Globalizing Tequila: Mexican Television's Representations of the Neoliberal Reconversion of Land and Labor

Abstract

can film and visual culture, new media and Mexican and Latin American cul tural studies. His articles on comics, photography, telenovelas, and film have appeared in journals in the U.S., Spain and England. During the twentieth century, Mexican identities were shaped in great part by the ebbs and flows of mass cul ture. The specificity of gestures, the discourses about masculinity and femininity, the language and ideas proper to social interaction are generally traced back to the films of the Golden Age (1935-1955), the broadcasting of mariachi music, boleros, and other musical productions as well as to televised spectacles (Martin Barbero 166; Monsivais, Aires 58-59 and Amorperdido 76-82; Murphy 251; Ramirez Berg 20-28). But the depiction of glamorous faces of film divas like Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio, or the bravado of masculinity derived from the acting of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete would have been less effective if a consumer culture did not accompany these visual discourses (Joseph 10). Once Mexico entered in the '50s to the category of what Debord calls the societies of spectacle, consuming clothes, soaps, drinks, and food were akin to consume music and images. One of the most salient products from the time of the construction of this modern national identity is tequila. Even if many of the values and nationalist symbols of Mexico's Golden Age of cinema were abandoned or displaced by others at the end of the century, media portrayal of tequila as the Mexican drink par excellence is still a current practice. How ever, what the stereotypical and modern marketing of tequila as a fashionable drink almost always fails to communicate is that this beverage is the product of a long colonial history. On one hand, tequila emerges from the local knowledge and agricultural practices of pre-Columbian times, directly related to the production of pulque nectar of the gods,