, and colonial towns in Chiapas, Mexico, and Petén, Guatemala. Map by Jack Scott.

sought social interaction and trade with outsiders.³5 The more intensified cultural contact at this time resulted in increased trade and economic transformation for Lacandon Maya. Lacandon people desired metal tools, salt, decorated pottery, cloth, coffee, sugar, and medicine, and these goods became necessities. Outsiders needed food (meat, corn, fruit, and vegetables), beeswax, incense, cacao, animal skins, and honey from the Lacandon. They also wanted the high-quality, cheap tobacco that the Lacandon had in large quantities. For the Lacandon, the trade in tobacco was ideal; they had few competitors for the quality and price of their tobacco, and the leaves and cigars were lighter than other goods, so tobacco was more easily transported to settlements across the frontier (typically one to four days’ walk). Frans Blom and Gertrude Duby describe how the sharing of indulgences brought trade partners of different cultural traditions together and helped structure the interaction: The Lacandon of Puná [Chiapas] know of coffee and once in a while they trek to coffee plantations to acquire it. They very much like coffee and many times we had to offer them a sweet cup of coffee and cigarettes, which vary from their terribly strong cigars that they make and smoke on a daily basis. [Lacandon] fields are very clean and particularly those with tobacco, 113

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which is their only commercial crop. One Lacandon told us not to use the tobacco patch [for the bathroom] since the tobacco is smoked.³6

Indulgences were a big part of the frontier exchange; Lacandon Maya provided the tasty tobacco that outsiders craved, and the foreigners brought coffee and alcohol to open the negotiations.³7 Tobacco may have started as an indulgence used to show goodwill during interactions, but it quickly became the desired good. Outsiders most frequently described Lacandon tobacco as being “excellent” more often than “cheap” or “plentiful,” indicating that they focused on its taste and intoxicating aspects over anything else. The emphasis of taste in tobacco echoes similar concerns in chocolate that Sampeck and Thayn analyze in chapter 3. The nineteenth-century Lacandon tobacco trade became part of the deep history of indigenous and European interaction centered on the production of this plant, much like the chocolate trade did. The economy was concentrated at the household level to fuel the acquisition of metal tools and other foreign goods in regional, informal exchange systems that existed in the postconquest Americas.³8 For present-day Lacandon Maya, domesticated tobacco (jach k’uuts) remains a special plant (figure 4.8). Its smoke rises to form rain clouds, and Lacandon gods enjoy the aroma and also smoke tobacco. The intoxication from smoking strong tobacco allows the Lacandon to communicate with deities and enter spiritual realms. Lacandon people also say tobacco plants, cigars, and their smoke keep away bugs, snakes, and malevolent beings. For them tobacco is an important medicinal plant when smoked, snuffed, chewed, and applied to the body for curing. Practically everyone in Lacandon society partakes in its powers and pleasures, even kids. Cigars allow for social interaction when a smoker crosses into the personal space of a good friend to light a new cigar tip to tip. Spiritual forces are given the products of the Lacandon tobacco harvest each year before people may indulge in it (figure 4.9). The gods made the tobacco, so they enjoy it first. Lacandon men reserve places in their fields to grow tobacco. They plant corn and beans, and then they blow tobacco seeds among their maturing crops. This allows the tobacco to grow after the crops have withered. Tobacco is also grown in a cluster (a “tabacal” in the written sources) on plots that are sometimes hidden from thieves. Blom and Duby recount a Lacandon man near San Quintin taking this kind of precaution: “Vicente has much tobacco planted in his lands far away to avoid having it stolen by local Tzeltal Maya.”³9 Lacandon harvest 114

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FIGUR E 4.8. Lacandon man in his tobacco field, Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. Photograph by Joel Palka.

FIGUR E 4.9. Lacandon pot, Maya god smoking a cigar offering. After Tozzer, A Comparative Study of the Mayas and Lacandones, plate XXI, fig. 1.

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FIGUR E 4.10. Freshly rolled Lacandon Maya cigars. Photograph by Joel Palka.

tobacco twice a year, just like their corn crops. However, tobacco plants use substantial amounts of soil nutrients, so the tobacco patches are only fertile for up to three years.40 Lacandon spend more time caring for their tobacco plants than they do for their corn. They plant the tobacco after the corn has finished tasseling, for they claim the pollen harms the tobacco.4¹ After the tobacco has grown, plants of various stages of growth are thinned twice to ensure room for the remaining stalks. Later, some leaves are removed so that the surviving ones become thicker and less bitter. Thus, the leaves are better for smoking from this careful treatment. Other people in the region do not grow the large quantity or high quality of tobacco that the Lacandon produce.4² At the end of the growing season, the Lacandon cut tobacco stalks and leaves and hang them to dry under special roofs in their fields. After the leaves dry for a few weeks, they remove the stems and leaves and wad them up. These wads become the cores for cigars, which are wrapped in tough tobacco leaves (figure 4.10). Sometimes sweet-smelling tree barks or bits of vanilla are added to the cores.4³ In the past the Lacandon smoked tobacco on a daily basis, and it was a main offering for their gods; thus much more was produced then. Tobacco was also a central cash crop, and Lacandon acquired wealth by growing lots of it.44 116

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The larger tobacco crops ripen in June and July, when they are sold, but the Lacandon have even received credit from outsiders, which is normally hard to get, until the desired tobacco is ready.45

CH ANGES IN LACANDON LIFEWAYS Outsiders in the lowland frontier wanted what the Lacandon Maya frequently used and enjoyed: excellent tobacco at a good price. The Lacandon readily provided it to acquire trade goods and bolster their household economies. Written sources regarding economic exchange with Lacandon Maya overwhelmingly state that outsiders traded for Lacandon tobacco.46 Many historical sources mention that Lacandon tobacco was of high quality and inexpensive. At the same time, Lacandon people acquired cheaply what they needed for a little homegrown tobacco (figures 4.11 and 4.12). Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge attest to excellent deals for both sides: “From the distant, shy Lacandones a little tobacco of fine grade comes out, in exchange for salt, dogs,

FIGUR E 4.11. Foreign trade goods from the nineteenthcentury Lacandon site of El Caobal, Petén, Guatemala: (a) Blue Willow ware. Middle: projectile points from window glass, iron machete fragment, and metal fishhook. (b) Machete. Photographs by Joel Palka.

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FIGUR E 4.12. Household trade items from the Lacandon site of El Caobal, Petén: (a) Blue Willow platter; (b) painted whiteware bowl; (c) white cup; (d) clear medicine bottle; (e) metal file; (f) wine bottle; (g) scissors; (h) metal pot; and (i) machete. Drawings by Luis Fernando Luín.

powder for flint-locks, and aguardiente.”47 The goods Lacandon people received in exchange contributed to significant social, economic, and religious changes in their society. Foreigners perceived tobacco as an indulgence, a necessary medicinal plant, and something to sell to make money. Lacandon people used the prized plant for economic prosperity. The brisk frontier trade explains my archaeological findings of abundant foreign goods in nineteenth-century Lacandon sites. The Lacandon tobacco trade underwrote the expansion of their domestic economy. This economy rests within the less known quotidian aspects of Maya archaeological and historical research—the lives of everyday people surviving in family units in peripheral areas. The effects of Spanish colonization on indigenous society and economy may have shifted tobacco from the elite Maya ritual economy to largely a domestic one focused on household production and local exchange. Mostly, the tobacco trade involved small transactions between people at random times, and it kept folks in logging camps and towns happily smoking. For Lacandon Maya, the plant was important culturally, and it was easily grown 118

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and packaged to trade for things they could not make, such as machetes and axes, which became household necessities. This economy of indulgences, small-scale interaction, and domestic lifeways has dominated frontier societies and was an engine for culture change in Mesoamerica and perhaps elsewhere. At the mid- to late nineteenth-century village called La Palmera, a multiethnic settlement of Yucatec, Lacandon, and possibly Itzaj Maya located in the ruins of Tikal in central Petén, archaeologists recovered several fragments of English-made kaolin clay pipes and examples of locally made red ceramic ones (figure 4.13).48 These finds indicate that tobacco was important to the inhabitants, and they likely traded it for the abundant decorated pottery, medicine bottles, guns, and metal tools found at the site.49 The artifacts recovered from Lacandon household archaeology in southern Petén, like those at El Caobal and Matamangos, include numerous machetes and machete fragments, iron axes, examples of white earthenware pottery with painted designs, glass bottles, and metal items such as fishhooks, a harpoon, scissors, pendants, and wire fragments.50 The Lacandon sites existed in remote places hidden in the rain forest; the native inhabitants had to travel to towns or logging camps in the region to acquire the trade goods. The increased availability of metal tools led to changes in Lacandon agricultural production and subsistence. The Lacandon men made larger fields and more of them once the metal axes and machetes enabled them to clear the forest more easily. They were able to more read-

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FIGUR E 4.13. Nineteenth-century tobacco pipes from La Palmera in the ruins of Tikal, Petén, Guatemala: (a) Maya-made red ceramic pipe with molded face. Photograph by Joel Palka. (b) English kaolin clay pipe stem. Photograph courtesy of James Meierhoff. 119

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ily move their fields, and subsequently their settlements, with the use of foreign metal tools. Importantly, Lacandon Maya involved in trade had to produce more tobacco. Their changing agricultural systems, such as larger fields and dedicated tobacco plots, allowed them to do so. Lacandon Maya traditionally grew the plant in their cornfields, but after the increasing trade in the late nineteenth century, they also concentrated it in large plots. Since tobacco quickly uses up nutrients in the thin tropical soils, they had to shift their fields and houses more often. The changes in horticulture and settlement patterns, in addition to the reliance of Lacandon Maya on metal tools, ensured the continuation of foreign trade, interaction with outsiders, and the subsequent population movements to new agricultural lands. Lacandon Maya learned to package and weigh tobacco bundles (figure 4.14; manojos in the Spanish sources) for foreign purchase, even as they continued to trade tobacco leaves and cigars as well. They learned these skills and how to determine the specific value (in pesos and weight) of tobacco from outsiders, particularly from early twentiethcentury chicle gatherers,5¹ and perhaps earlier from Aztec and Spanish merchants. Lacandon use the term sonte, which they borrowed from the Nahuatl tzontle for the number 400 in late preconquest or colonial times.5² A balance of two gourds, which is shown in colonial documents and used by Lacandon traders, was usually employed with a stone weighing about one kilogram to check the weight of tobacco bundles. These bundles were then wrapped in cloth and tied with strips of the inner bark of the balsa tree. The Lacandon community of Najá, Chiapas, supplied periodic mule trains with enough tobacco to sell at local markets. Photographs of this Lacandon settlement frequently show the dried leaves of tobacco and cigars for indigenous use, but the specially wrapped and weighed tobacco bundles for trade are also present in the images.5³ It is obvious that capitalism and consumerism became prevalent in the Lacandon forest in the twentieth century. Further culture changes occurred as Lacandon men sought multiple wives more often to help with the tobacco processing and trade. Lacandon women worked harder in the larger tobacco fields, and they created the numerous tobacco bundles for trade.54 More wives meant that more tobacco could be grown and packaged. Because of their importance in the local and domestic economies, Lacandon women gained power in their households. Some coerced their husbands into traveling to towns to trade for tools, pots, utensils, cloth, food, and jewelry by withholding their labor in the preparation of trade goods and food if the men refused to make the trips. 120

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FIGUR E 4.14. Lacandon man smoking and using a gourd balance to weigh a tobacco bundle for trade. Photograph by Gertrude Blom, courtesy of Asociación Cultural Na Bolom.

Transformations in Lacandon religion followed the growth in trade and interaction with outsiders.55 The deity of trade and foreigners, Akyantho’, became elevated in Lacandon beliefs or was perhaps even created in the nineteenth century. According to Lacandon beliefs, Akyantho’ or possibly Akyanto’ (ak santo, “our saint”?) brought trade goods such as machetes, guns, axes, and knives along with disease, subjugation, and conflict to Lacandon communities. Lacandon created a ceramic incense burner to communicate with this god during certain rites. Lacandon men burned incense to this deity to continue the flow of foreign items but also to ward off disease and misfortune from the outside world. Another possible religious change in Lacandon society following 121

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the rise in trade was the creation or increased importance of the “first fruits of tobacco” ceremony.56 This rite became one of the main Lacandon agricultural ceremonies. In this rite Lacandon men brought tobacco leaves and cigars to the god house immediately after the harvest of this economically and culturally important plant. They burned incense to the gods and offered them thanks for the tobacco by placing lighted cigars in the mouths of the god pots for these spiritual beings to pleasurably smoke. Then the men enjoyed the cigars, but the gods had to partake of the new crop before people did. It is conceivable that Lacandon women began to smoke more tobacco following the increase in trade with outsiders and in the tobacco supply. Blom and Duby mention that during their visits to Lacandon settlements Lacandon women smoked the same very large kind of cigars the men did and had done so since they were children.57 However, they note that an earlier anthropologist, Jacques Soustelle, stated that Lacandon women did not smoke. Historical sources link tobacco use largely with indigenous men in the colonial period as well.58 However, it is possible that Lacandon women always smoked tobacco as often as men.

LACANDON TOBACCO IN THE FRONTIER For the Lacandon Maya and their ancestors, tobacco, which was widely grown, had significant cultural and economic value. More than likely, tobacco was an important trade good in the Maya region since the beginning of agriculture and the creation of trade networks. From the Spanish colonial period to the present, Lacandon tobacco trade was a central part of the hidden economy in the unspecialized peripheries and remote culture contact zones of world systems.59 Far from the colonial core, frontier people were able to circumvent government management and taxation on the plant, and they obtained tobacco readily and cheaply from the Lacandon Maya. At the same time, tobacco trade constituted a symmetrical exchange, or nonhierarchical interaction, that created an economic interdependence and social symbiosis between different cultural groups in contact in this region.60 The equal and random exchange in these zones encouraged the generation of surpluses, which affected household labor production. The interaction was long-term, far-ranging, and stable since social ties were sustained and each group required trade items from the others. Further, this type of exchange introduced culture change among the various participants but allowed for the maintenance of cultural diversity, including indigenous 122

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Maya lifeways, in the periphery since one group did not subjugate the other. The giving of gifts in this economy and the curative powers of tobacco contributed to its importance as an indulgence, as did the ability to acquire cheap necessities from other groups; outsiders considered machetes cheap to trade for excellent native tobacco, whereas Lacandon got foreign metal tools merely by growing tobacco. The addictive properties of tobacco also explain its widespread use in Maya society and its overall economic importance. People have long enjoyed using tobacco because of its chemical properties and pleasant taste, and its allure resulted in the plant’s elevation as a central domesticate and significant trade item. As an indulgence, tobacco brought people together in the Lacandon frontier region. It is doubtful whether Lacandon people would have been able to acquire the quantity and quality of foreign trade goods found archaeologically in their settlements if they did not have this cheap, easily transported, deliciously addictive, and cross-culturally important plant. Trade and interaction between the Lacandon Maya and foreigners increased during the nineteenth century when loggers, chicle tappers, missionaries, and merchants entered Lacandon territory in larger numbers. Lacandon people traded more at this time by visiting the numerous camps and towns to obtain foreign goods more often. Thus, the greater production and distribution of Lacandon tobacco helped accelerate the growth of the frontier economy, especially for indigenous groups. Lacandon used foreign interest and addiction to their tobacco to acquire the things they needed from the outside world. The thriving economy and interaction with outsiders had various effects on Lacandon lifeways in the nineteenth century. Lacandon transformed their agricultural practices to meet the demand of the tobacco trade, and their increased use of metal tools affected their subsistence practices. Moreover, Lacandon men took additional wives to help work the fields and prepare tobacco for exchange. These changing marriage practices led to shifts in social structure, including the size and makeup of Lacandon families, marriage and political alliances, and the socioeconomic lives of Lacandon men and women. The cultural and economic changes led to transformations in Lacandon religious beliefs, such as the rise of Akyantho’, the god of foreigners, disease, and trade. Written sources attest to the increase in conflicts and disease that affected Lacandon social networks and families at the time of the nineteenth-century interaction, in part as a consequence of expanded trade. Importantly, the Lacandon tobacco trade was carried out on a small scale by men and women in single or extended families. Relatively 123

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small amounts of the dried plant and cigars were exchanged in this domestic economy of the frontier. The exchange was unstructured, since Lacandon men would travel to outsiders’ settlements to trade tobacco when they desired foreign goods. Tobacco was exchanged only when it became available. Therefore, this product was not a necessity like food, and it was not in constant supply. Each side set the prices and quantities of the goods exchanged. Hence, the Lacandon trade was not organized by leaders, nor was tobacco a high-status, elite good obtained through craft specialists or state political negotiations. It was not produced and sold in a marketplace until Lacandon began to sell their cigars in merchant stalls at the ruins of Palenque. Visitors to the Lacandon region, especially people traveling to the ancient Maya ruins near their communities, still buy native tobacco. Today, Lacandon tobacco is sold in the form of cigars or ground up for pipe smoking, but the quantities are miniscule compared to those of a century ago. Tobacco is widely available and inexpensive, yet grown and smoked less in the region. Recently I suggested that Lacandon merchants consider making smaller cigarillos of their fine tobacco due to their popularity in the United States. Soon afterward, I saw small packages of Lacandon cigarillos (mehen k’uuts) for sale at the ruins of Palenque alongside the larger cigars. Lacandon cigars have gotten smaller as the Lacandon have stretched the tobacco crop to make more money by selling more cigars from the same amount of tobacco. They have learned to adapt to changes in the market and maximize their earnings from outsiders. Interestingly, while foreigners indulge in Lacandon tobacco, indigenous consumption has fallen off dramatically, from several cigars a day to none. Lacandon people learned that smoking is bad for their health. Besides its adverse effects, “real tobacco” is no longer crucial to the cultural practices, economy, and religion of the “real people,” so they stopped smoking it. Modern economics, wage labor, and medical warnings have led to further Lacandon cultural changes, and once again they have innovated for their benefit. NOTES 1. Georgia L. Fox, The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015); Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, “Spatial Structure of the Mesoamerican World System,” in The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, ed. Michael E. Smith and Francis F. Berdan (Provo: University of Utah Press, 2003), 21–34; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 124

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2. Rani T. Alexander, “Afterword: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact,” in Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, ed. James G. Cusick, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper no. 25. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1998), 476– 496; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. Suzanne Cook, The Forest of the Lacandon Maya: An Ethnobotanical Guide (New York: Springer, 2016), 208; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’sEye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002). 4. Joseph C. Winter, “Botanical Description of the North American Tobacco Species,” in Tobacco Use by Native Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 90, 87–127. 5. Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 4. 6. Carolina Carrasco et al., “De pipas y sustancias: Costumbres fumatorias durante el período formativo en el litoral del desierto Atacama (norte de Chile),” Latin American Antiquity 26, no. 2 (2015): 143–161. 7. Karen R. Adams and Mollie S. Toll, “Tobacco Use, Ecology, and Manipulation in the Prehistoric and Historic Southwestern United States,” in Tobacco Use by Native Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 152, 143–170. 8. Francis Robicsek, The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 1. 9. Joseph C. Winter, “Food of the Gods: Biochemistry, Addiction, and the Development of Native American Tobacco Use,” in Tobacco Use by Native Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 317, 305–330. 10. See Norton’s foreword and the introduction to this volume. 11. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 20. 12. Winter, “Food of the Gods,” 305. 13. Robicsek, Smoking Gods, 20. 14. Ibid., 29–30. 15. Ibid., 13, 20. 16. Ibid., 14, 58. 17. Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 114–116. 18. Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal and Dimitri V. Zagorevski, “Maya Flasks: The ‘Home’ of Tobacco and Godly Substances,” Ancient Mesoamerica 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–12; Dimitri V. Zagorevski and Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Newman, “The Detection of Nicotine in a Late Mayan Period Flask by Gas Chromatography and Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry Methods,” Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 26 (2012): 403–411. 125

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19. Simon Martin, “Hieroglyphs from the Painted Pyramid: The Epigraphy of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1–4, Calakmul, Mexico,” in Maya Archaeology 2, ed. Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore (San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, 2012), 66, 60–81, http://www.mesoweb. com/articles/Martin2012.pdf. 20. J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 110. 21. Payson Sheets and Scott E. Simmons, “Household Production and Specialization at Cerén,” in Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Cerén Village in Central America, ed. Payson Sheets (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 182, 178–183. 22. Norman Hammond, ed., Cuello: An Early Maya Community in Belize (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181–183; Gordon R. Willey et al., Prehistoric Maya Settlements in the Belize River Valley, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 54 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1965), 494–499. 23. Thompson, Maya History and Religion. 24. Jan de Vos, Vivir en frontera: La experiencia de los indios de Chiapas (Tlalpan, Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1997), 142–143. 25. Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, History of the Conquest of the Province of the Itza, ed. Frank E. Comparato (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1983 [1701]), 199–200. 26. Andrea Cucina, Vera Tiesler, and Joel Palka, “The Identity and Worship of Human Remains in Rockshelter Shrines among the Northern Lacandons of Mensabak,” Estudios de Cultura Maya 45 (2015): 141–169; Vera Tiesler, personal communication, 2013. 27. The introduction to this volume provides an overview of the economic trajectories for tobacco in colonial commerce. 28. For detailed discussion of alcohol, see Bristol (chapter 5), Schwartzkopf (chapter 2), and Pezzarossi (chapter 6); for chocolate, see Sampeck and Thayn (chapter 3) and Pezzarossi (chapter 6). 29. Terry Rugeley, “The Caste War in Guatemala,” Saastun 3 (1997): 86. 30. Clara Elena Súarez Arguello, “De mercado libre a monopolio estatal: La producción tabacalera en Nueva España, 1760–1800,” in Caminos y mercados de México, ed. Janet Long Towell and Amalia Attonlini Lecón (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010), 429, 411–434. 31. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 162. 32. Robert W. Patch, Indians and the Political Economy of Colonial Central America, 1670–1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 32. 33. Rugeley, “Caste War in Guatemala,” 72–73. 34. Joel W. Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 35. Ibid.; Joel W. Palka, “Lacandon Maya Culture Change and Survival in 126

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the Lowland Frontier of the Expanding Guatemalan and Mexican Republics,” in Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, ed. James G. Cusick, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper no. 25 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1998), 457–475. 36. Frans F. Blom and Gertrude Duby, La selva lacandona (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1955), 79. 37. Phillip Baer and Mary Baer, “Materials on Lacandon Culture of the Pethá (Pelhá) Region,” Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1950), 171; Blom and Duby, La selva lacandona, 73. 38. Norton, Sacred Gifts, 148–151. 39. Blom and Duby, La selva lacandona, 85. 40. Ibid., 80. 41. Baer and Baer, “Materials on Lacandon Culture,” 152, 168. 42. Ibid., 169. 43. Ibid., 47–48. 44. Ibid., 152. 45. Ibid., 154. 46. Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 198, 207, 210. 47. Frans F. Blom and Oliver La Farge, Tribes and Temples: A Record of the Expedition to Middle America, Middle American Research Institute, publication 1 (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1926), 386. 48. James Meierhoff, personal communication, 2016. 49. Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 155–162. 50. Ibid., 130–142. 51. Baer and Baer, “Materials on Lacandon Culture,” 170. 52. Robert D. Bruce, “Death and Rebirth of the Gods (The Lacandon Maya Incense Burner Renewal Ceremony)” (1970), 212n31, manuscript in possession of the author. 53. Blom and Duby, La selva lacandona, 148, 372. 54. Frans F. Blom and Gertrude Duby, Andanzas arqueológicas (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1957), 194. 55. Joel W. Palka, “Historical Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change in Mesoamerica,” Journal of Archaeological Research 17 (2009): 297–346. 56. Baer and Baer, “Materials on Lacandon Culture,” 280. 57. Blom and Duby, La selva lacandona, 80. 58. Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, History of the Conquest, 200. 59. Smith and Berdan, “Spatial Structure,” 24, 29; White, Middle Ground; Wolf, Europe and the People without History. 60. Alexander, “Afterword,” 486–487.

