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A Social History of Alcohol and Other Drugs since 2000: Latin America

By David M. Fahey

Latin America

Looking at Latin America as a whole, the collection Alcohol in Latin America from editors Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui considers the centrality of the production, consumption, and regulation of alcohol to histories across the continent. It is worth noting that the volume focuses most strongly on Mexico. Other volumes that treat Mexico explicitly include Timothy Mitchell’s Intoxicated Identities: Alcohol’s Power in Mexico’s History and Culture, Isaac Campos’s Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origin of Mexico’s War on Drugs, and Deborah Toner’s Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.

For volumes that look at the Andes, there is Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, edited by Justin Jennings and Brenda J. Bowser, and The Origins of Cocaine: Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes, edited by Paul Gootenberg and Liliana M. Davalos.

Readers interested in Central America may wish to peruse the collection Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History, from editor David Carey, while those seeking a volume on the Caribbean may turn to Frederick H. Smith’s Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History.

Works Cited