Borderline Production
Sandro Canovas, an activist around sotol production and its connections to Mexican identity (image: Jessica Lutz).
I took my shoes and socks off to wade through the slither of the Rio Grande – at that time of year, more mud than water. Leaving Big Bend National Park in Texas, I emerged into the small Mexican border village of Boquillas, slick with sweat and floppy with heat-induced fatigue. Both sides of the river, and the roughly corresponding border, are part of the vast Chihuahuan desert. Overhead, birds and floating seeds make the same journey that I just have indiscriminately.
You might struggle to identify the periphery of the Chihuahuan desert on Google Maps; quite possibly the cartographers have too, bearing in mind that it’s roughly the size of Afghanistan and traverses one national and many state borders. The national border, however, was rendered hyper visible when the United States closed the Boquillas border station after 9/11. Despite reopening in 2013, the poverty that this closure inflicted on Boquillas is palpable, as is the commodification of its culture through the sale of embroidered Indigenous textiles as a necessary lifeline. Today, the border is made tangible in its barbed wire detention centres and amongst the young white, Black and Mexican boys who are cooling off in a reservoir on their breaks from the continued building of Trump’s wall.
Regardless of geopolitics, the landscape on both sides of the border is much the same: white rocks that burn rose-gold as the sun sets; stretches of arid land scorched by a heat that refracts off the floor in waves; and cactuses, fat with stored water. It is in this impossible ecosystem that the native dasylirion plant grows best. Also called “desert spoon”, dasylirion takes approximately 15 years to mature, at which point its leaves can be peeled back to reveal a giant pinecone-like heart. When roasted in an underground wood-fired pit for three days, before being milled and stored in a vat to ferment and the residual liquid distilled, the spirit sotol is born.
Sotol was granted a domestic Denominación de origen (DO) classification in 2004. Similarly to the stipulation around the production of champagne and parmigiano reggiano, this classification from the Mexican authorities recognises that sotol is culturally tied to a ring-fenced region: the three Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. Historically, the Pueblo peoples ate dasylirion stems like artichoke leaves and used its fibres to make sandals and baskets as far back as the 12th century BCE, but around 800 years ago, the Native Rarámuri people began to produce a low- ABV sotol drink similar to beer or kvass, most likely for its medicinal and spiritual properties. It wasn’t until Spanish colonisers brought distilling techniques in the 16th century, however, that sotol became the spirit it is today (a drink of around 38 per cent ABV). Small distilleries quickly mushroomed throughout the desert, springing up wherever the plant grew.
The dasylirion plant (image courtesy of Israel Palacios).
Either drunk long and neat or in cocktails, sotol tastes clean and smooth. Juan Pablo Carvajal, co-founder of the brand Los Magos Sotol (“mago” meaning sorcerer in Spanish) describes it as “tasting of the ancient land it comes from”. Carvajal means this both metaphorically and literally. His brand’s website features a dramatic video with squawking eagles diving across the desert plains, burning embers, and floating spirits to evoke the drink’s mysticism. The 16 dasylirion varieties are flavoured by the prairie, forest and mountainous environments in which they grow, tasting like anything from leather, wet earth, tobacco and pine, to Carvajal’s own grassland variety, which is light and citrusy.
History, however, has put a deep chasm between sotol’s celestial origins and its being elevated to a protectable product. The spirit was outlawed in 1944 by the Mexico government, which peddled the narrative that sotol was akin to moonshine (aided by the fact that sotol had been bootlegged across the border to Americans thirsty from prohibition), and produced in small, local distilleries throughout the desert. It proved a state- sanctioned justification for the persecution and killing of sotoleros (sotol distillers) and this history proves the backdrop to the industry’s future relationship with the US. With its roots in Indigenous culture and Spanish colonisers, wrapped up in US-Mexican relationships, sotol embodies the region’s mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing) process. A melange of land contestation, persecution, survival and mysticism, sotol defies easy categorisation.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the Mexican government finally reversed its position, legalising and promoting sotol as a cultural asset and potentially lucrative commodity – a decision that was presumably not unconnected to the global rise in popularity of drinks such as mezcal and tequila. Despite sotol’s ancientness, its commercialisation and status as a product are still in their infancy. “If you want artisanal, this is the real thing,” Carvajal says with a knowing smile. “We’ve been working in the peripheries for hundreds of years – it just hasn’t had the opportunity to get out there. We’re still making it the way we did 100 years ago. This is the real deal.” This sense of lineage is important to the drink. Ricardo Pico, a Chihuahua native, is the co-founder of the sotol compendium Sotoleros and brand Nocheluna, and a sotol educator. He works, he tells me, in partnership with Don Lalo, a fourth- generation distiller. “Of the 12 main sotoleros in the region,” he tells me, “I regard Don Lalo as the master of the desert because he’s taught so many others. He’s a real survivor, and I feel so proud to be able to partner with him. He’s like a second father figure to me.” Pico describes the desert sotol that he and Don Lalo create as “mineraly, herbaceous, tasting of honey from the cooked sotol hearts, and with a mid-note of mint, and cacao that hits at the end.”