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CH A P T ER F I V E

Health Food and Diabolic Vice: Pulque Discourse in New Spain JOA N BR I S TOL

M

ESOA MER ICANS H AVE CONSUMED PULQUE, A thick, milky, highly perishable beverage made by fermenting maguey juice, for thousands of years, although the degree to which it was widely consumed before the conquest is a matter of debate, bound up in ideas about Spanish-indigenous contact. Some scholars, following Sahagún’s sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, claim that preconquest consumption among the Nahua was limited to the elderly, ill, and religious leaders and that widespread consumption and abuse were a result of indigenous despair under Spanish rule.¹ Others contend that Mesoamericans drank pulque recreationally before 1521, particularly in Oaxaca and areas farther away from the center of Aztec domination, although consumption may have increased after the conquest.² What is clear is that questions of moderation and abuse have been part of pulque discourse since before the conquest. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Spaniards, castas, and blacks joined indigenous people in drinking pulque in public and private spaces, although pulque was always rhetorically associated with the overlapping categories of indigenous people and laborers. Beginning in the 1920s, Mexican government officials crafted policies meant to replace pulque with beer as a working-class staple, since beer was seen as representing European culture and progress. Pulque consumption decreased markedly.³ In the twenty-first century, young middle-class Mexicans have rediscovered pulque, and their attention has given it a new cachet. In an article from 2009, the New York Times describes “art students with dyed mohawks, hipsters with shaggy hair, and a giggling pack of girls in pearls and headbands” gathering at La Risa, one of Mexico City’s oldest pulquerías.4 Much of the current pul128

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que discourse revolves around defining Mexico through its past. The New York Times writer notes the “Aztec-style” murals adorning La Risa’s walls and describes pulque as “a thick and pungent 2,000-yearold Aztec drink” raised in “a toast to the Aztec gods.” A 2011 Los Angeles Times article describes pulque as “essentially and soulfully Mexican.”5 In 2014 the BBC reported that “in the last five or six years, pulque has made a small resurgence, thanks mostly to young artists and punks who view the ancient drink as everything beer is not—fiercely Mexican.”6 The idea of pulque as connected to Mexico’s past is not new. In the 1930s Mexican tour guides brought tourists to pulquerías for a “quintessential ‘Mexican’ adventure,” while most Mexicans, indigenous or not, drank beer.7 While this new generation of drinkers see themselves as carrying on tradition, however, they also see their choice as bold. A student interviewed in the 2009 New York Times article says, “It’s also a bit subversive; you can find so many different types of ideas and people in pulquerías.”8 The twenty-first-century association between pulque and an indigenous past is tied up in ideas about indigeneity and mixture that were part of the construction of Mexican national identity after the Revolution, when José Vasconcelos made native Mesoamericans central to the story of how Mexicans came to be the “cosmic race,” destined to usher in a new era of universal humanity.9 While celebrating the indigenous contribution to mestizaje, the indigenous-Spanish racial mixture touted as being at the heart of Mexican national identity (a formulation that explicitly marginalized Mexico’s African-descent population), Vasconcelos’s mixing ultimately meant Hispanization, understood as modernization, in which native culture would be left in the past.¹0 The government’s efforts to push beer and discourage pulque consumption during this period were part of the same modernization effort. Pulque is made from the agave plant native to Mesoamerica and more commonly known as maguey.¹¹ Just as pulque has had different meanings since 1910, the meanings ascribed to it during the colonial period varied too. These meanings were linked to specific forms of pulque and to the identities of their consumers. Pulque blanco, white pulque, is made by fermenting aguamiel, the sap produced when the maguey flowers.¹² Tlachiqueros (pulque makers) remove the flowering stalk after it blooms and collect the aguamiel that seeps into the resulting cavity. In the colonial period and earlier, tlachiqueros sucked out the aguamiel through a strawlike gourd; today they often use a metal scoop to extract the liquid. The juice is fermented for a few days and must be consumed quickly before it spoils. Pulque blanco was not the only option for colo129

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nial consumers. Mixed pulque, made by adding fruit, meat, honey, and other flavorings, as well as plants such as peyote, was also widely consumed. Yet white and mixed pulque had different meanings for policy makers. Spanish officials allowed the sale of so-called white, or pure, pulque, often requiring that it be sold only by Indians, but they did not allow sales of pulque that was mixed with any other substance because it was seen as creating disorder. As Daniel Nemser has argued for the late seventeenth century, “The study of mixed pulque offered elites a language for talking about race mixing (mestizaje), while simultaneously constituting pulque consumers as a seditious collective subject—a plebe (plebeian masses) defined, like pulque, by mixing.”¹³ The importance of pulque as a way to talk about purity and danger, Mary Douglas notes, continued into the eighteenth century.¹4 This use of pulque as a way to define people in the later period is significant for two reasons: first, we see that pulque was a way for colonial elites to express general anxieties about governance and social order, as well as the kind of dramatic disruption expressed through riots. Second, it reveals that the discourse about indigenous purity is not just a post-1910 phenomenon. However, looking at the colonial context from the vantage point of the twenty-first century reminds us that the meanings of ethnic and racial purity have changed over time. Rebecca Earle has shown that Spanish American elites have long identified Indians with drunkenness in ways that varied over time and ultimately reflect different kinds of elite preoccupations with governing and nation-building. When we look at pulque, we see that Spaniards at times also associated native Mesoamericans with moderate and healthful drinking, although in ways that also served to limit Indians discursively in the ways that Earle describes.¹5 While everyone drank pulque in the colonial period, pulque blanco was meant to represent pure Indianness and to distinguish segments of the population. Today’s pulque discourse is the opposite; pulque is meant to unite Mexicans under a mestizo identity. This reflects Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s description of the ideology of mestizaje: “that which is Indian remains as a past—expropriated from the Indians— that is assumed to be the common patrimony of all Mexicans. However, what was expropriated has no profound content and is converted into a vague ideological pride in what was done by ‘our’ ancestors.”¹6 As a heroic national symbol, pulque stands in for and replaces actual indigenous people; by celebrating pulque as something quintessentially both Mexican and indigenous, Mexicans smooth over the history of indigenous mistreatment and disenfranchisement. Yet this is not Marx’s commodity fetishism, in which the product is removed from the producer. 130

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In fact, pulque’s mystery and power as a national fetish derives precisely from its connection to indigenous producers and consumers.

IDEAS ABOUT HEALTH AND COR RUPTION When we look at the colonial period, we see pulque described and understood through sets of binary oppositions, including order and disorder, purity and mixture. Douglas’s claim that ideas about purity and order are often linked and can be used to explain as well as reinforce social order and hierarchies is made manifest in Spanish colonial discourse and policy.¹7 In the simplest way, the colonial discourse about mixed pulque as corrupting and disorderly functioned as an attempt to maintain class and racial hierarchies. Spaniards hoped to control ideas about pulque’s effects on the body and health in order to create purity and order. Yet the Spaniards who created this pulque discourse were themselves caught between ideas about purity and order. As creoles, they were seen by peninsulars as corrupted and degenerated due to their American origins, suggesting that ambivalence about pulque reflected ambivalence about self and other within the EuroAmerican context.¹8 Multiple characterizations of pulque appear throughout the colonial period, with negative and positive ideas sometimes coexisting in the same accounts. In the 1540s the friar Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinía, condemned pulque for making indigenous people “violently drunk and accordingly more cruel and bestial” while acknowledging that “actually, however, if taken with moderation, [pulque] is wholesome and very nutritious.”¹9 Seventeenth-century Italian traveler Gemelli Carreri notes that despite the loss of tax revenue, the Spanish crown temporarily prohibited pulque sales “because of the brutalities that drunk Indians commit.” He adds, however, “I drank [pulque] as it was taken from the plant, and it seemed to me the flavor of Spanish agua aloja [a spiced honey drink]: the color was of whey or of water mixed with honey.”²0 Others extolled pulque’s health benefits as a generally healthful and fortifying substance and as a medicine to cure illness. In the 1570s Francisco Hernández recommended strengthening medicinal plants by combining them with pulque, which he calls “vino de metl” (maguey wine).²¹ The Nahua writer Chimalpahin mentions this use, recalling a severe 1595 measles outbreak in which “people were helped with white pulque; eloquiltic tletlematzin [a plant or herb] was drunk in white 131

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pulque.”²² Nemser points out that Chimalpahin does not define this as mixed despite the addition of the herb.²³ José de Acosta describes aguamiel as “a liquor which they [indigenous] drink like water, being sweet and fresh. This liquor being sodden, turnes like wine [pulque], which growes to vinegar.”²4 The seventeenth-century friar Juan de Torquemada reports that “the plebeians and workers, when they transport wood or when they carry big stones, drink [pulque], some more and others less, to strengthen themselves and animate their work.”²5 Nemser shows that even after the 1692 uprising, which Spaniards claimed was started by Indians who were drunk on pulque, Spanish informants largely agreed that white pulque was a healthful substance and could be used to cure illness.²6 In the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero wrote, “It is strong and causes drunkenness, but not as much as grape wine. It is doubtless that it is a healthy drink and by many accounts worthy; because it is an excellent diuretic and a good remedy against diarrhea when taken as it should be taken.”²7 Clavijero’s claim that pulque is less intoxicating than Spanish wine seems to temper the idea of indigenous drunkenness. These ideas about health value did not come only from above; in 1820, when Mexico City officials claimed that pulque stands encouraged disorder and tried to relocate them to the city’s outskirts, a group of sellers responded that “without a doubt, [pulque] is a regional drink that is healthful, and necessary for workers. . . . [W]ith it they recover their strength[,] raise their spirits, improve and make their work tolerable.”²8 Ideas about violence and health go hand in hand in these accounts, as the possibility of abuse does not overshadow the health-giving aspects. These writings convey multivalent and long-standing ideas about pulque as good, bad, healthful, and causing disorder. When Spaniards moved from considering individual bodies to considering the social body, we see a similar multivalence, and the importance of context comes into sharp relief. While pulque could be good, mixing certainly made it bad, at least in the eyes of Spanish officials. In the case of pulque, mixture meant most specifically adulteration, the introduction of supplemental ingredients, as well as the mixture of people that occurred in pulquerías or other situations where pulque was consumed. As early as 1529, Spanish officials prohibited the sale of pulque mixed with other ingredients, which could include fruit, roots, peyote, and herbs. This regulation continued throughout the colonial period.²9 In practice, however, mixed pulque was widely available along with tepache, a similarly prohibited drink made by mixing sour pulque with fruit and sugar.³0 In a treatise discussing a smallpox epidemic of the late 132

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1730s, Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero places the blame for the epidemic in part on pulque abuse, although he also discusses pulque’s use as a medicine.³¹ Quoting a doctor on the causes of “the illness the Indians are suffering,” he writes, “it is possible to add drunkenness, with Pulque corrupted with sticks, and harmful herbs, with which they mix it to fortify it. And as an aside I say . . . that the said Pulque being fresh (not aged) and made of mature Maguey (not hastily removed) consumed moderately (not until falling-down drunk) it is not only not harmful, but it is a good diluent, and a drink that is very appropriate for Indians.”³² The idea of dilution refers to an earlier passage in which Cabrera y Quintero discusses the humoral theory that drinking certain kinds of alcohol makes the blood first move quickly and then coagulate.³³ The enthusiasm for purity extended to mescal, of which tequila is a variant, distilled from maguey. In 1786 a Spanish official in New Vizcaya claimed that “pure mescal, made from maguey, is not a harmful drink, nor is it dangerous to the health, as long as it is not mixed with any other ingredient.”³4 Tax revenue from pulque sales enriched the Real Hacienda, and in 1668 the crown established the asiento de pulque to ensure better tax collection by the administrator who received a cut of the profits.³5 At around the same time, the viceregal government began actively encouraging white pulque consumption and extolling its health benefits, presumably to increase sales and thus tax revenues, while still prohibiting its mixed variant.³6 The crown continued to encourage the sale of white pulque even when New Spain’s viceroy banned all pulque after the 1692 bread riots in the capital that some witnesses alleged was plotted in pulquerías.³7 Just two weeks after a total ban on pulque in the city, the authorities lifted the ban on “pulque without roots, which is medicinal,”³8 and this lifting of the ban was repeated five years later in a June 3, 1697, decree citing the royal physician’s certification that unadulterated pulque was acceptable because Indians had always consumed it.³9 Viquiera Albán claims, however, that lifting the ban so soon after the disturbances of 1692 and the continued viceregal and royal support of pulque selling into the next century indicate that “the interests of finance prevailed over moral considerations.”40 Yet if collecting tax money was their primary concern, why did the crown and viceregal authorities ban the sale of mixed pulque, which would presumably have brought in large revenues as well? The fact that officials were not profiting from nonwhite pulque but were instead trying to discourage its consumption suggests that increased regulation of pulque in the eighteenth century had to do with concerns other than taxation. Schwartzkopf makes a contrasting 133

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point in discussing the crown’s efforts to mediate the sales and drinking of chicha and aguardiente in Guatemala as a way to promote social order and increase crown revenues.4¹ Yet in the Guatemalan case, the rhetoric was about saving natives from alcohol abuse in general, although authorities tried to control aguardiente trade more forcefully than that of chicha, whereas in the case of pulque they distinguished between good and bad versions of the drink.

IDEAS ABOUT MIXT UR E It is not surprising that officials would want to prohibit pulque that had been enriched with peyote or other substances with obvious pharmacological properties. Materials like palo de timbre, a plant used to speed fermentation, were also seen as dangerous because they changed the nature of the drink. In the early seventeenth century, the Spanish friar and chronicler Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa claimed that indigenous people “make their sweet wine [pulque] to which they add a root [raíz] with which the Indians become drunk, which they are much inclined to do, and this drink causes notable damages.”4² Yet Nemser points out that for Spaniards, mixed pulque was more than merely a substance that had been fortified or adulterated with extra ingredients. For Spaniards, mixed pulque was a separate substance, one that was fundamentally altered; Nemser quotes a theologian as using the term “transubstantiate.”4³ A viceregal decree first issued in 1635 and reissued in 1671 prohibited “yellow pulque, corrupt, and with the root that strengthens it, causing drunkenness that is dangerous to the health, and to good customs, from which come the crimes, sins, and abominations that we see continually.” The decree proclaims that vendors in public stands must sell only white pulque, “pure and clean of all confection, mixture, root, or corruption.”44 The 1681 Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de Indias describes pulque as a drink that Indians distill from maguey “plants that are very beneficial for different effects”; it distinguishes “temperate drinking that Indians can tolerate, because they are already accustomed to it” from the “notable damages, and harms of the version they mix up, introducing ingredients that are harmful to spiritual and temporal health.” The law describes the Indian practice of mixing pulque “with certain roots, boiling water, and lime, with which it gets so strong, that it makes them lose their senses.” Moreover, “being alienated, they commit idolatries, make ceremonies, and Gentile sacrifices.”45 This was the argument 134

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against adding roots and lime ostensibly to preserve and perhaps also to strengthen the drink. Yet adding mundane flavoring materials such as fruit and meat to pulque was banned as well, even though these do not seem to significantly change the intoxicating qualities of the drink. Perhaps the reason Spanish officials prohibited mixed pulque was because of its mixed nature. When colonial writers expressed ideas about pulque’s health value and corrupting potential, they were also expressing ideas about purity and mixture in the realms of the individual body and the larger social body more broadly. We know that Spaniards valued purity of blood; presumably they also looked for purity in the substances that went into physical bodies. A 1783 survey of the drinking habits of New Spain’s residents, compiled in response to complaints about alcohol-inspired violence, suggests a connection between these two concerns. The survey yielded lists of alcoholic drinks, information about regional variations, and descriptions of ingredients and how they were made. Most of the recipes are neutrally explanatory; that is, to make a drink called mantequilla,46 informants reported that they “mixed aguardiente [distilled alcohol] and pulque and sugar or some other sweetener, and from these three ingredients this drink results.”47 In this matter-of-fact report a drink called coyote stands out. Coyote was “composed of inferior pulque, dark honey and palo de timbre, and putting it in an infusion it gets stronger and is drunk; although it is very harmful.”48 The name of the drink is striking. In the eighteenth century the term coyote was used to describe a person of mixed descent, theoretically one who was three-quarters indigenous and one-quarter Spanish.49 Thus liquid and human coyotes were characterized by mixture. The description of the beverage coyote as harmful and low-grade recalls contemporary Spanish ideas that castas, people of mixed racial background, including so-called coyotes, were inferior, dangerous, and disorderly. The Capuchin Francisco de Ajofrín asserts, “Lobos, cambujos, and coyotes are fierce people of bizarre customs.”50 Liquids and lineage are touchstones for mixture in Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco’s 1611 Spanish dictionary, in which he defines the noun mezcla (mixture) in its first definition as “the incorporation of a liquid with another.” The verb form, mezclar (to mix), means first “to unite diverse things” and in its second definition “to mix the lineages, when some are mixed up [se confunden] with others, that are not of the same quality; and we say it is a thing without mixture when it is pure.”5¹ This calls to mind the Spanish preoccupation with personal lineage, which was ultimately a preoccupation with another liquid. Social status was expressed through the language of limpieza de sangre; to have high 135

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status one had to have “pure blood.” Calidad, used in the 1611 dictionary in a general way meaning “quality,” was also used to indicate social status in the colonial period. Perhaps Spanish officials feared the mixing of liquids and other ingredients in pulque drinks because the resulting inebriation led to the mixing of bodies and ultimately blood, in terms of bloodshed and lineages.5² Spain’s mid-eighteenth-century Bourbon rulers were concerned with regulating social classes and their mixtures in a period when the lines among caste groups was becoming blurred through social mobility and intermarriage. Sexual unions among racial groups had been common since the conquest, of course, but legal intermarriage became more frequent in the eighteenth century.5³ Thus Spanish officials were worried about any kind of pulque (presumably pure as well) when it allowed for the mixing of people. In an attempt to stop sexual mixing, the decree issued in 1635 and reissued in 1671 prohibited men and women from drinking together.54

ENSUR ING INDIGENOUS PUR IT Y Fears about mixture were not only fears about Spanishness being adulterated, however. Officials were interested in ensuring indigenous purity as well. Throughout the colonial period the crown issued regular decrees prohibiting nonindigenous people from living in indigenous villages; these were couched in terms of protecting indigenous purity.55 A 1672 decree mandated that “the Indians [not] live mixed with the Spaniards, mestizos, and mulattoes,” referencing the “grave damages and scruples that result from mixing.”56 A few years later a royal decree ordered that governors in indigenous villages be “pure Indians, and not Spaniards or mestizos.”57 In 1724 the convent for indigenous noblewomen in Mexico City required that entrants prove their limpieza de sangre, which in this case meant purity of indigenous, rather than Spanish, blood.58 Policy makers made connections between pure Indianness and pure pulque. In 1769 an official was commissioned to ensure that no aguardiente was sold in Choapan (Villa Alta, now Oaxaca), “nor drinks other than pulque blanco.” This was because “in Indian villages . . . one can only sell pulque blanco and no other liquor.”59 In 1777 a royal official in Sonora reported that most shops sold two kinds of mescal—one refined and one common. He comments, “They have to be pure, and if any ingredient is mixed . . . it must not be permitted with any pretext to be taken out, or sold, in the Indian villages.” He warns that Indians be136

