[Aztlan] good pulque and bad

[Diehl, Richard]

First, let me thank everyone for the crash course on squash. We are off
to Mexico for a month on Saturday and I may do some informal ethnography
on the subject whenever I get the opportunity. 

Curado de Fanta?? Yuck! I lived at the Hacienda Metepec in the
Teotihuacan valley for three months in 1962 when it still was a
commercial pulque producer for the Mexico City market and I never heard
of such an abomination. Curado de tuna, curado de apio, yes. I once
tangled with some curado de apio that made it impossible for me to stand
even the sight of celery for a year. As far as the poor deprived
Yucatecos go, I have always assumed their Toltec conquerors simply
failed to civilize the backward Maya as completely as they should have.
That, admittedly, is the view of an archaeologist who has a
Chilango-centric view of things. 

With regards to Totonacs and Tajin, I am mildly persuaded by Jeff
Wilkerson's arguments that the Tajineros were Huastec-speakers during
the Classic/ Epi-classic periods but I believe the case is far from
proven. I certainly do not command the linguistic data. In any case
there were Totonac-speakers living high enough in the highlands to be
familiar with pulque.

I was not aware of the tequila-like licor de henequen in Yucatan. Pulque
is not a precursor of tequila; the plants and the technology are
different. While both plants were available in pre-Columbian times, the
distilling technology is Old World. As an interesting side bar, I know a
farmer/businessman in Ajacuba, Hidalgo, who is experimenting with
growing what will hopefully be tequila- producing agaves. He has given
up on maize production because NAFTA and the massive imports of US maize
into Mexico have made it completely unprofitable. US farmers are so much
more efficient that small Mexican landholders that he cannot even
recover the costs of production on the Mexican market. That may change
with the new bio-fuel craze. In any case, it will be interesting to see
how his experiment turns out. There is a booming world-wide market for
tequila. (I can hear Sandy Noble saying "But, of course!"