Who hasn't heard of José Cuervo? The brand is ubiquitous. But the man? Few know his story. In Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico, award-winning journalist Ted Genoways turns his eye on Cuervo himself and chronicles how he transformed a struggling family business into an agave kingdom, all while navigating death threats from Pancho Villa and being branded a public enemy of the United States.
Evan Kleiman: Your book starts out in the tumultuous late 1800s, which is rife with violence. There's a lot of social backstabbing, there are political coups and there are two family names that are prominent in the valley of tequila — Cuervo and Sauza. Give us some background for these two families and how they gained a foothold in this budding tequila industry.
"Tequila Wars" chronicles how José Cuervo, railroads, and the 1904 World's Fair changed the way Americans drink. Photo courtesy of W. W. Norton.
Ted Genoways: The Cuervo family is really the first to come into the Tequila Valley and make an empire of making the spirit that was then called vino mezcal, which is to say a wine made from the mezcal plant, the agave plant. They were really the lords of the Tequila Valley for a century before José Cuervo was born.
But at the same time that he was a child and was learning to make tequila, on the neighboring estate was a young man named Cenobio Sauza, who was also learning the trade and was starting to build an empire of his own. Through the late 19th century and the early 20th century, the leaders in the industry were the Cuervo and Sauza families, and those brands remain at the top of the industry today.
In the late 1800s, the Cuervo and Sauza families gained a foothold in the budding tequila industry. Photo courtesy of W. W. Norton.
There is so much about this story that, although it is historic, seems remarkably applicable to our times. Tell me a little about the border between the US and Mexico at this time, and how the railroad changed everything.
From a very early stage, what the tequila industry recognized is that American drinkers were willing and able to pay a great deal more for their product than Mexicans could. So the industry made an effort to try to get their product to the border and to American drinkers. The problem was that in the 19th century, the railroad network in Mexico was far behind that in the United States, so the first obstacle that they faced was trying to get railroads built, and especially to get North-running railroads so that they would be able to reach the border.
Much of the late 19th century is about José Cuervo and Cenobio Sauza working to lobby the government to build these railroads so that they could move their product north. That put them in cooperation at various times as they were sharing this interest and trying to expand their market but it also sometimes put them in competition as they had different ideas about how this should be done. This is the beginning of this complicated relationship between the two families.
José Cuervo, circa 1914. Photo courtesy of W. W. Norton.
José Cuervo takes this new railroad line that's finally built to St Louis to debut his product at the 1904 World's Fair. Describe the scene and what was in the bottles that he took with him. Would we recognize the tequila that José Cuervo was making in 1904 as the same product that we drink today?
Let me take the second part first, because it's an interesting question. The tequila that was being made over a century ago when Cuervo first took over his family business would have been, at that point, transitioning over from in-ground ovens that impart the smoky flavor that we think of as typical of mezcal to using steam ovens that are typical of the tequila industry. So that would have been quite similar. The difference is that the range of agaves that were used at that time is wider than it is now. So I think we would recognize it as tequila but I think it would probably be a bit of a wilder flavor to us, something that would seem a bit more raw than what we're accustomed to with the tequilas that are made today.
But this was the beginning of introducing this product to the American drinker, at a place where everything was aiming toward electrifying and modernizing. Cuervo was seeing all of these new technologies and also becoming aware of American tastes. So the modifications that were happening were partly technological but also partly aiming toward the American palate and figuring out what American consumers would prefer.
Interior of La Rojeña, showing the column stills installed by Jesús Flores. Photo courtesy of W. W. Norton.
So this fair is startling. The vision of modernity and the future it displays and all the different exhibitions to fairgoers is truly another world at that time. What was Cuervo's takeaway from his exposure to this kind of modernity when he goes back to Jalisco?
The main thing that he recognized is that if the industry didn't modernize quickly, that it was going to get left behind. What he was seeing was machine-made bottles and all of the products and the new technologies that relied on the telegraph and on electricity. What he recognized was that they needed to have the railroad built to Tequila right away. They needed to have electricity that would be carried on lines that would be erected next to the railroad tracks as they made their way through the valley. He recognized that they needed new technology. They needed telephones. They needed steam-powered equipment that would produce more tequila. If they were going to compete, they needed to be part of the modern world.
As this happens, as Mexico begins to modernize, the working class becomes increasingly disgruntled, as they see the rich benefit and foreign companies gain contracts in Mexico, and the country is ripe for revolution. Can you set the political scene and how Cuervo and his colleagues navigate these shifting tides?
Well, exactly as you described. They recognized that people were disgruntled. They recognized that this new technology was also allowing people to move and to communicate better. So labor organizers were coming into Tequila and communication was traveling over the wire and newspapers were popping up that were sharing information. The thing that Cuervo, in particular, recognized was that the industry needed to respond. It needed to do more for its workers and for the town of Tequila, where the product was made. They needed to try to play an active role in stabilizing the politics of the country.
