The Brooklyn Rail

The best books fundamentally alter your sense of history.

Ted Genoways’s Tequila Wars is a little bit Gabriel García Márquez, a little bit Mario Puzo, maybe a little bit Deadwood, and even a little bit Cormanc McCarthy, at times. It’s the history of a man who becomes a brand, which is to say that he becomes almost incorporeal, mythical, a figure who looms and whose story, straddling the highs and lows of political and military life, refracts the history of a nation, a culture.

Genoways and I are neighbors in Tulsa, Oklahoma—nevertheless, our exchange was conducted by email.

J.C. Hallman (Rail): In your acknowledgements you offer some hints as to how your interest in José Cuervo may have come about—can you be more specific? You write with clear passion for the subject. How did that passion take hold, and where did it come from? Relatedly, what was the first source you found that made you think, “This is a book”?

Ted Genoways: My dad is a biologist. He spent the years right before I was born studying bats in Jalisco. When I was young, my dad got hired at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which had an international exchange program for scientists, so he brought in some of the Mexican scientists he’d worked with. They stayed with us at our home—and there were lots of late-night stories of the Tequila Valley. I always wanted to see the region for myself.

Years later, I pitched a story to Bloomberg Businessweek on how the tequila industry was dealing with its booming popularity, including nascent moves to improve conservation efforts on behalf of migratory bat populations. I expected that to be a one-off magazine story, but I instantly fell in love with the town of Tequila, the city of Guadalajara, the Highlands to the east—the whole region. At first, I thought this would be the book—just a snapshot of the current industry, but I got more and more fascinated by the history, which essentially hadn’t been told before.

I did a lot of digging through the academic literature. A couple of sources referenced documents in the archives of the Supreme Court in Guadalajara. I went there on a fishing expedition, just to see what was available. It turned out to be a treasure trove—the first of several. That archive has all of the land records, civil records, and criminal records from Jalisco from the nineteenth century through the modern era. Seeing some detailed complaints against well-known tequila makers alongside their responses made me start to think: maybe there’s enough for a book that’s all history.

Rail: I’m very interested in beginnings—how books launch themselves. Your first paragraph is moody and evocative. What are you attempting to achieve here? Was it always the start?

Genoways: So the second important resource that I encountered was a pair of self-published memoirs, really autobiographical vignettes, by Guadalupe Gallardo González-Rubio, the niece of José Cuervo who grew up in his household from the age of about six. Her essays are incredibly rich and detailed but also frustratingly fragmentary and decontextualized. They’re really a series of childhood impressions, but they provided an important counterpoint to all of the legal documents at the archives. I could find records of a legal dispute in the archive, and then Lupe (as she was known) would supply a sense of the mood in the household at the time.

The first crucial example of this was a vignette from Lupe about her uncle fleeing from revolutionaries who wanted to arrest him. She doesn’t explain why they were after him or even provide clues as to when that was. From official records, I eventually figured out that Cuervo was fleeing Guadalajara while forces under command of Pancho Villa and Álvaro Obregón were closing in, and the Mexican president Victoriano Huerta was afraid that Cuervo would side with those revolutionary forces. That was key context, but the story—what brought that moment alive—was Lupe’s memory of Cuervo slipping out of their home, leaping rooftop to rooftop, and making his way to a nephew’s home to borrow his horse to flee the city. She provides the singular details of that night (that he fled in a suit that grew dusty from the ride, that he blew tequila into the horse’s nostrils to kill the pain in its aching hooves and ankles).

I wanted to start the book there, because it’s dramatic. But I also wanted to replicate my own experience for readers—that feeling of seeing a world unfold and become clear as you make sense of the emerging details and stitch them together.

Rail: I came into the book expecting something along the lines of a subculture ethnography—the history of a product. It became apparent, though, that the book was as much or more about politics and civilization and war. Did that happen to you as well? Did your conception of what the book would become evolve as you sank deeper into the history?

