ANTIGUA, GUATEMALA—Beneath the Arco de Santa Catarina, a courtyard holds large sculptures of the Passion of Christ for 51 weeks of the year. Then, when Semana Santa arrives in anticipation of Easter, the streets of Antigua, Guatemala fill with people from all over the country. The sculptures are mounted on the shoulders of the members of Antigua’s confraternities and paraded through the streets.
Semana Santa is the busiest week for everyone in Antigua, but one small shop in particular makes a killing. The unimposing storefront at 92 7a Avenida Norte fills with worshippers looking to buy religious paraphernalia and Semana Santa garb. The shop is just a block away from the famed Merced church from which the Passion of Christ statues process on Good Friday. But the shop doesn’t just sell religious goods, it also sells a spiced limeade that is strongly associated with Antigua’s Semana Santa. That drink is called chinchivir.
Tienda San Antonio, known locally as Chepe Armas after Jose Armas (Chepe is a nickname for Jose) who used to run the store, sells mostly hardware. Doorknobs, nails and screws, and paintbrushes are all labeled on shelves behind the security bars that separate customers from the wares. The store has been here for generations, originally selling basic household goods and diversifying into hardware and religious goods like incense burners and crucifixes. Alongside these offerings, a small cooler always sells refrigerated bottles of the Armas family’s recipe for chinchivir.
I ring the bell at the cashier’s post and two beige chihuahuas begin to bark. The store keeper, who married into the Armas family, comes out to quiet the dogs and help me. I ask for a bottle of chinchivir and she laughs. “You know about that?” “Sure!” I reply, “that’s the only reason I’m here.”
She asks if I want the drink frozen or warm. A neighbor passing by the door calls in jokingly, “I’ll take mine without ice,” and walks off. She hands me a sealed plastic bottle without a label. A chunk of ice floats freely in the neck. I ask her what’s in it, how it’s made, and where the name comes from. She answers me as best she can.
Her in-laws began selling chinchivir in 1935. The wife of Chepe Armas, Doña Maria Buen Dia, was the mastermind behind the drink. Now, the family has been decocting the same recipe for 88 years. Their original shop was just a block away at the corner of Calle Camposeco and 7a Avenida Norte. When they had their first child, they moved to their current location. Back then, she recalls, there were other vendors who sold similar spiced limeade drinks called chinchivir. Today, though, Tienda San Antonio is the only one in the city.
The drink is a proprietary combination of the juice of the Limon Real (Citrus jambhiri or rough lemon,) sugar, water, and spices. It’s a slightly cloudy liquid with a tawny color that compliments the yellow plaster of El Merced. The limeade is flat and, as expected, sweet and citrusy, but then dark aromas of spices take over. I can taste cloves. I can make out nutmeg. I dare to attribute ginger to the secret recipe.
The spices compliment the citrus in surprising ways. The drink is refreshing, but now it is more complex and savory. I find myself licking my lips and savoring the nutmeg residue. It is more luxurious and has more mouthfeel than a plain limeade. More than just quenching, I find it intriguing. And I understand how this could be a suitable drink for Semana Santa. For me, it is a mix between summer’s Lime Italian Ice and Christmas’s spiced wines. It is decidedly festive.
The Armas family has a registered brand with the name chinchivir. During the busy Easter season, the family has labels on their bottles decorated with limes. The origin of the name of chinchivir, the cashier tells me, has been lost to time as the elders of the family have passed. But, with a bit of research, it becomes clear that Antigua, Guatemala’s chinchivir has obscure roots in Afro-Peruvian Culture.
Antigua’s Armas family has legitimate historical claim to the production of chinchivir, which is conceived of as a local specialty beverage, but historical evidence can contextualize how the drink may have arrived to its current home on 7a Avenida Norte in Antigua. It seems extremely likely that those origins begin with the forced African immigration to Peru.
