Food and alcohol history have in recent decades won academic attention and have demonstrated their potential as privileged gateways for thinking about broad historical questions. Focusing on fermented and distilled beverages, this collection of stimulating essays aims precisely at using “alcohol as a way to understand bigger topics within Latin American history, such as identity, ethnic and communal bonding, race, class, gender, power relations, state-building, and resistance” (p. 9). The editors, both experts on the history of alcohol in Mexico, also intended to compile writings that cover a broad regional and temporal spectrum. The volume is organized chronologically and is divided into three parts, covering respectively the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, the long nineteenth century, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The introduction presents a well-developed historiographical overview of this subject, including the history of drugs.The essays of part 1 explore how the production, exchange, and consumption of chicha were central to the fabric of pre-Columbian Andean societies (by Justin Jennings), how the history of cachaça in colonial Brazil can illuminate Atlantic commerce, the traffic of slaves, and relations between colonial society and indigenous people (by João Azevedo Fernandes), and how alcohol consumption affected interpersonal relations in rural colonial Mexico (by Aaron P. Althouse). The contributions to part 2 examine the organization of a vineyard as a symbolic space for imagining the construction of a Europeanized and civilized Argentine nation in the mid-nineteenth century (by Nancy Hanway), women's active participation, both economic and political, in pulque trade and informal food selling near pulquerías in Mexico City from 1850 to 1910 (by Áurea Toxqui), and the relationship between alcohol consumption and racialized perceptions of indigenous people in Guatemala at the beginning of the twentieth century (by David Carey Jr.). The essays in part 3 treat the popular resistance of workers involved in the pulque, beer, and mescal industries to antialcohol campaigns carried out by the leaders of revolutionary Mexico between 1910 and 1940 (by Gretchen Pierce), the efforts made by the owners of one of the biggest tequila companies to convert this beverage into a central symbol of national identity (laden with racialized meanings) in postrevolutionary Mexico (by José Orozco), the transformation of wine production and culture in Argentina throughout the twentieth century thanks to advertisement and market enhancement (by Steve Stein), and the production and consumption of hard apple cider as part of a traditional feast that helps to maintain regional identity and communal bounds in contemporary southern Chile's Los Lagos region (by Anton Daughters).Although for specialists such a broad thematic, regional, and temporal scope can jeopardize the cohesiveness of the volume, this wider focus does present vivid examples of why alcohol matters in Latin American history in many ways. Indeed, the introduction makes a special effort to indicate the common themes shared by some of the chapters, although the focus of each one varies. The fact that each section begins with a very brief and general historical contextualization of Latin America during each period and that the volume includes a handy glossary of Spanish and Portuguese terms used in the chapters reveal two possible target audiences: scholars not directly related to the field, and students. Here it may be relevant to notice that the Muiscas are better characterized as inhabitants of the Andean region of Colombia rather than the Amazon region, as is stated in one of the section introductions (p. 22).Given the social and cultural topics that the history of alcohol can illuminate, some aspects of the recent historiography of food could also contribute to deepening methodological and theoretical approaches to the same topics. An additional reason to take into account this latter historiography is the fact that different beverages of Latin America, like Andean chicha (made from fermented maize or other ingredients), became principal sources of nourishment for thousands of poor people between the colonial period and the beginning of the twentieth century. Even cachaça was understood as a nutritional complement at the end of the eighteenth century (p. 52). This may allow us to think about how terms like “intoxicating beverages” — a general label used in the book to refer to fermented and distilled drinks — need to be historicized, given their culture-laden meanings and their entanglement with the history of alcohol's medicalization and pathologization. Besides these questions, some aspects that I found particularly interesting throughout the chapters were the South-South commerce (in this case, of cachaça between Brazil and Africa) that Atlantic studies often ignores, the appropriation of indigenous and slave knowledge by Europeans and criollos for the production of alcohol, the diverse traditions, social uses, and meanings of the experience of drunkenness, and the need for comparative studies of alcohol (for example, between Mexican pulque and Andean chicha).