Distilling the Influence of Alcohol

Aguardiente in Guatemalan History

David Carey Jr.

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780813064222
  9780813041629
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813063980
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development. Throughout world history, alcohol has helped build family livelihoods, boost local economies, and forge nations. The alcohol economy also helped shape Guatemala's turbulent categories of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, as these essays demonstrate. Established and emerging Guatemalan historians investigate aguardiente's role from the colonial era to the twentieth century, drawing from archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic sources. Topics include women in the alcohol trade, taverns as places of social unrest, and tension between Maya and State authority. By tracing Guatemala's past, people, and national development through the channel of an alcoholic beverage, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol opens new directions for Central American historical and anthropological research.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Writing a History of Alcohol in Guatemala
• 1. Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala
• 2. From Household to Nation: The Economic and Political Impact of Women and Alcohol in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala
• 3. “A Sponge Soaking up All the Money”: Alcohol, Taverns, Vinaterías, and the Bourbon Reforms in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Santiago de los Caballeros, Guatemala
• 4. Alcohol and Lowdown Culture in Caribbean Guatemala and Honduras, 1898–1922
• 5. Distilling Perceptions of Crime: Maya Moonshiners and the State, 1898–1944
• Conclusion: Community Drunkenness and Control in Guatemala
• Glossary
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index