Tequila, Mezcal, and the Civilizing of Humanity
How Agave Taught Us to Live Symbiotically
Tequila is one of México’s most famous and important industries. Every year México churns out 600 million liters of tequila, a steadily growing market worth $4.5 billion. I suspect that most readers of this essay have heard of tequila and know that it is distilled from agave.
A smaller but substantial portion of you have probably heard of mezcal as well. Another agave distillate known for its smoky flavor, México produces 8 million liters of mezcal annually, and it is the fastest growing liquor market in the world.
However, margaritas and tequila shots do not communicate the profundity of the spirit.
Agave distillates are the culmination of a 10,000-year, co-evolutionary relationship between agave and humanity. Agave was a cultural keystone for Mesoamericans throughout México and the Southwest United States. Humanity depended on agave for food, fiber, fuel, and shelter, and, in return, agave depended on humanity to maintain a fertile environment for her offspring.
Moreover, agave taught Mesoamericans the cultural values that allowed them to live symbiotically with her and the environment. Diverse agroforestry systems and artisanal mezcal production instilled patience, commitment, integrity, resilience, and resourcefulness in culture. Much of this culture continues today in the mezcal business. Maestro mezcaleros often manage their own farms with several species of agave and produce the mezcal with firewood, draft animals, and millstones in small batches.
Tequila, on the other hand, originates from the advent of industrial capitalism. The tequila industry has converted diverse agroforestry landscapes into monoculture fields and replaced ancestral tradition and natural processes with massive industrial machinery and chemical additives.
In this essay, we explore the ancestral roots of agave and how the relationship with her taught Mesoamerican humanity to live in a symbiotic civilization. Then, we will delve into the elaborate process to create an agave spirit – mezcal – and contrast it with the industrialized process of tequila.
Mezcal and tequila are brothers, but in many ways they are opposites. They originate from similar genes, yet one takes the path of symbiosis and artisanship and the other exploitation and industrialization. The story of agave, mezcal, and tequila shows us that we cannot separate agri-culture from culture. When we change agricultural practices from symbiotic to industrialized, we change the culture of society from balanced and reciprocal to excessive and extractive.
I’ve written before that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis. Modern culture, particularly Western culture, has replaced symbiotic values with the subordination of nature and individualism. As a society and species, we need to change what we believe and think if we want to transform our legacy from a humanity that destroyed ecosystems to one that nourished life on earth.
Change starts with actions, however small. Let’s dive in.
Agave: A Cultural Keystone
Few things are as distinctly Mexican as agave.¹
Of the 273 recognized species, 223 are found in México. Agaves cover most of the country, from the scorching deserts of northern México through the central valleys and coastal mountain ranges to the borders of the southern rainforests.
Agave has been a cornerstone of Mesoamerican culture for thousands of years. Dr. Howard Scott Gentry, one of history’s leading agave researchers, writes in his seminal Agaves of Continental North America, “the uses of agaves are as many as the arts of man have found it convenient to devise.”
Agave has been cooked and eaten since at least 9,000 BC, effectively as long as humans have cultivated the land, and traditional agave ferments and distillates have been documented in 24 of 31 Mexican states. Her flesh is packed with inulin, a prebiotic fiber, which nourishes the gut microbiome, regulates blood sugar, and helps the body retain water.² Babies were commonly weaned off mother’s milk with aguamiel (fresh agave sap). The sap was also fermented into pulque, a beverage which provides a cornucopia of healthy gut microbes, especially when fermented in rawhide bags.
Pulque was a centerpiece of social and spiritual culture as well as gut culture. Power brokers created coalitions and resolved differences in pulquerías (pulque bars). The beverage, and the modern distillate mezcal, have been revered as a sacred plant medicine for at least 3,000 years. Priests used it as a religious sacrament (well before Christians adopted wine), healers as a homeopathic remedy, and artists to invoke the muse.
Agave also protected Mesoamericans. The leaves were decomposed into threads for clothing, rope, sandals, or carpets. The sharp points were fashioned into weapons and tools and the woody stalks into firewood, posts, and building materials.
