Mezcal: Ancestral Fire is a study of the labor, ritual, and kinship sustaining ancestral mezcal production in Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca — a four-hundred-year tradition one family has kept alive, handed down generation after generation.

At Palenque El Conejo, maestro mezcalero Antonio Carlos Martínez makes ten mezcals entirely by hand: agave roasted for five days in a stone-lined pit, piñas then crushed with wooden clubs, and finally the liquid distilled in clay pots over open fire. The mezcal boom has brought autoclaves, mechanical shredders, and column stills. But El Conejo has decided to keep doing things the old way. Here “ancestral” is more than a production category; it is a declaration of resistance and continuity.

Every St. Valentine’s Day the village gathers to bless the coming harvest. Frankincense drifts through the open shed as a young brujo kneels before a candlelit figure of El Niño, leading prayers and songs shaped by generations of belief and labor. The blessing is not a prelude to the work; it is part of the work, binding faith to the agave, to the fire and community.

The passion begins with family. Gabriel, fifteen, intends to follow his father; Toño, nine, already joins the labor, the two boys chasing each other around the palenque as they shovel earth from the pit. Their play is inseparable from the work, just as family is inseparable from production. The same devotion reaches outward — to neighbors, and to the land that gives them the agave.