Mezcal exists because diversity exists
Sierra de Manantlán in the background and hills of dry forest with mesquite, huamuches, and different varieties of magueys on the slopes of the Colima Volcano and Nevado de Colima Volcano.
The multicultural and intercultural experience
Time ago, in the mezcaleria where I worked, a young Italian, kind and meticulous, entered. He said, “I must tell you, friend, that no matter how wonderful your country and its food is, Italian food is better. You go to Puglia, then you have burrata. In Emilia-Romagna the prosciutto. In Campania the pasta a la putanesca, and Liguria the pesto and focaccia. In Mexico you just have corn, tortilla, chili and salsa with tortilla." So, I launch the same claim that Alfonso Reyes makes in his Memorias de cocina y bodega: "What a pity! What the little habit supported by prejudice does!"
FIG. 1 The images show different varieties of corn occupied in different places to make tortillas, chips and other multidiverse derivatives of corn.
Food has always been an example of how diversity operates. It often causes misunderstanding when two different traditions come together. What is good or bad to eat? The novelist Edith Wharton ponders this in her book French Ways and Their Meanings. She recounts how the American soldiers stationed on the coasts of France received strong warnings by the French peasants when they saw them picking blackberries. "Don't! they give you the fever!" But across the canal, in England, people had eaten them for generations. Reyes explains in his aforementioned text: "If this happens with the products of our own country, what if foreign products are received with distrust?"
But who can understand diversity when it seems that the world is the same for everyone? One answer for the Italian is this: yes, corn and its dough flood the food of Mexico. It was unnecessary to tell him about the diversity of dishes that do not have corn dough or tortilla. That was not the point. The matter is understanding the contrasts between an empanada and a prepared tlayuda; a totopo from Istmo de Tehuantepec and some toasted tortillas. To do this, one must go from prejudice to habit, from participation to assimilation. One must learn to live interculturally.
When we speak the same language it may seem words mean the same for everybody. We take communication for granted. Food tells us we have difficulties explaining and understanding diversity. For example, between dishes that use corn and its derivatives. The same happens with mezcal, an ambiguous reference for a multicultural drink. We should approach it from an intercultural perspective. That is, a point of view that challenge us to live the deep perception of other people.
"What, then, is a mezcal?" Catarina Illsley asked in an insightful tone in her essay "Keys to savor a mezcal." The answer: a strong expression of diversity. In short, mezcal is not the same in different times or spaces. Rather than talking about conceptual differences between a consumer in Moscow and a producer who drinks his own mezcal, let's speak on the multiculturalism between different mezcal producers. Different universes of understanding.
The diversity of agave and NOT-agave
Not all mezcales are made with agaves.
FIG 2. Illustration based on the use of the landscape of the first peoples that settled in the valleys of Oaxaca
Taken from the book "Guila Naquitz" by Kent Flannery
It is a well-agreed convention that mezcal is a drink produced from the distillation of fermented must of the cooked agave heads. But sometimes mezcal is produced with a plant that does not belong to the same genus as agaves. Botany is the study and definition of plants. It comes from the greco-roman tradition and later european philosophical developments. The result was a systematized form of knowledge called science. However, at the same time without remedy, in some other apparently sterile plain a different race with an aftertaste of prickly fruits and honey water observed in a cave the first seeds of corn until that moment unknown. Later they would cultivate them with other shrubs and seedlings to live on that piece of earth. These facts would give way to a certain way of categorizing their cosmos.
There is only one science. But there are many traditions of knowledge to understand and explain the world. Modern science is one of these traditions.
The anthropologist Eckart Boege writes that most indigenous groups don't write and "have no documentation other than their cultural practice." What people know they write it in their landscape and how they relate to it. Magueys can be plants that do not meet the same western genus as agaves according to plant classification systems of some indigenous groups. Such is the case of sotol. The common name of some species of the genus Dasylirion. People fathom them as a magueys because they use them for the same purpose: making mezcal. Meaning and concept are written in customs.
Mesoamerican societies classify plants in order of cultural importance. In Tzeltal Principles of Plant Classification the authors emphasize a continuity of utility. They point out there are four different analytical categories for classification: cultivated plants, protected plants, significant plants, and unimportant plants. This thesis contradicts the scientific belief that plants are classified only by their morphology.
