Getting Tipsy in Latin America
Read Marisa's interviews with other SAMA curators:
Getting Tipsy in Latin America
Interview with:
Kristopher Driggers, PhD, Curator of Latin American Art
Marisa Morán Jahn, Gateway 2025–2027 artist
June 12, 2025
Pulque
Kris: Pulque is really an ancient beverage. We think of pulque as being made from fermented maguey, and we know that it was used in Mesoamerica, certainly in the time of the Aztec empire. So that would be the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also way further back, too. We see other fermented beverages used in ancient Mexico and Guatemala.
In artworks, when you see pulque painted in codices, it often has this kind of frothy, dot-like structure in the painting. This conveys that it’s an effervescent, bubbly drink.
There are various gods associated with pulque.There's a god called Xochipilli, or “Flower Prince.” Another one is called Macuilxochitl, or “Five Flower.” Even after the time of the Spanish military incursion in the Americas, pulque continues to be produced up until the present day in central Mexico.
Set of Cups in the Shape of Monkeys, Barrio de la Luz, Puebla, Mexico, ca. 1940, Glazed earthenware, Monkey with hat: 10 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (26.7 × 19.1 cm); Cups: 2 × 2 1/2 in. (5.1 × 6.4 cm); Tray: 11 1/4 × 1 in. (28.6 × 2.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Horse of a Different Color by Fred Pottinger, 93.34. Photography by Peggy Tenison
Pulque Pitcher, Metepec, Mexico, early- 20th century, Polychromed and glazed earthenware, h. 13 1/4 in. (33.7 cm); w. 6 1/2 in. (16.5 cm); d. 6 1/2 in. (16.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection, 85.98.1970. Photography by Peggy Tenison
Pulque, and mezcal, were often stored and commercialized historically in monkey-shaped jars [93.34]. We have a few of these pulque monkey jars in the collection. This one is really nice because of its glaze. This particular jar also comes with a few cups in the shape of monkey heads as its companions. Sometimes, there are pulque jars that have inscription on them, like this one that says “Feliz Año Nuevo” (Happy New Year) on it [85.98.1970]. On other objects, you find the name of the owner of a pulque jar.
Sometimes you'll see invitations to share pulque written on the jars. And I think that's one of the lovely things about these—that little text, as if the jar is speaking to you, inviting you to be part of the drinking, or commemorating the moment when you're drinking. It’s like they’re talking back to you.
Pulque Pitcher, Puebla, Mexico, 1936, Glazed earthenware, 18 1/2 × 10 in. (47 × 25.4 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Mexican Folk Art Collection, 85.98.1969. Photography by Peggy Tenison
So, these two are typical, and we have other examples of this, too, in the collection, in the place where these were made [85.98.1969 and 85.98.1970]. This is kind of the hallmark of what ceramics looked like.This is from Puebla, a colonial city where there was a very active pottery community producing these kinds of glazed pots, including lots of jars for pulque. That's one of the important forms for Puebla pottery.
Marisa: Why the monkey? Or why is pulque stored in the monkey? Does drinking pulque transform you into a mischievous monkey?
Kris: I think it’s because monkeys are yes, mischievous. And they’re fun and festive. There’s a Mesoamerican idea about your animal alter ego coming out when you drink. As an art historian, I'm not really sure when this connection started.
The old school pulque—well, some people don't like it. It’s not sweet. It's maguey. It's definitely bubbly. But it's not quite as easy to drink as some of the newer ones that you can get today where it’s more like a party drink, too. Like you can find them in Mexico City. They're places where you can go, and they'll serve twelve different varieties of pulque. Today, a lot of times people make pulque with fruit—like mango pulque, or any kind of tropical fruit.
Mayan Pottery
Kris: Now we're standing next to four Maya pots.
Between 308–1000 AD Maya cities really start to flourish. One of the kind of high-status items that Maya artists made were these drinking pots. And, so far as we know, they circulated mostly in the courts among elites. A lot of pots include signs from the Mayan hieroglyphic writing system, and many specify that they were made for young men.
Actually, it's sort of nice. The terms for young men, it's ch’ok, which means young sprout, so they're like the “sprouts” of the court.
Vessel with Ceremonial Scene, Maya, ca. A.D. 771, Polychrome earthenware, 4 1/4 x 5 in. (10.8 x 12.7 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of John and Kathi Oppenheimer, 2023.7.118. Photography by Alayna Barrett Fox
This one doesn’t include that term, but it is a story about a young man rising up in his city state. And by this one, I mean this pot that has the scene with the enema [2023.7.118]. So, the political drama here is that we're seeing two lords seated together. There's a young lord on the left and an older, more established lord on the right. The two of them are having this kind of interaction where they're holding objects in their hands. The older lord, known in scholarship as the Fat Cacique, brandishes this object that we've identified as a bladder for holding a hallucinogenic enema. You can see that it has this long tube for administering the enema. There's this substance that's kind of like dripping out of the end of the tube.
As far as we understand it, these enemas do a few different things. They're a ritual medicine that cleanses and purifies the body. But it’s also for achieving hallucinogenic vision—a state of altered perception. In Mayan art that shows these enemas being administered, it seems like there's often a gender dynamic: it's often women who administer these enemas to men, although not exclusively.
