as seventeen thousand people. It was a Zapotec stronghold, but was largely abandoned by 1000 CE. I could see that its soaring thirteen-hundred-foot perch would have commanded a strategic and formidable presence. Ahead of us, I caught glimpses of the twin towers of Santo Domingo Church, which was constructed over a two-hundred-year period, beginning in 1570. All around us, it seemed, were stark juxtapositions among the ancient, the old, and the new.
Faustino, who had some business to attend to, stepped out at a busy corner, while Ron and I continued to Mercado de Abastos. One of the biggest street marketplaces in Mexico, it spreads over several city blocks. Ron wanted to begin my introduction to mezcal by taking me to his favorite pulque stall. Pulque, he explained, is a mildly alcoholic pre-Hispanic beverage that’s made mostly from the aguamiel of the Volkswagen Beetle–size Agave salmiana, although other maguey species are also used. The nectar is fermented, like beer, rather than distilled, like mezcal.
Many believe that aguamiel fermentation was as far as indigenous peoples got with agave alcohol before the Spanish introduced them to distillation techniques. But new research debunks this long-held assumption. At the very least, Mesoamericans were enthusiastic experimenters, and their conquerors found them concocting alcoholic beverages from a broad selection of materia prima other than maguey. These included fermented cactus fruit, maize, hog plums, pineapples, coconuts, and honey, as well as various barks and roots—and even chewed tobacco juice and poisonous toads.
As soon as we entered the market, it became apparent that finding the pulque stall wouldn’t be easy, even though Ron had visited it many times before. The place felt like a labyrinth. There were no signs or maps to guide you through its dark, close aisles—only row upon row of vendors hawking a mind-boggling array of everything from underpants and stuffed animals to plastic buckets and power tools. It seemed as if anyone could hang out a shingle and do business. Goods hung on the walls, dangled from the ceilings, and were neatly arranged across the tables of makeshift booths.
There were so many articles that it was hard to make out the vendors amid their wares. But if I lingered for even a moment to take a closer look at a hand-carved wooden chocolate stirrer or a plastic bag of deep-fried pork skins, someone would immediately spring from the shadows and greet me with an enthusiastic “¿Qué tal, güero?” (What’s up, Blondie?) or a “¿Qué necesitas, caballero?” (What do you need, Mister?).
There were no price tags, and haggling was expected—which was how I imagined transactions had always been made there. Refreshingly non-corporate, Abastos felt as if the world’s most ginormous Walmart Supercenter had been gutted, roasted on a spit, chewed up, and regurgitated into the streets, where it had been reinvented under genuinely human terms. The one thing the market shared with big-box stores was that its various zones had particular themes.
An entire section was devoted to cups, bowls, saucers, plates, and almost anything else that could be made with barro (earthenware); another part to the many beautiful flowers of the region; somewhere else to zapatos (shoes) of all shapes and sizes; and yet another area to licuadoras (blenders), tortilladoras (tortilla presses), and other kitchen gadgetry. But unlike the generic Housewares, Sporting Goods, and Cosmetics sections of box stores, each part of the market had multiple vendors selling goods with their own individualized spins—and one could haggle with them for the best possible prices.
The variety of food items was astonishing: fly-covered cow carcasses; congealed pig heads slow-turning on meat hooks; plucked chickens and glistening hunks of goat; moist mounds of mysterious organs and entrails; pyramids of chiles in multiple shapes, sizes, and shades of red; stacks of brown eggs; earthenware bowls filled with moles negro y rojo Oaxaqueños (complex black and red chile sauces, two of seven traditionally made in Oaxaca); balls of string cheese, another local specialty; and an overwhelming selection of fresh breads, fragrant spices, amber honeys, and multihued fruits and vegetables.
