FERN editor-in-chief Theodore Ross talks to Genoways about his new book, Tequila Wars, which is an extraordinary exploration of the little-known – and often bloody history – of Jose Cuervo. Cuervo’s life, and his struggle to bring stability and prosperity to his industry during the profound disruptions of the Mexican revolutionary era, is an epic tale. This new book pulls Cuervo’s name off the bottle and pours it into real life.
TRANSCRIPT:
Teresa Cotsirilos: You’re listening to REAP/SOW — dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Vox Ad 1: Hey guys! It’s Dina here with Cuervo, and we’re asking—chaser? Or no chaser?
Vox Ad 2: That color is not appealing at all. But the taste? 9.5 outta 10!
Vox Ad 3: Introducing Jose Cuervo black medallion! Aged tequila with a smoother taste!
Teresa: Jose Cuervo. It’s the best-selling tequila in the world, up to 40 percent alcohol. And you’ve maybe had a few memorable run-ins with it over the years. But for a brand that’s this popular, Jose Cuervo himself is shrouded in mystery—most people don’t even know he was a real person.
May 6th is publication day for FERN Senior Editor Ted Genoways’ new book about Cuervo, a larger-than-life business magnate who survived drought, crop disease, charges of treason and death threats, and turned his family’s farm into an empire.
Ted recently sat down to talk about the book, Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit, with FERN Editor-in-Chief Theodore Ross. I’ll let them take it from here.
Theodore Ross: Ted, welcome to REAP/SOW. This is your second time here. We’re very glad to have you again. How are you?
Ted Genoways: I’m doing great. I’m excited to be back.
Theodore: Great. So why don’t we talk about Tequila Wars then?
Ted: That sounds good.
Theodore: So here’s my first question, and I’m gonna do what it is I consider my specialty as an interviewer, which is begin with the obvious, right?
So most people, they don’t know that José Cuervo was a real person. They hear the name Cuervo, they hear the name Sauza, they hear the name Herradura, whatever it may be, these things that they see on these bottles, and they don’t know that those are human beings, right? So your book disproves that for everyone.
It tells us something different. Tell me, who were these people?
Ted: Right. So the main families at the center of this book are the Cuervo and the Sauza families. And as you say, these were, were and are real families that are heavily involved in the tequila industry. People also don’t know that. Tequila is the name of a town that’s a real place in the Tequila Valley, just northwest of Guadalajara in central Mexico, the state of Jalisco. And so, yes, these things that, that I think people think of just as a spirit category and a label on a bottle. In reality, these are products of a particular place and made by families that, that arose at, at a similar time as the industry was industrializing and then becoming a national and international product that carried those names to the world.
Theodore: Okay, so one of the things about the Cuervos is they have long, long roots in Mexico, and the José Cuervo who is the subject of your book was by no means the first Cuervo to be making tequila in Mexico. In fact, according to Cuervo itself, the alcohol company, in 1795, I believe, this is José Maria Guadalupe de Cuervo began selling the very first Vino Mezcal, Tequila de José Cuervo.after he received an official charter from the King of Spain to produce tequila commercially. With those kinds of deep roots, why are we talking about the José Cuervo of this book? Why did we start with him?
Ted: Right. Yeah, so it’s true that, that the Cuervos have been around for a long time in the Tequila Valley before José Cuervo was born. As I say in the book, they had really ruled the Tequila Valley for a century before he was born, and they were the ones who acquired a good deal of land, where they were growing agave, which is the raw material to make tequila. And then at that time, they had small distilleries that were on various estates scattered around the Tequila Valley. What really happened in José Cuervo’s lifetime was that the main distillery,called La Rojeña that is right in the middle of the town of Tequila to this day, became the largest and most productive distillery in the country. And his father and his uncle were two of the main suppliers of agave to that distillery. And they then made a bid when he was young to try to compete with their uncle, who owned that distillery.
