Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

For the historian, drugs (including alcohol) are Janus-faced. In some respects, they are eminently ordinary commodities, produced, transported, consumed, and taxed like any other consumable. Even high-profile illicit drugs like cocaine and heroin appear almost mundane with respect to the laws of supply and demand. But in other respects, drugs are almost unique in their ability to rouse visceral responses in people, attracting some, repulsing others. Drugs are culturally volatile, and thus their historical trajectories tend to reveal much about the specific historical contexts through which they have passed.Alcohol, despite often being distinguished from other intoxicants (i.e., “alcohol and drugs”), is no less controversial or historically useful in this respect. Indeed, in Mexico, a country laden with fascinating drug histories, alcohol is ubiquitous and deeply meaningful. Tied at fundamental levels to preconquest culture and religious practice on both sides of the Atlantic, alcohol is found at the very center of postconquest conflict and anxieties. Over three colonial centuries, the link between alcohol, crime, violence, and disorder came to be accepted as commonsensical in Mexico, as did the stereotype of the “drunken Indian.” Given all of this, it is hardly surprising that alcohol became a lightning rod for nineteenth-century writers fixated on the present and future of the Mexican nation, and that is the subject of this welcome contribution to a rapidly growing field of alcohol studies in modern Mexico.This book has two aims. The first is to provide a “literary history” that will “expand the ways in which scholars understand nineteenth-century Mexican literature, and that of nineteenth-century Latin America more generally, in terms of the relationship between literature and the construction of national identity in the postindependence period” (p. xiii). The second is to present “a cultural history of alcohol's roles, both positive and negative, in nation-building discourses” (p. xiii). These goals are reflected in the structure of the chapters, each of which explores a theme first through archival research and then through the dissection and analysis of various works of literature.Deborah Toner is clear that the book is not meant to be “a comprehensive social history of drinking” but is instead focused on “ideas about drinking, drinkers, drunkenness, and alcoholism that shaped debates about the nation as they were articulated by the political and lettered classes” (p. xiv). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the most forceful new arguments come on the literary side, while the social-historical research mostly complements and reinforces the existing historiography. Building from theoretical work (by Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan) on the importance of the novel in nation-building processes, Toner examines a wide range of Mexican novels over the first century of the republican period. Though many arguments about the role of alcohol emerge from this analysis, there is a general effort here to challenge the view, forwarded originally by Doris Sommer, that the main means through which imagining the nation occurred in nineteenth-century novels was through allegorical romance. In much the same way that Robert McKee Irwin has provided a corrective to this argument by highlighting the importance of homosocial relations in these works, Toner argues that allegorical romance was just one of many means by which “nineteenth-century authors constructed ideals of nationhood and ways of belonging to, and participating in, the nation” (p. xviii).Probably the most innovative argument here is that nineteenth-century consternation about alcohol was fundamentally rooted in Enlightenment dichotomies between “open” and “closed” bodies. Building on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and others, Toner argues that Enlightenment thinking preferred “closed” bodies and that alcohol abuse tended to make bodies “open” and “grotesque” and therefore apparently “uncivilized” (p. 156). Other arguments are less innovative but valuable in reinforcing some of what scholars have already discovered about drugs and nineteenth-century Mexico (e.g., the “medicalization” of these discourses over time).Toner is admirably frank about the limitations of her research, recognizing that the works at the center of her analysis were written by elites for elites and that their “impact . . . in terms of creating nationalist sentiment and identity among the wider Mexican populace was therefore minimal during the nineteenth century” (p. xxi). Nonetheless, she suggests that a longer-term view reveals that these authors were “actively involved in developing the political, economic, social, and cultural institutions and ideas that would become fundamental to more properly ‘nationalist’ discourses in the twentieth century” (pp. xxi–xxii). There is certainly little doubt that the tropes advanced in these works remained influential well into the future, whether in newspaper portrayals of alcoholism or in the official antialcohol campaigns of the Mexican government. This book should therefore be of value to various fields and to scholars with a diverse range of interests

Archaeology · Colonialism · Criminology · Sociology · Subject (documents) · History · Psychedelics and Drug Studies