p1931 -
Beer, Gender, and Capitalism in Modern Mexico
Susan M. Gauss
Associate Professor, Department of History
University at Albany, SUNY
sgauss@albany.edu
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 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 was indigenous consumption reshaped to enforce new and highly gendered ideas about feminine and masculine behavior? How did the state use tax policy and regulatory codes to reshape these gendered behaviors? 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 gender and ethnic lines.