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came especially intoxicated with these forms of mescal.60 Ideas about pure Indianness and pure pulque and the importance of maintaining their purity were linked in crown and viceregal policies limiting the sale of white pulque to indigenous sellers. In 1608 the viceroy ordered that in Mexico City, one seller, a “respectable old [Indian] woman,” would be allowed for every hundred Indians.6¹ Decrees from 1635 and 1639 specified that two Indian women could be licensed for each Indian area in Mexico City and one woman for every town within five leagues of the city.6² In practice, Spaniards as well as men of different groups were involved in the pulque trade in Mexico City by the eighteenth century. John Kicza has found that in reality, most of the workers were men, although Spanish women owned pulquerías in Mexico City and indigenous women applied for licenses to open pulquerías as well.6³ Worries about the disorder inherent in indigenous drunkenness were strong, albeit often couched in paternalistic, protective terms. In 1659 a tavern owner in Teposcolula, Oaxaca, was accused of selling pulque con raíz—pulque mixed with a root, possibly palo de timbre—in her establishment, “where the Indians get drunk and are advised not to obey the mayors or tribute collectors [mandones].”64 There is a sense that the advice came from outside and that these drinkers were not totally to blame for their disorderly behavior. In 1643 the mayor of Teposcolula complained that there were “many pulqueras [female pulque makers and sellers] that have public and secret taverns where they sell pulque to the Indians, who neglect their religious obligations and their fields,” again reflecting a sense of manipulation.65 To Spanish witnesses part of the problem was of course mixed pulque: investigating a fight that broke out in a pulquería in Yanhuitlan in 1693, an investigator reports finding “a big jar with pulque that I spilled out and in it I found a bunch of prohibited root and I asked [the pulque seller] why she had the root in the pulque that she knew was prohibited because it is dangerous.”66 In a 1749 complaint from Mexico City a cleric claims “the inebriations, injuries, homicides, and other abominations are inevitable, because [of] the consumers, that are for the most part indios and indias, who drink the pulque that they buy there.”67 In 1761 a Teposcolula official ordered vendors of “intoxicating beverages” to avoid selling “excessive quantities of liquor” to “naturales.”68 In 1792 the mayor of San Antonio de las Huertas (Guerrero) reported that certain pulquerías were open all night, in violation of the law, and that this was causing “riots and commotions among the naturales (indigenous)” due to their “dominant vice which is drunkenness.”69 In 1784 an official in Pachuca, reporting on Indian resistance to pay137

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ing taxes on pulque, complained about “the women and operators (operarios) who sell pulque to indios,” in such great volume that it made the Indians “insolent.” This was not their fault, however—“this rebellion comes from the sinister influence of a mulato or lobo butcher named Antonio Escalante.” The official contends that Escalante “dominates them so much that drunkenness and the mixture of both sexes leads to an appetite for all vices.”70 The mixing that allowed the “mulato or lobo” to influence the villagers added to the rebellious environment created through pulque. Drinking increased the chances for mixing and the resulting loss of indigenous purity. Sexual mixing and inappropriate activity in certain areas also seem to have been worrisome. In 1786 a priest lodged a complaint about the drinking and carousing that went on in a tavern next to a graveyard, declaring, “I passed by the tavern that is right next to the holy ground, and I saw drinking men and women in the same spot where the cadavers are buried.” He complained about the “games and crowds of men and women” in taverns as well.7¹ Religious leaders were concerned about the disruptive effects of pulque on indigenous worship, and they implicated Spanish culture in this, hearkening back to an indigenous past that was purer and thus better in their eyes. In the mid-sixteenth century Diego Durán wrote, “Today what is called pulque, made by the Spaniards from black honey and water with the root in it, was never known to [the ancients]. Nor did they know how to concoct it until the Negroes and Spaniards invented it.”7² This seems to be the recipe for coyote, made with miel prieta and palo de timbre, according to the 1783 report. Discussing “white pulque,” Durán writes that producers added the word “white” to distinguish the drink from the one made with black honey, which he describes as “diabolical, stinking, black, potent, rough, without flavor or taste. . . . [O]wing to its strength they take to it more than to their own native wine, which is lighter and medicinal.”7³ Again we see the contrast between a drink, possibly coyote, made through mixture and characterized as repulsive, and a drink that is “lighter,” more wholesome and more purely indigenous. In his 1634 Nahuatl confession manual, the mestizo scholar Bartolomé de Alva addresses his indigenous contemporaries, lamenting that “for a gourd of pulque or a cup of wine you cast your souls to hell and give them to the devil.”74 He contends that the precontact Nahuas were better behaved than those of his time. [T]hey had discretion, prudence, fear and shame, and good breeding. But you who live now: What’s wrong with you? What 138

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will become of you? How long can you go on like this? Truthfully I say to you, that there’s nothing other than drunkenness and intoxication that has turned you into beasts, that has gone on taking away from you the use of reason and the natural light of knowledge the sovereign God gave you. Because you no longer raise your children with anything else nor give them more doctrine from the time they are born but that of wine and pulque. And even though the ancients, your elders, drank, it was with moderation and restraint (as your neighbors the Spaniards do today). And if by some chance they sometimes used to discover some drunkard, they immediately took away his life for it. And now in our times it exists because nobody restrains you with the death penalty.75

Alva laments the loss of good breeding, or familial and cultural purity, and the loss of moderation and restraint, or order. His nostalgia for Nahua habits of the past resonates with the idea that it was association with the Spanish that drove natives to abuse alcohol, and he almost suggests that the Nahua were better off in the precolonial past because then they drank moderately. While it may not have been true that precontact pulque consumption was moderate, the fact that he believed it to be true reveals his idealization of the past.

PULQUE AS HYBR ID Pulque blanco seems to have served as a metaphor or symbol of indigeneity for colonial and crown officials. The discourse of many of the policies surrounding the sale of pulque was that pure pulque was good and healthful, just as pure indigeneity was held up as pure and healthful, and the purity of both indigenous people and pulque had to be regulated. Yet in practice, pulque, like so many parts of novohispano culture, was hybrid. Writing about maguey, Ilarione da Bergamo, an Italian Capuchin who traveled in New Spain in the 1760s, says, This plant is also held in special esteem by the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, because in the year 1540 she appeared to an Indian named Juan de Aguila on the hill of Totoltepec, which is not far from Mexico City, and told him that he should look for her image in that very same place. After initial efforts he found, in the middle of one of these plants, a small statue of the Blessed Virgin 139

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with her babe in her arms, though it is not knows from what material it is made. . . . The Mexicans show great faith and devotion to this, and in time of greatest need they have special recourse to it through public prayers.76

The description calls to mind the most famous symbol of syncretism in Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in 1531. It also calls to mind Mayahuel, the goddess of maguey and pulque, depicted in the Codex Mendoza and Codex Borgia as a woman with four hundred breasts nursing a baby while sitting in a maguey plant.77 Pulque was hybrid not only in its syncretic characteristics, though. It was hybrid also because different kinds of people drank it in many different situations. Spaniards, blacks, mulatos, and other castas frequented pulquerías alongside indigenous people, and Spaniards were certainly involved in producing and selling pulque and mescal, particularly in Mexico City, by the late eighteenth century.78 Ilarione da Bergamo observes, [T]oday consumption of this beverage is so widespread that everyone drinks it. There are public pulquerías, which are like our public wine shops. A few years ago it was not proper for people with any kind of [social] standing to go into them because entering a place frequented only by drunks and by rabble of every ilk seemed to undercut their respectability. Now people of every rank frequent them; and during the time of my stay in Mexico, I observed many carriages and coaches of gentlemen, ladies, merchants, and other respectable people heading to these places. . . . As for myself, in the roughly five years that I resided in that country, I could not get used to drinking that liquor because of its foul odor, even though Europeans, after drinking it for two or three days, become even more keen on it than the local population itself.79

While Bergamo may have been participating in the discourse that saw Spanish creoles as degraded because of their American origins, his testimony shows that pulque consumption was not limited to indigenous people, however much the discourse about pulque revolved around identifying indigenous people as either pure or disorderly. When pulque was handled properly—made by natives and consumed in moderation—colonial commentators found its use acceptable. When

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pulque was taken out of this indigenous context, commentators found it more fearsome. This pulque discourse reveals the ways that colonial commentators associated consumption, commerce, and race. It reflects varied and complex ideas about indigeneity in a way that foreshadows but does not explain how ideas about indigeneity and Mexican identity emerged in the twentieth century. Ideas about indigeneity, purity, and mixture changed after independence as caste distinctions and ethnic privileges and protections were abolished by Liberal policy makers. After 1910 mixture was celebrated, and the idea of the Indian as part of the cosmic race became a linchpin for Mexican national identity even as actual indigenous people experienced discrimination. In the striving for modernity that accompanied attempts to forge the cosmic race in the early to mid-twentieth century, pulque was left behind. In the twenty-first century, pulque has been reborn and celebrated as a representation of Mexicanness. When today’s student enjoys the “different types of ideas and people in pulquerías,” she seems to echo important characteristics of pulque from the past—its hybridity, multiplicity, and openness to interpretation. When we look at the social life of pulque as it unfolded over centuries, it is tempting to see historical continuities between the colonial and modern idealizations of indigenous identity and the effort to discursively define Indians as pure. Yet when we examine this more closely, we see a rupture with the colonial past as well; indigenous people were a central concern of Spanish colonial authorities, who tried to contain them and their economic activities through this pulque discourse. Today’s pulque discourse emphasizes the mixed nature of Mexican identity and in many ways relegates its indigenous identity to the past.

NOTES Many thanks are due to Kathryn Sampeck, Stacey Schwartzkopf, the anonymous reviewer for the press, and Fred Smith. I benefited greatly from their input and insights. 1. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 7, 150; Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 48; Francisco Rojas González, “Estudio históricoetnográfico del alcoholismo entre los indios de México,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 4, no. 2 (1942): 113–114. 2. William Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Vil-

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lages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 28–30; Rebecca Earle, “Indians and Drunkenness in Spanish America,” Past and Present 222, no. 9 (2014): 89–93. 3. “The Americas: Debate in Mexico,” Time, October 11, 1943, http://www .time.com/; Marie Sarita Gaytán, “Drinking Difference: Race, Consumption, and Alcohol Prohibition in Mexico and the United States,” Ethnicities 14, no. 3 (2014): 437. 4. Alexis Okeowo, “Pulquerias in Mexico City,” New York Times, January 23, 2009, http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/travel/25bites.html. 5. Nicholas Gilman, “Here’s to Mexico’s Roots,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/. 6. Brad Cohen, “Mexico’s Ancient Drink Makes a Comeback,” BBC, November 28, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/. 7. Amie Wright, “‘La Bebida Nacional’: Pulque and Mexicanidad, 1920– 46,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire 44 (2009): 1. 8. Okeowo, “Pulquerias in Mexico City.” 9. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica (Madrid: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925); Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 114. 10. Analisa Taylor claims that mestizaje should be “understood not as a mixture of two parts in equal measure, but as a genetic and cultural absorption and attenuation of indigenous into Hispanic traits”; Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination: Thresholds of Belonging (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 7. 11. Henry Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 12–15. 12. Pulque is the fermented sap (aguamiel) extracted from plants of the Agave genus; mescal is a further distillation of aguamiel; tequila is a distillation of blue agave aguamiel (Agave tequilana weber, var. azul); see Bob Emmons, The Book of Tequila: A Complete Guide (Chicago: Open Court, 1997). 13. Daniel Nemser, “To Avoid This Mixture: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City,” Food and Foodways 19 (2011): 99. 14. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. 15. Earle, “Indians and Drunkenness,” 98–99. Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides an excellent example of this in early twentieth-century Guatemala; “Indians Are Drunks and Drunks Are Indians: Alcohol and Indigenismo in Guatemala, 1890–1940,” Bulletin of Latin American Research (2000): 341–356. 16. Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, 128. 17. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 3. 18. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, ed. Bauer and Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–57. 142

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19. Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. Francis Borgia Steck (Washington, DC: Washington Academy of Franciscan History, 1951), 331–332. 20. If he was drinking the liquid as it was taken from the plant, it was not really pulque because it was not fermented; however, he thought he was drinking pulque and compared it favorably to a Spanish beverage, indicating that he did not see it as linked to “brutalities”; Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Viaje a Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976 [1699]), 1:40. 21. Francisco Hernández, Historia natural de Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional de México, 1959 [1615]), 1:107, 183, 272, 281; 2:90, 155. 22. Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuantzin, Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuantzin, ed. and trans. James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 55. 23. Nemser, “To Avoid This Mixture,” 104–105. 24. Joseph de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, vol. 1: The Natural History, books 1–4, reprint of English translation by Edward Grimeston, Hakluyt Society, 1604 (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010), 247. 25. Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía indiana (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1975– 1982 [1723]), 4:339. 26. Nemser, “To Avoid This Mixture,” 103. 27. Francisco Javier Clavijero, Historia antigua de México, ed. Mariano Cuevas, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1968 [1778]), 267. 28. Pleito de los pulqueros de México sobre alcabalas, Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 20, exp. 16, 1820, f. 1v, AGN. This was part of an overall attempt to clean up and organize the city. Ideas about plebeian practices changed as Enlightenment-inspired reformers claimed that disorder had increased in the city in the eighteenth century; Juan Pedro Viquiera Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 29. Viquiera Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness, 131n240. Viquiera Albán says that “pulque was tolerated.” However, José Jesús Hernández Palomo (1979) says they did not allow the sale of any pulque before 1608; Hernández Palomo, La renta del pulque en Nueva España, 1663–1810 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979). 30. Michael C. Scardaville, “Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial Mexico City,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (1980): 645. 31. Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, Escudo de armas de Mexico: Celestial proteccion de esta nobilissima ciudad, de la Nueva-España, y de casi todo el nuevo mundo, Maria Santissima, . . . (Mexico City, 1746), 64, available through Gale, Cengage Learning, George Mason University Libraries, http://galenet.galegroup.com .mutex.gmu.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY101342048&srchtp=a&ste=14. 143

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32. Ibid., 151. 33. For an excellent discussion of humoral medicine and the way Spaniards understood health and the body see Rebecca Earle, “Humoralism and the Colonial Body,” chapter 1 in The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 34. Ayuntamiento, vol. 117, exp. 2, AGN; for a detailed examination of tequila, see Marie Sarita Gaytán, ¡Tequila!: Distilling the Spirit of Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 35. José Antonio Calderón Quijano, “Introducción,” in La renta del pulque en Nueva España, 1663-1810, by José Jesús Hernández Palomo, i–xxxv (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979). 36. Viquiera Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness, 132. 37. R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 127, 139; Scardaville, “Alcohol Abuse,” 657; Nemser, “To Avoid This Mixture,” 100. 38. Antonio de Robles, cited in Nemser, “To Avoid This Mixture,” 100. Robles was a seventeenth-century Mexico City diarist. 39. James F. Dudley, “Bourbon Reforms in the Pulque Industry,” (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1967), 5. 40. Viquiera Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness, 133. 41. See Schwartzkopf’s chapter 2 in this volume. 42. Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales, ed. B. Belasco Bayón (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1969), 99, bk. 3, chap. 10, para. 393. Palo de timbre is Acacia angustissima, a plant whose bark hastens fermentation and increases viscosity. I am not sure whether this is the same thing as ocpactli, which Clavijero and others say was used to speed fermentation. 43. Nemser, “To Avoid this Mixture,” 103–104. 44. Ordenanzas, May 7, 1635, vol. 2f, exp. 52, f. 55v, AGN; Ordenanzas, October 27, 1671, vol. 5f, exp. 63, f. 93v. 45. Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (Madrid: Julian de Paredes, 1681), bk. 6, title 1, law 37. 46. Today this means butter, although it may have meant lard in the eighteenth century, according to Covarrubias’s seventeenth-century dictionary; Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1995 [1611]), 734. 47. Aguardiente de caña, vol. 1, exp. 1, f. 25, AGN. 48. Ibid., 24v. The 1783 report is reproduced in a US consular report form 1884 in which nocivo is translated as “detrimental to health”; US Department of State, Consular Reports: Commerce, Manufactures, Etc. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1884), 12:390, at https://books.google.com/books ?id=H1hIAAAAYAAJ&dq=coyote+pulque&source=gbs_navlinks_s. 144

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49. Ilona Katzew, “Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico,” in New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, ed. Katzew (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1996), 75. These terms were not always used in practice. I do see “coyote” in the colonial court records, but I am not sure what people meant when they said it. 50. Francisco de Ajofrín, Diario del viaje que por orden de la Sagrada Congregación de Propaganda Fide hizo a la América Septentrional en el siglo XVIII el padre fray Francisco de Ajofrín (Madrid: Academía de la Historia, 1958 [1763]), 1:66. 51. Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 752. 52. This notion of mixing liquids recalls the practice or allegations of women putting menstrual blood in chocolate to control men; Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 166; Ruth Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Powers: Views from the Mexican Inquisition,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 179, 192, 194–199; Ruth Behar, “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 35. 53. Katzew, “Casta Painting,” 12. 54. Ordenanzas, May 7, 1635, vol. 2f, exp. 52, f. 55v, AGN; Ordenanzas, October 27, 1671, vol. 5f, exp. 63, f. 93v, AGN. 55. For a sampling of such decrees see Richard Konetzke, ed., Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicos, 1958), vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 287, 308, bk. 2, p. 402. 56. Ibid., vol. 2, bk. 2, p. 401. 57. Ibid., p. 403. 58. Ann Mirian Gallagher, “The Indian Nuns of Mexico City’s Monasterio of Corpus Christi, 1724–1821,” in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 154–157. 59. Villa Alta, Civil Bebidas Prohibidas, 1769, legajo 20, exp. 10, ff. 4r-10v, Archivo Justicial de Oaxaca (hereafter AJO). 60. Ayuntamiento, vol. 117, exp. 4, Sonora, AGN. 61. Viquiera Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness, 131. 62. W. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 38. By the twentieth century, the pulquerías were owned by men, according to my sampling of records of pulquería inspections by the Comision de Alimentos y Bebidas recorded in the Archivo de Salúd Pública in Mexico City between 1921 and 1929. 63. John E. Kicza, “The Pulque Trade of Late Colonial Mexico City,” Americas 37 (1980): 198. 64. Teposcolula Penal, 1639, leg. 15, exp. 10, AJO. 65. Teposcolula Penal, 1643, leg. 15, exp. 24, AJO. 66. Teposcolula Penal, Yanhuitlan, 1693, leg. 20, exp. 29, f. 5, AJO. 67. Clero regular y secular, 1749, vol. 154, exp. 7, 170, AGN. 145

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68. Teposcolula Civil, Mandamiento VA, 1761, leg. 15, exp. 08.04, ff. 2, 26r27v, AJO. 69. Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, 1792, vol. 29, exp. 7, 1v-2, AGN. 70. Minería, vol. 45, ff. 124r-126v, AGN. 71. Clero regular y secular, 1786, vol. 213, exp. 8, ff. 105, 109v, AGN. 72. Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar, trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 309. Heyden and Horcasitas add in a footnote on the same page, “In preconquest times only fermented beverages were known—this passage was probably the earliest reference to tequila, mezcal, and other distilled spirits.” To me this seems more like a description of coyote or at least some form of mixed pulque than a distilled beverage. 73. Durán, Book of the Gods, 310. 74. Bartolomé de Alva, A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, ed. Barry D. Sell and John Frederick Schwaller, with Lu Ann Homza (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 92. 75. Ibid. 76. Ilarione da Bergamo, Daily Life in Colonial Mexico: The Journey of Friar Ilarione da Bergamo, 1761–1768, ed. William J. Orr, trans. Robert Ryal Miller and William J. Orr (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 103–104. 77. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 57–62. 78. Kicza, “Pulque Trade,” 193–194. 79. Bergamo, Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, 102.

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CH A P T ER SI X

“Confites, Melcochas y Otras Golosinas . . . Muy Dañosas”: Sugar, Alcohol, and Biopolitics in Colonial Guatemala GU I D O PEZZ A RO S SI

A

NALYZING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRODUCtion, distribution, and consumption of ingestible commodities in colonial Guatemala brings into relief the manifold importance of native bodies to the Spanish colonial project in the region. In this chapter I explore the biopolitics of Spanish colonial policies and restrictions on the consumption of sugar and alcohol by native individuals, through the lens of coastal and piedmont sugar- and alcoholproducing communities in colonial Guatemala. In particular, I situate these policies and the restrictions they forwarded in the humoral medicine discourse that informed their elaboration, and I locate where and how sugar and alcohol fit within humoral medicine-informed biopolitical discourse in colonial Guatemala. In particular, a 1647 document details a dispute between native traders from Alotenango, Guatemala, and the corregidor (administrative and judicial official) of the coastal region of Escuintla that reveals a variety of clues related to the broader entanglements of commerce, colonial power, native bodies, and ingestible global commodities in colonial Guatemala.¹ The dispute centers on the right of native traders to peddle their wares (worked wax, clothes, and other goods) to cacaoproducing communities in the Escuintla region; they claimed that local officials had stopped them from trading in coastal towns by chasing them away, taking their wares, imprisoning them, and beating them. They also claimed that the revenues from trade helped pay their tribute obligations as well as provide support for themselves and their families. In response, Captain Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán, the corregidor of Escuintla (and likely the father of Captain Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, author of Recordación Florida),² claimed that native 147

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traders from the valley of Guatemala (near the Spanish capital at Santiago, present-day Antigua, Guatemala) simply operated on the pretense of selling innocuous necessities so as to gain access to vulnerable native communities on the coast and sell them alcohol and sweets. In this document, coastal populations (and indeed all native populations, according to the elder Fuentes y Guzmán) are portrayed as vulnerable explicitly because of their “natural” predispositions to drunkenness, which leads them to engage not only in bouts of drinking but also in associated criminal activities, such as hiding and protecting bootleggers from Spanish authorities in order to ensure access to drink. Even sugar was argued to be an unneeded good that was particularly bad for one’s health and condemned as a tasty treat dangled in front of coastal native populations to entice them to buy alcohol, a discursive twist that cements the paternalistic perspective of Fuentes y Guzmán and the Spanish colonial infantilization of native populations. I lean heavily on this document but connect the discursive threads that emerge and are specifically related to native health and the deployment of this health-related discourse to broader Spanish colonial political economic interests and epistemologies. As part of this, I explore the intersection of specific ingestibles (sugar, alcohol, cacao), colonial labor policies, and the biopolitics of Spanish colonial public health discourse and policies aimed at native populations. I explore the effects of these entwined elements by situating this analysis in place and focus specifically on a community that was impacted by and participated in these various discourses and policies and the legal instruments that enacted and resisted them. Since 2010 I have carried out archaeological and archival research on the site of San Pedro Aguacatepeque, a Kaqchikel Maya community in the Pacific piedmont of Guatemala; the town was embedded in and affected by the biopolitics of Spanish colonial public health policies, particularly as they intersected with concerns over sugar, cacao, alcohol production, and labor policies (figure  6.1). Archaeological and documentary sources indicate that the community of Aguacatepeque was growing sugarcane and producing sugar products for local and regional markets and consumers in addition to possibly illicitly/illegally brewing alcoholic drinks for informal local distribution.³ In both cases, sugar and alcohol production at Aguacatepeque embroiled the community in the production and distribution of two ingestibles identified by Fuentes y Guzmán and others as deleterious to the moral and physical health and productivity of the laboring native body and soul.4 The Alotenango petition, recently recovered from the Archivo Ge148

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FIGUR E 6.1. Locations mentioned in text. Map by Guido Pezzarossi.

neral de Centroamérica (AGCA), sheds light on the traffic in alcohol in the region and Spanish officials’ attempts at stifling trade in sugar and alcohol by falling back on authoritative discourses of native health, bodies, and morality, presumably to safeguard native populations. Nevertheless, the economic and biopolitical justifications for said policies in colonial Guatemala are without question. This situation and the specific language of Spanish colonial public health discourse lay bare the economic concerns undergirding—indeed the biopolitics of—Spanish colonial public health policies directed at native communities in colonial Guatemala.