And so the industry began to grow as José Cuervo was a young man and sort of ascending to his place in the, in the industry. And it was at that time that we start to see wider distribution of tequila as a product. And so it really — what I’m really interested in is that moment where it goes from being something that is regionally available, you know, to places that you can get to with barrels loaded onto the back of a team of donkeys to being something that is really a national product that is carried by rail and by truck, and eventually carried to Europe by ship, carried to the United States across the border, and becomes this kind of cultural calling card for all of Mexico, but also a source of real economic power for the people who were making tequila.
And so I’m interested much more in the era of power building and becoming political players in the national drama of Mexico as opposed to the kind of early artisanal era, where primarily what’s happening is just growth through land acquisition.
Theodore: So one of the things that’s interesting about the book is that, even as you write the history, you talk about the fact that José Cuervo himself is not that well known, right?
Even to his own family, right? In fact, here’s this quote — I love this quote from the book from his grand nephew, Juan Beckmann Gallardo. He says of his grand uncle that he regarded him ultimately as a failure. And then this is the quote, it cropped up twice in the book: “Yes, he was a nice man,” he said of José Cuervo, “but not a great businessman.”
Now this is a very strange statement, considering the fact that he oversaw the industrialization of tequila as a product and as a business entity that goes around the world. And this great nephew of his and his descendants, who all have the same name, are selling that tequila just about everywhere.
Yes. Why? Why was he considered a failure? How did that come to be?
Ted: So I think that some of this is Cuervo’s personality and the culture of the time and how it responded to that personality. Cuervo’s whole life was spent in a period of just tremendous upheaval in Mexico. And, you know, there are revolutions, there are uprisings, there are, you know, regional strong men who make bids for power.
Theodore: Hey, can I, I just wanna interrupt. For those of you who are gonna come to this book, there are many gory, bloody, violent, disastrous sacking of town, killing of people sections of this book. That is probably its most notable aspect, that everyone around José Cuervo is getting killed except for José.
Ted: José Cuervo, right? And so, and so that’s a really important characteristic to have if you want to be a great businessman. You know, staying alive is really important. And so I think it’s funny that I, that culturally the attitude was that in this period of tremendous upheaval, where everyone’s armed to the teeth and kind of ready to go to battle at any time, that there’s this notion that the way you were a powerful political figure was to be in charge of a militia and to lead it into battle.
And that’s really, you know, we see that model strongly with Cuervo’s, Uncle Florentino. That is the way he tried to build his business, was just by burning competitors’ distilleries down and threatening to kill them. Or at one point, you know, threatening to cut a newspaperman’s tongue out and eat it in front of him.
Theodore: A very striking man, by the way, the photos of him with his hair cropped and the big beard and the black frock. I mean, he’s a badass.
Ted: Yes, yes. You know, so, I mean, and yet what ultimately happens is that he ascends to this position where he’s essentially as important in the early period where Porfirio Díaz has taken power in the country.
He’s as important in the west of the country as Díaz is in Mexico City. But Díaz recognizes that’s a threat, and he does his best to sort of marginalize him. And then, you know, he becomes a kind of insignificant figure aat the end of his life as he’s simply trying to keep his business afloat when he’s out of favor.
And that is, to my mind, is kind of the lesson that José Cuervo learned, was if you get too big and too visible, then you become a target. And so what he was always trying to do was exert influence whenever possible, and he wanted to be at the table and helping to make these decisions. But you don’t want to be drawing attention.
And as you said, especially when the revolution gets started, I mean, it’s amazing to kind of look at a map of Cuervo’s neighbors and to see how they, one by one, get picked off by revolutionaries because they keep opening their mouths. They keep complaining about how they’re being held up for bribes or their properties being seized or whatever.
Theodore: And you have a, you have a great phrase about Cuervo, which I think gets to the point that you’re making here. You say that he’s strategically invisible.
Ted: Yes.
Theodore: But here’s a strategic question. How do you write a book about a man like that?
