Allow me to bring Mexico into the discussion, which bears similarities 
with other cases, but also may be a bit more complex.  In my 
dissertation, "Sober Revolutionaries: Class, Gender, and Ethnicity in 
the National and Sonoran Anti-Alcohol Campaigns in Mexico, 1910-1940," 
(yet to be finished!) I have found that politicians and temperance 
reformers most wanted to keep the generic "working-class" from an 
over-consumption of alcohol.  Surprisingly, they were less concerned 
with race (in this case, the indigenous) although they also assumed 
that indios had a propensity for alcoholism.  Although there are some 
people of African descent in Mexico, they do not show up at all in the 
literature I examined (in part because intellectuals at the time could 
not really conceive of Mexicans being anything more than a combination 
of Spanish and indigenous heritage).  Nor do Asian Mexicans (of which 
there was a sizeable population in the north) show up at all in 
official temperance literature, although there were some arrested for 
drinking-related crimes.  However, there were extensive anti-opium 
campaigns going on at the same time, of which the Chinese were almost 
the sole target.

Gretchen Pierce
Adjunct Instructor
Indiana University Northwest
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Arizona



Quoting David Fahey <[log in to unmask]>:

> Aren't we really talking about restrictions for alcohol consumption
> by Africans or African-descended people and indigenous peoples in the
> Americas amd Australia/NZ?  Was there much objection to Esat Asians
> and South Asians  and Middle Eastern people drinking?  "White" may be
> the wrong word for this discussion.  I recall Gandhi lamented the
> drinking by Indian laborers in South Africa around 1900.  They could
> drink legally only at bars but there they could drink as much as they
> wanted.  There is a reference to this in the Historian (2005) article
> that I wrote with Padma Manian.
>