If you look closely, you'll see that both the young and the old lords are each holding an enema bag. The young lord has one in his hand, close to the body, near his lap.
Both are wearing these big costumes. They're these big toad masks. Toads, you know, have their own kind of association with water. One of the words in Mayan languages for toad is actually muuch, so the sound he makes is similar to his name. There's the idea that toads always appear on the road right before it rains. They anticipate what was and is, you know, precious rain—this lifegiving resource. So, it was very powerful to be dressed like a toad.
There are also women from the court behind them. This becomes a political scene because, unusually, this vessel is showing us a moment where the two lords appear to be co-rulers of the city. That's an unusual structure for political rule. Usually, there's only one highest lord of a city, which might be a vassal to another city, but here they are sharing that responsibility. And we know from other painted pots that also showed his career that the younger lord moved up in the ranks to finally achieve his political power.
We know this particular story because the artist who made our pot also made lots of other pots showing the same political dynasty with some of these same figures. So, this is one of a few of these pots now dispersed into several different collections, but telling the story of this political ascension.
So much of the material culture of Maya civilization was lost or dispersed—we're piecing the stories together. There are four codices that still survive today, but they're all focused on only a very narrow slice of Maya life. They're all focused on astronomy, ritual, deities, but they don't tell us much about power and about courts—they don't tell us about politics. We have very little Maya art, actually, that tells us about daily life for people who aren't of the very highest elite of their cities. Maya art really focuses on the deeds of powerful men. There is less art that tells us about what commoners and the poor were doing—relatively little about the lives of women and children.
Marisa: Can you share more about why there are so many depictions of young men on drinking vessels in Mayan artifacts?
Kris: The scholar Stephen Houston has written a lot about this. In ancient Mayan culture, young men were seen to hold the promise of the future of Maya cities. As in, you need a generation in the pipeline to become the elites later.
At the same time, artworks tell us that young men had a lot of unproductive impulses that had to be controlled. So, for example, we sometimes see scenes about the education of the young, and it’s sometimes going really poorly. We see scenes of young men kind of acting out in their own drinking parties and getting ridiculously drunk. There are many scenes about the cultivation of these young sprouts in the hope that they will become austere leaders later.
There's also kind of an interesting focus in Maya art around very old men. Counter to our expectations, very old men in Maya art are not always figures of dignity or respect. Instead, they're often ridiculous. There are scenes of old men being deceived by their beautiful young
wives who sneak off to be with beautiful young men or beautiful younger figures, sometimes not human figures. There are scenes of old men having their clothes stolen by rabbits. Enfeebled old men are a recurring figure in a lot of Maya art and myths. They're part of this whole cycle of elite men who hold a royal position but might not always hold on to it. They might in fact transition to being other kinds of men later in life
Wine, Extraction, Cannibalism & the Eucharist
Kris: Now we are in Mexico looking at a silver chalice. There were major silver working centers in Mexico during the Viceregal period. Places that have silver mines tend to not only supply Mexico with silver but also supply the raw material for making silver objects across the Atlantic. So, these silver sacramental objects speak to mines and extraction and colonial histories in a really precise way: alongside extracting silver for liturgical objects, they're extracting silver that funds the Empire—its expansion, its power, and commercial interests across the Atlantic world.
Alejandro Antonio de Cañas (Mexican, 1755 - 1831), Chalice, late-18th to early-19th century, Silver and gilded silver, height: 9 1/16 in. (23 cm); diameter (base): 5 1/8 in. (13 cm); diameter (rim of cup): 2 15/16 in. (7.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, museum purchase, 72.88.9. Photography by Ansen Seale.
Marisa: And the chalice of course is a symbol of the missionizing process.
So, one thing about sacraments that always boggled and mystified me was the symbolic cannibalistic aspect of ingesting the body and blood of Christ. Is that same kind of like ingestion or metabolizing seen in other cultures proceeding?
Kris: Early in the sixteenth century, when we're seeing the transition from an Indigenous Aztec empire to a New Spanish religious tradition, when friars were trying to understand native religions, they observed that the Indigenous Nahuas of the Aztec empire also ate their gods.
Nahuas made sculptures representing important deities out of materials that were edible, like amaranth mixed with honey. They’d build a base of a sculpture and then, after consecrating it to the gods, they would then be eaten. That kind of consumption and the idea of symbolically eating the gods was seen by Spanish missionaries as a deviation of the divine sacrament of Christianity but also a link between Indigenous and Catholic ideas. Converting people to Christianity was a lot easier and more effective when missionaries understood the symbolism.
And so, even if Indigenous people were “doing it wrong” in the eyes of the missionaries, they could be interpreted as potential Christians—their religion was interpreted as evidence of humanity. The Spanish and other Europeans encountered many non-Western people throughout the world. And while they denied humanity to many, they did recognize the humanity of Indigenous people from Mexico because of their sophisticated religions that involved things like eating the gods.
Urpu (storage jar), Inca, ca. 1300-1532, San Antonio Museum of Art, Painted earthenware, h. 28 3/8 in. (72 cm); w. 16 9/16 in. (42 cm), gift of Mrs. Henry Ashby McCulloch, 41.103.1. Photography by Alayna Barrett Fox