Ted: Right. So this is the central challenge, that Cuervo in his lifetime is trying to be as invisible as possible.
And so what that means is he’s not out promoting himself in the way that some of his competitors were, and certainly people who were more politically just visible were. But it also means that he is, you know, not leaving as much of a paper trail and kind of by his own design. He is trying to keep a low profile.
And I’ll just say as an aside, I mean, there’s, there’s one moment in the book where Cuervo ends up, you know, standing trial for treason as an enemy of the revolution. And it’s over a couple of letters that he sent to a nephew, you know. He had good reason to try to make sure he was not putting things down on paper.
And so the challenge is that you have to find other perspectives. You gotta find other voices, and the thing that is crucial to all of this is that Cuervo’s niece, who was orphaned shortly after she was born, she comes to live with Cuervo and his wife, and they had, they essentially adopt her around the time that she’s six years old, and she lived with the Cuervos until José Cuervo died when she was in her twenties.
And she was an obsessive diary keeper when she was young, and in her old age, she was interested in trying to collect those memories and to write short kind of vignette pieces that she gathered into a couple of collections that she printed for family and friends. And thankfully, there are a few of those copies that still exist.
I mean, a handful of copies that still exist. And they are a treasure trove. They contain her views from the inside of the household. And so …
Theodore: And those have never been made public before.
Ted: They, they’ve been — it’s an interesting thing. They’re sort of known to the scholars of the industry, but they haven’t been used in this way.
And I think part of the reason is that they’re, they’re written in an almost obscure style where she is providing tremendous detail of what’s happening. But very rarely does she provide context. So you get a vignette that starts with her saying, you know, “One day my uncle told us that the revolutionaries were coming and that we needed to pack our bags and be ready to leave within an hour.”
And that’s okay. That’s dramatic. And she provides all of these details, but it takes some research to figure out which revolutionaries, when this is happening, you know, who are these people, what are the circumstances? But once that is filled in, then you’ve got this amazing ground-level detail that she provides.
And so in some ways it became a, in the research, a kind of tacking back and forth between her memories that are very granular and very focused on the household and then trying to find the official records that José Cuervo left, you know, talking to the government about land disputes or taxation or, you know, trying to change laws.
And you have that kind of official correspondence that then creates the spine and the chronology of events and getting those things together along with a lot of other resources, especially newspapers and, and other kinds of historical documents. It can be slowly pieced together. But the thing that I can say with confidence is that up until now, no one has really told any of this story before.
I mean, I’ve told people the longest biography of José Cuervo that exists prior to this book is about three pages long in Spanish. And so to go from that to what is a 350-page history of his family and his life is a major shift. These are, these are brand-new stories, and even the families themselves, for the most part, these stories were unknown to them.
Theodore: Okay, so let’s start with a little bit from the beginning of the book. The book begins in what is actually, there’s a cycle of these that happen throughout José Cuervo running for his life, either from revolutionaries or the government, or from revolutionaries who were now the government, or from his fellow tequila makers.
He often seems a victim of circumstance. Clearly you see him differently, though. What do you, how do you want us to understand what he was doing each of these times that he hightails it out the door and heads for the hills?
Ted: Yeah, so it’s funny. I think somewhere in the back of my mind was always lurking this kind of fascinating thing that Walt Whitman wrote about George Washington, which was that what we remember of Washington is his kind of military, you know, prowess, his ability to win battles. But Whitman said that what Washington’s real genius was, was his patience and his willingness to retreat.
And I saw that same thing, that same quality in José Cuervo. That he was always trying to sort of push his industry forward, his own business forward, his family forward. But when political circumstances shifted to become military circumstances where there was a risk of real violence, he had the sort of egoless ability to say: It is time to retreat. It is time to withdraw and wait for circumstances to calm before we can resume. And so that seemed crucial to me. And there’s a place in the book where I talk a bit about Pancho Villa and about Villa’s ultimate downfall being that he didn’t have that ability.
