The Political Economy of the Authentic: Beer and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Mexico

Beer has become one of Mexico’s most successful industries and currently produces some of its most globally-recognized brands.  Yet few historians have examined the industry in depth; those who have tend toward strict business histories, devoid of social context, or toward cultural studies of temperance that have ignored the underlying economic issues driving the industry’s growth.  This paper seeks to bridge this divide to analyze one small part of the larger story of Mexico’s brewing industry: the evolution of beer in the 1920s and 1930s from a “foreign” product into a thoroughly modern Mexican good.

I will use sources ranging from alcohol tax codes and production and consumption data to temperance debates and sanitation reports to explore this transition in the industry.  As part of this, I seek to explore the commodification of the “authentic” and its role in the dynamic interplay of the political and domestic economies of alcohol.  Key questions include: How did owners draw from a rising tide of temperance and reformers’ concerns with moralizing and modernizing Mexico’s “backward” Indians to rebrand beer as healthy, modern and Mexican?   How did the state use tax policy and other industry support to influence indigenous consumption patterns?  How did this shift impact domestic economies that long had relied upon the production of traditional fermented drinks, and which were characterized by close ties (spatial, social) between consumer and producer?  How, by commodifying the “authentic”, did Mexico’s brewery owners develop new modes of production and consumption that relied upon a growing distance (spatially, culturally, temporally) between producers and consumers? In the end, this study of the economic and cultural processes underlying the “indigenization” of beer in Mexico can broaden our understanding of the evolution of the country’s highly unequal mid-century growth and why it remains deeply fractured along class and ethnic lines.