Since 2019, I’ve been researching the history of connections between alcohol and drinking, and ideas about race and ethnicity, in the United States, Mexico and other parts of the world. This was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Leadership Fellowship, from 2019 to 2022, but as is often the way, we keep doing the history long after the funding stops, and so here we are in 2024 and I’m still at it!

It began with an idea for an academic history book – what university professors call a ‘monograph’ – charting the development of racial stereotypes about drinking in the US and Mexico between 1845 and 1940, paying particular attention to how those stereotypes circulated and interacted across borders. This 95-year period – and I can now no longer remember why I didn’t just round it up and go 1840-1940 or 1845-1945, but the reason was probably pedantic – was marked by increasing intercultural exchange and conflict between the US and Mexico, and by racial ideologies underpinning ideas about national identity in both countries. I set out to compare the movement of different racial stereotypes about drinking within and across borders during four key spaces of heightened international exchange: the Mexican American War (1846-48), international exhibitions (1876-1929), international anti-alcohol conferences (1885-1939) and international temperance activity (1891-1940).

Lots of trans-Atlantic travel to libraries and archives, and a complicated hiatus enforced by global events, later things have gone in a different direction. So this section of the blog is going to be about how this research has evolved over time, the talks, presentations, and publications that have emerged from it so far, and others that are on the way.