Genoways: When I first set out to tell the early history of the industry, I thought I’d spend equal time with a number of the major families—the Cuervo and Sauza families, yes, but also the Rosales family behind Herradura and some lesser-known families like the Orendain and Martinez families. But as I researched, I discovered that the Cuervos and Sauzas were really the key political players. And it was really Cenobio Sauza in the nineteenth century who was in competition with José Cuervo’s father, Malaquías, and his uncle Florentino Cuervo. I started to see: this was the story of two competing families in the early modern era of Mexico, as Porfirio Díaz took control of the country, and then it was the story of José Cuervo taking command of the entire industry and guiding it through the turmoil leading up to and through the Mexican Revolution.

What surprised me, the more I dug, was just how deeply involved these families were in the dramatic events all around them. Florentino Cuervo, José’s uncle, was a military commander who helped bring Díaz to the presidency. Cuervo family members were governors and lieutenant governors of Jalisco. Both families had multiple family members who were mayors of Tequila and other tequila-making villages. What I soon realized: the only way to effectively build the infrastructure to expand their businesses was to be enmeshed in politics. To bring a railroad or electrical lines to Tequila, to guarantee military support or affect tax laws required lobbying leaders and often taking leadership roles directly. In time, I came to see that the history of tequila is the history of Mexico.

Rail: You make the point that no previous book has told this story. So this is a lot of original sourcework. Can you describe the kinds of sources you were relying on? Where were they, how did you find them, etc.?

Genoways: The thing that convinced me to try telling this story from historical sources was the richness of Guadalupe Gallardo’s two privately printed two books of reminiscences. The books are composed in impressionistic mini essays—usually three or four pages—and are mostly random memories of neighbors, family members, friends. But there are also a few key memories of José Cuervo himself and his wife Ana González-Rubio, who was very close with Lupe.

So I had a small group of glimpses of personal life during the Mexican Revolution—and I wondered if I could match those to the historical context and maybe other supporting materials. At first, it was a bit of shooting in the dark. I knew there would be land records, records of civil disputes, tax payments, and so on. But eventually, I found criminal complaints, government investigations, reports of revolutionary attacks on Tequila. Little by little, things started to come into view. It was then that I began to approach the descendants of the Cuervo and Sauza families.

Luis Cuervo Hernandez published a genealogical history of the Cuervo family while I was in Guadalajara in 2019. That book included some manuscript materials, so I went to the launch party and met him and started sharing some discoveries back and forth. Maybe the biggest break came when Guillermo Erickson Sauza, a great-great grandson of Cenobio Sauza, agreed to let me access his family archive in Tequila. It’s the biggest and best collection of tequila documents in existence, and that filled in a lot of gaps for me. There were letters from Cenobio Sauza, letters between his sons Eladio and Luís Sauza, from José Cuervo and his brothers. Everything was built one document at a time, one discovery to the next.

The whole process took a decade.

Rail: Did you have strategies for how to proceed when there simply was no source material for a particular gap in the narrative? Or when sources conflicted with one another?

Genoways: So this was a major challenge! In some cases, I spent years trying to fill in a gap and finally succeeded. That was always amazing—but it also meant that it was difficult to know when to give up and concede that some materials just didn’t exist. The most dramatic years, the years of the Mexican Revolution, were also years in which all records in the town of Tequila were burned multiple times and all records in Guadalajara were burned at least as often. There was an active effort by revolutionaries to cover up all correspondence they had generated—and tequila makers like José Cuervo were trying to cover their tracks, too. You didn’t want to leave a paper trail, because any records could potentially be used against you. Cuervo learned this firsthand when two letters to a nephew were intercepted by revolutionary forces and presented as evidence against him at a trial for treason.

