buying into the regime by heidi tinsman

8/13/2019 Buying into the Regime by Heidi Tinsman

1/39

Grapes and Consumption in Cold War

Chile and the United States HEIDI TINSMAN

BUYINGINTO THE

REGIME


2/39

BUYING INTO THEREGIME

american encounters / global interactions

A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks

for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its

primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction

and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural

encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local.American En-

countersseeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. inter-

national relations and area studies specialists.

The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical research. At the

same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about

the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the

process,American Encountersstrives to understand the context in which meanings re-

lated to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged,

and reshaped.


3/39


4/39

Grapes and Consumption in Cold War

Chile and the United States HEIDI TINSMAN

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014


5/39

2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tinsman, Heidi, 1964

Buying into the regime : grapes and consumption in cold war

Chile and the United States / Heidi Tinsman.

pages cm (American encounters/global interactions)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn978-0-8223-5520-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn978-0-8223-5535-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Grape industryChile. 2. ChileForeign economic relationsUnited States.

3. United StatesForeign economic relationsChile.

I. Title. II. Series: American encounters/global interactions.hd9259.g7c55 2014

382.41480983dc23

2013029332


6/39

In memory of my father,

r. hovey tinsman jr.

And for my mother,

margaret neir tinsman


7/39

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsix

Introduction 1

one

The Long Miracle

Collaborations in the Chilean Fruit Industry, 1900199025

two

Fables of Abundance

Grape Workers and Consumption in Chile64

three

The Fresh Sell

Marketing Grapes in the United States 103

four

Boycott Grapes!

Challenges by the United Farm Workers and

the Chile Solidarity Movement 146

five

Not Buying It

Democracy Struggles in Chile207

Epilogue255 Notes267 Bibliography331 Index349


8/39

Buying into the Regimemarks my effort to participate in debates about trans-

national studies and world history. While bearing my name as author, the

book directly springs from collaborative scholarship. I am particularly in-

debted to two smart and talented women, Sandhya Shukla and Ulrike Stras-

ser. My work with Sandhya at the Radical History Reviewand in our coedited

volume, Imagining Our Americas, provided the framework for examining

Chilean and U.S. history together. Sandhya pushed me to think across the

boundaries of Latin American and U.S. area studies, insisting that interdis-

ciplinary frameworks could reconceptualize areaand region in ways espe-

cially relevant to historians. Ulrike and I cotaught the University of Californias

first large survey course on gender and world history, coled a faculty re-

search seminar at the uc Humanities Research Institute titled Historical

Problematics of Gender, Sexuality, and the Global, and coauthored several

articles on masculinity, gender, and world history. Ulrikes sharp insights

concretized why feminist analysis must be central to any serious project onthe world. It was also Ulrike who taught me the importance of studying

disconnectionsas well as connections in transnational dynamics. While col-

laborative work is given more lip service than real recognition in many hu-

manist disciplines, this book would never have happened without the thrilling

opportunity to think, write, and publish with others.

Buying into the Regimeis also the product of the rich intellectual environ-

ment at the University of California, Irvine. The Department of Historys

leadership in developing world history as a dynamic research and teachingfield provided an inspiring place to craft a transnational project. I thank

Ken Pomeranz, Steven Topik, Bob Moeller, Jon Wiener, Mark Poster, Jeff

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


9/39

x acknowledgments

Wasserstrom, and Jaime Rodriguez for their scholarly examples and sturdy

support of my work. I have benefited tremendously from the Gender History

Faculty Group, particularly feedback from Alice Fahs, Sarah Farmer, Lynn

Mally, Nancy McLoughlin, Laura Mitchell, Rachel OToole, Emily Rosenberg,

and Vicki Ruiz. Colleagues in the Department of Womens Studies distinctlyshaped my conceptual framework: thanks to Laura Kang, Kavita Philip, In-

derpal Grewal, Jennifer Terry, and Robyn Wiegman. At the uc Humanities

Research Institute, I benefited from spirited questioning by Anjali Arondekar,

Cynthia Brantley, Michelle Hamilton, Eve Oishi, David Serlin, and Pete Sigal.

Thanks to Marc Kanda for his help with images and crucial managerial talent.

