Other Six Things You Didn't Know about Chocolate

1. Cocoa beans were used as an exchange medium
   

   In the Aztec empire, being that cocoa was a strong status symbol, it became used as a currency for trade in the vast mexica tianquiztin or market places, and apparently outside of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (precursor of today's Mexico City) too. One can only find some examples of the value of cocoa beans: According to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (16th century), 10 cocoa beans could buy a rabbit; a slave was worth around 100; a prostitute used to charge from 8 to 10 beans, according to "what had been settled".
   
   But only one of the five main varieties of cocoa was used for such purpose. The others could be forged: lesser quality beans were roasted and painted so they could look like the “money bean”.

   
   The beans' economic cycle is difficult to know: although it was usually roasted, in the long term it would succumb to the facts of nature: putrefaction, loss of scent and so on. This is one of the doubts inherited to us by the massive destruction of local culture that took place in the Conquest. Also, it coexisted with other means of trade, such as bartering, some kinds of seashells, and sometimes also copper plaques.
   

2. The Mesoamerican grinding technique was also imported to Europe for a short time
   
   The main Mesoamerican grinding technique that is still popular (although it growingly descends) is called metate, a word which comes from Nahuatl metlatl. Its name is ka' in yucatec maya, jüni in hñahñu (otomi), etc. It consists in a flat, porous stone which is complemented with a metlapil, with which the user exerts pressure on the metate.
   
   This demands considerable effort, so, if you want stronger arms and lesser weight, stop buying miracle products, throw that old moulinex away and start grinding in a fashionable, sporty way! In short, you will be able to buy this and other cultural heritage products through http://www.culturalplaza.com.
   

3. The Native American of the US also found it medicinal and related it to a previous drink
   
   Chocolate was introduced to what today is the United States by whitemen. The native americans were fast to acknowledge chocolate's medicinal properties. The name a number of them gave to the chocolate drink was related to Ox blood. The Ojibwa named it miskwabo, "red liquid", which was also a drink they had made from a mixture of ox blood, fat and flour.

4. There was an intense ritual life surrounding cocoa

There are numerous and colourful examples of this in historic sources. For example, in Izcalco, which is today located in El Salvador, Diego García de Palacios (1576) relates how the best cocoa beans were chosen, exposed (probably offered) for 4 nights to moonlight, during which time couples had the obligation to abstain from sexual activity. The last night the prohibition was lifted, and they could “gratify their passions”. Then, some couples were chosen to abandon themselves to sexual intercourse simultaneously during the sowing of the chosen seeds.

Other example was seen by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in 1528, someplace in today's Nicaragua, at the time of harvest:

A colorful set of people consisting in up to 60 people, all men, some crossdressed and others with bodypainting, tufts and bird masks danced in a circle to the beat of ten to twelve loud drums.

At the center of the circle, a 56 ft tall pole rose from the ground, at the top of which stood an image of the God of Cocoa. Another four poles surrounded this one, at the top of which stood four 7 or 8 year old boys. One of them carried bow and arrows and other a bouquet of colorful feathers and a mirror in the other hand.

As the tension of the drums and dancing built up to a point of ecstasy, the children (who had one foot tied to the pole) jumped from the high poles and swung in circles around the God's image until they neatly touched the ground, standing. As soon as the children landed, the dancing stopped with a sudden silence. Eight days afterwards, the deity was removed and taken to its temple.

This kind of ritual performance still lives in Veracruz and Puebla, although not necessarily linked to cocoa.

5. Different cocoa exploitation systems

There was a complex network of cocoa trade and tribute by the time the Spanish met the new world: the Chontal Maya were avid traders who sailed along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico. It was in the Southeast (nowadays Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, and Guatemala, mainly) where most production took place, since the weather is favorable. The Aztecs, profuse warriors and ruthless conquerors, were not able to conquer the Chontal, but they developed trade relationships with them. The people at Xoconochco (Soconusco, Chiapas) were not as lucky: they were conquered and represented the most important source of the Aztecs' cocoa income.

After conquering peoples, the Aztecs imposed certain quantities of natural and/or manufactured products. They also ritually kidnapped the main deity and imposed their binomial cult of Huitzilopochtli (war) and Tlaloc (rain, water and thunder), which coexisted with local cults.

When the Conquest was completed, it was usual for the spaniards to employ people using cocoa as payment. Other times, of course, they simply enslavered them; especially where there was a lot of cocoa: they forced them to work extremely hard (they raised cocoa production by the millions), and between the pressure and the european imported pests, indigenous populations fell faster than the Democrats after the Monika Lewinski affair.

In Soconusco this was most dramatic. People there almost disappeared. So what they did was to kidnap indigenous workers from Guatemala, but they too ended in some of the nine levels of the Underworld, until the pests and deaths finally stabilized. Other solutions to this problem was to bring work force from Africa.

6. There was cocoa smuggling in colonial times

During the colonial period, the spanish crown took cocoa to every corner of its empire: the drink was introduced in the Peru vicekingdom and New Granada (today's Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panamá). Cocoa did grow wild in South America before, but it was not used the same way as in Mexico. Control over cocoa trade was very strict: you could only sell or buy the beans from specific trading channels. Since much more cocoa was extracted than before, the drink made of it was popularized among the impoverished population (where it had been something luxurious before).

Nevertheless, smuggling was frequent: traders and encomienda¹ owners made business behind the king's back. They used to bribe royal functionaries and exploit the indigenous (supposedly protected by the laws from exploitation). The widows and sons of dead natives acquired the debts of their defunct. One example of smuggling was that, in New Spain (today's Mexico), you could only consume newspanish cocoa legally; whereas in the market it was common to find equatorian cocoa.

Taking into account that cocoa has important psicoactive substances, could we say that this was Colonial illegal drug trade?

1Encomienda is a gift of land from the king to the conquistadors, including the people who lived there