Distilling the influence of alcohol aguardiente in Guatemalan history (University Press of Florida, 2012)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Consumption, custom, and control: aguardiente in nineteenth-century Maya Guatemala / Stacey Schwartzkopf -- From household to nation: the economic and political impact of women and alcohol in nineteenth-century Guatemala / Rene Reeves -- A sponge soaking up all the money?: alcohol, taverns, vinaterías, and the bourbon reforms in mid-eighteenth-century Santiago de los Caballeros, Guatemala / Alvis E. Dunn -- Alcohol and lowdown culture in Caribbean Guatemala and Honduras, 1898-1922 / Frederick Douglass Opie -- Distilling perceptions of crime: Maya moonshiners and the Guatemalan state, 1898-1944 / David Carey -- Conclusion: community drunkenness and control in Guatemala / Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development. Throughout world history, alcohol has helped build family livelihoods, boost local economies, and forge nations. The alcohol economy also helped shape Guatemala's turbulent categories of ethnicity, race, c