Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica

Abstract

This edited volume breaks new ground in critical food studies by exploring the allure that Africans, Indians, and Europeans held for ingested commodities such as alcohol, chocolate, peyote, sugar, and tobacco in Mesoamerica. The ability of these commodities to seduce peoples across racial and socioeconomic lines grants them a level of agency in their own right. Using consumption as an analytical tool helps the volume’s contributors illuminate the social meaning embedded within sensorial experiences. The book’s six chapters are grouped thematically into two sections, with the first foregrounding seduction and the second emphasizing substance.In the first section, Martin Nesvig considers how the meaning ascribed to hallucinogens such as peyote, teonanacatl, and ololiuqui changed over time, eventually leading to “a process of creolization” in the way that they were consumed in mainstream society (28). Although ritual specialists originally used hallucinogens to divine, heal, and interpret the cosmos, their consumption expanded to mixed-race peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, creating a hybrid Mexican custom. Stacey Schwartzkopf examines the production and ingestion of mead, wine, chicha, and aguardiente de caña among Maya peoples in colonial Guatemala. Schwartzkopf notes that the Maya resisted attempts to centralize alcohol production and that many Maya preferred sugar-based drinks over Spanish wine (60). Despite the fact that much of colonial society drank, colonial elites’ anxieties surrounding racial mixing prompted them to vigorously control the licensing of alcohol (67). Kathryn E. Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn investigate cacao usage in Central America and Mexico, tracking recipes to see how tastes traveled across the Atlantic and evaluating the palates of Mesoamericans and French, British, and Anglo-American colonists. Using GIS modeling, Sampeck and Thayn show that Maya and southern Nahua peoples shared similar preferences for cacao recipes and that most of Europe used British recipes as a base for their chocolate cuisine (89).In the second section, Joel W. Palka surveys tobacco cultivation and trade among the indomitable Lacandon Maya peoples in the late nineteenth century. Palka traces the social and economic changes that occurred due to the continued demand for the crop, including polygamy, a practice that increased the number of hands available to help with production. Moreover, Palka highlights the transformations in Lacandon religion as increased contact with outsiders elevated Akyantho, the god of trade and foreigners, over other deities (121). Joan Bristol discerns how elites projected their anxieties about racial purity onto the production and consumption of pulque in colonial Mexico. Bristol draws parallels between a drink known as coyote—made of pulque, dark honey, and palo de timbre—and the ethnonym coyote, used to describe a person that was “three-quarters indigenous and one-quarter Spanish” (135). According to colonial officials, the mixed nature of coyote drinks and people made them both inferior. Guido Pezzarossi employs Michel Foucault’s biopolitics to show how authoritarian governments stripped Indians of their political standing as vassals in colonial Guatemala (150). Pezzarossi uses his findings from archeological and historical research to show how alcohol, cacao, and sugar regulation in Guatemala intersected with the colonial government’s purported concerns for the health of native populations. This book’s fine forward by Marcy Norton and afterword by Carla D. Martin maintain that historians can deepen their understanding of subaltern agency by examining the purposeful attainment of heightened sensory states through seductive commodities since their consumption frequently provoked responses from powerful officials. In short, the many insights that the contributors provide in this bold volume should stimulate debate and produce new avenues of research for scholars of Mesoamerican and Latin American history and food studies.