So, in many cases, the documents are simply not there. Then, it was necessary to simply acknowledge the gap—and, to some degree, interpret it. There were several points in time where Cuervo disappeared from view while his allies remained vocal and publicly involved. Almost all of them wound up murdered, put before firing squads and simply shot and dumped in a public place. Telling some of those stories helped to explain why Cuervo was in hiding.

Conflicting sources was much less of an issue. If anything, I was often stunned by how multiple sources from single events matched up and corroborated each other. One of the dramatic scenes in the book is when Pancho Villa calls a meeting of tequila makers and threatens to erect a guillotine for them on the square in Guadalajara if they don’t pay him a steep bribe. As it happens, the meeting was attended by several foreign consuls in the city, who transcribed Villa’s threats word for word. Remarkably, the words taken down by the French consul (the most complete transcription) match up almost exactly with other transcriptions. I mean, variations of just a word or two, here or there. Those moments always just gave me a chill; it’s like being in the room.

Rail: The book includes both careful footnoting but also moments when you’re bringing a creative process to bear in the form of narrative storytelling techniques. What is your thinking here, on the theory of storytelling? Did you fashion any sort of “rules” for yourself in terms of when and how to set out to evoke mood and atmosphere?

Genoways: The most basic rule was that I didn’t introduce any facts that weren’t in archival evidence. When I describe Cuervo jumping from rooftop to rooftop in the dead of night to make his escape from revolutionary spies, that incident is described in detail by his niece Lupe. The district he fled through was also described by her elsewhere, so I made use of that to fill in some detail. And Cuervo rode away from the city that night on a black horse borrowed from one of his nephews—Lupe records this and records his route—so I looked at historical maps and visited that route to look for landmarks he would have passed. In short, I did as much research as possible and as little imagining as possible.

That said, there are places where you draw together different sources and interpret them. I had an account of the French consul meeting with Cuervo on the street in Guadalajara in January 1915 and telling Cuervo that the government was about to start seizing some of his lands. The consul reports that Cuervo was strangely unconcerned by this news. Looking at the land records, I found that Cuervo had sold and transferred ownership of those lands just days before. No wonder he wasn’t worried—it was someone else’s problem now! So it’s possible in an instance like that to put two facts side by side and see the connection.

I think you can also divine motives from certain documents. When Cuervo was building his business, the parish priest in Tequila raised concerns about increased public drunkenness. Cuervo almost immediately paid for the dirt floor of the church to be replaced with an elaborate parquet wood floor. He paid for the project with a loan and arranged for the bank to transfer ownership of the note to the priest himself, so he not only got the wood floor but also a monthly payment. Soon after, the priest was no longer concerned about Cuervo’s tequila production. Those are all facts—but I think you can also see Cuervo’s shrewdness; it tells you something about the man and his understanding of human beings (even priests).

Rail: This is maybe a similar question, but can you talk about the process of calling on techniques of storytelling and narrative strategies to make a complicated past compelling and exciting without distorting the history?

Genoways: The real gift of Lupe’s accounts of José Cuervo and his home life is that she had an incredible eye for detail. At one point, she describes riding by stagecoach from Guadalajara to Tequila. That would be a fairly dry set of facts in the hands of most observers. But she remembers how they always left around midnight so they wouldn’t be traveling in the heat of day. She describes the rutted road making the women rock around and knock heads inside the coach. And she recalls how the wagon broke a wheel, so she had to wrap herself in a blanket and walk out into a field of chirping crickets while she waited for the men to make the necessary repairs.

When you have those kinds of details, you kind of write toward them, if that makes sense. That story, for example, bought me a lot of latitude in explaining the importance of the military road they were traveling—its poor condition, the need to replace it with a rail line. I could get away with that discussion, because it was wrapped in Lupe’s story. It’s so quiet, but it’s so vivid that you feel as if you’re right there.