On the Texan side of the border, there is no existing lineage of sotoleros. Despite both this lack of historical precedent and the Mexican government’s DO, the US’s first commercial sotol producers, Desert Door, opened in 2017. While the US had agreed to honour the DO status of tequila and mezcal through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), sotol was excluded by virtue of its then illegality in Mexico. An opportunity to redress this exclusion arose when Donald Trump replaced the NAFTA agreement in 2020 with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and, for all of a moment, it was – at least in the draft version of the bill. Yet a group led by Texas’s Republican senator John Cornyn and backed by Desert Door intervened before it could be enshrined in law, arguing that sotol’s inclusion would kill Texas’s one-company sotol industry. The possibility of American recognition of the Mexican DO receded once more.
If DOs are the stamp of certification, however, terroir is its marketing device. Most commonly associated with wine, terroir is understood to be the taste of the soil, topography and climate that a drink has grown from. But it is much more than that. In a paper about the contestation of wines grown around national borders, anthropologist Daniel Monterescu describes terroir as “the palatable characteristics of place as a branded story of geographic distinction.” Physical characteristics are important, but storytelling and design – the soaring eagles and apparitions of Carvajal’s video – also help to thread taste and value into a cohesive narrative about the culture it espouses. Terroir becomes an organising principle that delineates edible authenticity from non: good vs. bad; tasteful vs. tasteless; real vs. fake.
These ideas have been picked up by the latest generation of Mexican sotol producers and storytellers. I asked Carvajal if he considers himself a cultural mediator of sorts. “In a way, yes,” he replied. “I’ve got friends who found the smokey part of the drink something difficult to get their palates around, often likening it to burnt tyres. So when we thought about our flavour profile, we wanted something that people would feel comfortable trying for the first time and would help them realise that the associations they had in their head were built on myths and stories,” he added. “So by triple distilling it and leaving it to rest before bottling, we made it less smoky, softer, but very flavourful and aromatic. It’s not like we invented anything really; this is still very much the flavour of the plant.”
Gaston Martinez, the founder of IZO spirits, recently added sotol to his existing repertoire of agave spirits. For him, the DO helps enforce quality control, which is important given that the vast majority of IZO’s market is in the United States and he sees his products as representative of his home region Durango, one of the three DO-mandated sotol states. “Having a DO is like going to the Olympics,” he says. “You’re going to put your shirt with the Mexican flag on and you’re going to do your best to win. Similarly, the DO becomes representative of Mexico, so you’ve got to do your best. When you drink sotol and recognise it’s been 15 years in the making, you start to respect the whole process and the people who made it,” he explains. “We wanted to reflect how refined and sophisticated the drink is. You’ll see our bottle is minimalist, elegant.” This bottle is long and lean, tapering slightly as it descends, while the sotol inside is burgundy in colour. It would not be hard to mistake it for wine. Martinez’s bottle, however, offers a very different take to Pico and Don Lalo’s Nocheluna range. Their bottles are chunky, the liquid ice-blue – everything about it is cool, down to its endorsement by Lenny Kravitz, the new celebrity face of Nocheluna. Martinez and Pico’s interpretations of the same drink are worlds apart.
The Texan distillery, Desert Door (image courtesy of Allyson Campbell).
What is deemed worthy of cultural protection or not is typically the result of political evaluation of the intersections between geography, tradition, craftsmanship and other similarly murky concepts. The government of Mexico, however, argues that DO-protected products exist first and foremost as those that are “factually” recognised by the public – it is following this ubiquitous recognition that the government protects it “through the corresponding declaration”. This, however, implies that some things are simply and unanimously important, but culture does not operate in this way. What we come to recognise as an emblem of culture is not natural: it comes into being through a series of particular decisions made by those in power, and which inevitably represent and elevate a particular group’s interests and interpretations. Culture is a shapeshifter that resists stratification: to suggest otherwise would also imply that culture has the immutable and clearly delineable contours of a cookie-cutter cut out, much like the hard edges of a political border. Sotol shows us that this is never the case.
