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Marie Sarita Gaytán , ¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2014), pp. vii + 212, £14.99, pb.
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As the recent growth of craft beer, real ale and artisan gin suggests, food and drink can draw on ideas about authenticity for commercial success, eliciting emotional responses from consumers and evoking a sense of local, ethnic or even national identity, often with reference to the past, tradition or history. Designating such products as authentic can be a politically, economically and culturally charged process, involving official legal protections, deliberate marketing ploys, adherence to particular production practices and the celebration of some cultural values or identities over others. In the case of tequila, a distilled agave liquor from the Tequila region of Jalisco, Mexico, official legal protection began in the form of a Denomination of Origin in 1974 (the first awarded in Mexico), and now comprises a whole host of regulated production, inspection and certification processes that promote tequila as a quality, unique and above all Mexican product. Marie Sarita Gaytán's fascinating book traces the longer-term history of how tequila became singled out for such protection, in the process explaining tequila's symbolic ties to Mexican nationalism, identity and culture. At the same time, she explores the power dynamics involved the tequila's construction as 'authentically' Mexican, revealing that, paradoxically, large multinational tequila companies benefit more from tequila's symbolic association with 'real' Mexico than small-scale, artisanal producers based in the Tequila region.
At the heart of Gaytán's analysis is the idea of lo mexicano or mexicanidad, a concept that will be familiar to students of nineteenth- and...