The Mezcal Rush. Granville Greene

      I WAS CURIOUS to see more of Oaxaca de Juárez, but Ron had other ideas. He kept a place in a nearby Zapotec community called Teotitlán del Valle, to which we were now headed. This was where he kept a warehouse, and where he hand-bottled the five varieties of “single village” mezcal he bought for export to the U.S. The community was also where he lived when he wasn’t at home in Taos, New Mexico. I gathered, though, that Ron spent much of his time on the road, promoting and selling Del Maguey mezcal. He appeared to enjoy this, although it seemed to be an expensive undertaking.

      We drove southeast from the city down a stretch of Highway 190, over what had once been an important road connecting the ancient settlements of Monte Albán, Yagul, and Mitla. Now it was a very tiny segment of the Pan-American Highway, a 29,800-mile route extending all the way from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. When the Mexican portion was completed in 1950, an annual speed race was created to commemorate the feat. The grueling La Carrera Panamericana, which followed the road the length of Mexico, was so dangerous that the race was canceled after only five years.

      A tamer version of the fabled event was revived in 1988, and two members of Pink Floyd made a film about driving it. The posh race for the classic-car crowd was hard to imagine, however, because the road was a roughly surfaced two-lane blacktop with abundant baches (potholes) and topes (speed bumps). Even so, its condition did nothing to discourage the evidently fearless colectivo (shared-taxi) drivers from darting through the traffic at breakneck speeds, in what for them was a daily road race.

      As the strong equatorial sun dropped behind the mountains, we rolled through a vast valley, passing fields of agave, corn, beans, and squash, then strangely shaped hills studded with shrubby trees, cacti, and scrub-covered ruins. Dotted here and there around the plains, small settlements were set against the bases of the steep, cloud-cloaked ridges towering around us. White-walled mission churches with red-tiled roofs rose above the communities: souvenirs of the Spanish colonization. We were now in the Zapoteca—the territory of the Zapotec. Ron pointed out wide swaths, cut straight down the slopes between the trees, that appeared to have been made for power lines but were actually boundary markers between municipios (municipalities), communally cleared each year.

      Much of Oaxacan land still falls under the ejido system. This form of land tenure was established after the Mexican Revolution and was put into practice on a large scale in the 1930s. The idea was to provide a way for landless farmers to establish and communally maintain specific parcels for agricultural purposes, following the takeover of their community holdings by haciendas in the nineteenth century. In 1992, the sale and privatization of ejido land was permitted after an adjustment of Article 27 in the Mexican constitution, and increases in poverty and migration have been attributed to the change.

      Mexico’s thirty-one states are subdivided into 2,440 municipalities. Oaxaca has 570 municipalities, a very large number—the huge state of Baja has only five. Four hundred and eighteen follow the usos y costumbres (traditions and customs) system of indigenous self-governance. The government structure for all municipalities in the country was defined in the constitution in 1917. Every municipio must have an alcalde (mayor), regidores (councilmen), and a síndico (attorney general). In municipalities that choose to follow usos y costumbres, men hold official positions under an unpaid cargo (administrative work) system, and perform short-term community projects under an unpaid tequio (labor tax) system. In some Zapotec communities, men are required to complete at least fifteen years of unpaid services before they turn sixty. Migrants to the U.S. often pay others to complete their duties instead of returning home.

      While driving, Ron gave me some background on his introduction to mezcal, using anecdotes that he often shared with others. He had first come through the area in 1970, when he and two buddies piled into a van to drive the “Pan-Am” from California to Panama on a spur-of-the-moment road trip. “We just wanted to see where the road went,” he shrugged. But it was during this journey, which ended up lasting months, that Ron initially visited Teotitlán del Valle. He had liked it so much, he said, he returned two decades later to work on various art projects, some in collaboration with master Zapotec weavers from the village, which is known for its finely woven tapetes (rugs) made of hand-spun, naturally dyed wool.

      As a young artist, Ron was associated with the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the late 1960s and included figures like Robert Irwin and James Turrell. In those days, Ron fabricated sculpture combining light and architectural elements to form contemplative environments. “Growing up in Ojai, light and space were really important to me,” he explained. “So I tried to paint on air, with these floating volumes of light made with beams crossing in complementary colors. It was the beginning of minimalism. It was the beginning of not using imagery. I decided to make works related to my experience, and not to art history.”

      As an art student in Southern California, in the early 1960s, Ron tried a mass-produced mezcal on a foray across the border to Hussong’s Cantina, a famous surfer hangout in Ensenada, Mexico. “I was the fool with the bottle upturned in my mouth, swallowing the worm,” he laughed. Ron’s interest in the traditionally crafted mezcal he began exporting didn’t begin until his visit to Teotitlán in 1970, when he first became acquainted with Oaxaca’s micro-distilled agave spirits. None were fabricated in the village itself, but as he started exploring the larger region in the early 1990s, he began finding mezcals that spoke to him—some of which he discovered through word of mouth, others by showing up at remote mountain villages and asking around. When Ron tried crossing the U.S. border with several large vessels of mezcal, a customs official allowed him to bring in only a tiny amount, and the seed was sown for Del Maguey.

      “This whole thing started because I wanted to be able to share the amazing mezcals I’d found with my friends,” he said.

      The spirits Ron began exporting under his label in 1995 were not being fabricated on anything close to a commercial scale. Handcrafted by maestros mezcaleros in small batches for consumption in their villages, they were mostly shared at fiestas, weddings, funerals, and other important events. If they were sold beyond their own vicinity, it was more often than not to brokers or bottlers, who bought them