The idea of tracing the consumer dynamics that link Chilean grapes to

the United States was first motivated by a conversation with Jolie Olcott as

we reflected on the legacy of Michael Jimnez, a passionate teacher and his-

torian of commodities who inspired us both to make a career of studying

Latin America. I thank Jolie for her numerous engagements with my proj-

ect, including the chance to workshop an early version at Duke University. I

am grateful to other colleagues who also generously gave their time and in-

stitutional resources to sponsor me in public lectures: Florencia Mallon and

Steve Stern at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Elizabeth Hutchison at

the University of New Mexico; Claudio Barrientos and Manuel Vicua at

Universidad Diego Portales; Soledad Zrate at Universidad Alberto Hurtado;

Vanessa Schwartz at the University of Southern California; Wally Goldfrank at

ucSanta Cruz; Margaret Chowning at ucBerkeley; Gonzalo Leiva at Universi-

dad Pontifcia Catlica de Chile; and Tom Klubock, then at Ohio State Univer-

sity. Many thanks to Barbara Weinstein, Temma Kaplan, Karin Rosemblatt,

Ericka Verba, Margaret Power, Peter Winn, Julio Pinto, Joel Stillerman, Lorena

Godoy and Elizabeth Dore for their longstanding support of my work. At Duke

University Press, Valerie Millholland and Gisela Fosado expertly guided thiswork to publication. Thanks to Rebecca Fowler and Danielle Szulczewski

for their careful edits. Julie Greene and an anonymous reader provided

outstanding critical comments on the original manuscript.

Funding for Buying into the Regime was provided by Fulbright-Hays,

the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the

Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the ucPacific Rim Re-

search Program, the ucInstitute for Research on Labor and Education, the uc

Humanities Research Institute, and the ucIrvine School of Humanities.I thank Gonzalo Falabella and participants at the former Casa del Tempo-

rero for sponsoring my original fieldwork in Santa Mara, Chile.


10/39


11/39

Temuco

Santiago

Valparaiso

San Fernando

TalcaCuric

LinaresCauquenes

Chilln

San Felipe

ACONCAGUA

VALPARASO

SANTIAGO

COLCHAGUA OHIGGINS

TALCAMAULE

LINARES

NUBLEC

H

I

L

E

0 km

100500 miles

50 100

Temuco

Iquique

Punta Arenas

CURICO

Los Andes

Santa Maria


12/39

SanJoaquinValley

SalinasValley

CoachellaValley

ImperialValley

Sacramento

Valley

0 km

140700 miles

70 140

CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES

MEXICO

Los Angeles

San Diego

San Francisco Oakland

San Jose

Sacramento

Berkeley

Delano

Fresno

map.1Chile: Provinces and cities of the Central Valley. (left)

map.2California: Principal agricultural valleys. (above)


13/39

By the twenty-first century, consumers in the United States expected to

be able to eat a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. The

produce department became the most centrally located and profitable part

of grocery stores, offering scores of delicacies unknown to many Americans

before the 1960s. Whether they lived in New York or Iowa, shoppers as-

sumed that they could find kiwis, mangos, endive, and radicchio for sale,

whether it was January or July. The abundance of fruits and vegetables in

the United States expanded rapidly after 1970, fueled by a growing interest

in fresh food and whole food as alternatives to a national diet that critics

warned was saturated with fat and sugar. It was also driven by the mass re-

entry of women into to the workforce and the advertising industrys appeal

to womens presumed desire for convenience and autonomy. In the very years

Americans grew more obesethe country was dubbed a fast-food nation for

Americans love of hamburgers and friesthey became obsessed with health

food, ate more blueberries and broccoli, and worried about vitamins andtoxins.1Calls to eat local and homegrown food increased apace with the size

of supermarkets selling ever-more produce raised in faraway places.

Grapes played a special role in changing food tastes. Oranges, apples, and

bananas had been year-round fruits for much of the twentieth century.2But

after 1970, growth in the U.S. appetite for grapes outpaced that for all other

fruits.3Grapes also earned political notoriety. Successive consumer grape

boycotts led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (ufw) aspired

to improve the lives of Californias mostly Mexican American and immigrantagricultural laborers. Although the ufwhad many victories, getting people

to stop eating grapes for long periods was not one of them. By the year 2000,

INTRODUCTION


14/39

2 introduction

Americans consumed three times as many grapes as they had three decades

earlier.4Grapes were no longer luxury items for special occasions or sum-

mer. They were known as a natural snack that could be eaten every day, any

time of year.

