Intoxicated Identities: Alcohol's Power in Mexican History and Culture

210 Pages·2004·1.71 MB·English

by  Tim Mitchell

INTOXICATED
IDENTITIES
Alcohol’s Power in Mexican History
and Culture
Tim Mitchell
ROUTLEDGE
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Timothy (Timothy J.)
Intoxicated identities: alcohol’s power in Mexican history and culture/
Tim Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94812-6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-94813-4 (pbk.: alk.
paper)
1. Drinking of alcoholic beverages—Mexico. 2. Alcoholism—Mexico. I.
Title.
HV5313.M57 2004
394.1'3'0972–dc22
2003063602
ISBN 0-203-50456-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57809-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Karla Ysabel Cavazos and to all the people
who loved her and believed in her
Acknowledgments
My drinking research began during the 1998 Faculty Abroad Seminar at the
Texas A&M University Center in Mexico City. A Faculty Development Leave
Award kept the project going and a 2002 Summer Development Grant was
crucial to its completion. I greatly appreciate the support or advice of Ben
Crouch, Charles Johnson, Craig Kallendorf, the Office of the Vice President for
Research and the Office of Latin American Programs at Texas A&M, Phil Bock,
Jeannette Marie Mageo, Mónica García Romero and Mónica Vega, Phyllis
Mitchell, Bill and Darrah Plank, Padre Rubén of the Universidad Iberoamericana,
and my beloved cuates on both sides of the border who shall remain nameless
for their own good.
Special thanks to CRC project editor Joette Lynch for an organized and
smooth production phase and to Daniel Montero for an outstanding copyedit.
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Time-Warping in Tenochtitlán 12
2 Anthropologists and Alcoholics 24
3 After Fifteen or Twenty Drinks 42
4 Bodies and Memories 66
5 Allá en el Rancho Grande 83
6 Death-Wish Aesthetics 99
7 Spousal Assault Rituals, Then and Now 116
8 The Pedro Infante Generation 136
9 Thirsty Urban Nomads 158
Bibliography 179
Index 201
Introduction
When an intoxicated human being from another culture or another century
speaks (or shouts or sings or weeps), should we even listen? And if so, how
should we listen? Every system ever devised for disciplining meaning is rendered
suspect or vulnerable by liquor’s peculiar psychology. In the right excessive
quantities, alcohol seizes personalities or local cultures and shifts them into
radically different zones, cycles, and wavelengths. Binge drinking should not be
seen as just another item in a behavioral inventory, still less as mere pathology,
but as a frightfully efficient meaning-generation machine, one that taps into an
abused group’s immense stores of psychic “dark matter.” To study the workings
of this somatic/semiotic machine yields priceless insights into the social
construction of selves and identities.
Our overfamiliarity with alcohol is the initial handicap to overcome. Every
country has its own heavy drinkers, light drinkers, nondrinkers, binge drinkers,
even “alcoholics.” Every country ever introduced to fermented or distilled
beverages developed its own love-hate affair with them, the United States most
notoriously. If we look at other nations, we find that certain cultures or
subcultures within them consume alcohol in less conflicted, more visionary ways.
Some have cultivated a taste for embodied temporal experimentation. Some
venerate their hard-drinking ancestors in newer, wilder bacchanals. Certain
communities, in consequence, have reaped the whirlwind of alcohol’s hedonic,
philosophical, and stupefying powers. Enter Mexico, home to hundreds of such
communities as a matter of ethnographic and historical fact.
The omnipresence of alcohol in Mesoamerican lifeworlds has long been
confirmed. The “muse” role of alcohol in Mexican artistic and literary
production has long been suspected. The seductive influence of heavy-drinking
role models in Mexican popular culture has been decried. Tequila’s role in
gender battles waged from Chiapas to Chicago is getting more attention in recent
times. Yet there is still a great deal to learn about Mexico’s heavy drinkers, and
even more to learn from them, if we can only narcotize our prejudices. Culturally
oriented drinking histories seek to be “policy-relevant” without falling into the
traps that characterized older modes of alcohol-knowledge production—
scientific protocols that kept drunkards at arm’s length, with research rationales
rooted in cultural blindspots or positions on the social map. The damage done to
2 INTOXICATED IDENTITIES: ALCOHOL’S POWER IN MEXICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
a body politic by alcohol is not a figment of the clinical imagination, however.