Agave was so essential to Mesoamerican civilization that they deified the species. The myth goes that Mayahuel, a stunningly beautiful maiden, possessed a magic plant that provided health and happiness. Her grandmother, a tzitzimime or star-god, sequestered her away from the rest of the gods, jealous of her beauty and gifts. The gods then sent Quetzalcoatl on a mission to retrieve the plant and share it with humanity. Quetzalcoatl and Mayahuel fell in love and eloped with her grandmother’s army on their heels. Mayahuel, in the effort to hide from their pursuers, transformed her and Quetzalcoatl into this marvelous plant, the agave. Unfortunately, Mayahuel was discovered and chopped into pieces. Quetzalcoatl buried the pieces of his lover and irrigated the land with his tears, cultivating the first agave for humanity.
Mayahuel, for delivering agave and all her gifts to humanity, was worshipped as a goddess of nourishment and fertility. She is often depicted as a beautiful woman with a flowering agave plant and breasts flowing with milky pulque to suckle her many children.
Paintings depicting Mayahuel found in Tequila, Jalisco.
I love ancient myths because they transport us into the minds of our ancestors that lived the essential unity of nature, humanity, and god. They teach us how humanity once lived symbiotically with the environment.
In agave land, everyone was a child of Mayahuel. This belief was not hyperbole, but based in the reality of life. In their book Agave Spirits, Gary Paul Nabhan and David Nuro Piñera identify agave as the “cultural keystone that served to meet most human needs: food, fiber, beverage, medicine, construction materials, and spiritual offerings.” Indigenous civilizations commonly revered and deified these cultural keystones, such as the Maya and other Mesoamericans did to maíz (corn), Plains native Americans did to bison, and Pacific Northwest groups did to salmon.
Moreover, the symbiotic relationship with agave formed the cultural foundation for civilization. Nabhan and Suro Piñera recount Dr. Gentry’s story of the humanity-agave symbiosis:
“The ancient Mexicans cultivated and coddled the maguey incessantly. They cleared the wild land and put agave into it. They opened a new and nurturing environment with varying habitats and ecological niches for the random variants of the gene-rich agave genus. The cultivators made agave a home on the deep productive soils and in time provided water and manure. They protected the plants from weedy trees. They selected genetic deviants of high production by planting genetic offsets. Agave species multiplied into more varieties than man has been able to characterize and count. This agricultural effort formed a socially disciplined complex subservient to the agave symbiont [emphasis mine]. Generally, that is what man did for agave in this Mesoamerican symbiosis.
In turn, agave nurtured man. During the several thousand years that man and agave have lived together, agave has been a renewable resource for food, drink, and artifact. As man settled into communities, agaves became fences marking territories, protecting crops, providing security, and ornamenting the home. Agave fostered in man the settled habit, the attention to cultivation, and the steadfast purpose through years and life spans, all virtues required by civilization [emphasis mine]. As civilization and religion developed, the nurturing agave became a symbol, until with its stimulating juice man made a god out of it. Agave civilized man. This is what agave did for man!”
As we cultivated agave, agave cultivated us.
Linguistics demonstrate that the development of human culture is inseparable from agriculture. The word culture derives from the Latin root colere, which means to tend or to cultivate. From this root, we distinguished agri-culture (the cultivation of field or soil) and culture (the cultivation of the mind, faculties, or beliefs). However, the linguistic root split into the culture and agriculture relatively recently. Originally, the cultivation of the mind and soil were one.
Because Mesoamericans utilized symbiotic agriculture, Mesoamerican culture was predicated on symbiotic values, and vice versa.
¹ Note to reader: Agave and maguey are used interchangeably in the essay. Agave comes from the Latin word for “illustrious” whereas maguey was brought to México by colonists from the Taíno (indigenous peoples of the Caribbean) Arawak language. Linguists have identified over 600 names for agave in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican languages including metl in Aztec Nahuatl, tzaatz in Mixe, mai in Huichol, ki in Mayan, and yavi in Mixteco. Mezcal itself comes from the Nahuatl words metl (agave) and ixcalli (roasted).
² We now understand that prebiotic fiber is critical for gut health. The USDA recommends 25 grams of fiber per day and the average American only consumes 10-15 grams. Archaeologists estimate that Mesoamericans ate 135 grams of agave inulin fiber per day, roughly 10x the average American!
Mezcal & Agave Agroforestry
Mezcal – the spirit of agave, distilled – embodies symbiotic values throughout the chain of production. Mezcal requires the mezcalero to master healthy ecology, polycultural cultivation, and patient production while injecting their personal flair.