He was an amazing military leader, but he refused to retreat. And I see in some ways Villa and Cuervo as being kind of two sides of the same coin. That Villa, you know, ascended and became one of the sort of central figures in Mexican history. But he never really achieved his goals because he just didn’t have the patience and the willingness to retreat when he needed to.
Theodore: Or the strategic insight to do it either. That we retreat to a position of greater strength.
Ted: Exactly.
Theodore: So one of the things that you write about that goes throughout the book is Cuervo’s almost continual efforts to forge links with his fellow tequila makers, sometimes successfully, sometimes very unsuccessfully, and never in any particularly enduring fashion.
You use, in the introduction, a pretty loaded word to describe what he’s trying to do, and that’s cartel.
Ted: Yeah.
Theodore: How does what Cuervo did with trying to forge these links between these major companies or soon to be major companies, how does it relate to today’s understanding of what we mean when we talk about a cartel?
Ted: Yeah, so there are a number of arguments here that I would make. And the first is a very practical one, which is that Cuervo seems to be the first person to actually use the word cartel. It’s a German word that describes a kind of business cooperative, and it is a word that was especially in use among the Germans at the time that Cuervo starts using it in Spanish.
Theodore: Germans in Mexico. I think we should make that part clear.
Ted: Absolutely. And so he, Cuervo, lived in the German district of Guadalajara that was near the German consulate, and his nieces, in order to gain some business advantages, he married them to a couple of prominent German businessmen, including Juan Beckmann, who became the German consul in Guadalajara.
And so when he’s using that word, he’s talking about these kind of big, vertically integrated syndicates that are intended to achieve a certain kind of consistency and a control of the market that allows you to move your product even in times of great upheaval. The Germans were doing it, preparing for World World War I, recognizing that there would be supply chain disruptions as they were suddenly engaged in war, and that trading partners were withdrawing from them. Cuervo at that point was already plunged into the revolution and was seeing the revolution arrive in Guadalajara and the rest of Jalisco and seeing the same sorts of problems, you know, railroads being blown up and, as you said, the town of Tequila being repeatedly attacked. And so …
Theodore: Sacked, looted, and burned.
Ted: Yes.
Theodore: It’s a recurring motif.
Ted: It really is. And so if that’s happening to you all the time, you need friends, you need to have people who you’re working in cooperation with. And Cuervo’s idea was:
Let’s all form a cartel together so that if your distillery has been cannonaded but you have a field of agave, and my agave has been burned, but my distillery is in operation, we can get together. We share our resources, and we produce a product together. And we also, in the way that we often think of with a cartel, we carve up, we carve up territory and distribution routes. We agree to keep prices consistent so that there’s no competition in that way. We are establishing market monopolies that we share together. And so that was all perfectly legal in Mexico at the point that Cuervo was creating this system.
And so because of that, you know, there are actual cartel agreements that exist in the Sauza family archives. There are documents where they map all of this out. Who owns, who controls which territory, what the prices are gonna be in different places, you know, and then all these names that are signed to it, that you know: the Cuervo name.
The Sauza name, the Rosales name from, from Herradura. And it’s all these brands that we still recognize. Well, where things change is, is when tequila becomes illegal in the United States at the tail end of World War I and then into Prohibition after World War I. And Cuervo makes a decision that he’s not gonna necessarily try to export illegally himself, but he is gonna produce a lot of tequila that he moves right to the border and sells to people who most certainly we’re smuggling across. And I think the thing that is, you know, most maybe relevant in asking this question of, like, okay, so this is a collective of people who have divided up territory. They’re moving a product to be smuggled, and be part of a black market. But then the direct connection to the cartels as we think of them today is that most often we talk about the very first narcotics cartel as being the Gulf cartel that is run out of Matamoros and still exists today. But what is important, and I think significant, is that Prohibition ends in December of 1933. The U.S. government gets busy passing a narcotics act, which is passed almost immediately after that. And the Gulf cartel emerges in the 1930s, run by a group of people who had been smuggling tequila across the border as part of the route. That was part of the Sauza territory in Tamaulipas.