This damage must be fully acknowledged and faced at the outset, so I proceed
with statistics that might strike anyone as alarming. A 1998 study undertaken at
the federal level to determine the connections between ethnicity and substance
abuse found Mexican-American men to have the highest rates of heavy, problem
drinking—downing five or more drinks in one sitting at least five times a month.
The rates were a third higher than any of the eleven groups surveyed, including
American Indians. Nationwide, Mexican Americans are nearly twice as likely to
be arrested for drunken driving as whites or blacks. In Los Angeles, cirrhosis of
the liver kills Mexican-American men at double the rate of white and black men
(Nazario 1999, 24).
Public health expert Raúl Caetano notes that “The profile of a drunk driver in
California is a young Hispanic male, and you have a similar situation all over the
Southwest” (Osborn and Alford 2003, 13). In Austin, Texas, men of Mexican
culture comprise just 11 percent of the driving population, but account for 43
percent of drunken driving arrests. “One thing I have noticed,” says an Austin
policeman, “is that the Hispanics I arrest for DWI, 90 percent of the time, are more
drunk than the white and black people I arrest” (12). This is not the kind of
diversity that gets celebrated at universities. In Sonia Nazario’s study, Mexican-
American women more than made up for the misbehavior of their men
—“resulting in the greatest gender gap in drinking problems of any ethnic group
studies” (1999, 24). She points out the obvious: we are in ethnically sensitive
territory. “Although many Mexican-American public figures and groups
privately acknowledge the harm inflicted by alcohol, few have tackled the
problem publicly, in part from fear that it would cement ugly stereotypes. But
doing nothing, many health officials warn, will hold back the nation’s largest
Latino group.”
What we see in the United States is the tip of an iceberg; the rest of the iceberg
is in Mexico. In the Western hemisphere as a whole, Mexico ranks number one
in deaths from cirrhosis. In 1985 it was the fourth leading cause of death in
Mexican males aged 15 to 64; by 1995 it was the second leading cause of death
for this gender and age group (Narro 1999, 101). In Mexico we find a
statistically constant increase in cirrhosis deaths since 1929. In men aged 45–64
it is the leading cause of death, with the majority of those deaths coming from
the lower socioeconomic levels. It is the number one cause of death in most rural
areas. The regional distribution of cirrhosis deaths has shown a remarkably
consistent pattern for forty years.
As table 1.1 makes clear, states in central Mexico are at the center of the
biocultural maelstrom. This has been an area of intense consumption of
fermented maguey juice—pulque—since pre-Hispanic days. If one had to pick
an epicenter, it might be the town of Ixtenco in Tlaxcala, with a cirrhosis
mortality rate six times the already high national average. Investigators suspect
that pulque production and distribution practices make it vulnerable to bacterial
contamination, but detailed studies have yet to be completed. It must also be
INTRODUCTION 3
TABLE 1.1
(Source: Mexico’s Dirección General de Estadística)

mentioned in this context that possibly one out of every three bottles of distilled
liquor sold in Mexico is adulterated in some way (Blomberg 2000, 51).
Cirrhosis is one of the top five health problems Mexico faces today; it is
epidemic as of this writing. Contrary to popular belief, however, only a fraction
of drinkers develop serious levels of liver disease; the statistics above would thus
suggest that very large numbers of Mexican men engage in heavy drinking. A
number of studies carried out in the 1970s calculated that anywhere from 29 to
36 percent of rural men could be classified as “excessive” or “problem” drinkers;
recent studies place the average number of men who drink regularly, rural or
urban, at between 70 and 82 percent depending on the region (Narro 1999, 103).
