Turning Mezcal into Mexican Heritage Through Transnational Circulation

• In Event: The Transnational Politics of Food Heritage in Bolivia and Mexico

Abstract

This paper explores how the transnational circulation of mezcal has led to the beverage’s resignification within discourses of Mexican gastronomic heritage. Mezcal is an alcoholic spirit made by distilling the fermented juice from agave (the same plant used for tequila). Until the late 1990s mezcal was a regional drink, produced on a relatively small scale for local consumption, and was virtually unknown outside of Mexico. More critically, middle and upper class Mexicans generally eschewed mezcal as a low-status beverage, associated primarily with indigenous and rural communities. Today, mezcal is undergoing a dramatic transformation into a prestige commodity produced for export around the world. This newly emerging market is predicated on the image of mezcal as a traditional, artisanal beverage that is produced under specific geographic, geological and climatic conditions (denoted by the French term terroir). And unlike tequila, mezcal has not been subject to rigid processes of commercialization and standardization, making it particularly suited to the demands of global consumers wanting increasingly specialized food and spirits. In this presentation, I discuss how mezcal is imbued with new social and economic value as it has become a transnational commodity. The popularity of mezcal in upscale foreign markets, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, has led to its “rediscovery” in Mexico by the very social classes who frowned upon mezcal historically as a drink of the rural poor. This paper explores the process of appropriating and remaking the mezcal’s image through ideologies of regional and national gastronomic heritage.

Author

• Ronda L Brulotte, University of New Mexico