Mezcal in Oaxaca: A Craft Spirit for the Global Marketplace, Ronda L Brulotte, 2025, University of Texas Press
If we are to understand where contemporary capitalism is taking us, we need to put culture front and centre, not least because it is at the heart of the polarisation that is a defining characteristic of our era.
As the political scientist Adrian Pabst has argued, identity politics and culture wars have fractured not just the left and right, but also our shared polity—and it is capitalism that is driving this phenomenon.
What underpins this epic cultural tussle is a deeper class conflict, with cultural divisions largely reflecting economic ones amid the social crisis that has engulfed the West since 2008.
It would appear, therefore, that the relationship between capitalism and culture is not as complex as it might seem if reduced through a filter of good old-fashioned historical materialism to what is, in essence, a class struggle.
That is, as human history is shaped by material conditions, productive forces, social relations and class war, and as all societies produce culture as a social expression of ideas, then the complex interaction of these dynamics finds its reflection in cultural ephemera.
But beyond interpreting culture for the clues it offers about social relations, it can increasingly also be considered a commodity in its own right—and a valuable one at that, especially where it can find a new niche in capitalist markets.
The relationship between “heritage” and tourism, for example, has been studied extensively, largely in terms of the commercialisation of a society’s unique cultural assets and how these are branded in a global marketplace.
But as some scholars have noted, the term “commodification” grounded in the Marxist theoretical tradition and critical theory has rarely been employed to explore this relationship.
This may be due to the prominence of anthropology in heritage studies even though there can be little doubt that a “heritage industry”—by which historic sites and traditions are marketed through familiar capitalist machinery—has long existed.
The commodification of heritage offers rich pickings for Marxist analysis because, as some thinkers have noted, it can provide examples that pertain directly to the problems such analysis attempts to explain: exploitation of an environment; alienation, either of a site’s residents or its visitors; and ample commodity fetishism, where a product no longer appears to people as the result of human labour but as something natural and intrinsic.
In her study of craft production of the Mexican spirit mezcal, Ronda Brulotte draws attention to one of the most exciting recent theoretical efforts to describe modern capitalism that puts this commodification of culture at the centre of debate.
Renewed interest in craft products worldwide can be seen as the latest in a long modern cycle of reaction against industrially produced goods, but also as an opportunity to illustrate what the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre call the “enrichment economy”.
In an influential work from 2017, Boltanski and Esquerre used the term enrichment to describe a distinctive type of late 20th-century Western capitalism that has emerged in the epochal climate of deindustrialisation.
Enrichment offers a new way to think about value in economies marked not by novel ways to make new things, but by increased exploitation of pre-existing resources that have taken on new importance. In this economy, it is the past itself that nurtures these markets, inscribing cultural artefacts with value by associating them with narratives.
Boltanski and Esquerre identify the arts and other cultural realms as ripe for economic exploitation, and draw attention to the trade in antiquities, the creation of museums, and the exploitation of national patrimonies, heritage sites and appellation controllée regimes.
Their primary motivation is to understand how value is established in contemporary capitalism, by contrast with industrial and financial capitalism, and their inspiration is the deindustrialisation of Europe, the historical core of capitalism, which has created the conditions for value to assume new forms.
Brulotte’s examination of the extraordinary explosion of interest in products such as mezcal in Mexico offers an excellent and novel case study for this development.
Her geographical focus of Oaxaca is not one where there has been deindustrialisation, but one where it never took place yet where there has been a concerted reinvention of rural society.
Her nine-year research project on the mezcal market that began around 2010 coincided with an unprecedented boom in the drink’s popularity, especially among US consumers.
Unlike tequila, which developed international markets by the late nineteenth century and more recently has become a favourite of celebrity US investors, mezcal was not popularised outside of Mexico until recently.
Associated with Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest and most Indigenous states, it was originally seen as the drink of rural and working-class communities, but as the state’s tourism industry has boomed the drink has been enriched with significant cultural value.
In keeping with the analysis of Boltanski and Esquerre, mezcal’s growing popularity has coincided with Oaxaca’s recognition as a culinary destination for foods rooted in an authentic, Indigenous past, alongside high-end innovation.
The term mezcal is broader than that of tequila and is used to refer both to any spirit distilled from agave as well as a specific category of agave spirit regulated by Mexican law through its own denomination of origin classification.
Oaxaca accounts for 90 per cent of mezcal production although under the regulations it may also be produced in Durango, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Michoacán, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas.
Unlike tequila, it remains an artisanal product, mostly produced in family stills with little mechanisation and commonly the use of an ox, horse or donkey pulling a stone wheel to crush the hand-harvested agave hearts. That means mezcal is, fundamentally, a craft spirit.
But despite its rudimentary mode of production, the market has experienced soaring growth, valued at US$242m in 2018 yet projected to hit US$738m by 2027. Growth has been driven by demand for mezcal in the US as part of a global trend in which consumers choose small-batch, craft spirits over large commercial brands.
Brulotte explores the meaning of “craft” in today’s marketplace, and the emergence of a “craft imaginary” that is fuelling the demand not only for mezcal but myriad other “artisanal” products in Oaxaca and beyond.
She situates this within the changing economy of Oaxaca amid an explosion in tourism—and associated gentrification—while also considering the distinct colonial undertones and persistent forms of discrimination that characterise mezcal production.
It is no surprise, for example, that the market has been overwhelmingly shaped by the interventions of Americans such as Ron Cooper, a New Mexico-based artist, founder of Del Maguey, and the first importer of artisanal mezcal to the US market.
At the same time, women occupy contradictory positions in the supply chain, often doing much of the laborious and unrecognised work behind the scenes, while as the author points out potentially on the verge of gaining recognition as expert producers in their own right.
Such ironies are not lost on the writer, who says: “As painful as it is for well-meaning consumers to confront such realities, this book is also premised on the idea that a full understanding of mezcal accounts for its less seemly side and, as such, touches on issues such as the consumerism, gentrification, migration, racism, and gender inequities underlying the drink’s commercial success.”
As Brulotte points out, this makes mezcal a powerful lens through which to view the major social and economic changes that have occurred in Oaxaca in recent decades.
She has compiled a fascinating historical and theoretical analysis, one of several enlightening works in recent years that have taken the commodification of food and drink as their point of departure for the consideration of social development.
And like mezcal itself, it is a story that can contain hints of bitterness—with issues of class never far beneath the cultural surface.
Brulotte writes: “Oaxacans are working to shape their economic destiny in a constantly shifting landscape in which they (like the mezcal they make) have been alternately disparaged and idealized.
“There is a cruel irony in watching something that was once stigmatized by the upper echelons of society later be popularized and monetized by some of the same people.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America, United States