The mescal wine estanco of Guadalajara (c. 1640-1742): a monopoly argued on medical grounds and spent on public fountains
Nueva Galicia drank palm and agave spirits, and a president decided the way to stop the worse home brews was to license the better one and tax it. A royal fiscal told the Council that prohibiting Indians the mescal and coco wines drove them to drinks that harmed them and into the hills, and that physicians had certified the wines healthful. The proceeds built the city's hot baths and then its public fountains, 1,200 pesos a year for twelve years.
Why this wins its question: Colonial alcohol policy in Spanish America reaches English-language readers as either pure fiscalism — the crown taxed drink — or pure repression, and the pulque revenue of Mexico City crowds out everything else. This object gives one provincial monopoly whole, from a single eyewitness chapter: the palm economy it grew out of, with tuba and its distilled aguardiente on the American Pacific coast and a native coquito-nut lamp oil selling at an eighth the price of the olive oil it displaced; the president's harm-reduction rationale and the pension on the monopolist that was also a policing duty; a royal fiscal telling the Council of the Indies in a cedula of 1671 that prohibition drove Indians to worse drinks and into the hills, with a physicians' certificate behind him and the Mexico pulque ordinances as the model; the earmarking of the proceeds first to the city's hot baths and then to its public fountains at 1,200 pesos a year for twelve years; and the author's admission that after decades of collection he could not find the grant that authorised any of it. It also refuses the comfortable reading: the same pages show the indigenous brews it replaced already under censure and penalty, and say so.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Before the monopoly the chapter describes what was being drunk, and the coco palm of the Pacific coast is treated as an established American crop with a full product line. The fruit is "del tamaño de la cabeza de un infante", the husk more than a finger thick of fibres "tan sutiles, que secas parecen estopa"; the hard inner shell is turned into coquillos "que bien limpios quedan tan negros y lustrosos, como si fuesen de azabache, que sirven para beber chocolate"; the flesh is "una pasta tan blanca como la nieve" from which the best conserves on the most splendid tables are made; the cavity holds about half a pound of water; "y de los tallos de esta planta ó macollos, se estila un licor muy dulce, que se llama tuba, del que alambicado se hace el aguardiente". Palm-sap tuba and a distilled spirit from it are being described on the American Pacific coast in a chapter written in 1742, alongside coconut-shell chocolate cups as an ordinary household good.
The same pages record a substitution that displaced an imported staple, and they price it. A second palm, the coquito, bears bunches of nuts called cuacayoles whose white kernel resembles coconut but is oilier, "y molidos en peroles con agua se les da fuego, y con prensas despiden crecida porcion de aceite tan limpio y de luz tan clara, que en todo el reino se gasta en lámparas, salvo en catedral y en las demas partes que están dotadas con aceites de olivos, y es tan abundante la cosecha, que un cuartillo vale un real de plata, valiendo el de olivos un peso". A native palm oil, milled, boiled and press-extracted, lit a whole kingdom at one eighth the price of the Mediterranean import, and the exceptions are the places whose endowments specified olive oil — that is, the substitution was blocked only where a legal instrument, not a preference, required the older product.
The monopoly's stated origin is a harm-reduction argument, made by a president and resting on medical opinion. Mescal plants are "parecidos á los magueyes, aunque la planta es mucho mas pequeña"; there is plenty of maguey in Galicia but the Indians use it less than in New Spain "porque apetecen mejor el vino mezcal", and in place of pulque they use other brews "que llaman vingarrote, tepachi, tejuino, sin embargo de las censuras y penas contra los que tales bebidas fabrican". Seeing that the Indians used such drinks in their retreats, "nocivas á la salud", and that physicians approved mescal wine as good, president Juan de Canseco y Quiñones "arbitró el que… se pusiese estanco de él, para que el que tuviese cuidase no se fabricasen los demas nocivos brebajes, y se le impuso una pension á favor de los propios". The monopolist's licence was also his policing obligation, and the city's revenue was the pension charged on it.
