COLIMA, CO—Calle Francisco I. Madero and Revolución intersect at the corner of Colima’s Jardín Nuñez. During the afternoon, the garden’s benches that happen to catch the shade of towering palms are occupied by locals and tourists alike. They are motionless, chastened by the heat and silenced by continuous sips of iced local refreshments they have in hand: tejuino, tuba, and bate.
Across from the park, the silhouette of Templo de la Merced, an old Spanish church, frames a bronze statue watching over the northeastern intersection. The orange metal of the sculpture must be scalding in the afternoon Colima sun, but the subject looks nonplussed. She is Doña María Cipriana Ascencio Dolores, and she braved this corner for 50 years as she sold the traditional drink called bate. She passed away in November 2018.
The statue, erected in memory of her daily presence on the corner, is just meters away from her bate cart, now operated by her daughter and granddaughters 365 days a year. Their family, specifically, and the women of Suchitlán more generally, are keeping the tradition of bate alive in Colima.
All bate roads seem to lead back to the community of Suchitlán. The small town is 21 kilometers outside of the state capital of Colima up on the brisk foothills of the state’s namesake volcano. The town is known for upholding ancestral Nahua traditions, particularly in regards to foodways. Any woman in Colima who knows how to make bate is either from Suchitlán, or learned about the drink from someone from there.
As I searched for bate experts, I independently came across three different groups, all of whom were from Suchitlán, all of whom knew each other, and two groups of which were directly related to Doña María Cipriana. The drink is local, but also ancestral. Bate comes from a gastronomical marriage of an endemic plant and indigenous knowledge.
In this case, bate is made from toasted and ground chan, beaten with water and sweetened with honey or a kind of molasses prepared from piloncillo, or hard brown sugar. Chan is a seed akin to the chia but botanically unique. The usage of the term chan in Colima refers to the scientific species, Mesosphaerum suaveolens. It turns out, chia and oregano (the leaves of chan smell exactly like the common “Italian” herb) are originally from Mexico. They have been part of indigenous cuisine for centuries. Chan is just a darker, wider version of chia that is lesser known. The black variety of the chan seed is the key ingredient in bate.
Chia drinks are known across Mexico, but chan is unique. Agua de Limón con Chia, a sweetened beverage made with lime juice and soaked chia, is consumed throughout Mexico and is considered a core agua fresca flavor. Seed flour beverages were common during Aztec times and were known as chianatole. Bate is one of the few examples remaining in this tradition.
A cousin of the Bate El Merced family sells the drink at Mercado Pancho Villa in Colima. She also mills the seeds commercially and sells the powder. She explains the wild harvest of the little, black treasures, “The plant grows to be large. There are some that bloom white and others bloom brownish. The brownish ones grow tall, the white ones are shorter.” The brown ones are used for bate.
In October, little spiky clusters dry out on the branches of the plant. Locals in Suchitlán ask permission to harvest the seeds on private land. Most owners think they are simple weeds. But chan grows wild across the small state and most of western Mexico. “You have to grab the plant with gloves because they have a kind of rigid spine.” she continues, “ Inside of the burs, that’s where the chan seeds are.”
But to get from seed to beverage, some processing must occur. The Mercado Pancho Villa vendor explains, “To clean them, I put them on a plate and winnow them. All of the little dust goes away in the wind. Then you must toast them on fire.” Once toasted, she grinds the seeds in a mill only used for chan. She then mixes the powder with fresh water and whips it–that’s where the drink gets its name, from batir, Spanish for “to agitate” or “churn.”
But, for how common the plant is, knowledge of the plant and of bate making is limited. Most people who come to drink from the stands have seen the plant but don’t know how to use it. There are even harvesters who do a poor job of harvesting only chan. In regards to these bad batches of harvested seeds, she says, “We say that the harvesters are guajalotes [turkeys]—they don’t take care–if you are going to harvest the seed, harvest it cleanly.”
