ABSTRACT
On June 8, 1692, a popular uprising left Mexico City in ruins. The colonial government blamed the violence on pulque, an indigenous alcohol made from the fermented juice of the maguey. Not all pulque, however, was considered equal. While ostensibly pure pulque blanco (white pulque) was seen as medicinal, pulque mezclado (mixed pulque), which contained certain additives, was condemned as a threat to political stability. This essay takes this often-overlooked distinction as a point of departure for examining the political and social significance of pulque by way of the grid of intelligibility that gave it meaning. For colonial elites, the mixing of pulque had a magnetizing effect on the social world, drawing the urban poor together in the space of the pulquería (pulque tavern) and making possible multiple forms of contact—from solidarity to sex. But it also had epistemological implications: the study of mixed pulque offered elites a language for talking about race mixing (mestizaje), while simultaneously constituting pulque consumers as a seditious collective subject—a plebe (plebeian masses) defined, like pulque, by mixing.
