Review
“An outstanding addition to our knowledge of Guatemala and the history of commodities.”―American Historical Review “Clearly shows how studying alcohol can shed new light on broader questions in Guatemalan and Latin American history, particularly regarding nation-building processes, and how these are shaped by issues of race, class, and gender.”―Hispanic American Historical Review “Perhaps its most arresting and thought-provoking finding is to remind us that, for better or worse, alcohol was one of the very few products or activities in Guatemala that continually forced the crossing of ethnic, gender, and regional boundaries.”―Journal of Latin American Studies “Engaging. . . . Articulate[s] the intimate historical, social, cultural, and political interrelationships between alcohol and Guatemala’s people and the way that Guatemalans used alcohol to facilitate ongoing gender, racial, and ethnic negotiations.”―Ethnohistory “Provides a wealth of historical data around unexpected gendered contestations against the state, debates over privatizations of public goods, and resilient cultural and class-based arguments repeatedly levied in order to challenge the morality of elites.”―Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
From the Back Cover
"This important collection of essays creatively uses the prism of alcohol to increase our understanding of Guatemala's role in the broader Atlantic world and to unravel the complex negotiations that shaped the construction of this diverse regional context."--Frederick H. Smith, author of Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History "With case studies from Mam, Q'anjob'al, Kaqchikel, and African American communities, this volume provides fine-grained historical accounts that enrich our understanding of everyday life in Guatemala while providing provocative interpretive takes on their implications."--Todd Little-Siebold, College of the Atlantic Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce so much so that researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol.A marker of social position and cultural identity, a crucial component in community and state building, and a commodity around which different cultural traditions and policing policies developed and evolved, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum)--often illicitly produced and consumed--was central to Guatemalan daily life. But scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development.The contributors to this volume are most concerned with understanding what alcohol--its production, sale, and consumption--meant to the servants, peasants, workers, professionals, and elites who lived in the locales where it was produced. Drawing from archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic sources, they examine how aguardiente affected lives and the formation of communities, colony, and finally nation, providing an opportunity to examine closely the give and take between power brokers and subordinates.Spanning nearly two hundred years of history, topics discussed include women in the alcohol trade, taverns as places of social unrest, and tensions between Maya and State authority. By tracing Guatemala's past, people, and national development through the channel of a single alcoholic beverage, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol opens new directions for Central American historical and anthropological research. David Carey Jr. is professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine and author of Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the Past, 1875-1970, and Our Elders Teach Us: Maya-Kaqchikel Historical Perspectives.
About the Author
David Carey Jr. is professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Southern Maine and author of Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the Past, 1875–1970 and Our Elders Teach Us: Maya-Kaqchikel Historical Perspectives.