BIOPOLITICS I will begin by analyzing the Spanish colonial public health discourse and policies and the undercurrent of economic concerns over the presence, utility, and productivity of native bodies in colonial labor policies through a framework built upon Foucault’s concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics.”5 These related concepts, ambiguously devel149

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oped by Foucault, have been taken up in the analyses of widely disparate case studies wherein life, as a political object, the “anatomo-politics of the human body,” and the maximization of its vitality and forces are central.6 Said differently, biopolitics refers to the interventions of colonial, state, and nonstate governing bodies and economic projects that, Foucault argues, “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”7 Hardt and Negri have advanced a post-Marxist application of biopower/biopolitics that focuses on biopower as power over life and the products of human vitality, in a sense, the labor power of the body. In turn, they cast biopower widely as the exercise of power-over, which for Giorgio Agamben is power over life gained through the ability to kill, as a means of extracting surplus value from human vitality.8 In Foucault’s own work, biopolitics was deployed as a way of rethinking how debates and policies around birth rates, morbidity, public hygiene, and medicine were frequently entangled with projects Rabinow and Rose describe as seeking to “produce and regulate ways of maximizing the capacities [economic utility] of both the population and the individual as a target of power.”9 I draw together these approaches for the purpose of embedding Spanish colonial discourses concerned with native health and the policy and practical interventions they buttressed in the economic motivations and surplus value-generating projects through which they were articulated. It must be noted that no modern conception of “public health” rooted in a singular, codified medical tradition was present in early colonial Guatemala. Moreover, the discussion of the applicability of biopolitics to early colonial contexts is an important one, as Foucault’s original formulation focused on the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries as crucial to the emergence of new ways of “massifying” individuals into populations and regulating them. However, I argue that the biopolitical framework is still applicable, in that concerns for native health yielded effects that paralleled public health initiatives via policy interventions rooted in expert medical knowledge(s) about the capacities and vulnerabilities of native bodies. Colonial contexts such as seventeenth-century Guatemala served as spaces for biopolitical experimentation, wherein native individuals were recategorized as laboring indios stripped of rights and political standing as human subjects.¹0 In other words, the colonized other remains valued as long as they are a viable instrument of labor (or candidate for conversion/salvation) and not due to their social or political 150

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status as human. This valorization of the enslaved and colonized solely on the basis of their biological vitality and the labor potential it affords creates, in Achille Mbembe’s words, a permanent “state of injury . . . a form of death-in-life.”¹¹ This state of being emerges at the callous intersection of violenceand terror-backed discipline and practices that sustain and promote life. This cruel cost/benefit analysis weighs the benefits of a body’s labor potential against the costs of care necessary to maintain the person as a viable laborer. It is here that native laborers in colonial Guatemala found themselves pushed and pulled between being allowed to die to meet the labor needs of others while being allowed to live in order to ensure a viable pool of labor for colonists. It is not surprising that contestation and confusion seamed through colonial biopolitics in Guatemala. The disparate interpretations of health-related policies and the humoral-medical epistemologies that undergirded them engendered much confusion and debate among colonists, from determining the healthfulness of cacao, sugar, and alcohol to identifying “good” and “bad” climate zones in regions. Moreover, active attempts at redeploying these knowledges and policies by native laborers as a form of resistance, as well as by colonists in the pursuit of economic goals, only further muddled the effectiveness of colonial forms of control and cultivation of the vitalities of the laborers while exposing the economic and biopolitical motivations driving health concerns in the first place.

SUGAR, ALCOHOL, HEALTH, AND BIOPOWER As mentioned, concerns over native health served as an acceptable justification for modifying colonial policies and policing behavior in the interest of economic gain and security. Similar health-focused discourse was leveraged in trade-related dealings, in particular those involving cacao, sugar, and alcohol. It is expected that foods would garner health concerns, in light of Earle’s exhaustive analysis of the centrality of food to Spanish colonial notions of physical well-being.¹² However, an added dimension emerges when we consider that these substances were three of the more important ingestible commodities circulating through Spanish colonial Guatemala. Perhaps one of the more illuminating instances of the entanglements between ingestible commodities, economic interests, and public health discourse emerges from the protectionist battle to preserve the Audiencia de Guatemala’s cacao monopoly in the mid-seventeenth 151

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century.¹³ The disputes over cacao trade and monopolies centered on the challenge to Guatemalan cacao exports that cacao grown in Guayaquil represented. Guayaquil produced forastero cacao, a hardier, more productive species of cacao tree that while yielding more pods per tree, produced (it was argued) a foul, bitter chocolate drink that contrasted with the high-quality criollo chocolate grown in Guatemala.¹4 The greater productivity of Guayaquil and Venezuelan cacao groves, due both to the forastero tree and larger laboring populations than the Guatemalan plantations boasted, targeted the Mexican market that Guatemalan groves could not keep adequately supplied. Guayaquil cacao flooded the market in the early 1600s, dramatically dropping prices and leading to a long series of acrimonious disputes initiated by audiencia officials in Guatemala and private individuals involved in the cacao trade who sought to exclude Guayaquil cacao from the ports of Guatemala and New Spain.¹5 Despite restrictions and bans on trade between Peru and New Spain in place by 1631, contraband Guayaquil cacao was smuggled via overland routes and colluding secondary ports. In 1628 the Audiencia de Guatemala issued its own ban on Guayaquil cacao, prohibiting it in all Guatemalan ports while continuing to advocate for a broader royal ban on its trade.¹6 The economic reasons for this exclusion are obvious as a protectionist measure intended to maintain Guatemala’s cacao monopoly, yet the justifications given by the Audiencia de Guatemala range from the economic to the biopolitical. In particular, the audiencia argued that the cacao groves were central to the vitality of Guatemala and among its only sources of income, while Guayaquil, a backwater, had other ways of supporting itself. The audiencia then provided further justification for stopping the cacao trade out of Guayaquil by leveraging broader concerns over native health and mortality in terms of the economic impact of death and disease. The audiencia argued that cacao from Guayaquil, which was widely consumed by native laborers due to its lower price and greater availability in self-organized black markets, was poisonous for Guatemalan native populations specifically and thus responsible for the continued depopulation of native communities and the concomitant economic difficulties that native deaths entailed. These two threads were woven together to argue that ultimately, if Guayaquil cacao was allowed to flow into colonial markets, it would lead to the destruction of the Guatemalan cacao groves, a marked decline in tribute, and bankruptcy of the royal treasury.¹7 Similar uses of this discourse are found throughout the Spanish Americas and at different times. Francisco García Peláez summarizes a 152

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similar argument against the importation of Guayaquil (and Venezuelan) cacao from a 1630s document: “the introduction of cacao from Peru was of concern in these provinces, due to its poor quality and for the harm it caused to native people who made use of it, as they dwindled and were consumed, and they ask that its importation be disrupted, following the prohibitions in place against it.”¹8 In a separate petition, dated September 5, 1635, a similar concern for native health is leveraged to highlight the dangers of imported Guayaquil cacao, except in this source imported cacao is held responsible for native mortality in Nicaragua and Sonsonate: [A]s far as H.M. [His Majesty] has prohibited the traffic and import of cacao from the kingdom of Peru, for having experienced the harm that the drink from said kind [of cacao] causes to the natives of these provinces due to the poor quality of the cacao that has consumed and finished the majority of those in the province of Nicaragua and jurisdiction of the town of Sonsonate, [he] ordered the chief district officers of the towns of Realejo and Sonsonate to impede its [Peruvian cacao’s] introduction.¹9

This pattern of discourse is repeated in starkly similar terms in reference to Guatemalan attempts at excluding Peruvian wine imports in 1611, highlighting the cross-over potential of biopolitical discourse that hinged on the health risks of ingestible commodities for native populations enunciated as a means of safeguarding economic value of monopolies and commerce in the Spanish colonies. In this 1611 petition to the crown, the conde de la Gomera (count of Gomera) in Escuintla, Guatemala, lent his support for banning the importation of Peruvian wine to Guatemala (and his jurisdiction, specifically) because “it was strong, raw, somewhat noxious, especially to the Indians.”²0 Murdo MacLeod highlights the similarity in these claims of the poisonous nature of Guayaquil cacao and Peruvian wine, arguing that both likely rested on similar combinations of “truth and prejudice.” Moreover, the same type of argument was used to justify banning Peruvian wine imports in Panama.²¹ At the very least, these documents indicate the non-unique nature of this type of biopolitical, protectionist discourse in sixteenthand seventeenth-century colonial Guatemala and in the broader Spanish Americas. In fact, the recently analyzed Alotenango petition in the AGCA relating to regional commerce in sugar highlights the rather expansive deployment of biopolitical justifications in economically moti153

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vated petitions, especially those involving ingestible goods, on behalf of Spanish colonists.

THE ALOTENANGO PETITION: SUGAR, ALCOHOL, HEALTH, AND TR IBUTE The 1647 Alotenango petition was written on behalf of itinerant merchants from Alotenango who claimed that they had not been allowed to peddle their wares, including worked wax and clothes, to cacao-producing communities on the coast.²² Local officials, they stated, restricted their access by incarcerating and beating them for attempting to trade. Coastal communities, especially those specialized in cacao cultivation, found themselves dependent on merchants and markets to acquire goods needed for day-to-day life as early as the late sixteenth century.²³ Growing cacao provided such communities the means with which to purchase goods at market, as the much sought-after crop drew the attention of merchants, traders, and others looking to trade and/or swindle as much cacao as possible from growers. The merchants from Alotenango made clear that they made their living through the small-scale commerce they carried out with coastal cacao producers, in whom they found steady demand for the goods they offered. They asked that the audiencia provide a measure of protection and support for their trade. Initially, the audiencia sided with the petitioners. Then Captain Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán, the corregidor of Cotzumalguapa, responded to the allegations in a now-familiar set of arguments. He responded that the reason such merchants from the “valley of Guatemala” (Santiago and surroundings) were chased away was because of the clear and present danger they represented to native bodies, morality, and economic productivity.²4 Fuentes y Guzmán’s justification centered on the wares allegedly peddled by these merchants: sugary goods and, more illicitly, alcohol, specifically wine or fermented sugarcane chicha (beer). In one passage, Fuentes y Guzmán states that these merchants approached the town under the pretext of selling innocuous goods such as clothes and wax but that in fact they were luring local people in with: “confites [sugarcoated or sugar-infused fruits, nuts, seeds, and so forth], melcochas [a coarse sugar candy beaten to incorporate air into the sugar] y otras golosinas [any of a variety of candies and sweets]” that were “muy dañosas” (very harmful) to life and health. Once the locals were lured in, presumably due to their childlike 154

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weakness for sugary treats, the merchants preyed on another (perceived) native vice: their inclination for alcohol. The merchants took the opportunity to draw native people into the fields, away from Spanish eyes, and sell them liquor that they purchased with cacao grown in their groves. This “waste” of cacao would have been of particular concern, as these coastal communities paid their tribute obligations in cacao and/or currency generated by commerce in cacao. Interestingly, Maya “wine” traders are mentioned in this petition and in a 1591 case in Sololá found in the Kaqchikel Chronicles; both cases involved the alleged sale of an illicit substance by native traders and corporal punishment for those accused of said practice. Of note, Fuentes y Guzmán justified his actions by explicitly referencing the peril that alcohol and sugar—specifically, “confites, melcochas y otras golosinas”—presented to native health, as they were not “necesarias ala bida humana pero muy dañosas” (necessary for human life but very harmful). Arguing that sugar was damaging to the health is an especially intriguing element of this petition, for sugar (unlike alcohol) did not yield the immediate mood- and behavior-altering effects that had led to the prohibition and demonization of alcohol.²5 As would later happen with cacao,²6 sugar was excluded from consideration as a food that would break fasts; instead, it was categorized as a medicine as early as the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas.²7 Rather than being viewed as a vice bad for the health, sugar was used in sixteenth-century Europe as well as in colonial Guatemala as a remedy for everything from fever, coughs, chest ailments, digestion issues, and chapped lips to even ocular maladies.²8 A 1667 accounting book explicitly mentions syrups and plain sugar among the medicines acquired for members of the native community of Chimaltenango in Guatemala, who were reeling from a “peste” (plague).²9 Within Spanish humoral medicine traditions, sugar, due in part to its sweetness, was considered a hot, moist, food that was good for melancholics with a cold, dry, bile-heavy temperament. Early Spanish evaluations of native bodies juxtaposed the hot, choleric Spanish temperaments to the cold, phlegmatic temperament of natives.³0 Sticking to this evaluation, hot, moist sugar would, rather than be detrimental to native health, serve as an ideal food to counterbalance the abundance of cold foods and cold temperament that defined native people. As the discussion of climate illustrates, Spanish colonists were aware of the different hot and cold regions within Guatemala and the effects on native health that moving between zones of opposite temperament entailed. As Earle argues, temperament was a dynamic, malleable thing, influ155

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enced in part by climate as well as the food that was eaten. Coastal populations, while eating a diet considered to be cold and dry, would have inhabited a hot and humid region that perhaps counteracted the effects of the cold diet and made the consumption of sugar unnecessary or perhaps even dangerous because of its ability to knock temperaments out of balance. Fuentes y Guzmán did not provide any details on how or why sugar was dangerous for native health, indicating a certain takenfor-granted knowledge of the damaging qualities of sugar consumption.³¹ As Mintz indicates, criticisms of sugar as a medicine had already emerged in sixteenth-century Europe as part of a broader anti-Islamic tilt, as the presence of sugar in the medicinal syrup and other preparations at the time was a direct result of Islamic influence on medical and pharmacological knowledge.³² By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a broader antisugar perspective had emerged in Europe. James Hart, writing in 1633 (fourteen years prior to the petition in question), lays out the various maladies that could come from the overindulgence of sugar, especially sugar confections of various types: [Sugar] yet being much used produceth dangerous effects in the body: as namely, the immoderate uses thereof, as also of sweet confections, and Sugar-plummes, heateth the blood, ingendreth the landise obstructions, cachexias, consumptions, rotteth the teeth, making them look blacke, and withall, causeth many time a loathsome stinking-breath. And therefore let young people especially, beware how they meddle to much with it.³³

Perhaps it was this knowledge, current at the time de Fuentes y Guzmán was responding to the petition, that informed his claims of how unhealthy sugar was, especially if it led to consumptions and cachexias that sapped the strength of laborers. More broadly, controlling sugar production, consumption, and distribution through such healthfocused discourse may have formed part of a broader attempt by colonists to ensure higher prices for sugar and sugar products whose trade they controlled.³4 The output of the “great numbers of little sugar mills” (described by Fuentes y Guzman’s son, Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, in 1690) operated by native people in the countryside oversupplied local markets and drove down prices, an outcome of obvious concern for colonists with a stake in sugar.³5 As a sugar-mill owner himself, Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzman had an obvious stake in this situation and felt compelled to argue against native sugar production for its broader adverse economic repercussions for criollo or mes156

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tizo sugar producers in control of sugar markets.³6 In his chronicles, the younger Fuentes y Guzmán, also linked native sugar production to the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol by native people (to various negative effects). In these comments, the lamentations over the drop in sugar prices caused by native production of sugar are joined to concerns over the inevitable production of alcohol from syrups and sugar by native producers that result in all forms of debauchery among native people. In particular, mention is made of maladies of the body and injuries that result from excessive drinking and fighting, all of which hasten native depopulation like “hay to a fire.”³7 Perhaps these claims of a “scourge” of underground and bootlegged sugar and alcohol that F. A. de Fuentes y Guzmán chronicles in Recordación Florida were in part due to his father’s influence, as the 1647 petition shows the younger Fuentes y Guzmán directly involved in attempts at controlling and limiting commerce in sugar (and alcohol) by native communities on the pretense of the biopolitical repercussions of such unabated trade. As mentioned, Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán was also the owner of a trapiche (sugar mill) in the Lago Amatitlán region in the seventeenth century,³8 forcing a consideration of his self-interest in objecting to the moral and economic transgressions that native sugar and alcohol production represented. Whatever the dynamic, the similarity in how sugar and alcohol production by native people is denigrated in both the 1647 Alotenango petition by Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán and the 1690s Recordación Florida by his son Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán is rather telling. The dangers of alcohol were perhaps more apparent, as early on Spanish officials sought to restrict the sale of alcohol to native people with an eye toward the economic potential of controlling alcohol production and distribution. Native people in particular were thought to have a predilection to drunkenness that they needed to be saved from. A 1678 real cédula (royal order), based on the bishop of Guatemala’s observations of constant drunkenness and chicha consumption among native populations, directed the president of the audiencia to find a way to mitigate native chicha consumption without banning the drink, presumably to allow revenue from its sale and production among nonnatives who weren’t “predisposed” to excessive consumption.³9 Continuing in 1735, the ayuntamiento of Santiago initiated autos (acts) to the audiencia that targeted the suppression of native production of bootleg homemade (hechiza) aguardiente in order to “avoid immorality and harm to the health.”40 Later still, in 1758, the audiencia of Guatemala had been ordered to provide a report on the dangers and “grave incon157

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veniences” that aguardiente de caña, as the distilled and more powerful alcoholic beverage gained popularity, visited upon the natives and other residents in the audiencia’s jurisdiction.4¹ Even with the gradual loosening of prohibitions and shift toward regulation of aguardiente and chicha evident in very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, penalties remained in place for those selling chicha to native individuals.4² Such prohibitions were purported to safeguard the lives, morality, and labor power of native populations in the face of their perceived weakness toward drink while in the same instance reinscribing the social and biological differences between native and nonnative that undergirded othering discourses and justified exploitative colonial (and indeed, modern) policies and practices.4³ The lack of enforcement of these policies is clear in the archive, as one document in particular highlights the frustrations of officials. In 1714, a cédula was issued in light of the lack of compliance with a cédula issued in 1693 prohibiting the production of aguardiente de caña.44 The new cédula called for rather harsh (possibly increased) penalties for aguardiente production and distribution: one thousand pesos for a first offense, two thousand for a second, and three thousand pesos and destierro (exile) for a third offense. Despite these measures, enforcement remained difficult due to a variety of factors. As the elder Fuentes y Guzmán indicates in the Alotenango petition, Thomas Gage in his travel writing, and the younger Fuentes y Guzmán in Recordación Florida, native people found ways to secretly produce, advertise, distribute, and consume illicit alcohol, working with the difficult and wooded terrain, the distances from Spanish officials, and the darkness of night to carry on unabated. In a related vein, alcohol consumption and crime became linked in discourse, more so than in practice, providing further justification for Spanish colonial elites who sought to denigrate and restrict native production and consumption of fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages.45 Complicating this issue, beyond the supposed public health and safety discourse that legitimized alcohol-related policies, Spanish colonists sought “to both control and profit from its consumption, [as] the Spanish crown established a monopoly on the sale and production of alcoholic beverages.”46 The entanglements of profit motives, public health discourse, and alcohol is made clear in diverse sources. As an example, a 1744 cédula indicates that a prohibition against aguardiente production and distribution in the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Cape Verde Islands came about through the explicit consideration of the losses in revenue suffered by vineyards in Spain.47 In a petition to a Guatemalan official in 1731, Pedro Lujan de Es158

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covar petitioned for a license to make and sell beer, only to be turned down on the basis that “hesta prohibida la venta de hechizos” (the sale of homemade alcohol is prohibited).48 This particular petition provides at least a small clue about regulations against native and nonnative production of alcohol as perhaps more than just a measure to protect the populace from the dangers of alcohol. The emphasis on the prohibition against hechizos indicates that it was unregulated, untaxed alcohol not controlled by Spanish colonial administration that was targeted in this case, mirroring the worries of an establishment trying to secure an alcohol monopoly.49 The denigration of hechizos in this petition resonates with the fixation on “pure” white pulque in New Spain discussed by Joan Bristol in chapter 5 of this volume. Such standards of quality and type, in addition to assuaging taxonomic anxieties about purity and danger, constituted attempts to restrict acceptable pulque to state-controlled and taxed sources while legitimizing this (ultimately unsuccessful) monopolization through an appeal to the danger of impure pulque for native consumers.50 Returning to Fuentes y Guzmán’s counterargument in the 1647 petition (and his presumed son’s later diatribe in Recordación Florida), in addition to the danger to native health, trade in sugar and alcohol also brought a danger to native morality, as local natives, interested as they were in maintaining a source of alcohol, would not inform on or turn over these merchants, but rather they actively protected them from Spanish officials, thereby colluding in the illicit activity of both drinking and distributing contraband alcohol. Anxiety over the colonized colluding with one another is not without precedent in colonial Guatemala.5¹ In particular, informal, illicit drinking establishments generated much anxiety in eighteenth-century Guatemala, as they were seen as potential “hotbeds of social unrest,” loci of moral degradation,5² and generally places where the discipline imposed by colonial labor and public health policies could be contested and undermined. Other drinking places in the Spanish Americas generated similar anxieties. Joan Bristol (in chapter 5) points to the association between pulqerías, drinking, and unrest or resistance that contributed to the 1692 bread riots. Beyond the Spanish Americas, Frederick Smith offers up Mapps Cave in Barbados as a place of drinking and respite for enslaved individuals that in turn came to play a role in the fomenting and planning of the 1816 slave uprising on the island.5³ Much of the concern expressed by the corregidor Fuentes y Guzmán in the petition centers on the seeming impossibility of catching these traders and their contraband, due explicitly to the collusion of local 159

