In his journey from brand founder to brand developer and importer, CDMX native Raza Zaidi has become an influential force in the realm of Mexican craft spirits. Joahna Hernandez explores how Raza’s unique background has played into his work, and then we hear from Raza in his own words.
I didn’t fully recognize it until recently, but my first real immersion into the world of mezcal happened far from Mexico — in Washington D.C. Working at a Mexican restaurant there pushed me to look at my own country of origin through a different lens, with a curiosity I hadn’t quite had before. I learned the basics about mezcal and how to mix drinks. But I also learned something more structural: how the US three-tier system actually works, the invisible architecture that gets a bottle of mezcal from a small producer to a bar in the US capital. It was in that context, around 2013, that I first encountered Wahaka Mezcal, a project Raza Zaidi had founded in 2010 and which had grown to include Eduardo Belaunzarán among its ranks. By 2013 they had launched Wild Agave Imports, and in 2015, Raza and Eduardo together with Ramón Ricoy founded Back Alley Imports, expanding the portfolio and, as I would come to understand much later, expanding a vision.
For years, Raza Zaidi was a name I recognized but hadn’t yet put a face to. I’d read the Back Alley newsletters, noticed his name as co-founder, and crossed paths at trade shows. Every year, Back Alley organizes a familiarity trip — an industry tradition where importers host bartenders, distributors and buyers to experience their products firsthand: how they’re made, where they come from, and the people behind them. Last year I was lucky enough to join them in Mexico City, and it was watching Raza guide our group through his city that something clicked. Here was someone not just randomly promoting Mexico’s rich liquid culture but someone who also belonged to it, in the complicated, layered way that only certain people do.
Because Raza’s story is, at its core, a story of migration — and Mexico has always been a country that receives, quietly absorbing people from across the world and making something new from the encounter. Lebanese families arrived after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Spanish Republicans came during the Civil War. Argentinians and Uruguayans moved in fleeing their dictatorial regimes. And in the 1940s, a significant community of Sikh Indians migrated to northern Mexico, many of them fleeing religious persecution with the hope of eventually crossing into the United States. A reminder that the human need to move in search of safety and opportunity is neither new nor resolved. History, in that sense, has changed less than we’d like to think.
Some of these stories didn’t have happy endings. Mexico, like any country, has its own history of racism and rejection toward immigrant communities. But what unfolded for Raza’s family is notably a story of welcome and possibility — one that begins far from Mexico City and takes a path that no one could have predicted. Mumtaz Zaidi, the youngest of eight siblings in an Indian family, watched his family scatter along the borders that Partition drew in 1947 — three siblings resettling in Pakistan, four remaining in India. Mumtaz took a different path entirely, eventually earning his doctorate at Cornell University, where he met Hilda Jacobson, an American Jewish woman completing her undergraduate degree. Mexico came to them the way it has come to many academics fleeing instability or simply searching for a place to belong — Mumtaz was offered the position of head of the physics department at CINVESTAV, one of the country’s most important research institutions, and they built their life in Mexico City. Not by default, but by choice. It is a path that echoes through many stories: Cuban and Venezuelan professors arriving during their countries’ upheavals, a Kenyan academic who migrated to Mexico City to teach at the Colegio de México and whose daughter, Lupita Nyong’o, was born there before going on to win an Oscar.
Raza didn’t choose to be born in Mexico City, but he chose to come back to it. Formed by its metro rides to the famous flea market at La Lagunilla, its used bookstores on Donceles street, and teenage afternoons guiding English-speaking tourists through the Centro Histórico, he left at 23 for New York carrying all of that with him. What he also carried was something not all children of migration get to have: the awareness of multiple worlds and the freedom to move between them, to pick up what resonated and set down what didn’t, and to eventually chart a path entirely his own. Most migrants want exactly that for themselves and their children. Not all of them get it. That Raza did — and that he has spent the last decade building something from that freedom — is perhaps the most honest way to understand what Back Alley Imports actually is.
In Raza Zaidi’s own words, this is a story about spirits and what it means to build something when your deepest loyalty is to a place, not necessarily to a passport.
Mezcal and Mexican spirits often find people before people find them. What was the moment or moments that made you realize this wasn’t just a drink you loved, but a world you needed to be part of?
When I moved to the US, it never crossed my mind that I wasn’t going back to Mexico and that I was to forge my life outside of Mexico. In the 1980s, Mexico went through a total economic collapse and, having studied electrical engineering, all jobs were in the US. At some point, in the mid-2000s, I started returning a lot for extended periods of time: summers in Patzcuaro to immerse my kids in Spanish and then spending as much time as I could with aging parents. Many of my friends from Mexico City had a similar trajectory and at this point in our life we started searching for ideas and reasons to have a stronger connection with Mexico. We all had levels of income that allowed us to pool our money into some idea and one of us came up with the mezcal idea (we explored tequila but it was too crowded) which was burgeoning and with few brands such that we could come up with positioning that would allow us to differentiate ourselves.
