In a region where historians have emphasized the impact of such export and subsistence commodities as coffee, bananas, and corn, they largely have neglected the crucial role of alcohol. A burgeoning field ripe with the potential of understanding Latin America’s past in innovative and original ways, the historiography of alcohol in Latin America pales in comparison to the rich corpus of literature on Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States. With the postmodern and social history turn in the last decades of the 20th century, scholars used alcohol as a lens through which to examine gender, ethnic, class, and race relations. Even as the field continues to grow as the 21st century unfolds, the role that local vendors and community leaders played in making alcohol readily available demands closer examination as does the study of how integral and essential alcohol was to indigenous and Afro-Latin American life. These and other topics promise to be rich lines of inquiry. What makes studying alcohol challenging is that its social meaning (particularly in indigenous communities) and economic significance are often elusive. Alcohol could unite or divide people. As ritual consumption and production customs demonstrate, alcohol drinkways reconstituted and revived communities across time. Ranging from a social lubricant to medicine and a substitute for potable water, alcohol served many functions and played many roles. Countervailing gendered interests are on full display in studies of alcohol from the women who produced, sold, and consumed moonshine on the one hand to the females who emerged as the rank and file of prohibition movements on the other. A number of scholars who study gender and alcohol also shed new light on notions of masculinity. Although moonshining, bootlegging, and corrupt officials make quantifying its impact difficult, licit or illicit alcohol revenue fueled colonial and national budgets and local economies. Whether as payment, inducement, or entrapment, alcohol also was intimately tied to labor recruitment. From elites to lower-class men and women, entrepreneurs maintained or improved their lot via the alcohol economy—legal or otherwise. The moonshiners who pled poverty or vulnerability as exculpatory, the perpetrators of violent acts who claimed they were drunk to mitigate their sentences, and those arrested (legitimately or otherwise) for drunk and disorderly conduct are but a few manifestations of the complex concatenations of alcohol and the law. Yet the extent to which alcohol production and consumption influenced state formation is hard to nail down. As a commodity, currency, and cultural icon, alcohol influenced Latin America’s past and historical reconstructions.