Bottles of tequila now command premium costs in fashionable bars. On Instagram, celebrity-backed manufacturers of the agave-based Mexican spirit jostle for consideration. And debates over cultural appropriation and agave sustainability swirl alongside booming tourism in Jalisco, the western Mexican state that serves because the world’s tequila distillation hub.
However behind the spirit’s flash of promoting and rising reputation lies a not often requested query: The place did the information to distill agave come from within the first place?
Lately, students finding out how Indigenous communities responded to colonialism and world commerce networks have begun to look extra carefully on the Pacific world. One key focus is the Manila-Acapulco galleon commerce route, which linked Asia and the Americas for 250 years, from 1565 to 1815.
The Manila-Acapulco galleon commerce route.
Jesse Nett/Oregon Encylopedia
After Spain colonized the Philippines in 1565, Spanish galleons – towering, multidecked crusing ships – carried Chinese language silk and Mexican silver throughout the ocean. However excess of items traveled aboard these ships. They moved folks, concepts and applied sciences.
Amongst them was the craft of distillation.
This missed connection might assist clarify how distilled agave spirits reminiscent of tequila got here into being. Whereas tequila is unmistakably a Mexican creation, the methods used to supply it might owe one thing to Filipino sailors, who introduced with them deep information of remodeling coconut sap right into a potent spirit often called lambanog.
3 competing theories
For hundreds of years, the rise of tequila has been credited to the Spanish. After the conquest of Mexico within the sixteenth century, colonizers launched alembic stills, that are based mostly on Moorish and Arabic know-how. In contrast to easy boiling, distillation requires managing warmth and capturing purified vapor. These stills represented a serious technological leap, permitting folks to rework fermented drinks into distilled spirits.
Agave, lengthy used to make the fermented drink pulque, quickly grew to become the bottom for one thing new: tequila and mezcal.
Colonial information, together with the “Relaciones Geográficas,” a large data-gathering mission initiated by the Spanish Crown within the late sixteenth century, describe native Mesoamerican communities studying distillation from Spanish settlers. This model is effectively documented. But it surely assumes that know-how moved in just one route, from Europe to the Americas.
A second thought means that Mesoamerican communities already had some understanding of vapor condensation. Archaeologists have discovered ceramic vessels in western Mexico which will have been used to seize steam. Whereas distillation requires extra steps, this prior information might have primed Indigenous teams to extra readily undertake new methods.
As Mexican ethnobotanists Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín and Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal have argued, “The adoption of distillation was likely not simply imposed, but creatively adapted to local knowledge systems.”
A 3rd perspective, which different researchers and I are exploring, traces a possible Filipino affect. The galleon commerce introduced hundreds of Filipino sailors and laborers to Mexico, significantly alongside the Pacific coast. In locations reminiscent of Guerrero, Colima and Jalisco, Filipino migrants launched strategies for fermenting and distilling coconut sap into lambanog, the coconut-based spirit.
The stills they used, typically known as Mongolian stills, have been constructed with clay and bamboo and included a condensation bowl. Historian Pablo Guzman-Rivas has famous that these stills extra carefully resemble the earliest Mexican agave distillation setups than European alembics. He has additionally documented oral traditions in some coastal Mexican communities to hyperlink native distillation practices to their Filipino ancestors.
The nonetheless on the left in Jalisco, Mexico, is analogous to the lambanog on the best from Infanta, Quezon, Philippines.
Picture on left courtesy of Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín and Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal; photograph on proper courtesy of Sherry Ann Angeles and Rading Coronacion, CC BY-SA
Past the bottle
Filipino affect extends past the distilling pot.
In Colima and different Pacific port cities, traces of the Manila galleon commerce ripple by every day life – in kitchens, cantinas and even in structure. The phrase “palapa,” utilized in Mexico and Central America at present to explain rustic thatched roofs, is strictly the identical because the time period for coconut fronds that’s primarily used within the Bicol Area of the Philippines.
Filipino migrants in Mexico additionally shared information of boatbuilding, fermentation and meals preservation. Coconut vinegar, fish sauce and palm sugar-based condiments grew to become a part of Mexican delicacies. One of the vital enduring legacies is tuba, the fermented coconut sap nonetheless common in coastal areas of the Mexican state of Guerrero, the place Filipino sailors as soon as settled. Recognized domestically by the identical title, tuba is offered in markets and alongside roadsides, typically loved as a refreshing drink or as a cooking ingredient.
A reproduction of a galleon, the Spanish buying and selling ship that traversed the world’s oceans from the sixteenth century to the 18th century.
Dennis Jarvis/flickr, CC BY-SA
Change moved each methods. Filipino vessels carried corn, peanuts, candy potatoes and cacao again throughout the Pacific, reshaping meals within the Philippines. These exchanges passed off underneath the shadow of colonialism and compelled labor, however their legacies endure in language, in style and even within the roofs over folks’s heads.
Technical information not often travels by official channels alone. It strikes with cooks in ship galleys, with carpenters beneath deck, with laborers who desert ships to settle in unfamiliar ports. Typically it was a solution to construct a roof or protect a taste. Different occasions, it was a technique for turning a fermented plant right into a spirit that might hold for lengthy voyages. And by the early 1600s, new forms of distilled agave spirits have been being made in Mexico.
Tequila is unmistakably a product of Mexico. However additionally it is a product of motion. Whether or not Filipino migrants immediately launched distillation strategies or whether or not they emerged from a mixture of Indigenous experimentation and European instruments, each time you sip tequila, you’re tasting an echo of these lengthy ocean crossings from many centuries in the past.