Traditionally, mezcaleros cultivate agave in polycultural agroforests with several species of agave integrated with perennial trees like pine, oak, mesquite, guamúchil, dragonfruit, and prickly pear cacti as well as annual crops like corn, beans, and squash. Take Rancho El Limón in Michoacán as an example, where Emilio Vieyra Rangel restored pine-oak woodlands with agave agroforestry. Nabhan and Suro Piñera observe:
“We would be hard-pressed to even recognize [Rancho El Limón] as a place of agricultural or agroforestry production. The agaves are transplanted into the open woodlands, tucked in between pines, oaks, feather trees, and arborescent prickly pears, rather than being placed in neat rows spread out across plowed ground. Orchids, pineapple-like bromeliads, and mushrooms decorate the trees like so many holiday ornaments. The wildness of the land has been restored, and the agave harvest is but a by-product of that generous human gesture of habitat restoration.”
The entire chain of production from the way the agave is cultivated to the caramelization, fermentation, and distillation methods leave an indelible thumbprint on the final mezcal. Once harvested, the agave is trimmed of her leaves and the hearts are slow-cooked to caramelize the carbohydrates within. The maestro mezcalero deliberately selects the species of firewood and volcanic stones to slow-roast the agave hearts over 3-10 days. Once cooked, the mezcalero may mash the agave hearts with oak clubs in a hollowed-out tree trunk, with a 2-ton volcanic tahona (millstone) pulled by a draft animal, or some other permutation of crushing technology. At this point, the fermentation process has begun and the agave hearts are mixed with water in underground vats to ferment anywhere from 30 hours to 30 days. Over 170 different types of yeast, bacteria, and nematodes have been found in mezcal fermentation, compared to just 1 strain of yeast in beer. Mezcaleros specially select the water source from rain, springs, or streams and use vats made of stone, clay, plastic, stainless steel, or rawhide. To finish the spirit, a mezcalero may drip the juices of a chicken breast or iguana tail over the distillation vat.
“Spring water with high minerality and earthy sweetness. Rainwater caught on roofs in cisterns. The trickling thread of crystal clear water draining out of sandy seeps. A mountain stream draining down from a forest of the sacred fir known as oyamel and the sagging pine called pino triste. All leave their marks in the making of agave spirits.”
— Gary Paul Nabhan and David Nuro Piñera, Agave Spirits
Consumers claim that mezcal from agave cultivated on agroecological lands with traditional distillation methods tastes more complex, sweeter, earthier, more minerally. Mezcaleros have thousands of instruments, if not more, with which to conduct the symphony of their mezcal flavor profile.
The values imparted by the process are even more important.
Generosity from restoring agave habitat. Patience from waiting to harvest until the agave is plump and packed with carbohydrates. Commitment from staying the course over long harvest and production periods. Integrity from maintaining the commitment to land stewardship and artisanal excellence. Resilience from navigating the inevitable surprises and challenges of agriculture. Resourcefulness from sourcing all inputs from the milpa (farm) and sustainably managing energy and water.
Nor in production can culture be separated from our actions to plants, people, and planet. As Oaxacan maestro mezcalero Eduardo “Lalo” Ángeles explains in Agave Spirits, “you cannot make a good mezcal if you do not make a good palenque [mezcal distillery]… To do justice to the gifts of the maguey, you must train your staff well… And you cannot support a good palenque if you do not have a diverse milpa.” All components of the chain of production reinforce cultural values from agricultural methods to distillation techniques, worker relationships, and profit sharing.
Today, agave agroforestry and artisanal mezcal, like so much of our food system, has been marginalized by monoculture agriculture and industrialized production. As a result, symbiotic culture has largely eroded.
Tequila and the Blue Desert
“On the clearest days, you can still see the iconic volcano of Tequila over the killing fields, but a haze of diesel smoke, pesticides, and dust from plowed-over fields rises up its flanks.”
— Gary Paul Nabhan and David Nuro Piñera, Agave Spirits
El Volcán de Tequila, pine-oak woodlands at its feet, surrounded by the blue desert. Photo by Iván Serrano Jauregui, Ciudad Olinka.
In contrast to the symbiotic agriculture and artisanal production of mezcal, the tequila industry is characterized by chemicalized monoculture agriculture and industrial efficiency.