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populations and their use of broken and wooded terrain that obscured surveillance. The activities happening outside of Spanish control generated much worry for colonists. Gage, writing in 1633, provides another example of such colonial anxiety, as his description of chicha production includes explicit reference to the hidden, community-based, and community-building practice of illicit chicha production and consumption. In his words, once fermentation of chicha was complete, producers would “call their friends to the drinking of it, (which commonly they do in the night time, lest their Priest in the Town should have notice of them in the day).”54 In addition to the ritual (re)deployments of alcohol among native populations, the social role of its consumption among communities must not be underemphasized.55 In Gage’s examples and others like that described by Fuentes y Guzmán in his response, alcohol appears to have served as a medium for communities, kin, and friends to gather, away from Spanish surveillance, and rekindle social and economic relationships now strained by colonial control and displacements brought about by new forms of labor organization and resettlement policies (reducciones).56 Finally, and perhaps most importantly to my broader argument, Fuentes y Guzmán the elder raised a more general economic justification for why the audiencia should be concerned with native health, providing a different perspective, specific to sugar and alcohol, on the biopolitical framework in which native health was embedded. He argued that the commerce perpetuated by these native merchants was detrimental to the collection of tributes and to the utility of native people as laborers in several ways. First, the peddled sweets and alcohol drained native coffers needed to pay tribute and for the day-to-day support of native households, as they used the cacao grown and paid as tribute to purchase these “unnecessary” and damaging goods. In addition, alcohol led to rampant drunkenness, which in turn meant native tributaries did not work their groves and fields, which led to their incarceration at various times of year.57 All this meant that native people in the region, because of their involvement with these merchants, would have nothing to pay as tribute or anything with which to feed and clothe themselves and their dependents, due to persistent drunkenness and associated derelictions of their duties as tributaries, laborers, and heads of household. The merchants from Alotenango responded to the claims made by Fuentes y Guzmán in a manner that highlights their knowledge and appropriation of Spanish colonial biopolitical health discourse, as described in the Aguacatepeque example below. They argued that they 160

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did not sell alcohol and that no proof existed that they had peddled alcohol in these coastal communities at all because they did not drink. The fact that their sobriety is mentioned as further justification is of importance, as it indicates knowledge of the discourse of the “perjuicio del bino” (harm of wine, alcohol) for native communities. It is possible that they leveraged this knowledge only to make a more convincing case, an adroit engagement of health discourse for economic goals, as Spanish petitions frequently did. If these traders from Alotenango did indeed stay sober out of a belief in the ill effects of alcohol—on health, productivity, and morality—as stipulated by Spanish authorities, this document speaks to the efficacy of Spanish colonial health-related “truth discourses” and enforced public health initiatives through which these native traders came to “work on themselves . . . by means of practices of the self, in the name of their own life or health, that of their family or some other collectivity.”58 To this biopolitical framing I would add practices of the self in the name of morality and its associations with health and life, a theme that resonates in these discourses of public health and morality and modern-day Guatemala, where entangled health and morality truth discourses and new forms of bodily discipline emerge from the proliferation of new mind/bodyaltering substances.59 The traders from Alotenango went on to argue that they should be allowed to trade because they helped distribute cacao to other regions and keep supply high and prices low, addressing a problem that arose when cacao was hoarded and prices made to rise artificially.60 Moreover, they argued that even if someone were selling alcohol on the coast, barring all trade with itinerant merchants was not the way to fix the alcohol problem. Finally, they made clear that this trade was how they supported themselves, and more importantly (indicating some knowledge of the broader motivations behind certain policies, including alcohol prohibition as articulated by Fuentes y Guzmán the elder), how they generated their tribute payments and thus should be allowed to continue trading unimpeded. Ultimately, the audiencia sided with them and compelled Fuentes y Guzmán to allow the merchants to trade their wares on the coast. Of particular interest, then, is the manner in which health-related discourse was pulled into, manipulated, and deployed by the different litigants, who all the while were cognizant of the economic justifications undergirding their arguments. Moreover, the intersections between the biopolitics of sugar and alcohol, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are striking, at least as they are articu161

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lated in the response by the corregidor Fuentes y Guzmán. Referring to twentieth-century bootlegging in Guatemala, David Carey argues that because of losses to state revenue caused by bootleggers undermining alcohol monopolies, “financial concerns drove public policy” and by extension, public health policy and related discourses.6¹ Virginia GarrardBurnett makes this more explicit, arguing that efforts at controlling alcohol consumption and eradicating its illegal and informal production “did not stem from the state’s desire to control alcohol consumption out of concerns for morality or public health.”6² Rather, they were intended to draw Maya communities further into the twentieth-century cash economy by eliminating local, informal production and distribution, thus routing consumers to state-regulated and -taxed drinking establishments and suppliers and thereby increasing the state’s revenues by casting it as the sole supplier of alcohol. These observations intersect with my central theme. Colonial-period records are transparent about the economic concerns undergirding petitions and policy changes related to native health (such as the need to stem native mortality and maintain health in order to secure an economically productive labor force) that remained central to twentiethcentury alcohol-related policy. Nevertheless, there remained some ambivalence around alcohol consumption. While drunkenness could impact the productivity and tribute-paying potential of laborers and potentially lead to insurrections or resistance to colonial plans, it also represented a means of creating a more pliable, dependent workforce.6³ Indeed, perhaps the most marked transition in health- and alcoholrelated discourse is found in the later nineteenth century. Alcohol, both fermented and distilled, came to be reframed as “useful and necessary for the health and life of the workers,” paralleling the global shift in perceptions of sugar from a luxury toward a necessity of workers’ day-to-day lives, providing abundant, cheap calories and energy when paired with stimulant-rich teas and coffees.64 Bristol notes a similar discourse around Mexican pulque in the early nineteenth century as this alcoholic beverage was recast as healthful to the bodies of laborers as well as to their spirits while laboring. Of interest is the manner in which the good qualities of pulque are couched explicitly in terms of its benefits to productivity and labor, a discourse already articulated in the seventeenth century.65 Alcohol, rather than a danger, would become a lubricant that fostered a chemically disciplined labor force (no longer in danger of dying off as early colonial observers feared) hooked into new forms and cycles of debt and dependency facilitated by the addictive qualities of alcoholic beverages.66 162

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ALCOHOL AND COLONIAL UMBR AGE AT AGUACATEPEQUE Recent work at San Pedro Aguacatepeque has provided evidence, both archaeological and documentary, of one such community embroiled in the production, distribution, and likely consumption of sugar and alcohol.67 Aguacatepeque’s liminal location in the Pacific piedmont region of Guatemala, at the interface between the hot, wet coastal plain and the cold, dry highlands, positioned the community within climate-specific Spanish colonial public health policies. These policies, similar to those guiding the corregidor de Fuentes y Guzmán in his denigration of sugar and alcohol, drew on extant Spanish colonial humoral knowledge of bodies and health to enact (albeit ineffectually) policies restricting the movement of native laborers from the climates in which they resided to opposite climates, that is, cold to hot climates and vice versa, as part of colonial labor demands.68 Aguacatepeque’s residents found themselves pulled into hot and cold climates to labor at different times despite their appeals made specifically on the grounds of colonial public health policies restricting these practices. In one 1593 petition, residents of Aguacatepeque and neighboring Malacatepeque petitioned to be excluded from laboring in the capital, Santiago, due to their community’s location in a hot climate and the capital’s location in a cold highland climate.69 They argued that carrying out that work would expose community members to illness and violate established policies prohibiting such interclimate labor movement. They added that the communities produced highly valued cacao and should be left to their work since it contributed greatly to the crown’s coffers. Their petition was denied on the grounds that there was great demand for laborers, a condition that necessitated flexibility in established policies; the adjudicating officials believed that Aguacatepeque was actually not in a hot climate but a more temperate one (however defined) and that they were not producing any cacao and thus not providing important revenue. In the absence of cacao production and despite the clear manipulation of established policies due to necessity, Aguacatepeque was required to send laborers to the capital. The manipulability of these policies and of the standing of communities in liminal climactic locations emerges quite readily from Aguacatepeque’s colonial experience. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, Aguacatepeque was growing sugarcane and producing sugar products rather than cacao, as was claimed in the earlier petition;70 sugar was a lucrative crop and craft 163

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made even more financially rewarding if fermented into chicha or distilled into aguardiente and distributed illegally, a common practice among native communities growing sugarcane in colonial Guatemala.7¹ Numerous colonial sources mention Aguacatepeque’s cultivation of sugarcane and the production of panela, rapadura (coarse, unrefined sugar), and melada (molasses) for sale at market.7² One 1740 document in particular explicitly states that the community paid tribute from sugarcane and sugar products, meaning sale of sugar products at market became a means of generating revenue to meet annual tribute obligations.7³ A 1689 document authored by Francisco de Zuaza provides further insight into Aguacatepeque’s sugar production and possible ties to Alotenango merchants.74 In this source, Aguacatepeque is mentioned as a visita (subordinate settlement) of Alotenango; inhabitants of Aguacatepeque were laborers in their milpas (cornfields) and the trapichillos where they processed the sugarcane they grew. Alotenango, on the other hand, is described as the head of the local doctrina (parish) and its inhabitants as hard workers and traders (tratantes) who brought various goods to market. Its natives are of the Kaqchikel nation and they speak this language, they are hard workers and traders both in the corn they sell in the city and on the coast, as well as in other things and legumes, they work much wood that they bring from the pinecovered hills and they bring it down to sell in Guatemala, they have a type of white wood that is like cork from which they make boxes for sugar [or sweets] and there is much demand for them in the city.75

In light of the Alotenango petition’s content, a few things immediately stand out. Alotenango had a reputation as a locus of native commercial activity, with traders operating in the capital and on the Pacific coast. Alotenango traders distributed various goods, from maize and beans to “other things,” clothes, wax, and so forth, detailed in the Alotenango petition. The residents were known to craft and sell specialty boxes for sweets, perhaps the exact kind Fuentes y Guzmán was concerned about in the Alotenango petition. There is no mention of sugar production or trapichillos in or around Alotenango in Zauza’s description; there is only mention of Aguacatepeque’s established sugar production. It bears considering that at least in 1689, the date of the above-cited description, perhaps Aguacatepeque’s residents found an

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outlet for their sugar products through the traders operating out of Alotenango. Rather than taking goods to market themselves, collaborating with Alotenango’s traders, who likely had well-established trade routes (as seems evident in the Alotenango petition), would have provided greater reach to both coastal and highland communities. Working through Alotenango’s traders on the coast could have purposefully avoided the official regulations and taxes of Santiago’s market and the unofficial coercive, unequal exchanges perpetuated by mestizo traders on the outskirts of Santiago who awaited native traders laden with marketable goods.76 The more informal exchanges between Alotenango’s traders and native populations on the coast described in the Alotenango petition were carried out not in a marketplace per se but in more direct oneon-one engagements, with Alotenango’s traders playing the role of peddlers more than merchants. These informal exchanges, wherein sugar and wax were traded for cacao and other currency out of sight and control of Spanish colonial officials, may have emerged in a self-organized manner as a result of the growing needs of coastal cacao-producing communities no longer producing sufficient subsistence due to the specialization in cacao production, for as Sandra Orellana states, “Wherever cacao was grown, maize was scarce.”77 One town in particular that was known to have little maize (and likely other necessities) in the late seventeenth century was Santiago Cotzumalguapa,78 one of the towns visited by the Alotenango traders to peddle their wares. These traders may have brought with them sugar products, candies, and other goods produced at Aguacatepeque to sell discreetly and potentially at fairer rates—for both consumer and vendor—than would be possible through more formal or official channels. The alcohol Fuentes y Guzmán claimed was being sold to coastal communities, a claim the Alotenango merchants denied, may well have been present and could very easily have come from the sugarcane and trapichillos at Aguacatepeque. Direct evidence of alcohol and sugar production at Aguacatepeque is scant, due to the likelihood that the trapiches used to crush cane and the molds used to make rapaduras were likely made of wood and would not have been preserved archaeologically.79 Despite this methodological hurdle, some recovered artifacts indicate that the community was potentially producing fermented beverages. In particular, two ceramic types unique to the colonial contexts at Aguacatepeque may be related to sugar and/or alcohol production. Large, thick-bodied, micatempered vessels (approximately fift y liters volume on average) with

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FIGUR E 6.2. Lead-glazed fermentation vessel rim. Photograph by Guido Pezzarossi.

evidence of soot and burning on the exterior point to possible use as ceramic boiling vats for sugar production,80 as boiling vessels for chicha production, or even as boiling vessels for distillation.8¹ Large lead-glazed, mass-produced ceramic vessels also proliferate in the colonial contexts at the site, a vessel type that may be of ideal size and composition for use as either a cooling vessel for postboil chicha or perhaps as a fermentation vat.8² These market-acquired vessels, seemingly produced in or around Santiago, Guatemala,8³ all have unrestricted openings, with a large diameter (mean rim diameter = 44 cm), and with nearly identical rims or lips thickened and rolled to the exterior. The overhang on the rim provides a suitable space for a fabric covering to be held in place by a small cord or other ligature to keep out contaminants (figure 6.2). The lead glazing on these vessels indicates that they were made and likely used to store liquid or semiliquid foods and/or drinks, as the lead glazing would inhibit evaporation of liquids stored within. The unrestricted opening of these vessels needs further consideration, as many modern fermentation vessels (such as carboys for fermenting beer) have restricted openings to minimize contaminant intrusion and invasion by critters intrigued by the sweet contents of the vessels. Gage mentions the use of vessels, possibly restricted neck or opening Spanish olive oil and wine jars, in his description of chicha production in seventeenth-century Guatemala.84 At present, no Spanish olive or wine jars have been recovered at Aguacatepeque, and if indeed these were the vessels of choice for chicha production, then evidence for alcohol production is minimal. However, the open-mouthed 166

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lead-glazed vessels recovered at Aguacatepeque bear consideration as possible fermentation vessels due in part to the description of chicha production offered by Gage. He describes chicha production among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kaqchikel communities in highland Guatemala in this way: Among themselves they make drinks far stronger than wine. These they confection in those great jars that come from Spain. They put in them a little water, and fill up the jar with some molasses or juice from sugar cane, or some honey to sweeten it . . . put in roots and leaves of tobacco . . . and [close] up the jar for a fort-night or a month, till all that they have put in be thoroughly steeped . . . this drink they call chicha.85

The various additives to chicha, including a toad,86 would have benefited from a larger opening to add ingredients during fermentation and either remove them or serve chicha by ladling, one serving at a time, rather than attempting to pour out of a large vessel with a very restricted opening, wherein all the additives would be more likely to clog the opening or flow out into the serving cup or bowl. Constrictedopening vessels, such as Spanish wine and olive jars, were produced to ship goods over vast distances with minimal loss of contents. While potentially excellent fermentation vessels, useful for transport of liquids within regions, their size and the inaccessibility of the contents present certain problems remedied by the unrestricted vessels at Aguacatepeque. As Hayashida illustrates for modern-day Peruvian chicha serving practices, chicha is not poured from large vessels but rather is ladled from covered fermentation vessels with partially constricted openings.87 The large-opening lead-glazed vessels recovered at Aguacatepeque are most similar to the cooling vats for chicha production described by Hayashida. These vessels may have been used to cool boiled chicha (if indeed sugarcane chicha production in colonial Guatemala was boiled as a first step) and then transferred to constricted-opening vessels for fermentation. Or perhaps chicha was cooled and fermented, or simply fermented in the absence of a boil step, in the same container,88 only to be ladled into smaller vessels for transport and sale or directly into the types of cups, bowls, and pitchers found at Aguacatepeque. An abundance of drinking vessels, many of them majolicas produced in Santiago or Chinautla-style polychrome-decorated shallow bowls, were found in direct association with at least four handled, finely burnished pinch-spout pitchers (figure 6.3).89 In concert with the evidence of al167

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FIGUR E 6.3. Burnished pitcher vessel found in association with multiple pitcher fragments. Photograph by Guido Pezzarossi.

cohol production, these findings raise the possibility that the area may have been a gathering place for surrounding communities, as Gage describes alcohol producers were,90 where alcohol was produced and consumed and social networks were reconnected or maintained.

CONCLUSION Colonial-period records are at times transparent about the economic concerns undergirding petitions and policy changes related to native health. In particular, the focus is squarely on the need to stem native mortality and maintain health in order to secure an economically productive labor force. Maintaining native health was, in many of these petitions and policies, simply a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. In the dispute between Alotenango traders and the corregidor of Escuintla, Fuentes y Guzmán, we are provided with an 168

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excellent case study for analyzing the microscale economic machinations that were legitimized by tapping into extant concerns for native health and morality, mirroring broader-scale policy shifts and attempts at monopolistic control of resource production and distribution.9¹ The archaeological evidence for possible chicha fermentation identified at Aguacatepeque signals the community’s shift toward a craft product of higher risks and rewards in legal (sugar) and illegal (alcohol) markets, both of which transgressed health- and morality-related discourse and policies as well as monopolistic projects. Where community appeals to public health polices failed in the face of more pressing economic needs of crown officials and colonists, the productivity of sugar production at Aguacatepeque and its contribution to crown coffers in the form of tribute may have provided the community with sufficient justification for relief from some colonial labor demands, as the community attempted in the 1593 petition in regard to their cacao production. Perhaps the frustrations of their position within malleable public health policies drove the community to concentrate on the production of sugar—and more discreetly, alcohol—as a form of umbrage against colonial labor policies that often contradicted public health policies. Notably, community members were forced to move across the landscape and away from their fields as part of the repartamiento labor draft despite its frequent collisions with colonial public health policies invested in preserving native life. The health policies were superseded in the interest of maintaining a viable workforce through colonial labor policies and practices that were implemented to maximize the labor power and profit potential of all remaining native individuals.9² Control over the production and distribution of sugar and alcohol, and manipulations of the available supply, promised great profits. Spanish colonial attempts at curtailing native production and distribution (such as at Aguacatepeque or by the Alotenango traders) or even production and distribution by other colonists (be they in Guatemala or Peru) in the pursuit of specific economic gains drew on a variety of tactics. As the Alotenango petition indicates, native traders could be actively kept from trading in sugar and other goods through force. In turn, these actions were justified through biopolitical discourses directed at the preservation of native bodies and livelihood (albeit in the interest of maintaining a productive labor force) through protection from dangerous and unnecessary ingestibles that were “muy dañosas” to human life. The native bodies and livelihoods that were supposedly the objects of protection were the same that were subjected to violence in the first place—a violence, control, and surveillance justified as being 169

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imposed for their own good. Some justified the tactics for the good of Spanish colonial enterprises that relied on native labor power yet were wary of how native production of sugar and alcohol could undermine extant monopolistic arrangements and colonial economic structures. As we move forward into the further study of ingestibles in the Spanish colonies, it is critical that we maintain an eye toward the biopolitics in which they were enmeshed and the outcomes they structured for the health, vitality, livelihood, and experience of native communities. NOTES Many thanks to all who provided funding for the research in this article: the Stanford University Department of Anthropology, Stanford University Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, National Geographic Waitt Foundation (#W10-107), and National Science Foundation DDIG (BCS-1346286). Thanks to Hector Concoha Chet for his assistance with archival sources in Guatemala and transcription work, to Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn Sampeck for the invitation to participate, and to Heather Law Pezzarossi for her comments on earlier drafts. 1. The chapter title, “Confites, Melcochas y Otras Golosinas . . . Muy Dañosas,” also is from the 1647 petition, which lists “candies, sweets, and sugary treats” as “very harmful”; “Real Provisión para que el Corregidor de Escuintepeque no impida a los indios el comerciar en su jurisdicción,” 1647, A.1.24, leg. 4647, exp. 39630, Archivo General de Centro América (hereafter AGCA). 2. Christopher Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 125. 3. Guido Pezzarossi, “A Spectral Haunting of Society: Longue Durée Archaeologies of Capitalism and Antimarkets in Colonial Guatemala,” in Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, 2nd ed., ed. Mark P. Leone and Jocelyn Knauff (New York: Springer, 2015), 345–374. 4. David Carey Jr., “Introduction: Writing a History of Alcohol in Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 1–16; Stacey Schwartzkopf, “Maya Power and State Culture: Community, Indigenous Politics, and State Formation in Northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 1800–1871” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2008), 380. 5. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978). 6. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1, no. 2 (2006): 196. 7. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 143; see also Stefan Helmreich, “Species of Biocapital,” Science as Culture 17, no. 4 (December 2008): 463–478. 8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 170

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University Press, 2000); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 198. 9. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 198–199. 10. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. T. Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 169. 11. Ibid., 170. 12. Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 13. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 244, 441; Manuel Rubio Sánchez, “El cacao,” Anales de la Sociedad de Geografía e História de Guatemala 31 (1958): 99–102. 14. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 241. 15. Ibid., 244. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Francisco de Paula García Peláez, Memorias para la história del antiguo reyno de Guatemala (Guatemala City: Establecimiento Tipografia de L. Luna, 1852), 2:45. The original reads, “de la introducción del cacao del Perú se seguia en estas provincias por ser de mala calidad y en mucho daño de los naturales, que por hacer uso del, se iban acabando y consumiendo, y pide se estorbe su entrada conforme á la prohibición que habia de ello.” 19. Ibid.; “que por cuanto S. M. tiene prohibido se tragine y traiga cacao del reino del Pirú, por haberse experimentado el daño que la bebida de dicho género causa á los indios naturales de estas provincias por la mala calidad del cacao que á consumido y acabado la mayor parte de los que habia en la provincia de Nicaragua y jurisdicción de la villa de Sonsonate, ordenaba á los alcaldes mayores de las villas del Realejo y Sonsonate impidiesen su introducción.” 20. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 266; emphasis added. 21. Ibid., 444. 22. “Real Provisión,” 1647, AGCA. 23. Juan Pineda, “Descripción de la provincia de Guatemala,” Anales de la Sociedad de Geografia e Historia 1, no. 4 (1925): 333–334. 24. “Real Provisión,” 1647, AGCA. 25. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986), 100. 26. Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 148, 152, 157. 27. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 99. 28. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 29, 41; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 97; Lesley Byrd Simpson, “The Medicine of the Conquistadores: An American Pharmacopoea of 1536,” Osiris (1937): 142–164. 171