Theodore: Yeah. That’s an interesting thing in the book. You point out that the tequila smuggling routes in the United States very shortly thereafter, in 1935, become drug drug smuggling routes, which brings up a sort of, you know, I think it’s not that much of the book, but it is subtext throughout. It’s the role of the U.S. market and the U.S. government and U.S. policy on trade within Mexico. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that?
I mean, we don’t get that much information about what’s happened in the United States throughout this, but I think the U.S. is playing a sort of definitive role both in the revolution and in the industrial success of tequila.
Ted: Yeah. Well, and one of the things that is funny, and I guess I hadn’t even realized it myself until I started on this.
I mean, we think of NAFTA as being this sort of game-changing situation where we strike this North American trade agreement. As it turns out, the U.S. has been doing that since deep into the 19th century. And so it is a fascinating thing that periodically, as you say, you know, things will sort of stabilize or seem to, you know, have achieved a certain amount of stability, and then all of a sudden the U.S. will show up and be, like, Hey, what if we had a trade agreement?
Theodore: That would be fantastic.
Ted: And the funny thing is that the tequila industry is always in favor of the trade agreements, because typically, what the U.S. was trying to do was lower and remove tariffs. Ironically, the goal was always to say, well, we want to. We want you to be buying more of our product, but tequila recognized, that industry recognized, well, we’ve got something we’re trying to sell to the U.S.
So yes, if we’re removing trade barriers, fantastic. That’s great for us. And they weren’t worried about competition from American booze because bourbon would be, and has remained, like, too expensive in Mexico. But they could move their product and offer it cheaper than American booze was being sold for and still sell it for much more than they were selling it for in Mexico.
So yes, it was always an objective to try to move product across the border into the U.S., and then because of that, it’s not just the American economy that is always this kind of pressure and point of influence, but it’s the American palate. I mean that there’s always this recognition that Americans love tequila. If you can get them tequila, they really like it. And so there’s this, all this conversation of, you know, if we can just get it across the border, if we can just make inroads, it takes care of itself from there. And so that’s, I mean, that American drinker is always in Cuervo’s mind and in the mind of his competitors.
Theodore: So, okay, let’s talk about that American drinker. Let’s talk about one particular American drinker, and that’s you. Right?
Ted: Yes.
Theodore: So would you say you were just describing yourself? Is that why this book came to be, or did you come to it because of José Cuervo himself or because you had this affection or this connection to tequila and how it’s produced?
So I was an avid, but mostly ignorant, tequila drinker until this project began. The funny thing is that this, the deep history on this project is that I grew up hearing stories of the town of Tequila and the Tequila Valley because my dad was a biologist who worked extensively in Jalisco in the years before I was born.
And he was studying the bats that were, the migratory bats that pollinate the agaves. And that has …
Theodore: So you should, you should just explain that for a second, because I don’t think most people understand what you’re talking about.
Ted: Although there’s a fantastic episode of a podcast called Buzzkill, produced by FERN, that would explain this in detail.
Theodore: Tell the whole thing. Yes.
Ted: But yeah, the agave in the wild is a flowering plant that is pollinated by, among other things, the Mexican long-nosed bat, and my dad was doing research in the Tequila Valley to see how many bats were present, where, figure out their distribution, that sort of thing.
And so years later, when I was sort of getting going as a freelance magazine writer, one of the things that I pitched was just, I wanna do something on how the tequila industry is addressing some of the questions of biodiversity with agave, and looking at bat conservation. Yeah, and I did a couple of stories related to that and just got utterly hooked on tequila itself and the region.
And the thing that I — you know well, Ted, that my turn of mind is always to ask about the history, to understand what’s going on now in terms of the historical context, and what everybody kept saying was the history’s gone. The history is lost. That it was, that the records were burned during the revolution.