Tequila traces its roots to “Father of Tequila” Don Pedro Sánchez de Tagle, a wealthy Spanish aristocrat who purportedly produced the “first” agave distillate in the 1600s.¹ The site of his distillery was near the town of Tequila, Jalisco, and, thus, this distillate was called tequila.² In 1758, King Ferdinand VI of Spain granted land near Tequila to aristocrat Don José Antonio de Cuervo for a distillery, and he began producing commercially by 1795. By the mid-1800s, distilleries on the haciendas of the wealthiest Jalisco families were capitalizing on the rapidly growing and lucrative tequila market. In this period, railroads networks emerged to link México’s mines with the Western United States and soon cases of tequila were loaded as well.
By 1901, Mexican distilleries produced 10 million liters of tequila per year, much of it sold into the US.³ The industry already required 70 million mature agaves per year, but tequileros couldn’t procure enough agave. The agave used at the time took 15-30 years to mature and did not yield enough carbohydrates for their industrial machinery.
Except for 1 species: a short bluish agave, now known as Agave tequilana azul. Tequilana azul reached harvest maturity in only 10-14 years and was packed full of carbohydrates. It also easily propagated vast monoculture fields through tissue clones rather than pollination. Soon, vast swathes of native pine-oak woodlands were converted into sweeping rows of tequilana azul. Today, 600 million tequilana azul clones cover 180,000 hectare (450,000 acres).⁴ Due to its extraordinarily low genetic variability and monoculture habitat, tequilana azul is hopelessly addicted to pesticides and other agrochemicals to combat pests and disease.⁵ These agricultural zones are now known as blue deserts.
In 1974, the core tequilero families lobbied the Mexican government to establish a Denomination of Origin (“DO”) for tequila to protect the market from competition. A DO decrees a set of place-based conditions, based on shared ecological and cultural characteristics, that must be met for a product to earn a title. For example, champagne, which requires grapes from the Champagne region of France and specific production steps. The tequila DO restricted production to the 160 municipalities in 5 states where the largest tequilero’s haciendas were concentrated rather than shared ecology. It also stipulated that only the tequilana azul agave can be used, while allowing for up to 49% of the sugars to come from non-agave sources like corn or sugarcane syrup. Since the establishment of the DO, tequila production has exploded from 20 million liters per year to 600 million liters in 2022, all distilled from the genetically identical clones of just 1 agave species.
To supercharge output, tequila is typically distilled by mechanically shredding, scalding, and decomposing immature agaves into a sugary juice that is then blended with corn or sugarcane syrup, fermented with chemical accelerators in steel vats, and doctored with artificial flavorings and colorants. Effectively, industrial tequila is to agave what high fructose corn syrup is to corn – an industrial invention that fundamentally changes the nutrition and flavor.
High output can be viewed favorably if you believe in trickle-down economics but a mind-bogglingly low share of the profits actually trickle down. For trimming 1 ton of agave, a team of 6 harvesters received $22.50 in 2022, or $3.75 per person. That 1 ton of agave will yield roughly 158 liters of tequila, which, when parceled into 2 oz pours, amounts to 2,608 cocktails. At about 90 cocktails per agave, a bar may make $48, of which only 0.3%, 0.16 of 1 cent, goes to the harvester.
The primary beneficiaries are the foreign multinational tequila companies. Just 5 brands dominate the market: José Cuervo, Patrón, Sauza, 1800, and Hornitos. José Cuervo is still 55% controlled by Don José’s descendants, the Beckmanns, with British multinational Diageo owning the other 45%. The rest are foreign multinationals.⁶
At each turn, the tequila industry dutifully followed the principles of industrial capitalism. Extract and manipulate natural resources. Rationalize complex polycultural agroecology into controllable monocultures. Design production for massive scale and maximum efficiency. Exert market power to reap a disproportionate share of profits for a concentrated group of shareholders. Focus on short-term profits over long-term resilience. It is also impossible to ignore the colonization and exploitation of local communities that so often accompanies the spread of industrial capitalism.
So, which cultural values emanate from industrial production?
¹ There is some controversy to the date of the first distilled mezcal. Some theorize that Mesoamericans were distilling mezcal before the arrival of the merchants or even the colonists.
² According to Nabhan and Suro Piñera, archives show that Sánchez de Tagle was nowhere near Tequila and it was a story fabricated by the tequila elite in the 1800s to differentiate tequila as a spirit of the aristocracy from mezcal’s indigenous roots.
³ The cross-border trade continues to today’s market, in which 70% of all tequila is exported and 80% goes to the US.