“If one wanted to define the Mexica people by an element of culture taken from the ethnobotanical domain, it had to be agreed to call it a civilization of the maguey”
The metl was a plant of superior importance, therefore known and documented. Oswaldo Gonçalves, a Brazilian chemist and historian, said, "if one wanted to define the mexica people by an element of culture taken from the ethnobotanical domain, you had to agree to call it the maguey civilization."
When Francisco Hernández, was studying medicinal plants in America, he found a plant generically known as metl, maguey in Nahuatl. A plant with great cultural relevance. It was present in several landscapes, cultivation systems and domestic construction. In the garments and daily trousseau of the population, in their cuisine and in their religion. Hernández recorded the general concept of the plant and its multiple specifications. He described teómetl, xolómetl, mexcálmetl, tlacámetl. He also gave details about the necuámetl or honey maguey. He said, “it has a stem with oblong inflorescence different from other magueys and its leaves are the width of a finger ”. His illustration shows us a maguey with fine leaves and a spiky inflorescence. Half a century later Alonso de Molina built the most complete Nahuatl vocabulary. In it he described the necuámetl as "a certain tree like palm" due to the similarity it has to certain varieties of palms. These are accurate descriptions of the morphology of a sotol or cucharilla (Dasylirion).
So, is it logical a different classification of plants? Can various divergent types of knowledge coexist?
Depending on the customs we learn, even our sensory units may be different compared with other cultural group. The nahua people elaborated the classification of metl that Francisco Hernández registered. According to their philosophy, what we need to learn is the heart. Situated between the head and the liver, the heart is the balance between reason and passion. This seemingly metaphorical idea is the basis of a sensory system that creates different universes of knowledge.
FIG 3.
Illustrations by Francisco Hernández.
Indigenous, rural people and other worlds of understanding
Is it possible to remember the future? Only through certain gestures and linguistic licenses. By recognizing that language is literature; that literature is the cultural. And the cultural, the universal, the natural. Modern literature shows this in the work of Ted Chiang Story of your life. In the story, a remote race from another world embarks on earth. Their written language has no known grammatical structure. A linguist discovers that the writing has no inherent direction in which the prepositions connect to each other. It has no premises or conclusions. A circular writing where all the components have the same weight and the precedence quality was identical. The written ideograms represent an idea without beginning or end. Without cause an effect it was impossible to argue that the light emitted on an opaque body casts a shadow. Plato is left without a myth and without a cave. To make matters worse, complex mathematical principles for earthlings were elementary arithmetic for aliens and for us their higher mathematics was a strange form of simple arithmetic. By understanding this language, the linguist began to feel time in a different way. She could remember the future as if it were an event that her mind had already lived through.
FIG 4. Semasiogram for the film Arrival based on the novel by Ted Chiang The Story of Your Life
The Nahua culture left a vast amount of literature. It vividly transmits the notions of their world. It speaks about their gods (teotl or essential energies), customs and origin, their feelings and the creations of their fantasy. These creations, unlike Chiang's work, were not authored by a single individual, but were collectively made. They are a good representation of the community vision. Much of this literature is embodied in codexes and oral tradition. It narrates the present in future tenses, thus creating predictions of the world. Facts that will respond to agriculture, cuisine, religion and customs of the present. In these settings the characters are nothing more than the vital forces around them. And the narrators themselves are ethnographic characters from their own stories. These stories and poems are archaic versions of a current novel in which the possibility of remembering the future is shown.
What does remembering the future and a tale of alien races have to do with mezcal?
That within our own world many worlds fit, as the Zapatista aphorism says. One concept of mezcal fits many concepts of mezcal. Yet, history has told us the version of a single author. When we decree that mezcal is the best drink in the world. When we state that mezcal is better or different than tequila. When we say that mezcal is for the poor, for those without culture, we fall into the error of monoculture. An imperial and dogmatic tradition that says there is only one way to live. Assertions like these are anachronistic, chauvinistic, and xenophobic.
Mezcal exists because diversity exists. To understand diversity we can recognize be the following principles:
The exceptional ability of adaptation and diversification of maguey to a complicated geography. This piece of land is called Mexico, but houses the cultural groups within it.