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29. Lesley Byrd Simpson, “A Seventeenth-Century Encomienda: Chimaltenango, Guatemala,” The Americas 15, no. 4 (1959): 393–402. 30. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 19, 29; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 103. 31. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 19. 32. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 102; see Simpson, “Medicine of the Conquistadores,” for examples of sugar-laden medicines in colonial Guatemala. 33. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 105. 34. Pezzarossi, “Spectral Haunting.” 35. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Obras históricas de don Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, ed. Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1969 [1699]), 1:316; Robert M. Hill II, Colonial Cakchiquels: Highland Maya Adaptations to Spanish Rule, 1600–1700 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). 36. Severo Martínez Peláez, La Patria del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 144–145. 37. Fuentes y Guzmán, Obras históricas, 316; R. Hill, Colonial Cakchiquels, 122. 38. Regina Wagner, Historia del azúcar en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Asociación de Azucareros de Guatemala, 2007), 34. 39. Real cédula, June 14, 1678, seeking to reduce drunkenness among native people, A1.23, leg. 1521, fol. 113, AGCA. 40. José Joaquín Pardo, Efemérides para escribir la história de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros del Reino de Guatemala (Guatemala City: Tipografia Nacional, 1944), 178. 41. The Audiencia de Guatemala is ordered to gather information on the dangers and harm aguardiente causes native people, 1678; A1.23, leg. 1528, fol. 188, AGCA. 42. “Reglamento venta chicha,” 1678, A1.22.2 leg. 4565, exp. 39156, AGCA. 43. Martínez Peláez, La Patria, 143–144. 44. Real cédula, September 30, 1714, addressing the noncompliance of a cédula from 1693 prohibiting aguardiente production, A3.4, leg. 48, exp. 916, f. 11, AGCA. 45. Carey, “Introduction,” 6–7. 46. Ibid., 7, emphasis added. 47. A1.23, leg. 1527, f. 221, AGCA. 48. Pardo, Efemérides, 171. 49. Carey, “Introduction,” 7. 50. I argue for a consideration of the biopolitical overtones of antimiscegenation and antimixing discourse in the Spanish Americas. Such restrictions provided a means of securing the native laboring population, as indios were depended on for tribute and labor. Sexual and reproductive mixing represented an additional force reducing the future indio laboring population. With this in mind, Bristol’s incisive discussion (chapter 5, this volume) of pul-

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que purity discourse as a thinly veiled metaphor for an idealized indigenous purity in colonial Mexico takes on additional political economic resonance. 51. Pezzarossi, “Spectral Haunting.” 52. Carey, “Introduction,” 10. 53. Frederick H. Smith, The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 125–127. 54. Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225; also see R. Hill, Colonial Cakchiquels, 69. 55. Stacey Schwartzkopf, “Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 17–41; see also F. Smith, Archaeology of Alcohol, 125, for discussion of the comparable role of Mapps Cave in Barbados as a social gathering and drinking place for enslaved laborers. 56. On new forms of labor organization such as repartimiento drafts and wage-labor opportunities in the capital, see Catherine Komisaruk, “Indigenous Labor as Family Labor: Tributes, Migration, and Hispanicization in Colonial Guatemala,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 6, no. 4 (January 2010): 41–66. 57. Compare this to similar discourse around the ill economic and labor effects of pulquerías described by Bristol in chapter 5 of this volume. 58. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 197. 59. Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “On Liberation: Crack, Christianity, and Captivity in Postwar Guatemala City,” Social Text 32, no. 3 120 (September 2014): 11–28. 60. For discussion of Spanish colonial antimarket processes such as manufactured scarcities, see Guido Pezzarossi, “A New Materialist Archaeology of Antimarkets, Power, and Capitalist Effects in Colonial Guatemala” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2014); and Pezzarossi, “Spectral Haunting.” 61. David Carey Jr., “Distilling Perceptions of Crime: Maya Moonshiners and the State, 1898-1944,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 122. 62. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “Conclusion: Community Drunkenness and Control in Guatemala,” in Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, ed. David Carey Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 160. 63. See F. Smith, Archaeology of Alcohol, 127–130, for a parallel discussion of planters’ situationally contingent concerns over drunkenness and unrest or support for enslaved laborers alcohol consumption as a means of alleviating day-to-day tension and labor disputes through alcohol-fueled escapism. 64. Ana Carla Ericastilla and Liseth Jiménez, “Las clandestinistas de aguardiente en Guatemala a fines del siglo XIX” in Mujeres, género e historia en Ame-

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rica Central durante los siglos XVIII, XIX, XX, ed. Eugenia Rodriguez Saenz (San Jose, Costa Rica: UN Development Fund for Women; Burlington, VT: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 2002), 14 (quote). See also Carey, “Introduction,” 7; Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 65. Bristol, chapter 5, this volume. 66. Carey, “Introduction,” 9–10. 67. Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology.” 68. Earle, Body of the Conquistador, 21–23; Pezzarossi, “New Materialist.” 69. William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 203. 70. Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology.” 71. Fuentes y Guzmán, Obras históricas, 1:316; Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225; R. Hill, Colonial Cakchiquels, 122; Schwartzkopf, “Maya Power,” 352–420. 72. The sources are summarized in Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology.” 73. Alonso Crespo, “Relación geográfica del partido de Escuintla, 1740,” Boletin del Archivo General del Gobierno 1, no. 1 (1935): 10. 74. Zuaza, cited in F. Vázquez and L. Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia del santísimo nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la orden de n. seráfico padre san Francisco en el reino de la Nueva España. Vol. 4 (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional, 1944 [1716]), 57–58. 75. Ibid.; emphasis added. 76. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala; Pezzarossi, “Spectral Haunting.” 77. Sandra Orellana, Ethnohistory of the Pacific Coast (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1995), 98; see also Pineda, “Descripción de la provincia,” 333–324; and Kathryn E. Sampeck, “Late Postclassic to Colonial Landscapes and Political Economy of the Izalcos Region, El Salvador” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2007), 54. 78. Orellana, Ethnohistory of the Pacific Coast, 54. 79. See Christine E. Eber, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of Sorrow, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 93, for an example of a twentieth-century wooden trapiche used for chicha production from Chiapas, Mexico. 80. See Pezzarossi, “Spectral Haunting”; Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology.” 81. See Frances M. Hayashida, “Ancient Beer and Modern Brewers: Ethnoarchaeological Observations of Chicha Production in Two Regions of the North Coast of Peru,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27, no. 2 (2008): 161–174, for an example of maize-based chicha ceramic boiling vats of similar volume in twenty-first century Peru. 82. Again, see Hayashida, “Ancient Beer,” for an ethnographic example from Peru.

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83. For INAA sourcing analysis of these ceramics, see Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology.” 84. Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Hayashida, “Ancient Beer.” 88. As described in Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225. 89. See also Pezzarossi, “New Materialist Archaeology,” for discussion of these ceramic types. 90. Gage and Thompson, Thomas Gage’s Travels, 225. 91. For further discussion see Guido Pezzarossi, “Tribute, Antimarkets, and Consumption: An Archaeology of Capitalist Effects in Colonial Guatemala,” in Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, ed. Pedro Paulo Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2015), 79–102. 92. See also Barbara E. Borg, “Ethnohistory of the Sacatepequez Cakchiquel Maya, ca. 1450–1690” (PhD diss., University of Missouri, 1986), 54, 124.

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Afterword C A R L A D. M A RT I N

T

HE CH APTER S IN THIS VOLUME BR ING MUCHneeded attention to the history of food and drug substances—ingested commodities—and the politics of race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, and social difference that impacted their production and consumption in the early modern Atlantic world. The social and environmental issues that undergird these commodities provide insights into the relations between colonizers and colonized, regional and global, poor and elite. As Mintz and others have argued, rather than their qualities of sweetness, stimulation, or inebriation, it is the social life—the social relations—of these substances that has made them meaningful.¹ Engagement with these essays demonstrates that an understanding of this history of production and consumption significantly informs contemporary study of commodity crops. A number of themes are common throughout these essays. Much of the existing literature on these ingested commodities is ethnographic in nature. Previous study has been characterized by a paucity of written record, meaning that much of what ethnohistorians rely on includes archaeological artifacts, the remaining codices, missionary and official government accounts, or even Inquisition cases from these times. In so doing, this volume’s authors interact with concepts of deep time and deep memory, attempting to place cultural ways of hallucinogen use in Mesoamerica. Likewise, they take up themes of cultural hybridity, multiplicity, and openness to interpretation, such as in the mixing of indigenous, African, and European conceptions of divinity, supernatural knowledge, and magic, or of beliefs around health and medicine, morality and behavior. Binaries that preoccupied the Spanish in the time period in question, for example, of purity and impurity, of 176

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blood, both in the consumptive and reproductive senses (where whiteness is linked with purity, virginity, and the Virgin of Guadalupe), worries over mixing with simultaneous romanticization of mixing, of the quotidian and the sacred, all speak to ongoing conversations in several academic disciplines. The essays also detail the social construction of beliefs around these different seductive substances and the ways in which European people adopted new beliefs and altered their existing beliefs as a result of their contact with indigenous people in the Americas. The gendered and racialized—intersectional—nature of consumption and production is also highlighted, with women, especially women of color, playing the role of cultural go-betweens and their sexuality key to the preparation of these ingested commodities. Similarly, the essays show how often consumption was done for a purpose, whether it be to cure health ills, find lost things, or reach altered states of consciousness. This influenced conceptions of public health, which were often paternalist and economically motivated rather than based in a system that privileged morality above all else. It brought about concerns regarding the consumption of these substances on health and productivity, or the potentially noxious impact of these ingestibles on people. Many of these concerns persist in the present day. This biopolitical, protectionist form of public health was often framed as somehow enacted on a passive indigenous population that was infantilized and treated as weak in moral character and bodily responses to drug foods. However, in these essays it becomes clear that, to the contrary, natives directly engaged and manipulated policies to their own needs, in the processes appeasing the motivations of colonial labor and health policies in the first place: ensuring the continued coerced productivity of native bodies and the unequal exchange of the products of these laboring bodies to the benefit of crown officials and Spanish colonists. This exploration of the relationship between the state and power is essential to understanding subaltern agency. These essays also do the interesting work of connecting ingested commodity traditions to the present day by illustrating some of the key continuities as well as ruptures with the colonial past, adding essential ethnohistorical context to existing scholarly work. The social relations of sugar today, for example, have been shown to result in what Benjamin Richardson calls “unequal embodiment.”² Sugarcane field workers in Central America have been hard hit in large numbers by chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes, with significant challenges to treating and researching the disease inflected by area power 177

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dynamics stemming from colonial history. Sugar towns in Zambia experience high rates of prostitution and HIV infection; poor and often Latino migrant and seasonal workers on sugarcane or beet-sugar farms in the United States struggle in contingent labor conditions and have the greatest difficulty accessing health care, especially oral health care; sugarcane field workers of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic face harsh working conditions and are systematically denied citizenship. Cane workers in several countries have been identified as working in conditions of slavery. Social environmental issues also prevail in sugar production. Fertilizer run-off from sugar farming has degraded and destroyed areas in Australia, Pakistan, and Florida. The crop’s water-intensive nature has damaged the sensitive natural environment of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and Brazil’s Atlantic forest. Clear-cutting for cane or sugar-beet planting causes soil erosion and degradation. All of these issues can result in permanent environmental damage and loss of biodiversity.³ Massive fish kills, wholesale conversion of habitat, and water contamination are well documented. In many cases, the people worst affected by these environmental changes are those most dependent on the affected resources (drinking water, agricultural land, fisheries) for their livelihoods. The contemporary tobacco industry has undergone significant change in recent years as a result of the antitobacco movement yet shares much in common with its historical antecedent. Today, tobacco production is characterized by the moral and financial struggle of growers and laborers, influenced by the globalization and industrialization of agriculture, and impacted by government and industry regulation and manipulation through immigration law and corporate social responsibility practices.4 Forced and child labor continue to be serious problems in many sites of production and are further sources of racial and ethnic tensions, as are deleterious health impacts of tobacco handling among workers and public health concerns over consumption. This culturally and ethically ambiguous crop remains one around which debates over power, economics, and the politics of citizenship are centered, whether in North Carolina, Kazakhstan, or Nicaragua.5 Ingested commodities like ayahuasca, an Amazonian beverage traditionally brewed for healing purposes and prescribed by a shaman, face challenges resulting from globalization. Treated as medicine, religious sacrament, or exotic drug depending on the population consuming, ayahuasca spurs vigorous debate and action.6 It draws ritual participants in its local communities while in the past several decades simultane178

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ously attracting cultural tourists.7 Recent tourist deaths potentially linked to ayahuasca tourism have drawn calls for regulation.8 Questionable entrepreneurial models that involve extraction of ayahuasca from South America for sale abroad have been condemned by academics and indigenous rights experts.9 Coca production, too, is enormously controversial given contemporary drug enforcement practices. Its centuries-old traditional uses in medicine, nutrition, and religion persevere in addition to large-scale, lucrative cultivation for production of the powerful narcotic cocaine. So significant is the global movement to control this substance that coca leaf remains prohibited in many international situations, with advocates of indigenous Andean rights and traditional consumption attempting to obtain legal provisions for use in their home countries.¹0 Efforts to engage coca producers in farming of other crops like cacao are often stymied by vast differences in profitability, with drug crops far outstripping bulk commodity crops.¹¹ The politics of production and consumption of ingested commodities are still linked with taste and desire as well as with notions of quality and heritage. While this volume makes clear that concepts of terroir have long existed, consumer demand for the celebrated taste of place has grown in recent years with a desire to (re)connect with people and sites of production. One might consider tequila and mescal, now two of the most popular products exported from Mexico, and the development of alternative markets abroad. The sociologist Sarah Bowen’s work on denominations of origin (DOs) in tequila and mescal has shown that while many argue that they preserve cultural heritage and grow market opportunities, DOs can also fail small-scale producers, farmers, and laborers who most need protecting.¹² She argues for the involvement of the state in the development of systems that are more democratic, inclusive, and participatory and that aim to address inequality and sustainability throughout the value chain from production to consumption. Thus, it becomes clear that attempts to address the changing value of ingested commodities are heavily impacted by historical inequality’s ramifications in the present day. Related to this, the sociologist Jennifer Jordan shows that many ingested commodities provide today’s consumers with powerful emotional experiences, physically linking them through produce to taste, memory, and the past.¹³ This exploration of culinary nostalgia and its link with food politics reveals that inquiries into botanical and genetic origins are intimately connected to imagined cultural heritage and ways of being in the world. At the same time, this interest in flavorful win179

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dows to the past provides insight into modern developments in agriculture, consumerism, and nationalism. Putting this work in conversation with the essays of this volume emphasizes the critical importance of historical understanding of pleasure, performance, and possibility in ingested commodities. Taking cacao and chocolate as a lens, many of these issues of social difference and inequality, global and local political economic forces coalesce. The divide between sites of production (Africa is the world’s largest cacao producer) and consumption (Europe and North America are the world’s largest chocolate consumers) is stark. Cacao history and contemporary production reflect characteristic use of unfree labor, the ongoing specter of which continues to challenge the industry.¹4 Attempts to address these challenges have at times led to unprecedented multiparty collaboration among farmer organizations, nongovernmental organizations, governments, academics, industry, consumer organizations, and more. While the results of such collaboration have been mixed in their overall capacity to reform labor abuses,¹5 they highlight the fact that many are aware of the fraught state of the value chain and its unsustainability in the long term. The more recent turn among producers and consumers toward slow, small-batch, craft chocolate similarly suggests that the social construction of realms of value will exert some force on the existing unequal commodity trajectory in the industry, though it is not yet clear what that might mean for the most vulnerable along the value chain. Much is left to be desired. The chapters in this volume bring historical, political, economic, and cultural implications of commodities to the forefront, providing a much-needed view into social difference, unfree labor regimes, and the development of capitalism. In so doing, they put ethnohistory in conversation across regions, temporal divisions, and disciplines. They should be of great interest to scholars of African and African American studies, Latin American studies, Creole studies, social and cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, and more. Ongoing scholarly conversations around slavery and capitalism, for instance, are primarily focused around the transatlantic slave trade and will be enriched by the early modern Atlantic historical context within.¹6 Moreover, emerging critiques of Creole Exceptionalism in linguistics and anthropology will be well served by the depth of this volume’s discussions on hybridity and cultural contact.¹7 Contemporary critical food studies will be bolstered by considering the many binary themes from these essays that persist in their relevance. Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural consideration is essential to the development of a more inclusive academy. 180

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Webs of desire and material production bind us together, whether we recognize them or not. Much of what we can see from the vantage point of these studies is the intense interest of the powers that be in the regulation of substances, human sources of labor, and the economy or the wealth that allows them access to these substances, complicated by the agency of those with less apparent power and privilege. For anyone interested in critiquing the neoliberalism that characterizes today’s capitalism and our own modern health care and food and labor systems, herein is especially compelling evidence of some of their historical antecedents. These ingested commodities, substances that have seduced so many around the globe, have a much more complex history than we collectively remember. Many popular origin myths must be retold, and in their retelling we can perhaps better narrate our present.

NOTES 1. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). 2. Ben Richardson, Sugar (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2015). 3. Ibid. 4. Peter Benson, Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 5. Matthew Kohrman and Peter Benson, “Tobacco,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2011): 329–344; Andrew Russell and Elizabeth Rahman, eds., The Master Plant: Tobacco in Lowland South America (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 6. Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Ayahuasca Religions: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Critical Essays (Santa Cruz, CA: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2008). 7. Juan Forero, “Peruvian Hallucinogen Ayahuasca Draws Tourists Seeking Transforming Experience,” Washington Post, August 21, 2010, http://www .washingtonpost.com; Tim Jonze, “Ayahuasca: Indie’s New Drug of Choice,” The Guardian, August 7, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/. 8. Tricia Escobedo, “Teen’s Quest for Amazon ‘Medicine’ Ends in Tragedy,” CNN, October 24, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/; Caroline Mortimer, “British Man Stabbed to Death in Psychedelic Ceremony,” The Independent, December 18, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/. 9. “One Hundred Academics for Ayahuasca Dignity in Colombia,” Africa Is a Country, September 11, 2015, http://africaisacountry.com/2015/09/one -hundred-academics-for-ayahuasca-dignity-in-colombia/. 10. Paul Gelles, “Coca and Andean Culture—The New Dangers of an Old 181

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Debate,” Cultural Survival, February 19, 2010, https://www.culturalsurvival .org/ourpublications/csq/article/coca-and-andean-culture-the-new-dangers -old-debate. 11. Alberto Arce and Norman Long, Anthropology, Development, and Modernities: Exploring Discourse, Counter-Tendencies and Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003). 12. Sarah Bowen, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production, California Studies in Food and Culture, 56 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 13. Jennifer A. Jordan, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14. Carla Martin and Kathryn E. Sampeck, “The Bitter and Sweet of Chocolate in Europe,” “The Social Meaning of Food,” special edition in English, Socio.hu (2016): 37–60, doi:10.18030/socio.hu.2015en.37. 15. Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, “Final Report: 2013/14 Survey Research on Child Labor in West African Cocoa Growing Areas,” 2015, http://www.childlaborcocoa.org/. 16. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014); Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British Society at the End of Slavery, Cambridge Studies in Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Peter James Hudson, “The Racist Dawn of Capitalism,” Boston Review, March 14, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas /peter-james-hudson-slavery-capitalism; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013). 17. Michel DeGraff, “Linguists’ Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism,” Language in Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 533–591; Carla D. Martin, “Music: An Exception to Creole Exceptionalism? Cape Verdean National Identity and Creativity Post-Independence,” Social Dynamics (2016): 1–23; Salikoko Mufwene, “Multilingualism in Linguistic History: Creolization and Indigenization,” in The Handbook of Bilingualism, ed. Tej K. Bhatia and Ritchie William (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 460–488.

