With this book, Mónica P. Morales describes a colonial imaginary of inebriation, citing extensively from Spanish chroniclers, Spanish officials, and Spanish law, as well as selectively providing commentary from the native Andean writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Her introduction sets the parameters for discussion of the colonial subject, the colonial project, and colonial discourse, using well-known methodologies drawn from Mignolo, Foucault, Glissant, and Bhabha, among others. She clearly demarcates the moral dichotomies of colonization, concentrating on drunkenness in the Andes as one of the tropes determining the category of deviant barbarian. Spanish men of the church and appointed officials wrote extensively of the excess consumption of fermented corn beer (called chicha in Spanish and aqha in Quechua), which then in turn led to diabolically induced orgies of sexual transgression, violence, and crime. Morales provides a European focus, reading Hispanic texts that promote the classical theme of moderation (Juan Ruiz and Berceo) to prevent a loss of rational capacity that distinguishes animal from human.

Morales’s turn to civil and canonical legislation in chapters 1 and 2 reflects a growing interest among scholars to parse the particulars of legal language, to explicate the nuanced cases of petitions and amparos (writs of protection), and to define the indigenous natives in functional roles as fiscal entities and legal entities. Thus Morales notes that the Spanish Laws of Burgos not only established the encomienda (land grant) system in the Americas, but also, to encourage Christian behavior among the Amerindians, proscribed against drinking. Likewise, later decrees found in the Recopilaciones de las leyes prohibit intoxication, as this inebriation leads to idolatry, lust, and incest. In the Andes, the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, observed firsthand the widespread consumption of beer, as did the chroniclers Matienzo, Sarmiento de Gamboa, and Cieza de León. Toledo enacted legislation to curtail this practice, restricting the amounts of corn flour shipped to Potosí for brewing (1572) and controlling consumption further by insisting on the building of taverns within urban spaces. We also learn that José de Acosta, a Jesuit priest, promoted acculturation through his participation with a team of theologians and linguists, based in Lima, writing Christian doctrine, a confession manual, and sermons that served to rein in drunkenness, idolatry, and fornication (1584–85).

Spanish writing on drunkenness is supplemented with Morales’s focus on Spanish interest in profits obtained through the sale of corn beer. Drinks consumed in a tambo (way-station inn) could be taxed and indigenous labor could be harnessed to provide sustenance for visiting inspectors or merchants lodging in inns, as Toledo decreed. Guaman Poma serves as a witness to the abuse of Andean natives: priests were more intent on reaping profits from beer than increasing the number of converts to Christianity, native women gathered in these taverns to offer sexual services, and indigenous communities often had to provide beasts of burden or food and drink with no recompense (chapters 3 and 4). Guaman Poma also supplies a vision of strict control of drunkenness under the rule of the Inca (as seen in Morales’s chapter “Drinking Archives”). His insistence that there were “no drunks” in the time of the Incas contrasts with his numerous colonial descriptions of solitary assimilated indigenous borrachos who drink from wooden quero beakers or guzzle fermented liquid from a serving flask.

Guaman Poma, adverse to the Hispanicized drinking patterns of profit and plunder, presents an alternative vision through an “iconography of cups” (an analysis developed by Tom Cummins). Depictions of agricultural rituals (for August, for spring) display the cultural norms inherent in Andean native communities. Fermented beverage, consumed in paired beakers, cements the bonds of communal reciprocity in the reception of visiting Incan dignitaries and also proclaims a covenant with the gods during Incan ritual festivities. Mónica P. Morales reads widely to provide a rich theological and historical analysis of Andean inebriation that supplements previous studies of moral transgressions written by William Taylor, the economic patterns of chicha production by Jane Mangan, and the ethnographic detail regarding coca rituals so memorable in the writing of Catherine Allen.