Before travelling to Big Bend National Park, I stopped off in Marfa, Texas. Known primarily for its association with artist Donald Judd, the founder of the Chinati Foundation, as well as for housing Elmgreen & Dragset’s satirical Prada store sculpture, Marfa feels like a toy town. I arrived at the El Cosmico campsite in the dark of night and woke in a stupor, enchanted by Marfa’s seemingly infinite flow of orange juice, proliferation of bohemian head scarves not dissimilar from (but extortionately more expensive than) the ones found in Boquillas, and fleet of airstreams that suggest nomadism, despite being permanently moored. In Marfa, surrounded by its pastiche saloon doors and hanging third-eye motifs, it’s possible to forget your proximity to Mexico. Yet, ironically, it was here where I first came across sotol. Bottles of liquor made by Desert Door and the Marfa Spirit Co., which launched its sotol in 2021, were being sold in a beautiful concept store with an accompanying handout informing consumers of the recent “controversy” surrounding the spirit. Both companies have been smeared as “culture vultures” by the likes of Sandro Canovas, an activist who is a native of Mexico City and naturalised US citizen. “I just want people to understand that these gringos are stealing my people’s heritage to make a profit off tourists,” Canovas told Texas Monthly in May 2022. “They are taking business from Mexican sotoleros who have done this for generations.” Yet Josh Shepard, one of the three founders of Marfa Spirit Co., tells me that sotol’s culture is nuanced, and is one “that crosses the border [river] daily.” His collaborator – the sixth-generation sotolero Jacobo Jacquez of the distillery Sotol Don Celso – insists that it’s a “heritage that we share.”
Terroir is always in dialectical relationship with what it is not: can the introduction of one border neutralise the violence of another? Does the ringfencing of a DO product help to overcome the effects of an international border, elevating sotol to the status of a product that can compete on the international market? Or does the perpetual construction of borders through the pinpointing of origin breed spaces in which appropriation can flourish? The history of DOs can be traced to the 1935 French “appellation” label regulation system, which was couched in the French colonial project in Algeria. At that time, French producers introduced protectionist terminologies to help compete with French- Algerian colonists on the other side of the Mediterranean. What attempts to present itself as being grounded in natural landscape, is in fact rooted in political landscape. After all, the perimeters of sotol’s DO protection are expansive: it contains a variety of different ecosystems, as well as cultural histories around production processes. The artisanal is sprawling. So what exactly is the DO protecting? Ninety per cent of sotol is produced in Chihuahua and very little in Coahuila, so why is this state included in the DO whereas others, where the plant also grows, are not? Does the category’s expansiveness flatten sotol’s internal specificities and differences?
Similar debates have played out in the work of food art-activists Cooking Sections, who have investigated how cultural narratives tied to “terroir” are challenged by climate change in France’s cheese and wine industries. When Cooking Sections asked one producer how the terroir of their cheese has been affected by the changes in temperature, she replied: “We are producing cheese exactly like my great-grandmother, using the exact same method, the same cow, the same village,” before clarifying that “the grass is completely different, there is more drought, there is less rain.” In a nutshell, the cheese produced today is not the cheese it once was, despite its immobilising protection. Similarly to the circumscribing of culture, are DO’s anthropocentric claims over nature too essentialising and unyielding? In an essay published in food newsletter Vittles, writer Mina Miller discusses a public spat between two east London smoked salmon producers. The producers H Forman & Son’s “London Cure” salmon was the first of the two to receive a PGI (protected geographical indicator): the salmon must be cured and smoked with rock salt and oak smoke in the London boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. When the Secret Smokehouse, a local competitor, manufactured a product in keeping with the category’s stipulations, however, H Forman & Son accused them of being “fakes”. Miller hints at the issue at the heart of the matter: the PGI was introduced to “preserve the East End’s rich heritage of salmon smoking, but of course, Forman’s was the only smokehouse meeting that criteria at the [time]”. For Forman’s, sharing the PGI status diluted its value.
Los Magos sotol (image courtesy of Los Matos).
Similar discussions now seem to be swirling around sotol, with the DO having proved a cursory but important first line in the sand for the spirit. “A bunch of people have said how important it was to get recognition, so that they could feel empowered to have these conversations that we’re talking about,” Carvajal tells me. “If we recognise who we are and what we have, then I can recognise what you are and what you have, and then we can sit down and talk about what we can do together.” This is particularly true in a geography where the movement of people and the colonisation of land has been so violent.
