TEQUILA WARS: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico, by Ted Genoways


As far as personal branding goes, getting name-checked in multiple chart-topping singles isn’t a bad strategy. To quote just one, Shelly West’s 1983 country-radio banger: “José Cuervo, you are a friend of mine/I like to drink you with a little salt and lime.”

But there’s a complex life behind this name, so often tossed around in American overindulgence ditties, and in “Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico,” the James Beard Award-winning author Ted Genoways has dug deep to find it.

“José Cuervo is arguably the most famous name in Mexican history, but because of his own reticence and carefulness, because of the documentary absences in public and private archives, and because of his tight-lipped community and the passage of time,” writes Genoways, “many people today do not even realize he was a real person.” His densely packed biography of José Cuervo Labastida y Flores is a textured account that details Cuervo’s relationships with rival tequila producers, and his efforts to survive in a politically unstable era.

By drawing on family, newspaper, government and university archives, as well as the extant scraps of Cuervo’s professional and personal correspondence, Genoways is able to paint a nuanced portrait of an elusive figure. Memories recorded by Guadalupe Gallardo González Rubio, Cuervo’s niece, provide many of the book’s more colorful passages (including rare vignettes of happy family times) — although, as Genoways warns, her “ornate, sensitive and marvelously detailed accounts are also frustratingly short on basic facts,” like accurate dates.

“Tequila Wars” opens with a reimagining of Cuervo’s 1914 escape on horseback from his Guadalajara mansion, after getting word that Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army is on the way to arrest him for backing the wrong side in Mexico’s chaotic civil war.Following a brief stop to blow a mouthful of tequila up his exhausted steed’s nostrils (depicted here as a folk cure for equine hoof pain), Cuervo goes into hiding.

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