Tlachiquero

The tlachiquero (from Nahuatl tlachiqui, "to scrape") is the field worker at a pulque hacienda whose entire craft is the twice-daily harvest of aguamiel from a tapped maguey. The hereditary apprenticeship traditionally begins around age twelve and is passed father-to-son. A skilled tlachiquero manages a route of 200 to 400 plants and visits each at dawn and at dusk, every day, for the six to eight months that the plant produces.

The signature tool is the acocote, a long hollow gourd (the dried fruit of Lagenaria siceraria) that functions as a suction pipe. The tlachiquero positions the small end of the acocote inside the maguey's hollowed-out heart cavity (called the cajete), seals his mouth around the large end, and draws the accumulated aguamiel up by inhaling. He spits the sap into a leather or wooden bucket carried at the hip. Once the cavity is drained, he scrapes the inner walls with a raspador (a curved bone or steel scraper) to stimulate the next round of sap flow. The plant produces 4 to 7 liters of aguamiel per day for months until it exhausts its reserves.

The tlachiquero's role survives today in dramatically reduced numbers: the pulque industry collapsed from its early-20th-century peak of 3 million liters per day, and the tradition is concentrated in a handful of Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Estado de México communities. See the culture chapter Part 3 on hereditary craft and the distillation chapter for the pulque-to-distilled-aguamiel lineage.