Although we had tasted great mezcales on assorted trips to Oaxaca during our adolescence and early adulthood, it wasn’t really readily available in Mexico City when we were growing up. So it was only really after repeated trips to Oaxaca in the early days of first finding a mezcalero and then building the brand that I understood the breadth and depth of the spirit. Much credit also goes to Erick Rodriguez who in those early days (2012 maybe) introduced me to mezcales from other states (Guerrero, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, etc), further adding to my understanding of this complex spirit.
One tends to romanticize one’s relationship to mezcal but I must admit that many of my choices were business-driven – trying to figure out how to make Wahaka Mezcal stand out with a tiny marketing budget vs. other brands with either a larger budget or already more established in the market. One of the choices I made was that I realized that, living in the USA, I was never going to be an expert on production. But being fluent in Spanish and knowing where and how to find obscure books in Mexico City, I decided to become more of an expert on the history of mezcal and its significance to Mexican culture. This then informed company decisions to create our “VdM” (Vino de Mezcal) line and our Fundacion Agaves Silvestres, a nonprofit to reforest agave. For Back Alley Imports, it meant finding the best options for a packaged pulque (not easy!!) as well as bringing in obscure agave spirits that form part of the history–such as comiteco and agave distillates.
Your story begins at a remarkable crossroads: a father whose family lived through the Partition of India and Pakistan, a mother who is American and Jewish, and you, born in Mexico. How did Mexico specifically shape you?
In simple terms, it shows how powerful one’s environment can be over genetics or cultural backgrounds. My father’s culture was too far away and my mother was disowned by her family so neither was a large part of my upbringing; they were just abstractions as opposed to the reality surrounding me. Mostly, what it did was impart a sense of history and the plight or trajectory of the immigrant. Mexico welcomed us with open arms and no questions asked as they’d done to Lebanese immigrants after the Ottoman empire’s collapse and with Spanish refugees during the Spanish Civil War. A typical response to my name when I was growing up was “Bueno, ese es tu apodo (nickname) pero ¿cómo te llamas?”
Both my parents were academics and our house was filled with books and music (and not much more). Lalo, one of my business partners, grew up the same way. Our parents imparted on us kids an appreciation for all cultures and to learn deep. This always has played a part in my professional career.
Foreigners are just recently discovering how unique Mexico City is. It’s always been that way, but we tried to maintain it as the best kept secret. Growing up there was also quite unique–that indescribable blend of chaos and creativity which is a lot like how we run Back Alley Imports. We grew up in the valley in an upper middle class neighborhood but close to everything that was going on. As kids, Mexico City was very safe and carefree. We’d take the metro downtown to La Lagunilla to hunt for old coins at the flea markets or hit the used bookstores on Donceles street in downtown. In highschool, I worked for the DIF in CDMX, the government entity in charge of community building, as a walking tour guide of the centro historico mostly doing the English tours for tourists. Learning the history of each building and their significance was also a big part of my upbringing.
Many people with multicultural roots spend years figuring out where they belong. Others turn that question into fuel. Looking back at the last decade of building Back Alley Imports, how much of what you’ve built is really a reflection of who you are?
My Mexican childhood friends always say I am more chilango than they are. Looking at Back Alley Imports throughout the last ten years, it is interesting, though not surprising, to see how the balance of producers has shifted so strongly to Mexico City. We started importing wines from Baja California and rare spirits like Comiteco from Chiapas but now a large percentage of our producers are in Mexico City. The Mexico City culinary and artistic scene is currently in a very positive space which has overflowed into the spirits arena and we’ve naturally been able to tap into that vein.
The back alley is where the real stuff happens, away from the polished front of the house. What was the origin story of the company, and what were you trying to do that nobody else was doing?
Part of it was a business decision: by 2015 or so, Wahaka Mezcal was profitable but not enough for me to quit my day job. As a company, we had built a distillery in Oaxaca that could pump out tens of thousands of bottles of mezcal per year but also, in the US, we had created our own import company, had established relationships with 15 distributors and had great relationships with many famous chefs of Mexican restaurants. I started thinking about what else we could bring in through that channel. At that time, Mexican wine was where mezcal had been in, say, 2005 – only real connoisseurs knew about it. Seemed like the right time to import some cool brands.
The other part comes from my background. The year I moved to the US to go to college was also the first year I took a trip to India to visit my family there. Upon returning, one thing that struck me was that Indian food in the US was much closer to Indian food in India than Mexican food in the US was to Mexican food in Mexico (remember hard shell tacos of ground beef with lettuce?). Even in those days, I had the bug in me to help change this perception of Mexican culinary culture with many ideas that never came to fruition until Wahaka Mezcal.
I don’t think we’re doing anything that others aren’t, but we’re typically very early (not always the first) at identifying the new trends in Mexico. There are other great importers of Mexican libations–some that have, alas, beaten me to products and categories that I definitely would have loved to import. However, I think we’re the ones more focused on stuff coming out of Mexico City.