This geography shelters and traces a paths to different human groups. They call it a home and in its resources, their companions. Such as the maguey.
There are agaves and human groups that develop in incompatible positions. Thus each culture reproduces itself in a different narrative of the world.
We are not sure how to define an indigenous community. But we do know that these groups have certain relationships with each other:
They share a non-European language and as far as the definition allows us, they are rural people. They coexist with their landscape, and they do not exploit it in industrial ways. They know the land and generate tools to live in it, such as agriculture, everyday utilities (handicrafts) or mezcals. These communities promote dirt paths not paved roads that were the origin of the urbanization. All this is related to the fact that peasants shelter most of the biodiversity. In other words, the people of the countryside not only live in it, they protect it and regenerate it.
FIG. 5 Map by Eckart Boege showing the regions where there is a diversity of Mesoamerican peoples and languages associated with a territory of great biodiversity.
These societies have taught us another economic theory where the scarcity of supply does not increase the price of demand. An idea that would leave many economists without reason to be, given that it is the fundamental assumption of a capital market economy. In the Sierra Mixe (Ayuuk), for example, people don't give a financial value to the maguey. It does not have one because it is product of the mountain that has life and lacks exchange value. It rather has a use value. Market economics will consider this an underrated maguey.
In Europe peasants say that those who make wines are not peasants. They are rich landlords. As a hobby they till the land or send others to do it. Either way wine exists. To do so you can study its physics, its chemistry, its biology in a formal education center. You cannot do so for mezcal. Someone asked me, "What does it take to be a mezcal master?" After considering it for a moment, I answered that to be a Maetsrx de Mezcal, you have to be born such. It is a quality given by the fact that they are born in the center of the context: where the plant develops, where the inputs come, where a family has found a fire to share and teach life. Livelihoods that for generations have become experts in the arts of mezcal. One cannot learn that in school.
We can only understand the wine, beer and coffee model through general regulations. There is no diversification. Coffee is not good if its processing was not carried out according to certain parameters imposed by those who were not at first coffee farmers. Natural wine is a trend gaining momentum. Conventional manufacturers see them as irreverent drinks. In order to be pleasant the taste has to be standardized. Barley, other grains and hops in beer flow from industrial monocultures. Where is the diversity of these drinks if they derive from an great standardization? Mezcal, in comparison, is socially certified by each town and each family that makes it through the historical taste.
Photography by Nacho López in Tlahuitoltepec of an Ayuuk evaluating mezcal qualities
We have internalized diversity in our mind and body. That is why we can recognize the unique value of the different mezcales. We find the artisanal process fascinating, but not because the description itself. It is because each modus operandi is the manifestation of diverse territories. E.g. the use of sabino fermenters in temperate zones. Or leather fermenters in places like Santa María Ixcatlán where the Xula people live. The term terroir in mesoamerican villages translates to milpa: the place to cultivate the food and the senses.
Our head can trick our reality. It sometimes prevents us from listening the symphonies around us. Our reality is validated or not, according to how we were raised. It is not a serious fact that other understandings can co-exist. Diversity can be overwhelming sometimes. We will expand our perceptions only through deep experience, time and patience. Only by thinking with the heart can we remember a future where we can live better on earth.
Bibliography
“Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca” de Roberto González
“Los mazatecos ante la nación” de Eckart Boege
“El patrimonio biocultural de los pueblos indígenas de México” de Eckart Boege
“Claves para saborear un mezcal” de Catarina Illsley
“Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production” de Sarah Bowen
“Comida, cultura y modernidad en México: perspectivas antropológicas e históricas” de Catherine Good y Laura Elena Corona
“The Development Dictionary” de Wolfgang Sachs
“Good to eat” de Marvin Harris
“One Straw Revolution” de Masanobu Fukuoka
“Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification” de Brent Berlin, Dennis Eugene Breedlove, and Peter H. Raven
“El maguey y el pulque en los códices mexicanos” de Oswaldo Gonçalves da Lima
“La memoria biocultural. La importancia ecológica de las sabidurías tradicionales” de Victor Toledo y Narciso Barrera Bassols
“LA FILOSOFÍA NÁHUATL ESTUDIADA EN SUS FUENTES” de Miguel León Portilla
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