Oaxaca’s staggering biodiversity was already in evidence. Over six hundred species of birds have been verified in the state, as well as hundreds of mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, and thousands of species of flowering plants. As we made our way into the city, I could see cacti towering in traffic islands, tropical palms swaying in the breeze, and flowering trees with birds and butterflies fluttering through their foliage.
There were also agaves of many shapes and sizes: a preview of why I had come.
JUST AS A coconut-laden palm tree can bring an idyllic beach memory into soft focus, or a majestic organ pipe cactus will make you picture the Wild West, a round, green, spiky agave almost always springs Mexico to mind. The plants naturally occur in an expanse stretching all the way from the northernmost countries of South America, up through Central America, across the Caribbean, and deep into the southwestern U.S. But Mexico, home to the largest and most diverse agave population in the world, is their epicenter. Of the approximately two hundred recognized species (there are undoubtedly more), at least 160 grow in the republic, and about 60 percent are endemic to it.
Although estimates vary, sociologist Sarah Bowen writes in her authoritative book, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production, “at least twenty species of agave are commonly used in the production of mezcal, with some studies finding upward of forty-two species.” She cites the ongoing research of ethnobotanist Patricia Colunga-García Marín, of the Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY), who has “found evidence of a history of mezcal production in twenty-four of thirty-one Mexican states and the Federal District of Mexico.”
An agave’s circular leaf structure, called a rosette, is similar to an artichoke’s. Its swordlike (and sometimes thorny-edged) pencas (leaves), tipped by a single needle that can be wickedly sharp, are effective armor for its bulbous middle, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, depending on the species. Mankind has presumably utilized the plants for as long as we’ve lived with them—and not only for making spirits. The word “mezcal” is derived from the Nahuatl words ixcalli (roasted) and metl (agave). The piña’s starchy, nutritious flesh can provide food, when baked, and drink, when the hearts of some species are scooped out and the vitamin-rich aguamiel (nectar) is allowed to collect within the resulting hollow. According to archaeological studies of Mesoamerica, pit-roasted agave hearts have been a food staple since at least 9000 BCE. In the U.S., the Mescalero Apache are named after the mescal agave (Agave parryi) that they still gather in south-central New Mexico for food. In prehistoric North America, the Hohokam culture farmed the plants.
The thick and powerful quiote (inflorescence), which can thrust as high as thirty feet upward from an agave’s center in the final act of its life (anywhere from five to seventy years, depending on the species), can also be eaten, along with the succulent yellow flowers crowning it. The blossoms serve bats, birds, and insects, which act as pollinators in return. Many agave species have a symbiotic relationship with a particularly helpful assistant in this regard. For example, the Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) is a crucial pollen-spreader for A. tequilana.
The stalks have many other uses. They serve as firewood and as material for constructing bamboo-like fences and walls. They’ve also been crafted into surfboards and didgeridoos. The plant’s rigid pencas can be dried and fashioned into crude shelters, and its leaves’ strong ixtle, or pita, fibers can be formed into rope, woven into coarse mats and cloth, or made into baskets and sandals. In the artisanal craft of piteado, the agave’s fine white threads are intricately embroidered into belts, saddles, and other leather goods for charros (cowboys). Its fierce needles have been used as writing instruments, as well as for piercing, poking, or even drawing blood: pre-Hispanic codices depict thorns lancing ears and pricking tongues. As the botanist Howard Scott Gentry puts it in his landmark book Agaves of Continental North America, “The uses of agaves are as many as the arts of man have found it convenient to devise.”
Because they are often seen grouped with desert plants, agaves are commonly considered relatives of cacti or aloe. But they are actually unrelated, for a long time having been a part of the subfamily Agavoideae of the family Asparagaceae before being placed in their own separate family, Agavaceae. Genus Agave was first described in 1753 by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in his groundbreaking two-volume book, Species Plantarum, the springboard for modern plant nomenclature.
The Latin name Agave is derived from the ancient Greek word for noble or splendid, agauós, and that culture’s mythology provides a cautionary tale for drinkers: The daughter of the goddess Harmonia and Cadmus, the king of Thebes, was named Agave. While under a spell from Dionysius, the so-called party god, she mistook her son Pentheus for a lion and tore him apart, limb from limb, during a drunken bacchanal. She didn’t recognize her mistake until she brandished his head before her father.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus and his three shiploads of men arrived in the Caribbean on a Spanish Crown–sponsored expedition seeking a new route between Europe and Asia, they noticed that the indigenous Taíno people who lived on the islands called agave maguey. The name became part of the Old World’s emerging lexicon for the New World, the Taíno’s Arawakan language also providing roots for the English words “barbeque,” “hammock,” “potato,” “hurricane,” and “canoe.”
Twenty-seven years later, when the gold-hunting Spanish nobleman Hernán Cortés set foot on the shores of what’s now called Mexico, he discovered the Aztecs using the word “metl” for agave in their Nahuatl language. But the Spaniards ignored this, imposing the word “maguey” as part of their conquest. The plants are now generally known as both agave and maguey inside Mexico, and as agave outside it. But among the country’s many remaining ethnic-language groups, they are still identified by a mellifluous assortment of ancient names—tzaatz in Mixe, mai in Huichol, tyoo’ in Chatino, yavi in Mixteco, and ki in Mayan, to name only a few.
The plants can now be found all over the globe. The tough fibers of sisal agaves (Agave sisalana) are harvested to make everything from twine and carpets to lumbar-support belts and scratching posts for cats. They are cultivated in Brazil, Tanzania, Java, China, Haiti, and Madagascar. Among other places, A. tequilana has made a second home in South Africa, where it’s been used to make a non-Mexican version of tequila.
Other species are prized as ornamental plants, particularly in Europe. Agaves bask in the elegant botanical gardens of Nice and Monaco, and in the wonderfully rambling Giardini Botanici Hanbury, which occupies a spectacular forty-five-acre chunk of coastline near the Italian town of Ventimiglia. In the U.S., two of the best collections are found at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. But the intrepid plants are rooted everywhere, from Miami to Golden Gate Park.
It would be hard to imagine a more striking maguey collection than the one overseen by the botanist Dr. Abisaí Josué García-Mendoza in the magnificent garden of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Instituto de Biología, in Mexico City. The extensive assortment of agaves thrives among volcanic stone outcroppings, and is probably the most representative concentration in the world. It’s an excellent spot to wander, imagining the different plants as spirits.
It’s unsurprising that the Zapotec are the largest producers of traditionally crafted mezcal, given that they’ve been cohabitating with agave for at least twenty-five hundred years. As a people, they number an estimated several hundred thousand, predominantly living in Oaxaca, home to the broadest diversity of maguey species in the world. Mezcals are distilled in the state from at least eight different species of the plant, from many varieties within those species, and from combinations of all of the above. With its deep history of ties between man and agave, and with mezcal-making rooted in its cultural heritage, Oaxaca is the spirit’s epicenter.
AS WE APPROACHED the city’s center, Ron nodded at a barren mountaintop to our left, on which, he said, were the legendary ruins of Monte Albán. A mezcal brand had been named after it—Monte Albán—the first large-scale commercial type to be exported from Mexico, in 1975. The pre-Columbian