Back in Marfa, I visited The Blessings of the Mystery, an exhibition by artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas at the Ballroom Marfa museum. It looked at the ways in which Indigenous and settler knowledge of the land collide, including a film in which Juan Mancias, chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, looks angrily and unforgettably down the lens of the camera. Swwathes of Indigenous lands were appropriated through the US’s 19th-century Westward Expansion project, with the Public Land Survey System aiding this occupation by displacing most tribes into reservations. The fact that 95 per cent of Somi Se’k – “Land of the Sun”, which is what the Carrizo Comecrudo people call the occupied land known as Texas – is private land is testament to this legacy. In their exhibition, Caycedo and de Rosas ask what immeasurable things – such as genocide and exploitation – have been excluded from the processes by which we map and understand land? After battling with the separation of time-zones, Mancias and I speak over Zoom. “Sotol was a big part of us before the white man came here,” he says. “It wasn’t only a food source – it’s got great healing properties, beyond alcoholism! It allowed us to homemake: it was a source of survival and meant we didn’t need to travel far because it grows so vociferously.”
The desert knows no borders and yet is almost entirely defined by them. For such a young and emerging (as far as commercialisation goes) industry, sotol’s reclaiming of terroir may present a unique opportunity to fashion a new cultural narrative that goes beyond the static political economy of the DO. Pico, for instance, postulates a future in which the DO may become far more localised, allowing for better communication to be made within the desert, and between the two countries. “At the end of the day,” he says, “there’s a lot more in common between Chihuahua and Texas than between Chihuahua and Chiapas.” Pico, Carvajal and Martinez all agree that language is an important place to start. “If something is traditional, it already has a name,” says Pico. “The word ‘sotol’ comes from the Nuhati word ‘zōtolin’, which means palm. So if Texan distillers want to go ahead and make their own drink – great. Just don’t call it sotol. It’s their opportunity to create a new story.” Thanks to some grassroots campaigning, as well as close relationships with Mexican producers such as Pico, the producers behind the Marfa Spirit Co. released a liquor earlier this year named “Far West Texas Desert Spirit”, which they did “in respect for our friends and producers in Mexico,” Shepard tells me. They do, however, still produce “Chihuahuan desert sotol” that is distilled and uses plants harvested in Mexico. “Our cultures are interdependent at the end of the day,” Pico says. “Governments and private entities should be closer. I get along very well with the guys from Marfa Spirit Co., and I respect that they changed their name. There is so much hate in politics right now. Food and beverages can unite us. Let’s get closer, have discussions and go from there.”
These conversations are vital. Until recently, sotol has been made from wild dasylirion. To ensure future sustainability of the plants, the DO mandates that only 40 per cent of all wild growing, mature plants can be extracted within a given area over a five-year period. The same is not true in the United States. “In Texas, there is no regulation about what you can take from private land [which accounts for 95 per cent of Texas], so we’re limited by the political border in a way that they aren’t,” Carvajal explains. “It’s not fair to have to compete and share shelf space with a spirit that has the same name but comes from a different tradition, has different terroir, and is governed by different regulations.” This legal discrepancy advantages Texas producers, whilst also causing concern for the plants’ posterity.
With the growth of the sotol market, however, producers are starting to farm plants on both sides of the border. “We need to make sure we don’t run into the same problems as agave, where the use of GMOs and monocultures have bred disease,” Pico continues. “That’s why we’re partnering up with researchers and farmers. It’s important we get this right.” There will need to be some joined-up thinking. The terroir of farmed dasylirion will be different to the wild kind – the possibilities of its future and all that it represents is wide open – but Pico is diplomatic and calm in expressing his concerns and hopes. “My biggest worry about production in Texas is that they decide not to take care of the land in the way that it needs,” he says. “I don’t mean to tell people what they need to do, but I do want people to take care of the land. It is important for people to show respect to other people. My biggest hope is that we can sit down and show the respect that is needed to everyone involved. Hopefully from that respect, a community can grow. I would rather not be pissed off; I would rather work towards building a stronger community.”
The taste of sotol is still new to me. As I swilled the liquor around my mouth, I picked up on some tastes and smells that were discernibly familiar: dried fruits, smokey grass. But there are other things my palette can’t quite distinguish. Sotol’s taste and the crafting of its multi-threaded terroir will continue to evolve. As producers attempt to heave this drink’s cultural ancestry into the present, we must remind ourselves of the constant and ongoing ruptures necessary in the process of placemaking. It calls for transparency, respect, and the forging and redressing of relationships – old and new. Perhaps over a long glass of cold sotol. Because sotol is, in many ways, the tale of how the local is always nebulous: it is local only insofar as it is connected and even puppeteered by a giant web of largely camouflaged global policies. It has become the totem of its own history: like the insistence and resilience of sotoleros, the plant grows in the most belligerent conditions. And thanks to the controversy around Texan production, it is an emblem of its geopolitical history and arguable cultural erasure. Despite this, however, terroir is here to stay. “If the spirit tastes of the land, then we can reference it and let people know of the beauty here,” Carvajal says. “Then they can come to understand that there are rich cultures here, and these cultures are beautiful. This desert is magical, and it tastes like sotol.”
Words Lily Wakeley
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.