Theodore: Burned. The sacking. The looting.
Ted: Yes. Yes, exactly. And then afterwards people were too careful to put anything down on paper. And there is no history to recover. And, you know, as a bit of a contrarian and just that sort of journalist instinct, I just figured that couldn’t be true. And that led me to the archives.
And, you know, in some ways Cuervo becomes the main character, in part because he’s a name that people recognize, but also he really is the industry leader. He really is the person who transforms the industry from being a local or regional product into this, this international empire. And he therefore leaves more of a paper trail than most of his competitors.
Theodore: So, you know, you brought up Buzzkill, which is FERN’s’s podcast series on the pollinator crisis, and the episode that we did from Jalisco about biodiversity and the cloning of agave. And one of the things that was interesting to me in the book was how much, even in these early days, you know, into the 19th century, there was blight among the agave plants because they’d all been cloned.
Ted: Yup.
Theodore: So you had no biodiversity or you had very limited biodiversity, limited use of bats for pollination. And it was interesting just — and this is just trivia here because it’s not really a part of the book — but how the efforts that we were chronicling down in Jalisco to use bats were,
even in the early 1900s or the late 1800s, were not part of the conversation.
Ted: Right. Yeah. I mean, the thing, the effort was always how do we kill the blight? And, you know you’ll hear in that podcast episode that Elliot Woods produced, and I should say that the very first story that I did
as a magazine writer on tequila for Business Week. I was the writer. Elliot was the photographer. So, I mean, we kind of discovered this region together. But you know, Elliot and I, on that trip, we went to the highlands east of Guadalajara. He did that again for that podcast episode.
Theodore: Elliot Woods, the reporter for Buzzkill, is who he’s referring to.
Ted: And Elliot was… Well, the reason tthat those agave are there in the highlands east of Guadalajara is because tthe mountain air is drier and colder and kills the fungus that had been causing the blight in the 1880s. And so, yes, I mean, this is always my obsession: to understand how events of the past reshape the landscape and then give us the world that we see in front of us.
Theodore: So you mentioned that I know that you like to turn to history. I also know a few things about you as a writer, and I wanna point out that it took you more than a decade to put together this book.
Ted: Yes.
Theodore: Which is not shocking to me as your editor. Maybe shocking to the audience out there who sees all of your accomplishments, but why so long?
Ted: Well, the process of all of this reminded me a bit of, there’s this great bit and interview that was done with E.L. Doctorow, where he talks about the process of writing a novel being like driving home at night with your headlights on. And he’s, like, the headlights only illuminate maybe a hundred feet in front of you, but if you follow them, it’s enough to get all the way home and.
And that was the research process for this book: that I couldn’t, I couldn’t see the route to the book. I couldn’t see certainly what all of the context was. All I could do was kind of illuminate a small space that I was working on, and then once I understood that, move to the next space and keep working slowly ahead.
And so that process was painstaking and slow. But the thing that kept me doing it is that every time I would make a small discovery, a new piece of information would fit into place, I understood more and I also understood what I needed to research next, which archive I needed to go to, which newspaper I needed to look at.
And every now and then there would be periods of kind of stalling out, and then something would present itself. There would be, you know, something new that would appear in the academic literature, or there would be a new person who would come to me and say, Hey, I hear you’re working on this stuff, I have something that I’m interested in sharing.
And so even as slow as it was, it never really completely stalled out. And so it was enough to keep me just rolling forward and slowly piecing all of this together. But, I mean, the thing that is funny to me now is that I’m starting to have this experience of talking to people about the book, people who have not spent the last 12 years working on this, and people are, like, wow, it’s so fast-paced and there’s so much action and an adventure.
Theodore: Well, it reads like a novel. That’s one of its great, one of its greatest achievements. We have what is essentially the history of a businessman. But — and trade policy and the building of a cartel — but it does read as a narrative. We enter into the lives and the emotions of these different people.