Before heading to South America, it is worth noting that the term chinchivir reaches back into the distance of Guatemalan history. The book El doctor Mariano Gálvez: apuntes, documentos, leyes, reseñas, notas curiosas was published in 1925, but discussed the life of an early leader of Guatemala in the 1830s. The text describes a scene in the central plaza of the city of Jocotenango in 1857:
“Goods for sale were displayed everywhere in total disorder, under woven reed parasols; here the tables were covered with glasses and jugs with cinnamon water, horchata, tiste [a drink of cacao, rice, achiote seed, cinnamon, and sugar] and chinchivir…Everything was offered to the public in great quantities and cheaply.” (Diaz)
While we cannot conclude what ingredients this drink contained at this early date, we can confirm that chinchivir (spelt with an ‘r’) is clearly typical of 19th century Guatemala.
Moving south, we can find a similarly named beverage in Costa Rica today. Chinchiví is apparently made in the Alajuelita neighborhood of Costa Rica’s capital. The area is notorious for crime, but I would go to Alajuelita just a month after I had chinchivir in Guatemala. The central plaza of the neighborhood is marked with plaques celebrating the beverage, but no one is selling it on the day I visit. It is more typical in the early months of the year. The recipe in Costa Rica, however, is entirely different from the spiced limeade of Guatemala. The modern Tico version contains flour, cornstarch, barley, sugar, yeast, vanilla and ground cinnamon. It is served out of metallic kegs under pressure so that it foams.
Ultimately, though, the name of the drink comes from the African diaspora in Peru. A text on traditional medicine by Valdizán and Maldonado suggests that a drink called Chinchiví existed in the early 1800s in Peru made from chicha, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and elderflower.
The article “Rescate, Interpretación y aceptabilidad de la bebida alcoholic “Chinchiví” en el distrito el Carmen, valle de Chincha” argues that the drink developed as a result of cultural syncretism and agricultural availability. African slaves worked on sugar plantations and used the juice of sugarcane to make alcoholic beverages. At first, the drink would have been made of fermented sugarcane with basic spices like cloves, cinnamon, and elderflowers. But, as Africans became acculturated to South American gastronomy, they began to incorporate corn chicha into the recipe.
The Peruvian drink has strong cultural undertones of African identity in music and popular culture even today. Modern recipes combine corn, barley, quinoa, apples, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, beer, and brown sugar.
Linguistically, Diccionario De La Gastronomía Peruana Tradicional believes that the term chinchiví has indigenous Quechua roots. The theory believes the term is chicha combined with sufijo kikongo bi which means “bad, very bad.” That is, Quechua drinkers would have looked down upon the Afro-Peruvian innovations on their traditional drink.
Finally it is worth noting that a prominent book on Chilean gastronomy from 1943, Apuntes para la historia de la cocina chilena, describes chinchiví as a root beer or ginger ale.
The flavors that come out of the spiced limeade in Antigua deserve the name chinchivir. The drink contains some of the key ingredients that its Peruvian ancestor used: ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar.
Sure, the Guatemalan version is not alcoholic and contains citrus where no other citrus is mentioned in Peru, but it seems very likely that the Afro-Peruvian beverage migrated north up to Guatemala at some point in the 19th century.
The fact that beverages of similar names exist in Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, and Guatemala point to a forgotten moment of popularity. As the beverages have been isolated for well over 100 years in their respective places, local innovation has turned into tradition. Collective memory, at least in Guatemala, does not capture the whole historical picture of the beverage.
This is not to say that chinchivir is not a unique beverage—obviously it is. But the origins of the beverage owe something to the cultural amalgamation of Peru. So, while the vendors at Chepe Armas might not know where the name of their money-making tradition comes from, we can sip on the nutmeg limeade with a bit more savor as we think about the incredible history of such a simple beverage across Latin America.
Díaz, Víctor Miguel. El doctor Mariano Gálvez: apuntes, documentos, leyes, reseñas, notas curiosas. 1925.
Peñuela Rubio, Luis Fernando, and Alison Odalis Zavala Rodríguez. “RESCATE, REINTERPRETACIÓN Y ACEPTABILIDAD DE LA BEBIDA ALCOHÓLICA “CHINCHIVÍ” EN EL DISTRITO EL CARMEN, VALLE DE CHINCHA.” (2019).
Salas, Eugenio Pereira, and Rosario Valdes. Apuntes para la historia de la cocina chilena: Edición a cargo de Rosario Valdés Chadwick. Uqbar, 2007.
Zapata, Sergio. 2006. “Chinchiví”. Diccionario De La Gastronomía Peruana Tradicional. Lima: Sergio Zapata Hacha.
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