⁴ From 1990-2005, Jalisco alone lost 3.2% of their forest (48,618 hectare / 121,545 acres) every year, predominantly due to conversion to agave plantations.
⁵ Monoculture agriculture is extremely vulnerable to pest and disease due to lack of genetic defenses and natural defense systems (predators of pests, fungi, etc). For example, in 1998, a combination of bacterial, fungal, and viral disease evaded the agrochemical defenses in the blue deserts and killed 200 million plants (roughly a 1/3 of the crop).
⁶ 1800 is owned by Proximo Spirits, an American multinational founded by the Beckmanns. Sauza, founded in 1873, was sold to Spanish sherry aristocrat Pedro Domecq in 1988 and is now a subsidiary of Japanese multinational Suntory. Suntory also owns Hornitos. Patrón was founded by 2 Americans in 1989 and is now owned by Spanish multinational Bacardi.
Industrial Capitalist Culture
The ascension of tequila to industrial scale reduced agave from a nurturing mother and caretaker of all species to a genetically identical clone; converted resilient polycultural agroforests into fragile monocultural deserts; and turned a sanctified, artisanal spirit into an industrialized commodity.
If we cultivated agave values of patience, commitment, integrity, resilience, and resourcefulness through healthy agroecology, artisanal production, and reverence, what do we cultivate by reverse engineering the process for industrial efficiency?
Greed.
We learn to value extraction over symbiosis, the individual over the community, now over future generations, easy and cheap over hard and durable, and subjugation of nature over respect. It’s no wonder that disposability, instant gratification, and disconnection characterize modern culture because the entire economy is built upon these principles.
The story of mezcal and tequila is a microcosm of industrialization. Across the world, we have exploited and destroyed ecological health, local communities, and ancestral wisdom in pursuit of extraordinary accumulation of resources and commoditization.
60 million bison ranging across thriving grasslands have been exterminated and replaced by cattle in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) injected full of growth hormones and antibiotics. Maíz now predominantly lives in a golden ocean of homogeneity, agrochemicals, and synthetic fertilizers, where the thriving grasslands used to be. The largest portion of this production is fed into the CAFOs. 70% of salmon are raised in highly pollutive factory farms (like cattle) while wild Pacific salmon populations face habitat destruction and population decline. In all these industries, just 4 or 5 companies control 80% of the market.
The industrialization of agriculture served a very important purpose, principally food security, and I don’t recommend that we discard technological breakthroughs to return to prehistoric lifestyles. However, the way in which we apply human ingenuity matters. In the spread of industrialization, we used technology for extraction and exploitation and developed a culture based on individualism and greed. In the process, the values of symbiosis eroded, which now endangers life on earth as we know it.
Symbiotic values are not lost forever. Humanity can re-cultivate symbiotic culture by practicing and supporting symbiotic agri-culture and artisanal production. Humanity, particularly indigenous peoples, know how to manage landscapes sustainably and productively. In fact, polyculture acreage often generates more calories and sequesters more carbon than monoculture acreage, in addition to benefitting biodiversity, ecosystem health, and human health. We now have the opportunity to apply human ingenuity from a place of symbiosis and re-awaken ancestral wisdom.
Governments, investors, and corporations have been slow to act, but consumers have all the power and responsibility to change the food system. Ultimately, corporations project consumer demand onto agricultural supply. Our spending choices move markets and influence the culture and agriculture we see in the world. In tequila and mezcal’s case, American decisions are very important: 70% of production is exported, 80% of which goes to the US. It’s opaque and confusing, but curiosity and effort go a long way in making informed food decisions. We have to be vigilant – even mezcal is becoming more industrialized. In 2016, mezcal exports exceeded domestic consumption for the first time and agave monocultures for mezcal production are popping up all over Oaxaca.
Agave teaches us that we cultivate our culture through action. Deliberate, consistent steps, whether you are a producer, consumer, or somewhere in the middle, will awaken our symbiotic heritage.
Source Material
Gentry, Howard Scott, Agaves of Continental North America, University of Arizona Press, 2004.
Gobierno de México, “Un regalo de los Dioses: el agave,” 2016.
Greene, Granville, The Mezcal Rush: Explorations in Agave Country, Counterpoint, 2017.
Nabhan, Gary Paul and David Suro Piñera. Agave Spirits: The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Regeneration International, “Presentación de Billion Agave Project.”