That was the funny thing about this project. Usually, you’re looking for action—something that reveals your subject’s character in the face of crisis and makes him active. With this project, I was actually looking for moments of quiet. The years of the revolution produced lots of gun fights and attacks on railroads and other kinds of spectacular violence. Those incidents usually generated some kind of investigation and report—so it was easier to find details about explosions of violence than it was the calm in between. Once I realized that the details of daily life were necessary narrative pauses, maybe more important than the shootouts, then everything started to fall into place.

So my favorite passage surrounding Álvaro Obregón’s seizure of Guadalajara, for example, is Lupe describing how everyone in the household knew the troops would enter the city at dawn, so no one could sleep all through the night. She remembers watching the latticed shadow of the window frame, illuminated by the moon, as it creeps across the floor of her room. Those moments of anticipation and calm are riveting to me.

Rail: The story loosely follows the life of José Cuervo—but it may be more accurately described as the saga of the Cuervo family. Was there a particular character, apart from José, who surprised you by coming to the fore and demanding additional narrative attention as you wrote?

Genoways: Aside from Cuervo, I was utterly fascinated by his uncle Florentino Cuervo. José’s father, Malaquías, was much like José himself—practical, even-tempered, careful. Florentino was just the opposite: impulsive, petulant, and violent. He became a military commander which means that he generated a fair amount of official correspondence. Usually that correspondence is officious and sterile, but his personality is on full display in those letters. The correspondence is scattered in collections from Texas to Mexico City, so it was a chore to assemble, but every new letter yielded treasures—some new bitter and sharp-tongued turn of phrase, some unguarded critique of a rival or political leader. He became a really fun foil to José’s father, who was always building alliances and trying to carefully work political connections.

Rail: About halfway through the book, there’s a remarkable image of a famous actress discovering the wheels of her carriage covered with blood after she has her driver take her past the scene of a shooting. Did you find yourself drawn to vivid images like these? Did any particular image or images come to serve as a guiding principle or controlling metaphor as you worked?

Genoways: These scenes were really how the architecture of the book was determined. The whole thing started with places where the archives yielded enough depth of detail to create fully realized scenes. Once those were in place, it was a matter of writing from one to the next. It was a kind of narrative game of Frogger. I could hang out on a log recreating a detailed scene but then I’d have to move as quickly as possible to the next spot in the narrative.

The only guiding principle in selecting and shaping those scenes was to try to make them cohere from one to the next. It was exciting to find accounts of people being thrown off their land in the 1880s by Cenobio Sauza, for example. The details of burning fields and cutting down trees were vivid and compelling. But that scene really became important when I discovered that one of the people Sauza had displaced would thirty years later become the leader of the revolutionary movement in Tequila, with an emphasis on demanding that stolen lands be returned. Now it wasn’t just vivid; it was revealing.

Rail: It becomes so clearly a kind of allegory for civilizations—the milieu of García Márquez is palpable, very early on—when did the story start to have that kind of scope for you?

Genoways: When I set out, I thought I’d just focus on the life of José Cuervo himself. He’s the famous name, after all, and his rise closely mirrors the moment of crisis for all of Mexico. But eventually I came to recognize that you don’t really understand what Cuervo had at stake without understanding something of his family history. His father built an empire on a particular ethos and vision for the future of the country but then left his business in a precarious state. José and his brothers were at odds about how best to preserve that legacy—and, when they couldn’t save it, they fought over how to rebuild that empire. It becomes a multi-generational struggle between brothers who want to build influence through cooperation and those who want to build power through dominance. It’s about the tension between slow, peaceful transition and violent revolution. Those kinds of bigger questions—how we build civilizations, what becomes the defining character of a culture—give the story an epic sweep. They’re so much in evidence that I certainly didn’t want to give them short shrift.

Rail: How did you approach and resolve the question of whether you were the right person to write this story, and did your usual process change in any way as a function of stepping outside of your own ethnic identity to write the book?