A royal fiscal put the same argument to the Council of the Indies, and the cedula that reports it is the strongest document in the chapter. By cedula of 15 October 1671 the king told the audiencia that the fiscal Fernando de Haro y Monteroso had written that inconveniences followed from prohibiting the Indians the use of the mescal wines and those of Colima — "este es el de cocos" — "por las muchas bebidas que inventaban contra su salud, y que si se les evitaban, se iban á los montes, y que los vinos no eran nocivos, sino saludables, como constaba de certificacion de los médicos, y que á su pedimento se habia permitido, y era bien se estableciese en un estanco, con las ordenanzas del pulque en México". Prohibition named as counter-productive on two specific grounds — clandestine substitution and flight beyond reach of the administration — with a physicians' certificate cited in support and the Mexico pulque ordinances proposed as the regulatory model. The certificate itself was not seen for this entry and reaches us only through the cedula.
The revenue was earmarked, twice, to public works, and the author cannot resist the symmetry. The first product of the estanco was "consumido en la fábrica de los baños de agua caliente" — the municipal medicinal bath the previous chapter says was built at the cost of the propios — as the cabildo answered on 22 March 1651 when the judges demanded to know by what faculty it had set the monopoly up. Later, "especialmente de órden de su Magestad, se aplicó su producto para los costos de poner fuentes públicas en la ciudad por doce años, é importa 1,200 pesos en cada un año. Bien es que el producto de vinos se convierta en agua." The estanco de vinos is one of the three revenue branches the chronicle names four chapters later as funding the piped water and public fountains delivered in 1740.
The monopoly ran for decades without anyone being able to produce its grant, and the author says so in his own book. He records that the estanco was made a charge against president Pedro Fernández de Baeza, "á quien entre otros capítulos, se le hizo cargo y respondió hallarlo introducido, y ser propios de la ciudad", the judges ordering the cabildo to account for its product and exhibit the faculty by which it had been set up; that after the answer of 1651 "ello es que parece se extinguió dicho estanco"; and, of the later revival, "no he hallado la cédula en cuya virtud se concedió dicho estanco, sin embargo de que ha muchos años que está en corriente". A resident lawyer searching the archive of his own city for the title to a standing tax and reporting that he could not find it is a better test of the record than any summary of it.
Whatever the health rationale, this was a fiscal monopoly on what indigenous people drank, and the chapter's own words establish the cost side. The brews the estanco was meant to suppress — vingarrote, tepachi, tejuino — were already prosecuted under "censuras y penas contra los que tales bebidas fabrican", so the policy replaced criminal suppression of indigenous drinks with a licensed substitute sold under monopoly; the "retiros" in which the author says the Indians drank are the private spaces the arrangement was designed to reach; and the monopolist's incentive to stop rival production was commercial before it was medical. The revenue that piped water to the city's fountains was raised from the drinking of the population the same administration elsewhere legislated against. This entry states both halves because the chapter does, and because an account that kept only the fountains would not survive contact with the source.
The author's closing proposal is an argument for extending the monopoly, and its stated purpose is jails. He reflects that the estanco exists only at Guadalajara, while mescal wine "se usa en todas las provincias de Ávalos, y las demas alcaldías mayores de la Galicia, cuyos alcaldes mayores dan las licencias", so that without the estanco the excess would not cease; and he proposes that such monopolies be taken "como ramos de real hacienda, que puede su Magestad aplicar, para fábricas de cárceles en las cabeceras de jurisdiccion, porque no las hay, de que se sigue que los reos hacen fuga, ó los conducen á la cárcel de corte de Guadalaxara; y de concederse los estancos se evitan otras bebidas, que embriagan y son nocivas". The complaint that district capitals had no jail at all, so that prisoners either escaped or were walked to the capital, is incidental evidence about the reach of colonial criminal administration in 1742 that the chapter offers without meaning to.
The limits of this entry. All of it is read from pages 334 and 335 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742, by a lawyer of the audiencia arguing for a revenue his own city holds and proposing its extension. No cedula, licence, contract or account was seen; the physicians' certification is reported at third hand — the author quoting a cedula quoting a fiscal quoting the physicians — and no physician is named. Nothing here establishes how much mescal wine was actually sold, whether the monopolist ever suppressed a rival brew, whether the 1,200 pesos a year were in fact paid over for the twelve years, or what indigenous drinkers in Nueva Galicia thought of any of it: no indigenous voice appears in the chapter. The claim that the palm wines were "saludables" is a seventeenth- century administrative opinion recorded as such, not a medical finding this entry endorses.