The son of a Pakistani-Indian Muslim and an American Jew, raised in Mexico, working between two countries — in a moment when the world seems obsessed with putting people in boxes, how do you navigate that? And do you find that your identity actually gives you an advantage in this work, where trust across cultures is everything?
Deep down inside, I am (still) just a kid that grew up in Mexico City and still have deep connections there. This means I often find out about new producers before others or conversely producers find out about us through their network. Many of the producers have become friends more than a buyer/seller relationship. In the US, much communication (and thus first impression) happens before people have a chance to meet me in person so my name and English fluency tends to throw people off a lot but since we’re dealing mostly with distributors that have a very international view of business to begin with, it hasn’t seemed to be an issue – our portfolio kind of speaks for itself.
Importing artisanal spirits is as much about relationships as it is about logistics. What are the hardest parts of what you do right now — whether that’s regulatory, commercial, or simply the challenge of making people in the US truly understand what they’re drinking?
Certainly, fluency in English and Spanish helps me navigate many of the regulatory issues that come up on both sides of the border, but the most difficult thing is having to create new categories of Mexican spirits and brand awareness of tiny companies with absolutely no marketing budget. In these new categories of Mexican spirits, there isn’t the camaraderie that existed in the early days of mezcal. In those early days, as Wahaka Mezcal, we would partner with Asis (then of Jolgorio), Elisandro (of Tosba) and others to be able to afford doing events and category awareness. Sadly, this doesn’t exist among the gin or wine brands. It is one of the reasons we decided to bring in four brands of Mexican gin–to show that it was a movement not a one-off. I also tend to like to make the end customers do a little investigation of their own. When creating the US versions of labels, I always like to leave certain words or phrases in Spanish. Have the customer try to pronounce and figure out things like cempasúchitl or cacahuate. I used to do this a lot on social media for Wahaka–posts that were from the palenque in Oaxaca were always in Spanish and posts from bars/restaurants in the US were always in English. It played to our strengths as not many people are totally fluent in both languages. With Back Alley Imports’ social media, the vast majority of posts are in the US so we only do it in English.
Several of the brands you represent work with small producers using traditional, land-respecting practices. But the history of “craft” going mainstream is often a history of those practices getting eroded by demand. What do you think about your role as someone standing between a small Oaxacan or Chiapanecan producer and a US market that can consume faster than any agave grows?
One of the reasons I have been focusing so much on gins and corn alcohol-based liqueurs is that they are way more sustainable than agave spirits. The agave plant has to be killed to produce a spirit and, in the case of wild agave, it’s killed before it has a chance to reproduce. Back Alley Imports, to date, doesn’t work with mezcal producers and, if we do, it will be with someone who will limit their production. Comiteco is made with an estate-farmed variety of agave.
For you, working directly with the people and places behind these spirits, what does it actually look like to protect the integrity of what makes Mexican spirits extraordinary and, is it a battle you think the industry can win?
Mexico is one of the countries with the highest biodiversity. As opposed to thinking purely about artisanal spirits, we try to find spirits that represent something Mexican. Again, this brings us squarely back to gins and liqueurs. The Taller Astrafilia team works very diligently to represent endemic Mexican botanicals in their gins as well as Mexican flavors into their liqueurs. Concepts like adding cenote water to a vodka (Luma Vodka) or using Mexican limes in a limoncello (Alma Limoncello) are things we like. As mentioned, many of our choices are business driven. It’s great to support these up-and-coming projects, but we do need some products in our portfolio that can scale to large volumes. Working with the Diega team is great for us–volume is not an issue, either economically or on sustainability issues, and it’s made in one of the longest operating distilleries in Mexico City. This fact ties into our obsession with Mexican history.
What does the next chapter look like for Back Alley Imports? Are there categories, regions, or stories you haven’t told yet that you’re itching to bring across the border?
At the moment, we’re laser focused on growing El Güel, our in-house brand, which means most of our work is opening new markets for its five products. But the great thing about a company like Back Alley Imports is that we have multiple ways to grow — new markets, new volumes, new products. One I can announce is J.J. Amarguito, a blood orange wine from Baja California. More will follow throughout the coming months.
What I find harder to talk about is what I call the archeology of Mexican libations. Over the years, traveling through the provinces during adolescence and early adulthood, I came across products that most people have never heard of, some dating back centuries. Comiteco came from that kind of discovery. There are others. Some of these producers are so small that the path from a chance encounter to an actual import involves helping them build a brand from scratch, navigate FDA and TTB requirements, and find their footing in a market that doesn’t yet know they exist. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the idea just stays an idea, waiting.
I’m deliberately vague about which ones, partly because the competition among importers is fierce and I’ve already been beaten to products I’d spent years tracking down. But mostly because some stories aren’t ready to be told yet. What I know is that Mexico keeps producing them — spirits, producers, histories that deserve to cross the border. That work, for us, is never finished.
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