Genoways: I think this is an interesting question when we’re talking about tequila. It begins as an indigenous drink. But the Spanish introduced double distillation after the Conquest. The French brought barrel aging during the French Intervention. Germans, who made up key members of the French invading forces, revolutionized distillation and baking technology and contributed significant research to the natural history of agaves. Soon after, in the 1880s, tequila makers began trying to tailor their product to American palates and to whisky drinkers in the British Isles. By the turn of the twentieth century, Cuervo’s modernization projects involved Southern Pacific, St. Louis dam-builders, German steel manufacturers, and French electricity companies. So it’s very much an international story—and the biggest problems of Cuervo’s life, aside from the direct violence of the Mexican Revolution, involved US government efforts to keep him away from American drinkers.

That said, I didn’t grow up in Tequila or Guadalajara. I don’t know the language, culture, or social circles in the way that a local would. So that’s a hurdle to overcome. To the best of my ability, I addressed that by having lots of interaction with modern-day members of these families—gathering stories, getting a feel for family and social dynamics—and I had lots of people who checked my translations of source materials. It’s easy to make mistakes or to miss something, so I relied on people who really knew the milieu—if not the precise history—to guide me in those ways. This is part of the reason that the book took more than a decade to complete. I didn’t want this to feel like an outsider’s quick-hit history; I wanted it to feel like a world that you were being welcomed into, just as I was.

Rail: As I said, the book evoked García Márquez for me, but also Mario Puzo, maybe even a little Cormac McCarthy? Were these kinds of associations occurring to you as you researched and wrote the book? Did you work to accentuate those connections, or did they just emerge out of the research and the story?

Genoways: Well, you’re speaking my language. García Márquez is always in my mind when thinking about how to depict village life. Puzo’s multi-generational saga is a clear inspiration for how I approached the weight of family history that José Cuervo had to bear. And, yes, when it comes time to describe a shootout with blood in the streets and threats snarled through clenched teeth, it’s hard not to have Cormac McCarthy in the back of your mind. So was I drawing from those sources? Honestly, yes, but I was also aware that I couldn’t achieve their level of psychological depth—because of the limitations of nonfiction and because of my limitations as a writer. So I could aspire to those heights with full knowledge that they weren’t attainable, especially for a mere mortal like me. But, I hope, what you get instead is a story that hues religiously to the truth while seeing how it echoes some of those almost mythical narratives.

Rail: What do you feel the book has to say about civilization and politics? What sorts of lessons about this particular have to offer to the modern world, to our current political predicament?

Genoways: Well, as I said, the story is often about the tension between cooperation and conflict. That narrative reaches its pinnacle in Cuervo’s adaptation of the German cartel model to the needs of the tequila industry in the late stages of the revolution. The families must band together to survive the crisis of war—but an element of that is arming themselves and building market monopolies. It feels inevitable that, almost as soon as that cooperation begins to succeed and the war subsides, the agreement unravels and descends into conflict between families. Pride and greed rear their ugly heads. Disputes emerge. And now, everyone is heavily armed, with more and more money at stake. I think this is just human nature and probably the fate of all civilizations. We find ways to work together when the need arises, but prosperity breeds a particular kind of unrest—the desire to profit but also to control.

The clearest parallel to our present moment is that President Donald Trump has a Captain Queeg-like obsession with “the border”—building a wall, expanding military and border patrol presence, stepping up interdiction, looking for ways to punish Mexico. The thing is: all of those things have been tried. During World War I, José Cuervo was placed on the Enemy Traders list and barred from doing business in the United States. Soon after, importation of all tequila was banned. We built the first border fence and allocated funds to start the border patrol in that same era. Before long, we had National Prohibition and Texas Rangers patrolling the Rio Grande Valley, looking for smugglers carrying tequila on mule-trains. But, in the end, all it did was make José Cuervo into a legendary name and increase the price and demand for tequila. We know this from history, so why do it again? I think it’s the same answer: the desire to dominate, to win. We always think we can overcome history. We can’t.