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. Acacia angustissima (palo de timbre), 134, 135, 137, 138, 144n42 acculturation of hallucinogen use, 28, 37, 41, 50n8 achiote (annatto), ix, 79, 81, 83–84, 89, 99n34 Acosta, José de, 132 addiction: and labor, 162; and nicotine, 106; and seduction, 9; and substance ingestion, 8; and tobacco, 104, 123 Adlam, John, 94 affective magic: and hallucinogen use, 29, 38, 43, 48; and Peraza case, 37, 41; and peyote use, 40, 42; and Taximaroa stories, 45–46 Africa: and affective magic, 43; and cacao production, 3, 93, 180 African-descended Mesoamericans: and affective magic, 43; and cultural hybridity, 176; and hallucinogen use, 36; and Mexican national identity, 129; and Peraza case, 39; and pulque consumption, 128; and substance ingestion, xvi; and wine trade, 59 Agamben, Giorgio, 150

agave (Agave americana; Agave tequilana weber, var. azul), 4, 22n9, 129, 142n12 agriculture: of cacao, 74, 76, 93; and changing lifeways, 120; and Lacandon Maya, 17, 112; past and present, 180; and ritual offerings, 1; of sugar, 16; of tobacco, 122, 178 Aguacatepeque, Guatemala: and alcohol production, 165–167; archaeological research in, 148; and biopolitical health discourse, 160; on map, 149f; and petition (1593) for labor exclusion, 163; and sugar production, 164; and tribute, 169 aguamiel (flowering maguey sap), 129, 132, 142n12 aguardiente: and alcohol succession, 19, 55, 66–67; and Audiencia de Guatemala, 172n41; and chicha, 70n27; and class, 18; and colonial health discourse, 157; colonial restrictions on, 136, 158; and colonial rhetoric, 134; financial rewards of, 164; in mantequilla drink, 135; and market changes, 16; Maya production of, 63; and monopolies, 65; political

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aguardiente (continued) economy of, 64; and sugar industry in Guatemala, 62; and tobacco trade, 118. See also rum Aguila, Juan de, 139–140 Ajofrín, Francisco de, 135 Akyantho’ (Lacandon deity), 121, 123 alcohol: and addiction, 66, 104; Aguacatepeque production of, 165–168; and Alotenango petition, 148–149, 154– 155; and biopolitics, 157; and cigars, 106; and class, 18; colonial discourse on, 67, 158–159; colonial restrictions on, 147; and colonial rhetoric, 134; and custom, 16; and fetishism, xvi; and government regulation, 9–10; and health discourse, 151, 160–161; and humoral theory, 133, 163; and labor, 11, 162, 173n63; and Lacandon Maya, 114; Maya ritual consumption of, 62; and monopolies, 3, 65, 169–170; and Nahua people, 139; official attitudes toward, 6; and peyote, 5; physicality of, 7; political economy of, 56; and Postclassic highland Maya populations, 57–59; and purity, 135; and ritual consumption, x; and social change, xi; and Spanish colonial revenue, 111; and state control, 13; and state revenue, 14, 15; succession of, xii, 19, 55; and sugar, 2; and vulnerability of native populations, 148. See also specific types almonds, 84, 85, 89 Alotenango, Guatemala, 149f, 164 Alotenango petition (1647): and Aguacatepeque, 164–165; biopolitics of, 153–154; and colonial health discourses, 147–149, 168–169; Fuentes y Guzmán’s response to, 157, 158, 159; merchants’ claims in, 160–161 Alva, Bartolomé de, 138–139 Amaia, Antonio de, 47 206

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ambergris, 83, 85, 89 anabasine, 106 anise, 85, 89 anthropology, 1, 6, 13, 28, 68n6, 180 antimiscegenation discourse, 172–173n50 apiculture, 58 Aquinas, Thomas, 155 Archestratus of Gela, 9 Argentina, 3 Asunción Mitá, Guatemala, 75 Atacama Desert, Chile, 105 Atlantic World: and alcohol succession, 67; and chocolate, 19, 72–73, 91; and early modern transformations, 2; and ingested commodities, 5 atole, 81, 85 Audiencia de Guatemala, 151–152, 157–158 Ávila, Alejandro de, 78–79 Avila, Leonor de, 46 axes, 103, 119, 121 Aztecs: and cacao, 76; and Lacandon Maya, 120; and pulque, 4, 128, 129; and sumptuary laws, 58; and tobacco, 106, 109f

Báez, Cristóbal, 43, 45 Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, 62–63 balché (mead): and affective magic, 47– 48; and alcohol succession, 19; and chicha, xii; and class, 18; and Lacandon Maya, 104; in Postclassic highland Guatemala, 57 Baptista, Petrona, 45 Barbados, 159, 173n55 Barker, Judith C., 5, 13 Barrena, Rodrigo Alonso, 42–43 beer: and Alotenango petition, 154; and commodity succession, 57; fermentation of, 166; and Lacandon Maya, 104; and Mexican national identity, 129; and monopolies, 159; and pul-

Index

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que, 4; as working-class staple, 128. See also chicha Benavente, Toribio de (a.k.a. Motolinía), ix, 35, 131 Bergamo, Ilarione da, 139–140 Bioko (Fernando Pó), 93 biopolitics: and Alotenango petition, 169; and antimiscegenation discourse, 172–173n50; and Guayaquil cacao, 152; and humoral theory, 147; of ingestibles, 170; and Peruvian wine, 153; and protectionist public health discourse, 177; and Spanish colonial public health discourse, 148–151; of sugar and alcohol, 6, 20, 157, 160, 160–162 biopower, 149, 150, 151–154 Bixa orellana (achiote), ix, 79, 80, 81, 83–84, 89, 99n34 black pepper (Piper sp.), 82 Blom, Frans, 113, 114, 117–118, 122 Blue Willow ware, 117f, 118f Bocabulario de Maya Than de Viena (sixteenth or seventeenth century), 83 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 130 Bonilla, Isabel, 42 Brazil, 3, 178 bread riots of 1692, 133, 159 Bristol, Joan: on alcohol, 104, 126n28; on pulque, 9, 72, 159; on pulque and labor, ix, 162, 173n57; on purity, 10, 13, 17, 172–173n50; on state anxieties, xi, 6, 20

Cabrera y Quintero, Cayetano, 132–133 cacao: as addictive, 104; and Alotenango petition, 147, 154–155, 161, 165; American ingredients for, 81–84, 82f; beverage recipe analysis, 80– 81; and biopolitics, 148; and chocolate recipes, xiii, 72; and chocolate’s etymology, 92; and coca farmers, 179; in colonial Mesoamerica, viii; 207

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and colonial trade, 84; as early import to Spain, 10; economic boom in, 3; etymology of, 78–79; European ingredients for, 85f; GIS recipe analysis of, 19, 85–87, 86f, 87f; and health-related colonial policies, 151; and inequality, 180; and intercropping with vanilla, 83; and labor, 163, 169; and Lacandon Maya, 113; map of, 75f; and market changes, 16; and monopolies, xii, 152–153; in Nahuatl songs, vii; preparation of, 77–78; qualities of, 29; recipes for, 95n1; and ritual offerings, 74–75; and slavery, 93; and sociability, 8; and social tobacco use, 106; and state anxieties, xi; and temporal change in taste, 90–91; and “thingyness,” 7–8, 73; and tribute, 160; and women, 17. See also chocolate calendar, 57, 74 Cameroon, 93 Campos, Isaac, 13 Cape Verde Islands, 158 capitalism, 1, 67, 120, 180, 181 Capsicum sp. (chile): in chocolate, ix, 78, 81, 85, 89, 104; in Mesoamerican food, 82–83; in Mexico, 49 cardamom, 85 Cárdenas, Juan de, 36, 80, 81, 88, 89 Cardosso, Jorge, 47, 48 Carey, David, 162 Caribbean region, 3, 4, 106 Carreri, Gemelli, 131 Castañeda, Catalina de, 42 castas (mixed-race people): and cacao, 3; and ingested substances, xii; and pulque consumption, 128, 140; in Santiago de los Caballeros, 59; Spanish attitude toward, 20, 135 Catalán, Juan, 39 Catholic Church, xi, 34, 59 Catholicism, 29, 40–41 Catholic saints, 43

Index

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Cervantes, Catalina, 40 chewing tobacco, 3, 106, 114 Chiapas, Mexico: and aguardiente, 64; and cacao, 3; and chicha, 174n79; and chocolate recipes, 88; and Lacandon Maya, 20, 106, 112, 120; on map, 113f; and tobacco, 109, 110f, 115f chicha: and Aguacatepeque, 164, 166– 167, 169; and aguardiente, 64, 70n27; and alcohol succession, xii, 19, 55, 59, 66; and Alotenango petition, 154– 155; and class, 18; and colonial health discourses, xi; and crown’s alcohol policies, 134; and cultural associations, 62; and drunkenness, viii–ix; illicit production of, 160; and Maya sugar mills, 63; and native populations, 157–158; production of, 60, 174n79, 174n81; recipe for, 61. See also beer Chichimecs, 32, 35–36, 37, 40, 46 chicle, 103, 112, 120, 123 Chile, 105 chiles: in chocolate, ix, 78, 81, 85, 89, 104; in Mesoamerican food, 82–83; in Mexico, 49 Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuantzin, Domingo de San Antón Muñón, 131–132 Chimaltenango, Guatemala, 155 China, 84, 95n1 china (chocolate additive), 89 chocolate: and affective magic, 145n52; American ingredients for, 81–82, 81–84, 82f; British recipes for, 88– 89; and class, 18; and colonialism, 73–74, 92–93; and Columbian Exchange, 2–3; and communities of taste, 80; as early import to Spain, 10; etymology of, 78; European ingredients for, 85f; evolution of, xii– xiii; GIS recipe analysis of, 85–87, 86f, 87f, 90; and horizontal succession, 16; as icon, 91–92; ingredients 208

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added to, ix; mapping recipes for, 19; Maya ritual consumption of, 62; as medicine, 12; as mind-altered cacao, 73; preparation of, 77–78; and racial anxiety, 17; recipe for, 79; and Spanish colonial revenue, 111; and sugar, xii; and temporal change in taste, 90–91; varied tastes of, 72. See also cacao Ch’olti’ Maya, 106, 109 Ch’orti Maya, 106 Christianity, xi, 33 cigars: etymology of, 106–107; and Lacandon Maya, 104, 113–114, 116– 117, 116f, 120, 124; and Late Postclassic Maya, 108–109; and ritual offerings, 1, 122. See also tobacco cinnamon, ix, xiii, 82, 83, 85, 89, 92 citron, 89 class: and alcoholic beverages, 56; and cacao, 3; and pulque, 4, 128, 131; and purity, 13; and racial mixing, 136; and repartimiento, 173n56; and substance ingestion, 18, 176; and witchcraft, 38 Classic Period artifacts, 30, 30f, 77, 107, 107f, 108f Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 132, 144n42 climate: and cacao production, 93; and humoral theory, 11–12, 93, 151, 155– 156, 163; and Spanish colonial health policy, 163 clove, 82, 85, 89 Coahuila, Mexico, 27 Codex Borgia, 140 Codex Magliabechiano (ca. 1528), 33, 33f Codex Mendoza, 140 coffee, 2, 11, 113–114, 162 colonial discourse, 13, 20, 131, 150. See also specific subjects colonial economy, 14–15, 79, 95. See also specific aspects colonial elites, 59, 130, 158 colonialism: and alcohol succession in

Index

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Guatemala, 55; and biopolitics, 150– 151; and capitalism, 67; and chocolate, 92–94; and chocolate markets, 79–80; and chocolate recipes, 73– 74; and drugs, 13; and health discourse, 160; and ingestibles, 10; and maintaining distinctions, 16; and native populations, 148, 158 Columbian Exchange, 2, 59 Comitán, Chiapas, 64 commodification: and alcohol succession, 55, 65, 67; and cultural frameworks, 56; and drugs, 13; and ritual consumption, 19 commodity fetishism, 130 commodity succession, 15, 55, 57, 63– 64, 66–67 communion through hallucinogens, xii, 34–35, 36, 46 consumerism, 8, 14–15, 120, 180 copal (Protium copal, Burseraceae sp.), 1, 33, 34, 43 corn: and Aguacatepeque, 164; as chocolate ingredient, 85; as divination tool, 43; and etymology, 78; and Lacandon Maya, 114, 116, 120; in Nahuatl songs, vii; and tobacco, 113. See also maize Cortes y Larraz, Pedro, 65 Cosimo Medici II, 90 cosmic race, 129, 141 Costa Rica, 93 Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala, 154, 165 Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, 135, 144n46 coyote (mixed alcoholic beverage; mixed-race person), 135, 138, 145n49, 146n72 creoles, 49, 131, 140 creolization: and alcohol succession, 67; and hallucinogen rituals, 43; and hallucinogen use, 17, 19, 28, 28–29, 45–46, 48–49 Cruz, Mariana de la, 44 209

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Cuba, 3 cultivation zones, 21f cultural diversity, 122–123 cultural hybridity, 17, 37, 48–49, 176 curanderismo, 18, 29, 32, 43 Cymbopetalum penduliflorum (ear flower, orejuela), 82, 83, 84

Datura (toloache, toloatzin), 29, 43 Dávila, Gertrudis, 44 Day of the Dead, 2 deep memory, 16, 28, 176 demand: and addiction, 9; and alcohol succession, 61; and Alotenango petition, 154, 164; for cacao, 3; and changing tastes, 84; and consumerism, 14; cultural construction of, 15, 56; and denominations of origin, 179; for labor, 163, 169; for tobacco, xii, 123 dendrogram of cacao, 86f, 87, 88–89, 90–91 Dening, Greg, 28, 49 Díaz, José Luis, 29–30 Diccionario de San Francisco, 83 disease: and Guayaquil cacao, 152; and humoral theory, 11; and Lacandon Maya, 121, 123; and personalistic etiologies, 23n25; and unequal embodiment, 177–178 divination: and hallucinogen use, 5, 29, 34, 36, 43, 48; and Inquisition cases, 46; and mushroom use, 35; and Peraza case, 39, 41; and peyote use, 47, 53n43; and Taximaroa stories, 45–46; and teonanacatl, 27 divinity, x, 31, 32, 34–35, 36, 176 Douglas, Mary, 13, 130, 131 Dresden Codex, 107f drunkenness: and aguardiente, 65; and elite preoccupations, 130; and indigenous disorder, 137; in Kaqchikel Chronicles, 61; and labor, 162,

Index

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drunkenness (continued) 173n63; and Maya sugar mills, 63; and mixed pulque, 134; and native populations, 157; and public discourse, 56; and pulque, 131, 132; and smallpox, 133; and tribute, 160; and vulnerability of native populations, 148; and wine trade, 60 Duby, Gertrude, 113, 114, 122 Dunn, Alvis, 65 Durán, Diego, 35, 138 Durkheim, Émile, 7–8

Earle, Rebecca, 11, 12, 73, 130, 151, 155–156 Ecuador, 3, 93 El Caobal, Petén, Guatemala, 117f, 118f, 119 El Salvador, xii, 3, 19, 76, 107 England, 68–69n8, 88, 90 Escalante, Antonio, 138 Escuintla, Guatemala, 147, 153, 168 estancos (royal monopolies), 3, 65 Estrada, Luisa de, 42 ethnicity, 13, 17, 36, 44, 176 Europeans: and chocolate, 79, 89, 91, 92, 95; and humoral theory, 11; palate of, 82, 84; and pulque, 140; and sacramental substance use, xi; and sugar, 1; and tobacco, 3, 111

Farfán, Augustín, 81 fasting, 32, 40, 48 fermentation vessels, 166–167, 166f Fernando Pó, 93 fishhooks, 119 Florentine Codex (1577), 77–78, 109f, 128 Flores, Guatemala, 112 flowers, 1, 77, 82, 83, 106, 129 flowery world, vii–viii, x, xii, xiiin6 food: and achiote, 83; and cacao, 77– 78, 81; and chiles, 82; and European 210

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palate, 84; and humoral theory, 93, 155–156; and Lacandon Maya, 112, 113; as medicine, 12–13 forastero cacao, 152 Foster, George, 12 Foucault, Michel, 149–150 France, 89, 90 Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio de: on native alcohol, 63, 64, 65; on native sugar production, 156–157, 158, 159; as son of Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán, 147; on vanilla cultivation, 83 Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco: and alcohol prohibition, 161; health discourse of, 163, 168–169; on native health, 156, 160; on native morality, 159; and response to Alotenango petition, 147–148, 154–155, 157, 158, 162, 165

Gage, Thomas: on chicha production, 160, 166–167, 168; on Maya drinking rituals, x, 61–62, 64–65, 158; on Spanish wine sales to Maya, 59–60 galangal, 84 García, Andrés de, 37, 39, 41 García de Palacio, Diego, 74–75 García Peláez, Francisco, 152–153 Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 162 gender, 13, 17, 56, 142n15, 176 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 72, 80–81, 85–87, 90 ginger, 82, 85 glass, 103, 117f, 119 Glasse, Hannah, 91–92 God K (K’awiil), 108, 108f God L, 107–108, 108f Goffman, Erving, 74, 94 Gold Coast, 93 González, Juan, 46 Gootenberg, Paul, 13 Guadalajara, Mexico, 42

Index

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Guanajuato, Michoacán, Mexico, 37, 38 Guatemala: and alcohol succession, 19; and bootleggers, 162; and cacao, 3; and chocolate, 79, 80, 89; and chocolate recipes, 90, 91; colonial regulations in, xi; and crown’s alcohol policies, 134; and Guayaquil cacao, 152; smoking rates in, 4; and tobacco, 111; and trade, 84 Guayaquil cacao, 152–153 Gutiérrez Flores (inquisitor), 47

hach k’uuts (”real tobacco” cigars), 104 hallucinogenic memory, 49 hallucinogenic mushrooms: and affective magic, 46; and class, 18; and deep memory, 16; and divination, 27; and indigenous memory, 19; and indigenous ritual practice, 4–5; and Mesoamerican religion, xi; ritual use of, 31; Sahagún on, 34–35; visionary properties of, 30. See also nanactl; psilocybin; teonanacatl hallucinogens: and colonial populations, xii, 16; creolization of, 28–29, 36, 43, 48; and cultural memory, 19; denunciations for using, 41–42; and divination, 45–46, 47; of European origin, 10; and heightened sensory states, viii; and Mexica history, 35; of Mexico, 27; and Mictlantecuthli, deity of the underworld, 33; and Peraza case, 37; ritual consumption of, x; and state anxieties, 4–5; and Xochipilli, Lord of the Flowers, 31. See also specific types Hardt, Michael, 150 Hart, James, 156 Hayashida, Frances M., 167 hazelnuts, 89 health: and Alotenango petition, 155; and cacao trade, 153; and chocolate, 95; and colonial discipline, 159; co211

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lonial discourse on, 149; and colonial policies, 151; and infantilization of native populations, 148; and pulque, 131–132, 134; and substance ingestion, 15; and sugar, 156 Hernández, Ana, 39 Hernández, Francisco, 81, 83, 131 hierarchies, 74, 93, 131 highland Maya: and aguardiente, 64; and alcoholic beverages, 57; and alcohol succession, 19; and honey tribute, 58; and humoral theory, 12; ritual offerings, 1, 2f; and sugar, 15–16 Hill, Robert M., 62 Hispanization, 129 Hojeda, Isabel de, 38, 39, 40 Holy Trinity (peyote), 40 honey: and agua aloja, 131; and alcohol succession, 59, 60, 82; and balché, xii, 47, 55, 57; and cacao, 77, 84; and chicha, 61, 66, 167; and chocolate, 81; and coyote, 135; and Lacandon Maya, 113; and pulque, 130, 138; and teonanacatl, 35; as tribute, 58 horticulture, 120 Huichols, 5, 31, 32, 40, 49n1, 50n3 humoral theory: and chocolate, 81, 92; and colonial health policies, 147, 151, 163; and European ideas of health, 11–12; and public health policies, 169; and pulque, 133; and selfhood, 73, 93; Spanish understanding of, 144n33; and substance ingestion, 14; and sugar, 20, 155–156 Hunt, Geoffrey, 5, 13 Huxley, Aldous, 29

idolatry, xi, 3, 5, 33, 41, 47 Indianness, 130, 136, 137 indigeneity: and Mexican national identity, 129, 141; and pulque blanco, 139; and pulque production, 131; and

Index

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indigeneity (continued) purity, 136; and substance ingestion, 13; of substances, 16, 17 indigo dye, 84 Indonesia, 3, 93 indulgences, 103, 104, 106, 113–114, 119, 123 Inquisition: and copal, 33; and hallucinogen use, 5, 28, 45, 46; and outsider women, 38; and Peraza case, 37, 41, 52n34; and peyote, 40, 42–43, 47, 49; and peyote ban, xi; as written record, 19, 176 intercropping, 83 intermarriage, 136 Italy, 43, 89, 90 Izalcos (El Salvador): and cacao, 76; and cacao production, 79, 93; and chocolate, xii–xiii, 19; on map, 76f; and Pipil language, 78

Jaccard similarity coefficient, 86, 88 jach k’uuts (“real tobacco”), 104, 114 Jamaica pepper, 89 jasmine, 18, 85 Joya de Cerén, El Salvador, 107

Kaqchikel Chronicles, 60, 61, 155 Kaqchikel language, 61 Kaqchikel Maya, 63, 148, 164, 167 Kelly, Brendan, 74 K’iche’ language, 57, 106 Kicza, John, 137 Kingdom of Guatemala, 3, 64 k’uuts (tobacco), 104, 107

labor: and alcohol regulation, 158; and biopolitics, 150–151; and colonial discipline, 159; and humoral theory, 163; and native populations, 162; and

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repartimiento, 173n56; and tribute, 169; and violence, 170 Lacandon Maya: and cigars, 106; and divinity of tobacco, x; ethnogenesis of, 112; and lifeways changes, 119–120, 123; and mead production, 58; and smoking, 109; territory of, 113f; and tobacco production, xii, 17; and tobacco trade, 20, 113–114, 116– 117, 121f, 124; and trade items, 103, 117f, 118f La Farge, Oliver, 117–118 land reform, 112–113 las Casas, Bartolomé de, 57 lemon peel, 89 León, Juan de, 45 León Pinelo, Antonio, 81, 88 limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), 135, 136 lineage, 135–136 Lophophora williamsii. See peyote LSD, 30 Lujan de Escovar, Pedro, 158–159

machetes, 103, 117f, 118f, 119, 121, 123 MacLeod, Murdo, 62, 153 Madrid Codex, 108f maguey: and alcohol succession, 57; and mescal, 131, 133; and pulque, 4, 58, 128, 129, 131, 134; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 139–140 maize: and alcohol succession, 57; and Alotenango petition, 164; and beer, 104; and cacao, 85, 165; and chicha, 70n27, 174n81; as divine entity, 31; Earle’s focus on, 12; and etymology, 78; in Nahuatl songs, vii. See also corn mantequilla (mixed alcoholic beverage), 135 Martín, Inés, 43–44 Matamangos, Petén, Guatemala, 119

Index

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material culture, 7 Maya: and aguardiente, 64–66; and alcohol succession, xii, 19, 55, 66, 66– 67; and balché, 47–48; and chicha, 61–64; and chocolate recipes, 88; and humoral theory, 20; and mead production, 57–58; and ritual alcohol consumption, x; ritual offerings of, 1, 2f; and ritual tobacco use, 106; and smoking, 110f; and Spanish wine, 59–61; and sugar, 17. See also specific groups Mayahuel (goddess of maguey and pulque), 140 Mbembe, Achille, 150–151 mead. See balché mecaxochitl, vii, viii, xivn8, 89 medicine: food as, 12–13; and hallucinogen use, 36; Islamic influence on, 156; pulque as, 131–132, 133; sugar as, 155, 156 mehen k’uuts (Lacandon cigarillos), 124 Mendoza, Pedro de, 48 menstrual blood, 43, 45, 145n52 mescal, 22n9, 133, 136–137, 140, 142n12, 146n72, 179 mescaline, 31–32 Mesoamerica: and agave, 129; and cacao, 93; cacao cultivation in, 75; and coffee, 11; and culture change, 119; and flowery world, vii; and hallucinogen use, 19, 29, 176; and Huichols, 5; indigenous life in, 10; and Nahua dialects, 78; and sugar, 1–2; and tobacco, 105–106. See also specific peoples and specific places Mesoamericans: and cacao beverages, 92; and cacao production, 74; and hallucinogen use, 29; and preconquest pulque consumption, 128; and sacramental substance use, xi; and self, 10; and sweeteners, 82. See also specific peoples

