{"id":37,"date":"2020-01-08T16:01:49","date_gmt":"2020-01-08T16:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www534.lamp.le.ac.uk\/?p=37"},"modified":"2020-02-05T11:32:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T11:32:21","slug":"why-is-it-important-to-understand-the-development-of-racial-stereotypes-about-alcohol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/?p=37","title":{"rendered":"Why is it important to understand the development of racial stereotypes about alcohol?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a>“, discussions at various Drinking Studies Network<\/a> events, and research for an edited book, A Cultural History of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850 to 1950, <\/em>I increasingly considered the question of racial stereotypes about alcohol use to be of transnational and global significance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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]<\/a> Racially differentiated alcohol regulations in Australia, based on long-standing racial stereotypes about Indigenous drinking, have compounded rather than reduced alcohol-related harm.[2]<\/a> The so-called \u201cdrunken Indian\u201d 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]<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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]<\/a> 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]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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]<\/a> By the late nineteenth century, degeneration theory \u2013 the idea that physical, mental and moral defects were passed down from generation to generation \u2013 transformed alcohol abuse into a major threat to racial and national health.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Book<\/a>
Shameless plug alert: you can read more about this point on degeneration theory in my first book, Alcohol and Nationhood in 19th Century Mexico<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mexico\u2019s 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]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity <\/em>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This approach\nresponds to and advances recent calls to analyse the increasingly transnational\nand global nature of debates about alcohol in the nineteenth and twentieth\ncentury. Mills and Barton acknowledged the role of racial stereotypes about\nalcohol and other drugs in the legitimisation of European imperialism but\ncalled for more research on how such ideas were \u201ctransferred and circulated,\nand with what effects.\u201d[9]<\/a> Pliley et al examine some\ntransnational aspects of anti-alcohol activism but highlight the need for more\ncomprehensive studies of transnational actors, ideas and processes. They also encourage\nresearch to go beyond the geographical limits of Euro-American imperialism and\nto go beyond traditional organisational studies of temperance groups.[10]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several\nsmall-scale studies of the relationship between alcohol and racial stereotypes indicate\nhow transformative a larger, transnational and comparative study could be. Historians\nof colonial North and Spanish America have shown how \u201cdrunken Indian\u201d\nstereotypes became embedded in discourses of Indigenous weakness, impurity and\nbarbarism.[11]<\/a>\nGayt\u00e1n compared the racialised meanings of particular drinks in Mexico and the\nUnited States in the early twentieth century, revealing how the American press\nassociated tequila with a stereotype of Mexicans as volatile, savage and\ninferior.[12]<\/a>\nGuatemalan alcohol policies in the early twentieth century were driven by\nracial assumptions that Indigenous people were more susceptible to alcohol\nproblems, despite evidence that non-Indigenous Guatemalans drank in socially\ndisruptive ways more frequently.[13]<\/a> Debates about alcohol\nprohibition in Southern Nigeria in the early twentieth century were central to\nthe formation and challenging of ideas about racial difference between Africans\nand Europeans.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll close here with some of the key research questions I’ll be exploring as part of this fellowship project:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. How and why did racial stereotypes about drinking solidify around some ethnic groups but not others? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. To what extent did American and Mexican ideas about alcohol and race interact with one another? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Was the racialisation of drinking behaviours a global phenomenon?
<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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[1]<\/a> R. Caetano, C.L. Clark\nand T. Tam, \u2018Alcohol Consumption among Racial\/Ethnic Minorities: Theory and\nResearch,\u2019 Alcohol Health and Research\nWorld<\/em>, 22:4 (1998).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> P. D\u2019Abbs, \u2018Alcohol\nPolicy and Aboriginal Drinking in the Northern Territory, Australia,\u2019 Contemporary Drug Problems<\/em>, 39 (2012). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> M.D. Holmes and J.A.\nAntell, \u2018The Social Construction of American Indian Drinking: Perceptions of\nAmerican Indian and White Officials,\u2019 The\nSociological Quarterly<\/em>, 42:2 (2001); J. Fish, T.M. Osberg and M. Syed,\n\u2018Alcohol Beliefs and Acculturation in Relation to Alcohol Consumption among\nNative Americans,\u2019 Journal of Ethnicity\nin Substance Abuse<\/em>, 16:2 (2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> L. McGirr, The War on Alcohol <\/em>(New York: W.W.\nNorton, 2016). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> I. Ishii, \u2018Alcohol and\nPolitics in the Cherokee Nation Before Removal,\u2019 Ethnohistory<\/em>, 50:4 (2003); R. Phillips, Alcohol: A History <\/em>(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina\nPress, 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> J.M. C\u00f3rdova, \u2018Notes\non the Drunken Indian Image in Colonial Mexico,\u2019 Word & Image<\/em>, 31:1 (2015). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> D. Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century\nMexico <\/em>(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/a> G. Pierce, \u2018Mexico\u2019s\nNational Anti-Alcohol Campaign and the Process of State-Building, 1934-1940,\u2019 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs<\/em>,\n23:2 (2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/a> J.H. Mills and P.\nBarton (eds), Drugs and Empire: Essays in\nModern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500-c.1930 <\/em>(Houndmills,\nBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),pp.\n14-15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/a> J.R. Pliley, R. Kramm\nand H. Fischer-Tin\u00e9 (eds), Global\nAnti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\n2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11]<\/a> R. Earle, \u2018Indians and\nDrunkenness in Spanish America,\u2019 Past and\nPresent<\/em>, Supplement 9 (2014); P. Mancall, Indians and Alcohol in Early America <\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1995); J.A. Fernandes, \u2018Alcohol, Identity and Social Hierarchy in\nColonial Brazil,\u2019 in G. Pierce and \u00c1. Toxqui (eds), Alcohol in Latin America <\/em>(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[12]<\/a> M. S. Gayt\u00e1n,\n\u2018Drinking Difference: Race, Consumption, and Alcohol Prohibition in Mexico and\nthe United States,\u2019 Ethnicities<\/em>, 14:3\n(2014). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[13]<\/a> D. Carey Jr., \u2018Drunks\nand Dictators: Inebriation\u2019s Gendered, Ethnic, and Class Components in\nGuatemala, 1898-1944,\u2019 in Pierce and Toxqui, Alcohol in Latin America<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[14]<\/a> C. Ambler, \u201cThe Specter of Degeneration: Alcohol and Race in West Africa in the Early Twentieth Century\u201d in Pliley et al, Global Anti-Vice Activism<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Why is it important to understand the development of racial stereotypes about alcohol?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,5,7,6],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-update","tag-alcohol-history","tag-mexico","tag-racial-stereotypes","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alcoholhistory.le.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}