Cuervo's grand plan was to try to keep Porfirio Díaz, the president of the country, in power who had been ruling over the country since the 1870s but to modernize and to liberalize at the level of the state government. And he played a very active role in trying to shape who would be the governor and eventually was appointed to be the speaker of the state congress as well. So he got directly involved in politics and tried his best to show that there was progress that was perhaps slow and steady but would not cause the disruption that revolution would bring.
It was during this time of unrest that Cuervo and his colleagues formed a union of tequila makers, which is considered to be the first Mexican cartel. What was their vision and did it bear any resemblance to the modern cartel?
I think this was the great revelation of all of the research in this book, that Cuervo recognizing that revolution couldn't be avoided and that destruction from years of war meant that that people had factories that had been canonated, they had fields that had been burned, that the railroad lines that they had built and had gone to such trouble to have built were blown up and the distribution was disrupted. The only way they were going to get through it was to all work together. So the cartel system, at its origin, was really just a cooperative.
Cuervo's nephew, who was the German consul in Guadalajara, was the person who seems to have provided this word to Cuervo. It's a German word that describes a kind of collective model creating these vertically integrated monopolies so that you can control all parts of your production and distribution. Eventually, what the brands did was sit down, and exactly as we would imagine, they carved up territory, they set prices, they agreed not to compete with each other, and they put all of that on paper and signed it as a shared agreement.
In that way, it does resemble the cartels of today. But at the time, there was nothing illegal about what they were doing. Where things became a little bit more of a gray market is when the US instituted Prohibition and those companies started trying to move their product to the border, where they knew that there would be a robust market in people who were going to buy their bottles of tequila and smuggle it across the border. They recognized the market opportunity in that. It doesn't appear that they did the smuggling themselves but they were certainly supplying the black market that emerged there.
"I think we might not know the name José Cuervo if not for the institution of Prohibition," says journalist Ted Genoways. Photo by Mary Anne Andrei.
You write that toward the end of the Civil War, José Cuervo was an official enemy of the United States. What was the relationship between the US and Mexico at this time? And why was Cuervo a target?
At a point in 1917, with World War I raging in Europe, the Germans were concerned about the US entering the war and coming in on the side of the Western powers. So they approached Mexico about the possibility of entering on the German side, and this would keep the US occupied in North America. The United States responded by entering the war, but also by establishing a list of companies and individuals who were considered to be enemies of the United States. Because José Cuervo's nephew was the German consul, and because he had another nephew who was running the distillery by then, who was also German, there was great concern that his company was under German influence.
Especially considering that Cuervo had shown that he was armed during the Mexican Revolution, and that he now had access to all of these railroads that they had built, and had specifically built those railroads to run toward the border, there was a concern that a company like Cuervo could arm revolutionaries and ride them to the border where they would be able to flow across and enter the US and start a war. So Cuervo was carefully monitored, and he was officially declared an enemy of the United States.
I think about what's happening today, with so much scrutiny around the US/Mexico border and the threat of tariffs lingering over all international goods. I wonder how, through the lens of history, you are thinking about this moment in US/Mexico history.
Yeah, well, this moment where the US declares Cuervo an enemy of the state and closes the borders to all importation of tequila, and then at the end of the war, makes that even more formal by instituting national Prohibition and preventing all alcohol from entering or being produced in the country, all that effort did was create a huge market for tequila. It created a great deal of revenue for the producers in Mexico so that they were able to rebuild after the revolution. And the more that the US built fence and created the Border Patrol and brought customs agents and military to the border, the more that just drove up the price of tequila and made it more desirable.
I think we might not know the name José Cuervo, if not for the institution of Prohibition and the whole border apparatus that we built trying to keep his product out of the country. Instead of making it something that was blocked and kept out, it made it something that was highly coveted, and made José Cuervo, as the maker of the best tequila at the time, the person and the brand that that everyone was after the most.
When and how does José Cuervo meet his end?
Shortly after the start of Prohibition, there's an election in Mexico, and that is really when the cartel, among all of the producers, unravels. In the wake of that, there's a great deal of political upheaval.
Cuervo's brother, Carlos, was a member of the Mexican Congress in Mexico City, and he was stirring up a lot of the trouble that was happening there. José Cuervo went to Mexico City to have dinner with his brother to counsel him to be more moderate in his rhetoric. The two of them had dinner together, and the next day, both of them fell desperately ill. Carlos was bedridden for weeks and eventually recovered but José Cuervo died in the days after.
The rumor spread, and has persisted, that they were poisoned, and the belief is that the target was most likely Carlos, not José, but because they had eaten together, that José met his end by arriving in Mexico City and hoping to convince his brother to be more temperate.