Emergency room patients in Mexico tend to have much higher levels of blood
alcohol than in other countries (Medina 1999, 264). Two Mexican psychiatrists
found that in one sanitarium run by the government, 107 of 161 patients admitted
for the first time were there for “alcoholic psychosis” (Cortés 1992, 105). Along
with such physical or mental consequences of heavy drinking we must include
the indirect social consequences, insists medical anthropologist Eduardo
Menéndez (1991, 29). In 1997, 25 percent of all people sentenced for crimes
committed them while intoxicated. The number is significantly higher in the
states of San Luis Potosí and Sonora, higher still in Nuevo León, and in the state
of Querétaro it reaches 47 percent. In Mexico City, 49 percent of people
sentenced for homicide had been drinking beforehand; in the same megacity, 37
percent of all suicides were completely drunk when they did the deed (De la
Fuente et al. 1997, 278). If the role alcohol plays in accidents and violent incidents
of all types is brought into the equation, then it necessarily constitutes the
number one cause of mortality for Mexican society as a whole. Even when
nondrinkers decide to end their lives, they get as drunk as possible first (Medina
1999, 276).
The cultural pattern of drinking that emerges from the statistics cited above
differs significantly from the American “norm.” In Mexico the issue is not so
4 INTOXICATED IDENTITIES: ALCOHOL’S POWER IN MEXICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
much the frequency of drinking (Americans generally imbibe more often) but the
amount of alcohol consumed on a particular drinking occasion. De la Fuente and
his team find plenty of evidence that this is indeed the characteristic pattern of
drinking in Mexico, applicable to some 75 percent of all alcohol consumers
(1997, 274). Mexicans who migrate to the United States “maintain the pattern of
consuming large quantities in a short time” (274), exactly the data confirmed by
Dr. Caetano (Osborn and Alford 2003). Dr. Medina and her team deem alcohol
the chief addictive substance used in Mexico, an addiction satisfied not so much
on a daily basis as on a “special occasion” basis (1999, 264). The Spanish word
for a binge—borrachera—encapsulates its episodic nature, its status as a special
event. The borrachera patterns that concern epidemiologists were already well
established by the end of the eighteenth century. Heavy drinking was promoted
by powerful vested interests, both rural and urban. “Some of the wealthiest and
most influential families [of Mexico City] were pulque producers, more than five
hundred shopkeepers sold wine and spirits as well as sundries, and the tax
revenue from liquor was a prime source of municipal funds” (Taylor 1979, 68).
But whence the unusual demand? Was it a response to ethnocidal colonial
politics? To poverty, oppression, or racism? Was it some sort of irrepressible
love of the fiesta that persists to this very day? Although Medina and her
colleagues consider alcohol to be the number one Mexican addiction, they do not
maintain that the addiction paradigm suffices to explain it. Rather, they cite the
urgent need for new studies focusing on the “cultural definition” of alcohol use
in Mexico, including the powers and properties it is believed to possess (1999,
271). This is exactly the objective of my own study, which by necessity draws
methods and ideas from anthropology, ethnohistory, cultural history, cultural
psychology, literature, sociology of the arts, ethnomusicology, and many others.
Some scholars are strict supply-siders. For Eduardo Menéndez and his team,
the key concept to grasp is “alcoholization,” the historical structuring of the
alcohol supply by powerful groups or entities. The Mexican custom of “drinking
and dying” is not a bizarre quirk of the collective unconscious, Menéndez
maintains; rather it is inseparable from a massive for-profit agroindustry that has
grown up around alcohol use, the tax benefits that accrue to the Mexican State,
and the ideological manipulation of subaltern groups (1991, 29). Public health
experts in the United States have been sharply critical of companies like
Anheuser-Busch. The company aggressively pursues Mexican and Mexican-
American drinkers, as evidenced by its marketing of Azteca beer in Southern
California, by its Bud Light product—the number one choice of Hispanic
drinkers in the United States—and by the strategic use of Mexican nationalist
slogans in its advertising campaigns (Nazario 1999, 25). The Miller Brewing
Company is the major and sometimes the only sponsor of “Fiestas Patrias”
celebrations every September Sixteenth in scores of U.S. towns and cities with
significant Mexican populations. Other major brewing companies are pouring
money into Spanish-language advertising to ensure that any emerging Latino
identity retains a strong alcohol-friendly component.