sun that pounded the wide boulevard outside. This may have been the rainy season, but it could be incredibly hot anyway. The traffic lanes were clogged with a slow-moving procession of taxis decorated with elaborate floral arrangements and brightly colored crêpe streamers. It was fiesta day for the Oaxacan cabbies, and they were having fun making their way around town, honking the horns of their taxis and blasting salsa music through their stereo speakers.
Ron told me that fiestas are almost a daily occurrence in Oaxaca—mostly held for religious observances. But there were also some esoteric ones, such as Noche de Rábanos (Radish Night), which takes place in December. For this annual competition, the crimson root vegetables (a Spanish introduction) are painstakingly carved into saints, nativity scenes, and human figures, then displayed in the town plaza. The winning sculpture appears in local newspapers. I wondered if Ron was pulling my leg—until I came across a postcard of a disturbingly depicted radish-person. That’s probably how I look to most people who live here, I thought: pink and strange.
Across the boulevard from the market were a couple of bodegas selling mezcal. I followed Ron between the taxis to one of them, a dimly lit shop. As my eyes adjusted, I could see a broad assortment of vessels: plastic garrafones (jugs, or jerry cans), glass bottles of various shapes and sizes, hand-painted gourds, and crudely made clay vessels. A number of ceramic containers were shaped like changos (monkeys), and others had been garishly formed and painted as lactating breasts and ejaculating penises. Ron explained that mezcal is widely considered an aphrodisiac.
There were also bottles of pink, baby blue, and caramel-colored cremas (cream-flavored mezcals), as well as expensive especial mezcals, like pechuga (breast), named after the chicken part traditionally hung in the still vapor during pechuga distillation, and tobalá, made from the wild-grown Agave potatorum. Ron speculated that both these fancier types were likely fakes. Bottled mezcals of varying shades of brown (reposados and añejos) were allegedly barrel aged—but Ron said many makers just added dye. Last, but not least, a huge glass jar on the shop counter held brackish-looking mezcal and several inches of what appeared to be wrinkled pinkish-red worms.
Despite my previous misadventures with crummy mezcal, I had managed to get this far without ever having eaten the notorious worm. I was relieved to learn there was no point in ever devouring one. Ron explained that the iconic creature wasn’t really a worm at all, but usually the edible larvae of the Hypopta agavis moth. It’s commonly found on magueys, although sometimes the larva of the agave snout weevil (Scyphophorus acupunctatus, or picudo del agave) is used instead.
I had always assumed that putting worms in mezcal was a long-standing Mexican tradition. But the idea has been attributed to Jacobo Lozano Páez, a mezcal bottler who had first moved to Mexico City from the state of Coahuila to study art. Instead, he ended up working in a liquor store before launching the brand Gusano Rojo (Red Worm) in the early 1950s. The rumored hallucinatory effects of “eating the worm” are unfounded. But new tests have shown that mezcals with worms exhibit higher levels of cis-3-Hexen-1-ol. The grassy-smelling, plant-produced, oily compound—used in perfumes—acts as a pheromone for some insects and mammals, although its aphrodisiac effects remain unproven in humans.
According to Ron, larvae were probably the drink’s least offensive additives. He guessed that, if tested, most of the shop’s mezcal would likely contain more sinister ingredients: food coloring, cane alcohol, fertilizers, pesticides, and other nasty chemicals used to accelerate the fermentation process, kill agave pests, and otherwise mess with what, he insisted, should be an entirely natural process—from the cultivation of the agaves to the making of the spirits.
“A good mezcal,” Ron pronounced, “should always smell of sweet roasted maguey!”
As if on cue, the girl behind the shop counter offered me a plastic cup brimming with a yellowish sample from the larvae-filled jar. I held it to my nose and inhaled a bracingly powerful bouquet: a touch of gasoline, hints of paint thinner and fresh asphalt, and what appeared to be a long, dry, smooth finish of airplane-toilet aroma. It smelled just like that first mezcal I had tried in Baltimore.
I handed it back to the girl, and we left.
I WAS CURIOUS to see more of Oaxaca de Juárez, but Ron had other ideas. He kept a place in a nearby Zapotec community called Teotitlán del Valle, to which we were now headed. This was where he kept a warehouse, and where he hand-bottled the five varieties of “single village” mezcal he bought for export to the U.S. The community was also where he lived when he wasn’t at home in Taos, New Mexico. I gathered, though, that Ron spent much of his time on the road, promoting and selling Del Maguey mezcal. He appeared to enjoy this, although it seemed to be an expensive undertaking.
We drove southeast from the city down a stretch of Highway 190, over what had once been an important road connecting the ancient settlements of Monte Albán, Yagul, and Mitla. Now it was a very tiny segment of the Pan-American Highway, a 29,800-mile route extending all the way from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. When the Mexican portion was completed in 1950, an annual speed race was created to commemorate the feat. The grueling La Carrera Panamericana, which followed the road the length of Mexico, was so dangerous that the race was canceled after only five years.
A tamer version of the fabled event was revived in 1988, and two members of Pink Floyd made a film about driving it. The posh race for the classic-car crowd was hard to imagine, however, because the road was a roughly surfaced two-lane blacktop with abundant baches (potholes) and topes (speed bumps). Even so, its condition did nothing to discourage the evidently fearless colectivo (shared-taxi) drivers from darting through the traffic at breakneck speeds, in what for them was a daily road race.
As the strong equatorial sun dropped behind the mountains, we rolled through a vast valley, passing fields of agave, corn, beans, and squash, then strangely shaped hills studded with shrubby trees, cacti, and scrub-covered ruins. Dotted here and there around the plains, small settlements were set against the bases of the steep, cloud-cloaked ridges towering around us. White-walled mission churches with red-tiled roofs rose above the communities: souvenirs of the Spanish colonization. We were now in the Zapoteca—the territory of the Zapotec. Ron pointed out wide swaths, cut straight down the slopes between the trees, that appeared to have been made for power lines but were actually boundary markers between municipios (municipalities), communally cleared each year.
Much of Oaxacan land still falls under the ejido system. This form of land tenure was established after the Mexican Revolution and was put into practice on a large scale in the 1930s. The idea was to provide a way for landless farmers to establish and communally maintain specific parcels for agricultural purposes, following the takeover of their community holdings by haciendas in the nineteenth century. In 1992, the sale and privatization of ejido land was permitted after an adjustment of Article 27 in the Mexican constitution, and increases in poverty and migration have been attributed to the change.
Mexico’s thirty-one states are subdivided into 2,440 municipalities. Oaxaca has 570 municipalities, a very large number—the huge state of Baja has only five. Four hundred and eighteen follow the usos y costumbres (traditions and customs) system of indigenous self-governance. The government structure for all municipalities in the country was defined in the constitution in 1917. Every municipio must have an alcalde (mayor), regidores (councilmen), and a síndico (attorney general). In municipalities that choose to follow usos y costumbres, men hold official positions under an unpaid cargo (administrative work) system, and perform short-term community projects under an unpaid tequio (labor tax) system. In some Zapotec communities, men are required to complete at least fifteen years of unpaid services before they turn sixty. Migrants to the U.S. often pay others to complete their duties instead of returning home.
While driving, Ron gave me some background on his introduction to mezcal, using anecdotes that he often shared with others. He
