A marriage made in heaven
Eugenia is the madre of Eléctrico Mezcal. She is the smiling force of nature that drives Maestro Cirino and their children to create some of the finest mezcal in the world. She is a well-loved part of the community of San Baltazar Guelavila, but she is not from there and her story exemplifies the strength and vitality of the women of mezcal.
Eugenia’s sister had come to the little town in the hills beyond Tlacolula some years earlier and married a man in the town. Eugenia would visit her sister every week, travelling 90 kilometers each way from their hometown, El Camarón Yautepec over the hills to the South West. El Camarón is a waystation on the 190 Carretera Internaçional highway. It’s an agricultural town named more for the shrimp-shaped bend in the highway it sits on rather than its proximity to the Pacific, some hours away. It’s a mixed bag of peoples and purposes. So, young Eugenia was happy to take time away from the family to travel to the strong, isolated community of San Baltazar Guelavila.
One weekend in the late 1990s, her sister invited her to the San Baltazar annual fiesta. The band Los Sicarios would be playing, there would be food and mezcal and there would be baile, traditional dancing with plenty of good-looking men to dance with.
When she saw Cirino, all dressed up with his fancy talk of the USA and his slick footwork it was, she says, ‘love at first sight.’ She doesn’t exaggerate. The following morning, her sister had to call her parents and tell her that Eugenia had been stolen by a man and wasn’t coming back.
They weren’t happy. The huehuete, the marriage counsellor, had to visit her parents twice to convince them to accept a wedding. Even then it took four months and by then, Jacqueline was on the way. Cirino did everything to convince them of his good intentions, including paying for an eight-day wedding party featuring the star band Los Mendes.
‘Later we went to see my mother and apologised,’ says Eugenia. ‘She was happy then because we gave her four turkeys, two tinas of bread, chocolate and the 50 ingredients needed to make a good mole negro. We were lucky. These days we’d have to give her a bull!’
The expense of the wedding cleaned out Cirino’s savings, and he was forced to return to the USA to earn enough to pay off the debt. This left Eugenia living with his parents. It wasn’t easy. She has a strong will. So did they. For eight years they lived together with Cirino visiting when he could. ‘It was difficult, especially with two daughters. But I survived.’
When Cirino returned for good, his parents gave them a piece of land in the centre of town, with room for three houses. But Cirino had other plans. He and his brothers were running the family palenque, supplying mezcal to the locals. Cirino wanted to make something better, something that would cost more to make but make more money in the process, something he could be proud of. He refused to use ammonium sulphate to accelerate fermentation. He wouldn’t buy a motorised pulveriser to mill the agave hearts. He wanted his mezcal to be made by traditional methods without chemicals or machines. He invited his brothers to invest 30,000 pesos each on new tinas, wooden fermenting vats. He said he would make the finest mezcal and double the price. They laughed, saying they would never see their money back. They walked away.
It caused a rift in the family for a while, but Cirino and Eugenia were determined to plow their own furrow. They struggled on, making mezcal of quality but above the local price. It was tough. He experimented with recipes, honing his art as a mezcalero. They ran out of money.
On his last trip to the USA, Cirino had bought ‘el Rojo’, his red Nissan pickup truck, and he used it to drive people and goods for money. He loaded it up with dead wood he had gathered in the hills and sold it to other palenques. ‘He would do anything to earn money,’ she says of the difficult days when they struggled to support their daughters and their new son Wilbur. ‘But he only ever wanted to be a mezcalero. He wanted to do something different, something better, and we didn’t want everyone spying on us and laughing at our plans.’
At which point fate stepped in. They met Kathleen Blackwell, musician and entrepreneur, with a taste for mezcal and a love of Oaxaca. Over a few months, Kathleen and Cirino established a business agreement to make the finest quality mezcals for the US market and Kathleen invested.
So, Cirino and Eugenia bought some land on the edge of town and gave the plot in town to his siblings as a peace offering. Together, Eugenia and Cirino and the girls built their own home and palenque, the same one where Eléctrico’s exquisite mezcal is produced today.
‘Now we can do our own thing here away from the old family palenque,’ says Eugenia. ‘It makes me feel really happy that my children are involved because we are all working together. At the family palenque, no one helped, but I like to help Cirino and be here and part of the process. Even when he worked through the night, I would bring the little children and blankets so we could keep them warm and I could help him. It’s a passion in me.’
Cirino is as passionate about her. ‘Eugenia has no comparison,’ he beams. ‘We do everything 50:50. There are no words to describe our relationship because we share everything. If I say stay in bed and rest while I go to work, she says ‘no, I’m coming.’ Everything we’ve achieved we’ve done together. We are very lucky.’