Professor Hernández Palomo’s new book is the sixth in a series of studies of royal tax revenue in New Spain completed under the guidance of Dr. José Antonio Calderón Quijano. Like its predecessors, La renta del pulque makes full use of the treasure house of records in the Archivo General de Indias to describe the administrative history of royal revenue from pulque (the popular fermented drink made from the juice of the maguey) and to plot the course of income produced from this renta. As Dr. Calderón Quijano remarks in the prologue, no important aspect of the pulque renta and its product is missing. In two ways, this study stands apart from its carefully crafted, detailed predecessors. It makes extensive use of archives in Mexico City to enrich and critique the documentary evidence from AGI, and it goes beyond a close discussion of the renta to analyze the fiscal records for pulque as serial evidence for the economic history of the colony. Another attractive feature is that the author provides a running commentary on the nature and quality of his manuscript sources. He alerts the reader to discrepancies and gaps in the records, openly struggles with the difficulties of researching the asiento period, and provides a valuable guide to the fiscal records.
The first half of the book traces the administration of pulque from failed attempts to prohibit its use, to legalization in 1608, to an asiento system of decentralized private monopolies licensed by the Crown for the collection of pulque taxes from 1668 to the 1760s, to royal administration of the renta, which gradually replaced the asientos between 1763 and 1778. Underneath these changes, we can discern the “acculturation of pulque from an indigenous, pre-Hispanic beverage to a commercial drink produced by Spanish pulque ranchos as well as by Indian villages and sold mainly in the big colonial cities and towns. At their peak in the 1770s, pulque taxes stood with alcabalas and tribute as the most important source of royal revenue next to mining. Professor Hernández Palomo traces this administrative history in full detail—he discusses the types of taxes collected; the tension between desire for revenue and fears about the social and political effects of drunkenness; the ways in which royal laws were interpreted to allow exceptions; the organization, development, and replacement of the asiento system; the organization of the royal bureaucracy to collect the tax after 1763; and much more. One particularly dramatic event in the history of pulque administration that is developed here was the Mexico City uprising in 1692. Increased consumption of pulque in the years before the uprising and the fear of unruly drinkers led royal officials to terminate the asientos and ban all use of pulque. But a colony without revenue was too great a luxury for the hard-pressed Spanish Crown so that New Spain’s prohibition lasted only five years.
The second half of the book, replete with graphs, charts, tables, and figures, makes sense of the summary fiscal records for pulque (primarily the registros of the cajas reales de hacienda) over the last century of Spanish rule. Dramatic growth in royal revenue from pulque began in the 1760s with the change from asiento to royal collection; the yield from pulque taxes reached its peak in the early 1780s and gradually declined thereafter until the beginning of the Independence Wars, with the districts producing pulque for sale increasingly restricted to those nearest Mexico City. Positing a close relationship between tax revenue and total production—a legitimate but problematical hypothesis—Professor Hernández Palomo sets the pulque figures alongside the chronology of agricultural crises and epidemics in eighteenth-century Central Mexico. Apparently, pulque revenue was not adversely affected by either type of catastrophe; in fact, recorded pulque sales increased in periods of epidemics and food shortages, although such changes seem to have been minor in comparison with the longer curve of growth and decline in pulque revenue during the second half of the eighteenth century. The decline of pulque revenue after the mid-1780s is explained as the result of the great maize famine of 1785 and accompanying epidemics, and progressively higher taxes on pulque, which made its sale less attractive. The active political campaign against pulque and in favor of legalizing aguardiente de caña after the 1760s (which Professor Hernández Palomo has discussed in an earlier study) and the likelihood that pulque ranchos had overexpanded production in the booming third quarter of the eighteenth century, may also be important considerations in the subsequent decline.
This thorough, clearly written study gives scholars of the colonial period much to consider. For example, the well-documented decline in pulque revenue after 1785 fits with other recent research suggesting a general economic decline in the last decades of the colonial period. One important ingredient in this decline posited by the author that boded ill for the rural and urban poor was conversion of maize land into maguey (and I would add cattle in Indian pueblos) production in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century. The evidence for the late seventeenth century of increased production and commercialization of pulque, with pulque acquiring new currency as a colonial rather than primarily Indian drink, suggests the importance of regional economies producing for local needs posited by Peter Bakewell and others, although in this case, the growth of local production and markets received the active encouragement of the Crown. The administrative history section of the book provides case evidence of Hapsburg and Bourbon bureaucratic maneuvering and the single-minded interest in taxes as a source of royal revenue. Professor Hernández Palomo is now at work on the cultural history of pulque drinking in colonial Mexico, a study that is certain to enlighten us still further on the history of this most Mexican drink.
