In 1992, Rafael Valdez was a foreign exchange student at an exclusive Ivy League college in the United States.

While he appreciated his family’s sacrifice and hard work for his education, he felt something was missing. He always remembered stories of his great grandfather, a Mestizo, that lived to the ripe old age of 113. He researched his genealogy and found a 1929 census in Jalisco, Mexico that listed a man as head of the household: Name, Cuitláhuac Valdez. Age, 108. Language, Bilingual: Spanish and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. This had to be his great-grandfather!

Desperate to make a connection, he headed to Jalisco, Mexico, and searched the city archives, libraries, and old newspapers, but found no address, home, or sir name for his family. On the last day of his visit, he went to a small village at the base of the Volcan Tequila and asked the elders for help. Finally, “¡Don Cuito, el maestro tequilero!” an old man remembered.

It seems Don Cuito, was a legendary tequila farmer who had a secret recipe for the best tequila in the entire State of Jalisco. He lived on a modest farm with a small dog. People thought he was crazy as they couldn’t understand what he was saying to his small dog as they harvested the blue agave plants, however, the dog understood Nahuatl perfectly. Rafael asked if the dog was a pure bred Xoloitzcuintli, sacred dog of the Aztecs, but the old man said “No, los dos son Mestizos, sabes...un mixto de culturas.”

As the years passed by and his senses left him, Don Cuito would depend on the small dog to smell the rich red soil around the blue agaves until he found to most ripened ones for harvest. He then took his batch of pinas and distilled them to perfection to create a unique blend. Then, on one hot summer day, the small dog alerted him to a broken-down ice

truck by the farm. Don Cuito offered to share tequila for some ice. The driver gladly agreed. Don Cuito cut a lime in half and a new drink was born. Soon after, many would claim the frozen margarita as their own.

In his last days, tourists, farmers, officials, and even movie stars, would come from all over the world and offer to buy it and sell it as their own, but he was not interested. They couldn’t understand why he would not want to be an exclusive brand and deliver the pride of Jalisco around the world as a part of this new delicious frozen drink. When they asked for his secret recipe, he simply said “El Perrito.”