Everywhere, hawkers were competing for attention, sticking earth-spackled bunches of onions in our faces, offering us handfuls of roasted pumpkin seeds and ripe tomatoes, or trying to sell us shoulder bags of recycled sugar sacks, in case we wanted to carry anything home. Other vendors called out the names of popular local snacks—tempting us with “Tlayudas . . . tlayudas . . . tlayudas” (baked tortillas loaded with refried beans) and “Nieves . . . nieves . . . nieves” (ices flavored with everything from avocado to leche quemada con tuna—burnt milk and the red fruit of the prickly pear cactus).
Chickens squawked, turkeys gobbled, and boom boxes pumped out ballads crooned over jaunty polka beats as cooks in mom-and-pop food stalls combined the market’s ingredients into aromatic concoctions. Their creations were served to hungry patrons, who squeezed together on benches alongside tables covered with brightly patterned oilcloths. Bowls of fresh salsa and sliced limes—their contents eagerly added to everything—sat at the ready, refilled as soon as they were emptied.
Ron asked directions of a girl mixing cacao seeds, sugar, and almonds into a hand-cranked chocolate grinder; sampled a few crunchy, chile-roasted chapulines (grasshoppers) from the basket of an elderly woman; and made further inquiries of a vendor selling a pair of forlornly honking geese before we finally, almost miraculously, arrived at a nondescript stall with a hand-painted sign: REFRESQUERIA ANITA, PULQUE Y TEPACHE.
Below the sign sat Anita herself. Completely indifferent to the incongruous pair of gabachos (foreigners) who appeared before her, she had the thousand-yard stare of someone who, as Ron cryptically put it, “has seen a lot of people explode into flames.”
Two earthenware vessels—one containing pulque, the other tepache (a traditional drink fermented from pineapple)—rested on the counter in front of her. She took off the pulque jar’s metal lid, ladled a white foamy liquid into two jícaras (traditional cups made from halved dried gourds), and passed them to us. The drink felt cool through the hard vegetal skin and smelled mildly acidic. But as I was about to take a cautious sip, Ron stopped me with a light touch to my forearm before carefully tilting his jícara and sprinkling a few drops of pulque onto the ground.
“For the Earth Mother,” he said. “She always drinks first.”
The libation, which tasted sweet and sour and citrusy, traveled down my throat with a slightly alcoholic kick. From the way Ron was gauging my reaction, I could tell we weren’t just having a beer here. So I took my time, slowly drank some more, and soon found out why. Deep into my second pulque, I began feeling decidedly different. It wasn’t at all like I had felt when drinking beer, mezcal, or anything else I had tried before. Indeed, with my sensory faculties suddenly heightened, the market now seemed like a vivid Takashi Murakami–Frida Kahlo mash-up.
Ron put it another way: “Pulque is psychedelic, man!”
NO ONE KNOWS exactly when people began making and drinking pulque—only that, when Cortés arrived on the shores of what is now Mexico, it was integral to the religious observances of the polytheistic Aztecs, who were the dominant ethnic group at the time. The sacred drink, which they called iztac octli (white wine), was also used by other indigenous societies of the central highlands, where the agaves for pulque-brewing grow naturally. It was particularly prominent in the religious ceremonies of the Mixtec and Zapotec cultures in the region now known as Oaxaca.
The process for making the drink has changed little over the centuries. The agave species harvested for pulque are generally much larger than those grown for mezcal and are also juicier. When a pulque-producing plant matures, usually at around twelve years, the sprouting of its enormous quiote signals the appropriate time to harvest its bountiful nectar, which surges in volume as the agave directs energy to its center. A hole is cut into the middle of the maguey and the heart scooped out, leaving an open hollow where aguamiel collects. Pulque agaves can yield between one and two gallons of sap per day, and some continue to do so for several months.
The liquid is continuously removed and transferred to vats and other containers. Unlike beer, which requires yeast, pulque is fermented with bacteria. A hundred years ago, when immigrant brewers found their beers in competition with the traditional native drink, they propagandized the superstition that muñecas (cloth satchels of feces) were added to pulque to