The Spirit of Mezcal:Motherhood, Connection, and Reciprocity

This essay was originally published on ActiveCultures Digest on August 13, 2022.

I descend from at least three generations of mezcal producers on my maternal side. We all belong to the world capital of mezcal, Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico. After my parents got married, they continued our village’s craft: artisanal mezcal production.

Outsiders often compare mezcal to tequila as its smokey cousin. But mezcal is not young or new; I’d say mezcal is tequila’s mother since tequila is technically a mezcal. Indigenous peoples have been cohabitating with the agave plant for thousands of years. Zapotecs, the Indigenous group I’m a part of, are the largest producers of traditional mezcal. While now celebrated as a refined and complex Mexican spirit, there was a time when it was seen as poor Indigenous people’s drink, a spirit for lower and working-class people.

In the early 1900s, a national railroad reached Oaxaca, which allowed for more commercialization, including of mezcal. But in the 1980s, mezcal production plummeted as the demand for tequila continued to grow. The type of agave used to make tequila — blue weber — became scarce, so tequileros illicitly purchased the raw material we would’ve used to make our own agave spirit.

Hundreds of palenques (mezcal distilleries) in our pueblo shut down in that decade. Consequently, my parents stopped producing mezcal. My father was forced to migrate to the U.S. in search of better economic opportunities. And in 1992, he sent for the rest of the family to join him. Hence, this ancestral inheritance has not been passed down to me. But I am raising my son in Oaxaca and in California and his bicultural experience helps transmit the ancestral knowledge, values, and principles I want to pass on, even if he chooses not to learn the craft. Because in my lifetime the global market for mezcal was born and has exploded since.

This rapid industrialization and commercialization is tearing the story of mezcal from its Indigenous roots. Oaxaca, one of the states in Mexico with the largest Indigenous populations, is home to the stewards of mezcal. Yet, there is a lack of meaningful attribution, recognition, and respect for the people who have preserved this spirit. These new stories, neatly packaged for mass consumption and commodification, are pared down and compressed for the information age: western scientific information on the agave plant, the artisanal production process, mezcal’s organoleptic qualities, and even how to find your maestro mezcalero and start your own brand.

But mezcal exists and is able to be enjoyed by people from the global north because people like my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and other relatives endured hardship. When it was degraded by the nation of Mexico, and even outlawed, it existed in our communal lives as medicine and for social gatherings. Fewer stories are told of the ways the exquisite spirit holds struggle, trauma, and pain.

My maternal great-grandfather taught my maternal grandmother how to make mezcal when she was a young girl. Perhaps there were gentle teaching moments from my great-grandfather, but it remains true that for my grandmother, learning to make the delicate spirit was entangled with violence. My grandmother shared how her father would beat her and her siblings if they made a mistake, especially during the cooking process. Mishandling a batch had a direct impact on the family’s financial well being. As a single father, my great-grandfather had no room for error. My mother dropped out of elementary school so she could help my grandparents make and sell mezcal. She has a deep scar on her right shin from when, while carrying loads of mashed agave to distill at one in the morning, she slipped and fell near a water tank.

These are the acute and chronic stressful conditions my mother and grandmother grew up in. These experiences remind me of Kazu Haga’s powerful message: “If we carry intergenerational trauma (and we do), then we also carry intergenerational wisdom. It’s in our genes and in our DNA.” The conditions that my mother and grandmother endured are also part of the mezcal inheritance.

In cultures that fear looking at the past, especially when the past shows evidence of anti-Indigeneity, it’s easier to erase those stories, and with them, any acknowledgment of our intergenerational trauma and wisdom. The erasure of these central stories traps consumers and producers in an endless cycle of extraction and exploitation.

Witnessing the mezcal boom while holding the lived experiences of forced migration, family separation, and my parents’–especially my mother’s–excruciating experiences producing mezcal to make ends meet back in Matatlán, sometimes paralyzes me. Yet, the experiences that my mother and grandmother endured are also the seeds that fuel my passion for a more equitable and Indigenized mezcal industry. By sharing the stories of people with lived experiences, we can access the knowledge we need to create cultures of appreciation and cohesion.

The mezcal industry, as it exists in the U.S., is far from cultural appreciation. My first mezcal experience at a bar — an experience very different from the communal experiences with family and relatives that I had since I was a young child — is seared in my memories.

It was early in 2013, I had just gotten my green card and I was eager to finally visit places where I could show an ID and experience the visibility that I longed for. A hipster mezcal bar had just opened in the Downtown L.A. neighborhood where I worked. I also saw guerilla marketing for a mezcal brand plastered along the sidewalks.

It was a weekend night and the bar was crowded. I previously worked in the service industry, at a restaurant, so I knew to be patient, especially on busy nights. But the bartender, a tall slender white woman with tattoo sleeves, kept overlooking me. Someone next to me was kind enough to get her attention and let her know that I had been waiting for a while. In instances like these, I’ve either left a generous tip to cause guilt, or left a note in the tip section. This time, I chose the latter. Something along the lines of: “You would’ve gotten at least 20%, but service was awful.”

This wasn’t the first time a server ignored me. Nor was it the first time I had inadequate customer service. Many bars and restaurants aren’t inclusive spaces, or spaces of belonging. Often, they’re the least accessible to the people whose culture is being sold. For example, a glass of mezcal in the U.S. is what Native people would pay for a liter back home. But over time, I’ve learned to take up space in exclusionary spaces. So that’s what I did that night. But I never stepped foot in that bar after that night.

Those of us that are of mezcal culture should not be denied access to our own culture. By listening to the harmful impacts that the mezcal industry continues to have on Indigenous peoples, we have the possibility of course-correcting and avoiding the footsteps of the tequila industry — an industry that propelled the theft of Indigenous lands for the purposes of industrial tequila production and has became a subpar product from what it once was.

In nations like the U.S. and Mexico, that both uphold a culture of white supremacy, it’s time for that system to compost. Those of us who have fermented our generational suffering, and distilled our lived experiences into their essential knowledge and wisdom, are the ones to lead and co-create the future of mezcal, and by extension, re-introduce systems of reciprocity and interdependence.

Just like the hijuelos — the agave clones, which sprout up from the root system of the mother plant — I am deeply connected to my motherland, and that’s why I feel so protective of her.