The bate stands at El Merced and Mercado Pancho Villa are sort of for-profit embassies of tradition. Doña María Cipriana’s granddaughter tells me, “Yes, we are representing the culture of Colima through the drink.” But the work isn’t easy. They operate the stand every day of the year, without regard to holidays.
Each day, the women stand behind their cart with a large balsa, a dried and hollow gourd of impressive size, filled with prepared bate. As customers come up and order cups or bags of the drink, they ladle out the thick, grayish liquid and top it off with a float of piloncillo molasses.
The drink tastes similar to chia, and has a bitter and toasted flavor. But, bate is notorious for its texture. Many American drinkers have had chia. When soaked in water, it becomes enveloped in a sort of gel. Chan, entirely pulverized in the mill, turns the water into a quagmire of globular chunks–a watery suspension of coagulated chan. For some, this slimy and stringy consistency is a major turnoff. But you can chew the drink a little and push gelatinized chunks around with your tongue. The texture makes it more interesting. And in the Colima heat, the gooey, toasted drink quenches thirst. It’s kept on ice and the chan retains a cool, natural tone.
The family is proud of their legacy. I have the privilege of speaking to two of the generations. The mother points to her mother’s statue, “My mother was named Cipriana Ascencio Dolores and she was the one who started the bate stand here and sold it for 40 years. I am the second generation and this is my daughter, her granddaughter, the third generation.”
Doña María Cipriana’s granddaughter seems to understand her role as an ambassador of the drink and a link in the generation chain that keeps it alive and known. She rattles off the elevator pitch with eloquence, “The beverage, bate, is a traditional beverage of the state of Colima made from a base of the chan seed. The chan seed is originally from the state of Colima. It’s from the same family as the chia and the flax.”
The granddaughter adeptly ladles out more bate, educating Mexicans and foreigners alike on the beverage that her grandmother and her more distant ancestors have made in Colima. The family knows they have something special, and they want the world to taste it.
In addition to being a quenching drink, bate and its source material have some impressive health claims. Both vendors say that the thick drink has gastrointestinal benefits, providing the drinker with fiber and also assisting with gastritis. Between the two Suchitlán families, they also listed kidney health, circulation, and hot flashes within bate’s range of ameliorative properties. But there is one larger claim that stands out: chan, and also bate, may help prevent and cure cancer.
The vendor at Mercado Pancho Villa showed me a laminated news article from Diario de Colima summarizing an academic study that a Mexican student, Francisco Javier Espitia Orozco, conducted on the “reserve proteins” of the black chan seed, which help to provide the young plant with a source of nitrogen. The bate vendors said that this was the oil that comes out of the seed during roasting, but I cannot say whether or not that is technically correct.
The study’s conclusion is that these proteins have anti-carcinogenic properties, particularly in regards to cervical and uterine cancer. While it made local news, the study, titled Identificación de péptidos de chan y su potencial uso en el tratamiento de obesidad y cáncer, does not appear to be peer reviewed. But science says chan has other great potential. It has soluble fiber and a good amount of protein by weight. Really, much remains to be studied.
Whether or not all of these medicinal claims are true, chan and bate surely merit more attention. The extreme geographical and familial isolation in which this beverage survives today is remarkable. Doña María Cipriana has been immortalized in metal, and her granddaughters have decades of bate selling ahead of them. The drink is not going to disappear anytime soon. Perhaps, if more people can appreciate its history and medicinal properties (yes, its gooeyness too,) bate can become a staple in other chan growing regions of Mexico. For now, a trip to Colima mandates a slurp or too of the roasted seed water. It’s like boba tea, if the tapioca pearls were blended up into long strings of chia flavor.
Lopez Ortega, Ellianne Lizeth. “Investigacion revela que semilla de chan combate el cancer.” Diario de Colima, Date Unknown, from clipping.
Mapes, C., Basurto, F. (2016). Biodiversity and Edible Plants of Mexico. In: Lira, R., Casas, A., Blancas, J. (eds) Ethnobotany of Mexico. Ethnobiology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6669-7_5
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