I have been thinking about racial stereotypes connected with drinking behaviour in one way or another since the first year of my undergraduate degree in History – way back in 2002! The issue was raised by a session within a module on the Social History of Food in Latin America and, from there, questions about racial stereotypes remained in the background of my MA and PhD research on the history of alcohol in Mexico. Through my own teaching at the University of Leicester, particularly a course I designed called “From Beer to Fraternity: Alcohol, Society and Culture in North America“, discussions at various Drinking Studies Network events, and research for an edited book, A Cultural History of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850 to 1950, I increasingly considered the question of racial stereotypes about alcohol use to be of transnational and global significance.
Through these different avenues of exploration, I found that research from a range of disciplines on alcohol-related harm showed there is a real need to deconstruct racial stereotypes about drinking. Stereotypes have perpetuated prejudice against Native Americans and Hispanic Americans, encouraged aggressive marketing of distilled drinks to African Americans, and reduced opportunities for Asian Americans to seek help for drinking problems.[1] Racially differentiated alcohol regulations in Australia, based on long-standing racial stereotypes about Indigenous drinking, have compounded rather than reduced alcohol-related harm.[2] The so-called “drunken Indian” stereotype still shapes the attitudes of US government officials involved in harm reduction programmes for Native Americans, and the internalisation of racial stereotypes about drinking helps to cause alcohol-related harm amongst Native Americans.[3] Explaining how and why racial stereotypes about drinking have developed historically through cultural processes of othering in the United States, Mexico and the wider world, as I aim to do in this project, is a critical step in reducing the harm that they still do.
Historians have clearly established the role of anti-immigrant prejudice in garnering support for the United States policy of national prohibition (1920-33), and the century-long temperance movement from which it grew. Enforcement of the national prohibition law was disproportionately targeted against ethnic minorities, especially Mexican Americans, African Americans and poor European immigrants.[4] Widespread perceptions about the tendency of Native Americans towards excessive drinking meant that prohibition laws had already been applied to them in the nineteenth century and persisted long after national prohibition was repealed.[5]
In Mexico, cultural misunderstandings about Indigenous alcohol use and the commercialisation of alcohol contributed to the development of a stereotype about Indigenous drunkenness during the colonial period (1521-1810).[6] By the late nineteenth century, degeneration theory – the idea that physical, mental and moral defects were passed down from generation to generation – transformed alcohol abuse into a major threat to racial and national health.[7]
Mexico’s more limited policies of prohibition in the early twentieth century have been less thoroughly researched than the US experience of prohibition, but anti-alcohol campaigns foregrounded concerns about Indigenous drinking practices more than those of other ethnic groups.[8]
In the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project, I aim to draw together these distinct historiographies to provide a systematic analysis of what different racial stereotypes about alcohol had in common, how they interacted and how they changed over time in the US and Mexico. The goal is to analyse the relationship between these stereotypes in the context of changing power dynamics across borders. In turn, this should help to reveal the importance of debates about alcohol to the construction of modern ideas about race and racial difference.
This approach responds to and advances recent calls to analyse the increasingly transnational and global nature of debates about alcohol in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Mills and Barton acknowledged the role of racial stereotypes about alcohol and other drugs in the legitimisation of European imperialism but called for more research on how such ideas were “transferred and circulated, and with what effects.”[9] Pliley et al examine some transnational aspects of anti-alcohol activism but highlight the need for more comprehensive studies of transnational actors, ideas and processes. They also encourage research to go beyond the geographical limits of Euro-American imperialism and to go beyond traditional organisational studies of temperance groups.[10]
Several small-scale studies of the relationship between alcohol and racial stereotypes indicate how transformative a larger, transnational and comparative study could be. Historians of colonial North and Spanish America have shown how “drunken Indian” stereotypes became embedded in discourses of Indigenous weakness, impurity and barbarism.[11] Gaytán compared the racialised meanings of particular drinks in Mexico and the United States in the early twentieth century, revealing how the American press associated tequila with a stereotype of Mexicans as volatile, savage and inferior.[12] Guatemalan alcohol policies in the early twentieth century were driven by racial assumptions that Indigenous people were more susceptible to alcohol problems, despite evidence that non-Indigenous Guatemalans drank in socially disruptive ways more frequently.[13] Debates about alcohol prohibition in Southern Nigeria in the early twentieth century were central to the formation and challenging of ideas about racial difference between Africans and Europeans.[14]
In focusing on the US and Mexico from 1845 to 1940, in the first part of this fellowship project, I want to examine how multiple racial stereotypes about the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups were formulated in dialogue with each other. I’ll also be combining analysis of official and popular perspectives about alcohol during points of transnational exchange. These include cultures of consumption of soldiers in the Mexican American War; early marketing practices of alcoholic products in international exhibitions; debates about alcohol regulation and harm in international conferences; and anti-alcohol activism that crossed borders through temperance tours.
I’ll close here with some of the key research questions I’ll be exploring as part of this fellowship project:
1. What racial language, imagery and concepts were used in describing the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups in the United States and Mexico between 1845 and 1940?
2. How and why did racial stereotypes about drinking solidify around some ethnic groups but not others?
3. To what extent did American and Mexican ideas about alcohol and race interact with one another?
4. Was the racialisation of drinking behaviours a global phenomenon?
[1] R. Caetano, C.L. Clark and T. Tam, ‘Alcohol Consumption among Racial/Ethnic Minorities: Theory and Research,’ Alcohol Health and Research World, 22:4 (1998).
[2] P. D’Abbs, ‘Alcohol Policy and Aboriginal Drinking in the Northern Territory, Australia,’ Contemporary Drug Problems, 39 (2012).
[3] M.D. Holmes and J.A. Antell, ‘The Social Construction of American Indian Drinking: Perceptions of American Indian and White Officials,’ The Sociological Quarterly, 42:2 (2001); J. Fish, T.M. Osberg and M. Syed, ‘Alcohol Beliefs and Acculturation in Relation to Alcohol Consumption among Native Americans,’ Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 16:2 (2017).
[4] L. McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).
[5] I. Ishii, ‘Alcohol and Politics in the Cherokee Nation Before Removal,’ Ethnohistory, 50:4 (2003); R. Phillips, Alcohol: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
[6] J.M. Córdova, ‘Notes on the Drunken Indian Image in Colonial Mexico,’ Word & Image, 31:1 (2015).
[7] D. Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
[8] G. Pierce, ‘Mexico’s National Anti-Alcohol Campaign and the Process of State-Building, 1934-1940,’ Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 23:2 (2009).
[9] J.H. Mills and P. Barton (eds), Drugs and Empire: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500-c.1930 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),pp. 14-15.
[10] J.R. Pliley, R. Kramm and H. Fischer-Tiné (eds), Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[11] R. Earle, ‘Indians and Drunkenness in Spanish America,’ Past and Present, Supplement 9 (2014); P. Mancall, Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); J.A. Fernandes, ‘Alcohol, Identity and Social Hierarchy in Colonial Brazil,’ in G. Pierce and Á. Toxqui (eds), Alcohol in Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).
[12] M. S. Gaytán, ‘Drinking Difference: Race, Consumption, and Alcohol Prohibition in Mexico and the United States,’ Ethnicities, 14:3 (2014).
[13] D. Carey Jr., ‘Drunks and Dictators: Inebriation’s Gendered, Ethnic, and Class Components in Guatemala, 1898-1944,’ in Pierce and Toxqui, Alcohol in Latin America.
[14] C. Ambler, “The Specter of Degeneration: Alcohol and Race in West Africa in the Early Twentieth Century” in Pliley et al, Global Anti-Vice Activism.