So when they are being told by José Cuervo to pack up and run, we want them to move fast, right, because the danger feels real. So that is, I think, that’s a pretty incredible accomplishment.
Ted: Well, I appreciate that. I’m glad that it reads that way. It’s funny because, you know, I have long since reached that point where all I can see is the ways in which the Frankenstein’s monster has been stitched together. And sso it’s wonderful to hear from other people reading it that they’re like, you know, that it seems seamless to them and that it does — I mean, my goal from the beginning was, I want this to be a story.
There’s been a lot of books that talk about the process, that talk about the numbers, that talk about, you know, the regions and just kind of the facts of tequila as a product. I wanted the story of the families, and as I discovered this incredible drama between the Cuervo and Sauza families, these two names that we know above all others in the industry, I just wanted it to be the story of that conflict.
Theodore: Well, I actually think you captured, I mean, you certainly do capture that story of the families, but I think you capture something even bigger than that, and you talk about it in the subtitle. So the title of the book, which we should all already know, is Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.
The spirit of Mexico — that’s a great phrase. It tells us about tequila, but it has a nice double meaning, right? So tell me what you think is the role of tequila itself in Mexican history and culture, and also Cuervo’s place in that, because the thing that I truly think you capture is the spirit of Mexico in the book.
Ted: Well, that’s great. That’s, you know, that is the big objective, to try to show how central José Cuervo was to all of Mexican history, how central tequila has been to Mexican history. The thing that, I guess I would say that I had no idea of going into this, that so much of the history of Mexico is one of resources being exploited by foreign powers for a small return to the Mexican people. And generally speaking, I mean, Pofirio Díaz kind of set this mold. It’s like, you know, you come in here and you open a mine. Great, give me 20 percent or 30 percent of your profits, and I’ll keep it for myself. And you can have the rest.
Theodore: Yeah. Along with the sacking, the looting, and the burning, there’s the bribing. There’s a lot of that.
Ted: And so, athere’s never any wealth trickling down to the Mexican people. One of the few ways then that you could actually control enough of a supply chain to build a business of your own and ascend to some position of political power was through alcohol, because you could, it was essentially an agricultural industry, regardless of what you’re making, whether it’s cane liquor, or, you know, agave spirits like mezcal and tequila. You own the property, then you distill on that same property, and then you try to build your distribution channels. And because of that, we not only see the power that is wielded by the tequila families like Cuervoand Sauza, but the thing that I just didn’t know was that Francisco Madero, who successfully leads the revolution, the money comes from his family’s booze business.
I mean, they are the biggest makers of wine and cane liquor in the country. And then eventually, his secretary of war becomes a challenger and becomes a president of Mexico. After him, Venustiano Carranza, and Carranza was also a liquor maker and a winemaker. And so the history of that transformation of Mexico from an agricultural society to one that is more industrialized, it makes sense that the transition is an industry that contains both of those things in one. And the people who were able to rise and effect that transition were people who came from that industry. So the strange thing is that one, with that one, you see Cuervo interacting with Maderos or interacting with Carranza.
Yes, these are political power players who are trying to guide the direction of the country. They are also business competitors. Yeah. They have products that are in the marketplace competing against each other. And I just think that’s fascinating.
Theodore: I do, too. And I think we should leave it at that.
I just wanna say, I love the book. I think it’s a very powerful and moving portrait of an overlooked figure in history, right? And I hope that people will come to it and understand what José Cuervo represents and what tequila represents, which is this industry. And I also think it really is the country of Mexico, which I think this is not exactly a love letter to it but an ode to it in a sort of certain way.
So, good luck with the book. Congratulations on the achievement, and thanks for your time.
Ted: Thank you so much, Ted. I appreciate all of it.
Theodore: All right.
Teresa: REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our Executive Producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our Sound Engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner is the Producer and Video Producer for REAP/SOW. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
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