Annually, 4 million airline passengers arrive in the USA from the Dominican Republic—roughly 10,000 per day. As customs brokers rifle by means of baggage, they routinely encounter massive glass bottles filled with botanicals like tree bark, wooden chips, twigs, roots and complete spices—the makings of the Dominican Republic’s nationwide drink, mamajuana. Veteran brokers know the drill. They maintain up the bottle and shortly look at its contents: If the botanicals are dry, brokers classify them as vegetation and set the bottle apart for confiscation; if the contents are macerating within the common combination of rum, wine and honey, brokers classify it as a beverage and place it again within the traveler’s bag. However Joshian Fernandez, a younger Dominican American steering counselor and baseball coach from Cortlandt, New York, who often brings bottles again from his household dwelling in Santiago, says, “Actually, mamajuana is medication.”
After getting back from summer season break to his place at a principally Latinx highschool in Westchester County, New York, Fernandez extolled the virtues of mamajuana together with his coworkers: “Individuals drink it for pleasure, however it treats completely different situations, relying on what’s in it,” he says, “Principally, individuals use it like a Viagra.” As he talked, the varsity’s assistant principal walked by and poked his head within the door. “Mamajuana? I’ve had the identical bottle at my home, unopened, since my honeymoon in DR in 2005.”
Mamajuana could also be a novelty for honeymooners, however it has been a vital a part of the Dominican medication cupboard—and bar—for greater than a century. The therapeutic properties of its particular person botanicals have been identified to the Taínos of Hispaniola since earlier than colonization, and have been studied by medical doctors and chemists around the globe ever since. For instance, one wooden generally used within the infusion, guayacán, was harvested and brought to Spain for research inside a couple of years of the island’s colonization in 1493. Nicolas Pol, Germany’s high physician on the time, wrote, “Some three thousand Spaniards deplorably stricken with the loathsome illness, who had tried innumerable remedies in useless, had already been restored to well being by the guaiacum decoction ‘which proved virtually miraculous.’” One other widespread mamajuana ingredient, anamú (the petiveria shrub), is used historically to deal with arthritis and different joint and muscle pains, in response to the New York Botanical Backyard’s information to Dominican medicinal vegetation; a 2007 research within the West Indian Medical Journal, discovered that the dibenzyl trisulphide it comprises is of “great pharmaceutical curiosity” for its potential useful results on irritation, long-term reminiscence and the inhibition of sure most cancers cells. Over a dozen different roots, shrubs and woods, together with bejuco de indio and palo de brasil, and sometimes animal elements, reminiscent of cat’s claw, present related focused advantages.
Whereas the Taínos knew the worth of their native flora for hundreds of years, it doubtless wasn’t till enslaved Africans arrived within the early sixteenth century that the concoction started to seem like what we’ve at the moment. Related glass bottles stuffed with medicinal woods, shrubs, roots and different botanicals are steeping in pantries and medication cupboards throughout West Africa and the Afro Caribbean diaspora: Cuba has galones; Trinidad, mauby (which, like mamajuana, makes use of bark from the mauby tree); in Togo, atikédi is a healing; and within the taverns and bistros of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, patrons drink koutoukou.
Within the Dominican Republic, mamajuana turned immensely well-liked within the Nineteen Fifties, when a touring salesman named Jesus Rodriguez promoted his combination of botanicals steeped in purple wine and rum with the assistance of well-known merengueros and different Dominican influencers of the day. Right now, each in New York and on the island, mamajuana is a vital a part of Dominican id. As Fernandez explains, “Each Dominican man has a dusty bottle of mamajuana at the back of the cabinet. Making your first one is a ceremony of passage. I’ve a cousin that provides mariscos,”—shellfish—“however it’s nasty. One other man I do know places precise Viagra into his. I make mine with wooden and bark, and I exploit port as an alternative of wine. Additionally, I add raisins as a result of that’s how my dad taught me.”
Although mamajuana is historically made at dwelling, it’s potential to strive it out at a bar, too. Final yr, Richard Sandoval and Antonio Espaillat opened a department of the long-lasting Santo Domingo restaurant Jalao in Washington Heights, New York, on the northern tip of Manhattan. They make mamajuana from botanicals procured within the campos of El Cibao and serve it neat or of their Mamajuana Manhattan. In creating the cocktail, the Jalao workforce knew they needed it to hark again to the mamajuanas all of them grew up with.
Bartender Yoldin Castillo recollects that mamajuana was his first alcoholic drink at age 18. “My grandfather grabbed me and gave me a double shot,” he says. “It hit me arduous at first, and I used to be dizzy, however my household ritual was to have a shot within the afternoon to alleviate stress.” Common supervisor Chantal Montilla remembers a bottle of mamajuana doubling as a ornament within the nook of the room, pulled out for particular events, as a digestif, as an ingredient in her mom’s medicinal onion tea, and as a centerpiece in Santeria altars. Montilla says of the housemade mamajuana at Jalao: “I all the time knew that it belonged with a basic cocktail, nothing with any fruit or juices as a result of we don’t need to disassociate from its which means.” Certainly, the Angostura bitters and herbaceous Frangelico that the Jalao workforce provides to the anticipated candy vermouth play naturally with the woodsy and anisette notes within the mamajuana itself. For each Castillo and Montilla, the Mamajuana Manhattan seems like dwelling—within the Heights and on the island. A sip warms and opens the chest in a well-known method. As Montilla explains, “It’s just a little piece of us and we’re glad to have it right here and convey it dwelling.”