213

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mestizaje, 17, 129, 130, 142n10 metal tools, 119–120 Mexica, 35, 50n7 Mexican law, 5 Mexican Revolution, 129, 141 Mexico: and cacao, 3; and chocolate, viii; and chocolate recipes, 90, 91; and colonial trade, 84; and hallucinogenic substances, xii, 19; and indigenous ritual practice, 5; and national identity, 129; and purity discourse, 172–173n50; smoking rates in, 4; and sugar, 2; and sumptuary laws, 58; and syncretism, 140; and tequila, 179; and tobacco, x; and tobacco trade, 111. See also specific places Mexico City: and alcohol sales, 140; and hallucinogen use, 42, 47–48; and limpieza de sangre, 136; and Peraza case, 37–39; and pulque, 4, 132; and pulque sales, 137; and racial anxiety, 20; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 139–140 Michoacán, Mexico, 37, 42 Mictlantecuthli (deity of the underworld), 33, 33f Mintz, Sidney W., 68n8, 156, 176 missionaries, 35, 40, 41, 123. See also specific people Mixcoatl, Andrés, 33, 34 mixed pulque: colonial discourse on, 131; and coyote, 146n72; as disorderly, 131; making of, 130; prohibitions on, xi, 132, 133; Spanish attitude toward, 134, 135, 137. See also pulque Moctezuma, 35 molasses, 59, 61, 62, 106, 164, 167 molinillos (chocolate paraphernalia), viii, 77 monopolies: and aguardiente, 65; and alcohol revenue, 158; and bootleggers, 162; and cacao, 151–152;

Index

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monopolies (continued) and colonial regulations, xii; and commodification, 19; and health discourse, 153; and taxation, 159; and tobacco, 3; and violence, 170 Morales, Pedro de, 79 morality: and alcohol regulation, 158; and Alotenango petition, 154; and chocolate, 95; colonial discourse on, 149, 161; and cultural hybridity, 176; and economic machinations, 169; and native populations, 159; and public health policies, 162, 177; and seduction, 9; and selfhood, 73; and state revenue, 15; and substance ingestion, 13–14; and tobacco, 4 moralizing discourses, 14, 56 Moreno, Gabriel, 48 morning glory seeds (ololiuqui), 27, 29 Motolinía (Toribio de Benavente), ix, 35, 131 mushrooms. See hallucinogenic mushrooms musk, x, 83, 85, 89

Nahuas: and cacao, 75–76; and chocolate recipes, 88; and hallucinogen use, 36; and Inquisition, 33; and medicine, 131–132; poetry of, x; precontact behavior of, 138– 139; and pulque, 128; society of, 54n62 Nahuat language, 76, 78, 83, 91 Nahuatl language: development of, 50n8; and ear flower etymology, 83; and gourd etymology, viii; and hallucinogen use, 46; as lingua franca, 54n62; and loan words, 78, 92; and mushroom etymology, 27, 34, 44–45; and Nahuat language, 76; and number etymology, 120; and peyote et-

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ymology, 27; and tobacco etymology, 106 Najá, Chiapas, 109, 112, 120 najb’aj (aromatic tree resin), 104 nanacate (mushrooms), 44–46. See also hallucinogenic mushrooms nanactl (mushrooms): Church policy on, 33–35; as commonly understood, 38; creolization of, 43; and divination, 44–45; and hallucinogenic memory, 49; and Inquisition cases, 46; Spanish understanding of, 38. See also hallucinogenic mushrooms Native American Church, 5 Native Americans, 5 native populations: and alcohol regulation, 157–158, 160; and Alotenango petition, 165; and biopolitics, 153; and colonial health discourses, 13, 148–149, 168–169; and Guayaquil cacao, 152; and labor, 150. See also specific groups Nayarit, Mexico, 31 Negri, Antonio, 150 Nemser, Daniel, 130, 132, 134 Nesvig, Martin: on creolization of hallucinogens, 17; on deep memory, 19; on hallucinogen use, xii; on mushroom use, viii, 6, 9, 16; on peyote regulation, xi; on purity, 13 New Spain: and aguardiente regulation, 158; and drinking habits, 135; and ethnicity, 39; and Guayaquil cacao, 152; and ingested commodities, xiii; and maguey, 139–140; and monopolies, 3; and pulque, 20; and tobacco, 111; and white pulque, 133, 159 Nicaragua, 153, 178 Nicotiana rustica. See tobacco Nicotiana tabacum. See tobacco nicotine, 20, 105, 106, 107, 107f Niño de Atocha (peyote), 40

Index

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Niño Jesús (peyote), 40 nornicotine, 106 Norton, Marcy: on chocolate, 10, 80, 92, 95; on gradual change, 91; on sociable phenomenology, 7–8; on Spanish dependence on Indians, 79; on tobacco, 106; on xochinacaztli, 83 nutmeg, 82, 89

Oaxaca, Mexico, 42, 128, 136, 137 Ocosingo, Mexico, 112 ocpactli (fermentation hastener), 144n42 Olivares, Catalina de, 44, 45 ololiuqui (morning glory seeds): and divination, 36, 48; Spanish understanding of, 38; Spanish use of, 36; as trance-inducing plant, 30; use in Mexico, 27; and Xochipilli, 31, 32f orange blossoms, 85 orejuela. See Cymbopetalum penduliflorum Orellana, Sandra, 165

Pachuca, Mexico, 137–138 Pajuyú, Guatemala, 63 Palenque, Mexico, 107, 108f, 112, 124 Palka, Joel: on demand, 15; on Lacandon Maya, xii, 17, 20; on smoking, x; on tobacco, 7, 9, 72 palo de timbre (Acacia angustissima), 134, 135, 137, 138, 144n42 Panama, 59, 153 pataxte (jaguar cacao), 74 Peraya, Juan de la, 47 Peraza, Catalina de, 37, 38–40, 41, 43, 46, 52nn34–35 Peraza, Guillén, 37 Pérez, Gonzalo, 43–45 Pérez de Garfías, Pedro, 43–44 peripheral zones, 104, 118, 122–123 Peru: and chicha, 167; and chocolate

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recipes, 80–81, 88, 90; and Guayaquil cacao, 152–153; and tobacco, 105; and trade, 61, 84, 169 Petén, Guatemala: and Lacandon Maya, 20, 112; on map, 113f; and tax revolt, 111; and trade goods, 103, 117f, 118f, 119, 119f peyote: and affective magic, 45; as appetite suppressant, 32; ban on, 41– 42; and Chichimec custom, 35; creolization of, 17; and hallucinogenic memory, 49; and Huichols, 49n1; and idolatry, 4–5; and indigenous memory, 19; and Inquisition cases, 46; mind-altering effect of, 73; and pulque, 130, 132, 134; representations of, 30f; ritual consumption of, 29, 37–38; Spanish ban on (1620), 36; Spanish understanding of, 39; use in Mexico, 27; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 28; as visionary psychodysleptic, 30 Pezzarossi, Guido: on alcohol, 72, 104; on alcohol economics, 15–16; on colonial biopolitics, 20; on colonial health discourses, 13–14; on government control of alcohol, 9–10; on labor, x, 11; on state anxieties, xi; on sugar, 6–7, 17 picietl (pikiyetl or pisiyetl; wrapped tobacco), 29, 106 Piper amalago (possibly mecaxochitl), xivn8 Pipil, 76, 78, 91 pipiltzintzintli (hallucinogenic plant), 29 pitcher vessels, 168f Popol Wuj, 57 Postclassic highland Maya, 57, 58 pottery, 29, 30, 30f, 103, 113, 119 power relations, xiii, 13, 15, 18, 77 poyomate (hallucinogenic plant), 29 Príncipe, 93

Index

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Problemas y secretos marauillosos de las Indias (Cárdenas 1591), 36, 80 Protium copal, Burseraceae sp. (copal), 43 psilocybin, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 73. See also hallucinogenic mushrooms psychotropics, 31 Psylocibe mushrooms (teonanacatl). See hallucinogenic mushrooms public hygiene, 150 public policy, 162 Puebla, Mexico, 42, 46, 53n43 Puerto Rico, 111f pulque: ban on, 133; and ban on men and women drinking together, 136; and class, 18; and colonial populations, xii, 4; consumption of, 128– 129; and cosmic race, 141; effects of, viii–vix; fermentation of, 143n20; and health, 132; and indigenous context, 141; and indigenous worship, 138; making of, 142n12; and market changes, 16; as medicine, 131; and mestizaje, 17; from Mexico, 29; and purity, 20, 130; quality of, 9; and smallpox, 133; and sumptuary laws, 58; syncretic characteristics of, 140. See also mixed pulque; white pulque pulque blanco, 129, 130, 136, 139. See also white pulque pulquerías: and bread riots of 1692, 133; and labor, 173n57; and Mexican national identity, 141; in Mexico City, 4, 128–129; ownership of, 137, 145n62; and social mixing, 132, 140 purity: and alcoholic beverages, 133, 135, 159; of blood, 176–177; and colonial discourses, 13, 131; and humoral theory, 12; and indigeneity, 136–139, 172–173n50; and mestizaje, 17; and Mexican national identity, 141; and peyote ritual, 38, 40, 43, 48; and racial anxiety, xi, 20, 130; and substance ingestion, 13 216

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Quintero, Juan, 39

Rabinow, Paul, 150, 161 race: and alcohol succession, 56; and castas, 135; hierarchies of, 131; and indigeneity of substances, 17; and ingested commodities, 177; and intermarriage, 136; and mestizaje, 129; and pulque, 20; and purity, 130; and social mixing, 4; and substance ingestion, 13; and tobacco, 178 Ramírez, Francisco, 47, 48 Ramírez, Juan, 46–47 Real de Catorce, Mexico, 31 Real Hacienda, 133 Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de Indias (1681), 134 Recordación Florida (Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzmán), 147, 157, 158, 159 Relación geográfica de Zapotitlán (1579), 79 Rengel, Francisca, 39, 46 repartimiento (labor drafts), 169, 173n56 revenue: and aguardiente, 158; and alcohol, 6, 65; and bootleggers, 162; and cacao, 163; and chicha, 157; and monopolies, 3, 67; and morality, 15; and pulque sales, 131, 133; and sugar, 164; and tobacco, 111–112. See also taxation Rice, Stian, 55 Río Ceniza valley, 76, 76f riots, 130, 133, 137, 159 ritual consumption, vii, ix–x ritual offerings, 1, 74 Rodríguez, Miguel, 47 Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique, 77 Rose, Nikolas, 150, 161 rose water, 85 Ruiz de Alarcón, 36 rum: and alcohol succession, 55, 57; and Atlantic World transformations, 2; and colonial economy, 15, 16; and

Index

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Mesoamerican history, 5; and ritual offerings, 1. See also aguardiente

Sacatepequez, Guatemala, 63 saffron, 82 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 34–36, 52n23, 77–78, 128 Salazar, Juan de, 38–39 Sampeck, Kathryn: on cacao, 104; on chocolate recipe variations, 10, 16, 19; on chocolate’s “thingyness,” 7; on colonialism, xi; on evolution of chocolate, xii; on flavors, ix, 114; on “thingyness,” x San Antonio de las Huertas, Guerrero, 137 San Jerónimo, Guatemala, 62–63, 64 San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala, 63 San Luis Potosí, Mexico, 27, 31, 46 San Pedro Aguacatepeque, Guatemala. See Aguacatepeque, Guatemala Santa Catarina Pinula, Guatemala, 62 Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa. See Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala Santa María (peyote), 40 Santa Rosa María (peyote), 40 Santiago Cotzumalguapa. See Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala Santiago de los Caballeros (now Antigua), Guatemala: and aguardiente, 64, 65; and aguardiente regulation, 157; and Alotenango petition, 147– 148, 154, 165; and labor, 163; on map, 149f; and sugar industry, 62; as vessel producer, 166; and wine trade, 59–60 São Tomé, 93 Satanism, 36, 37, 41 saunders, 89 Sayaxche, Guatemala, 112 Scanlon, Christopher, 94 Schwartzkopf, Stacey: on alcohol customs, 16; on alcohol succession, xii, 217

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17, 19; on government control of alcohol, 6, 15, 133–134; on labor, 11; on sweetening, 82; on “thingyness,” x self: and biopolitics, 161; and chocolate, 92; early modern ideas of, 73; and humoral theory, 11, 12, 93; and ingestion, 6, 13; Mesoamerican limits of, 10; and morality, 14; and other, 131 Serna, Jacinto de la, 35, 36 sesame, 84 Seville, Spain, 84, 111 sexual abstinence, 37–38, 40 shamanism, 27, 29, 32 slavery: and Barbados uprising, 159; and biopolitics, 150–151; and cacao production, 93; and capitalism, 180, 13; and Catalina de Peraza scandal, 38; and drugs; and peyote, 40; and sugar, 1, 16, 178 smallpox, 132–133 Smith, Frederick, 159 smoking: beginnings of, 105; of cigars, 105f; in Europe, 111; as indulgence, 104; and Lacandon Maya, 115f, 121f, 124; and Lacandon women, 122; in Maya art, 108f; and Maya deities, 108; as medicine, 114; in Mesoamerica, 106; paraphernalia of, 109f; and precontact Maya, 109; technologies of, 106; and tobacco cultivation, 116; and tobacco trade, 118. See also tobacco snuff, 106, 107, 107f, 109, 114 sociability, 4, 8, 15 sociable phenomenology, 7–8, 9 social mobility, 136 social networks, 123, 168 social order, 13, 130, 131, 134 social status, 135–136 Soconusco region, 75f, 76 Solanaceae sp. (nightshade family), 105 Sololá, Guatemala, 60, 155 Sonora, Mexico, 136

Index

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Sonsonate, El Salvador, 153 Soustelle, Jacques, 122 South America, 74, 93, 105, 179 Southeast Asia, 3, 93 Spain, viii, 10, 84, 90, 111–112, 158 Spaniards: acculturation of, 50n8; and chocolate, 79; and decrees against mixing, 136; drinking habits of, 135, 139; and drunkenness discourse, 130; and hallucinogen use, 28–29, 36, 37– 39, 40, 48; and health discourse, 131; and humoral theory, 144n33; and mixed pulque, 134, 138; and pulque, 128, 132, 137, 140; and wine trade, 60 Spanish conquest, 104, 107, 109, 112, 128, 139 Still Life with Chocolate Service (van der Hamen y León, 1632), ixf, xiii–xivn7 sugar: and Aguacatepeque, 163–164; and alcohol succession, 19; and Alotenango petition, 154–155; as base for fermentation, 59; and biopolitics, 6–7; and cacao recipes, 84–85, 89; and chicha, 70n27; and chicha production, 66; and chocolate, xii, 81; and class, 18; and colonial biopolitics, 20; colonial restrictions on, 147; functions of, 68–69n8; and health-related colonial policies, 151; and humoral theory, 163; industry in Guatemala, 62–63; and labor, 162; and market changes, 16; as medicine, 156; and Mesoamerica, 1–2; and monopolies, 170; and native populations, 148, 157; and racial anxiety, 17 sumptuary laws, 4, 58 supply: of cacao, 93, 161; and commodification, 56; economic organization of, 15; of sugar and alcohol, 62, 66, 169; of tobacco, 122, 124; of wine, 61 Swanton, Michael, 78–79 symmetrical exchange networks, 104 218

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Tabasco, Mexico, 76 Taíno language, 106 taxation: and alcohol regulation, 158– 159, 162; and chicha, 157; indigenous resistance to, 137–138; of pulque, 4, 131, 133; and tobacco, 111, 122. See also revenue; tribute Taximaroa, Michoacán, 42, 43, 44, 45–46 technology: of chocolate, xii, xivn11; and colonialism, xiii; of distillation, 64, 66; of fermentation, 58; and Lacandon tobacco trade, 120, 121f; of tobacco, 106 Tenosique, Mexico, 112 teonanacatl (Psilocybe mushrooms): and demonic practice, 33; denunciations for using, 41–42; etymology of, 34, 35; and idolatry, 4–5; Mexican use of, 27; representations of, 30–31, 31f; Sahagún’s description of, 35; Spanish use of, 36; as visionary psychodysleptic, 30; and Xochipilli, 31; and Xochipilli sculpture, 32f. See also hallucinogenic mushrooms tepache (sour pulque with fruit and sugar), 132 Tepeyac, Mexico, 139–140 Teposcolula, Oaxaca, 137 tequila, 4, 22n9, 133, 142n12, 146n72, 179 Texcoco, Carlos de, 33 Thayn, Jonathan: on chocolate and colonialism, xi, 19; on chocolate consumption, 104; on chocolate recipe variations, 16; on chocolate’s evolution, xii; on chocolate’s “thingyness,” 7, 10; on taste, ix, 114 Theobroma cacao. See cacao theobromine, 73, 74 theriac, 10 “thingyness,” x, 6–8, 22n12, 73, 74 Tikal, Petén, Guatemala, 119, 119f Tizoc (Mexica ruler), 35

Index

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Tlatelolca people, 35–36 tlilxochitl. See vanilla tobacco: and agricultural practices, 116; bundled for export, 111f; cigars, 116f; in colonial Mesoamerica, viii; and Columbian Exchange, 2; commodity trajectory of, 3–4; etymology of, 106–107; and European tools, xii; illustration of, 105f; and Lacandon art, 115f; and Lacandon Maya, 17, 20, 103–104, 113–114, 118, 120; and Lacandon religious practice, 121–122; in Late Classic Maya art and writing, 107f; and market changes, 16; medicinal uses of, 106, 114; from Mexico, 29; origins of, 105; paraphernalia of, 119f; photo of, 115f; quality of, 9; ritual consumption of, x; and sociability, 8; and Spanish colonial revenue, 111; theft of, 114; and “thingyness,” 7; trade in, 109, 122–123. See also cigars; smoking toloache (Datura), 29, 43 tomatoes, 29 Torquemada, Juan de, 132 total institutions, 74, 94 trade: and aguardiente, 64, 65, 134; and alcohol succession, 56; and Alotenango petition, 154, 161, 165; and biopolitics, 156–157; and colonial health discourses, 149, 151; and colonial policies, 147; and fermentation vessels, 166; between Guatemala and Peru, 84; and Lacandon Maya, 20, 104, 112–114, 117–118, 119–124; and monopolies, 152; and morality discourse, 159; and pulque, 58, 137; and slavery, 180; and Spanish wine, 59– 61, 63; and tobacco, 107, 109 trade goods: and Lacandon Maya, 103, 117f, 118f, 119; and Lacandon religion, 121–122; and Lacandon women, 120; and tobacco, 117, 123 219

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transatlantic wine trade, 59–60 Tremblay, Adrienne, 67 tribute: and Aguacatepeque, 164, 169; and Alotenango petition, 161; cacao as, 75, 155; and Guayaquil cacao, 152; honey as, 58; and labor, 162, 172n50; and trade, 147, 160; wine as, 61. See also taxation Turner, Victor, x, xi Tzeltal Maya, 104, 114 Tzintzuntzan, Guatemala, 12

United States, 105 US Supreme Court, 5

Val de Cañas, María de, 45 Valladolid, Mexico, 42, 48 Valley of Guatemala, 64 van der Hamen y León, Juan, viii, ixf, xiii–xivn7 van Doesburg, Bas, 78–79 vanilla: and chocolate, vii, viii, 78, 81, 83, 85, 89; and colonial maritime commerce, 84; and tobacco, 106, 116 Vasconcelos, José, 129 Vavilov, N. I., 89 Vázquez de Espinosa, Antonio, 134 Venezuela, 93, 111, 152, 153 Verapaz, Guatemala, 57 Verdugo, Hierónima, 45 Vergara, Martín de, 42 vices, 3, 6, 137, 138, 155 violence: and affective magic, 43, 45; and alcohol consumption, 135; justification for, 169–170; and labor, 151; and pulque, 132; and total institution, 94 Viquiera Albán, Juan Pedro, 133 Virginia, 89, 90 virginity, 38, 40, 42–43, 43, 48, 177 Virgin of Guadalupe, 28, 140, 177

Index

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Wagner, Regina, 62 Wasson, Gordon, 31 white pulque: and coyote, 138; crown’s encouragement of, 133; and hechizos, 159; making of, 129; as medicine, 131–132; and purity, xi; and racial anxiety, 20; sales of, 134, 137; and taxation, 159; and viceregal decrees, 134. See also pulque; pulque blanco wine: and alcohol succession, 19, 66; and Alotenango petition, 155; and class, 18; and colonial monopolies, xi–xii; and colonial trade disputes, 153; in contrast with mead, 59; and drunkenness, 132; and Eucharist, xi, xivn10; political economy of, 61; and racial anxiety, 17; Spanish control of, 63 Wirikuta, Mexico, 31 witchcraft, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 145n52 Wixárika. See Huichols women: and affective magic, 38, 41, 42, 43, 45, 145n52; and colonial changes, 18; as cultural go-betweens, 17, 39,

220

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177; Lacandon Maya, 120, 122, 123– 124; and pulque sales, 137–138; and purity, 136 worms used in magic, 37, 41, 43, 45 wormwood, 10

xícaras (gourds), viii xochinacaztli (“ear flower”), 82, 83, 84, 89, 98n28 Xochipilli, Lord of the Flowers, 31, 32f xochitl (flower), vii

Yucatán, 47–48, 58, 88, 112 Yucatec Maya, 57 Yucatec Maya language, 83, 106

Zacatecas, Mexico, 27, 31, 42, 46 Zamora, Barbola de, 46 Zuaza, Francisco de, 164 Zumárraga, Juan de, 33, 34

Index

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