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In a sixteenth-century report into the treatment of Amerindians in its new world colonies, the Spanish Council of the Indies noted that ‘all Indians are inclined to vice and drunkenness and laziness, never applying themselves willingly to any sort of labour’. 1 Indians, a Spanish physician concurred, were ‘given to wine and drunkenness’. 2 A few decades earlier a colonial account of pre-conquest indigenous culture in Peru similarly concluded that ‘drunkenness and intemperance in drinking was a characteristic passion of these people’. 3 In the late eighteenth century a priest in colonial Mexico commented that ‘everyone knows the Indians’ predisposition to drunkenness’. 4 One could easily cite a stream of comments spanning the intervening two hundred years, and from across Spanish America, that make the same observation about Amerindians and their tendency to get drunk. Proclivity to drunkenness, in short, was one of the criticisms most frequently levelled against Spanish...
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