Since the violent overthrow of the Socialist president Salvador Allende bya military coup on September 11, 1973, almost all grapes eaten in the United

States between January and April have come from Chile. Chilean grape ex-

ports to the United States rose spectacularly, from 15,000 metric tons in the

early 1970s, when the military seized power, to more than 350,000 metric

tons in the late 1980s, when civilian rule was restored.5By the twenty-first

century, Chile was exporting more than 500,000 tons of grapes worldwide.6

The fruit-export boom was ignited by a radical privatization of Chiles econ-

omy during General Augusto Pinochets seventeen-year military dictatorship.

Between 1973 and 1990, Chile became the worlds first poster child for neo-

liberal restructuring, a model that other developing countries embraced, or

were compelled to embrace, in the following decades.7In the early 1980s,

Chile was hailed by international business circles as an economic miracle,

and the fruit-export industry was celebrated as a prime example the regimes

success. But the wonder of Chilean fruit exports was also predicated on ex-

tensive repression and exploitation: persecution of organized labor, ghastly

human rights abuses, and the massive employment of low-paid workers,

unprecedented numbers of which were women. By the 1980s, women making

less than US$1.50 a day made up nearly half of all grape workers and 90 per-

cent of workers in fruit-packing plants. Alarming increases in malnutrition,

female-headed households, and poverty testified to the limits of miracles.8

The specter of U.S. plenty and Chilean suffering invokes a familiar sce-

nario. Americans growing appetite for grapes fed on the literal fruits of a

coercive Latin American regime. As with food commodities that came beforesugar, coffee, bananas, chocolatethe circulation of Chilean grapes in U.S.

supermarkets was propelled by miserable wages and systemic violence south

of the border.9By 2001 the labor conditions that had existed in Chile during

Pinochets dictatorship were stock tropes for representing the perils of

globalization: extreme poverty, human rights violations, and the mass em-

ployment of women. Labor activists worldwide denounced sweatshops in

Haiti, Guatemala, India, and China that produced sneakers and computers

for first-world desires.But it was during the cold war that U.S. consumption and its relationship

to the third world became most charged. In the four decades following World


15/39


16/39

4 introduction

average Chilean teenager had spent ten thousand hours in front of the tele-

vision, gleaning information and acquiring important didactic skills.13

Chilean poor people also bought things never before available to them.

Despite low wages, many women and men who harvested grapes for export

became proud owners of televisions as well as gas stoves, radio-cassette play-ers, dining room furniture sets, bicycles, and washing machines. Many such

goods were purchased with credit and debilitating debt. Sometimes the goal

of owning modern appliances took precedence over buying adequate food.

But most fruit workers saw their purchases as positive improvements. Women

took particular pride in outfitting their homes with new amenitiesan elec-

tric iron, a blender, a stoveas well as buying occasional lipstick or blue

jeans for themselves. Mens wages went more to paying rent and purchasing

groceries, now increasingly available in local supermarkets. Men also spent

money at bars and soccer games. They worried about what women were do-

ing with their own wages when male family members were not around. In

short, the new consumption generated by Chiles fruit-export economy

was never just happening in the Northern Hemisphere or Chiles wealthy

neighborhoods.

Buying into the Regime is a history of the relationship between Chiles

fruit-export industry and the growing appetite for grapes in the United States.

The book traces the emergence of Chiles commercial grape sector in the early

twentieth century and the significant collaborations between U.S. and

Chilean governments in developing Chiles fruit exports long before Pino-

chet came to power and neoliberalism was in vogue. It examines the par-

allel, often coordinated, campaigns of Californian and Chilean businessmen

after the 1960s to promote grapes inside the United States as healthy food.

American consumers did not eat more grapes simply because they were

there. Appetites had to be whetted and a passion for nominally fresh foodcreated. Businessmen on both sides of the equator participated in this

endeavor. Chilean fruit exporters were especially active inside the United

States in elaborating consumer desires, and were particularly attentive to

American women shoppers, whom they believed to be interested in conve-

nience and low-calorie foods. Chilean and Californian marketing strategies

intentionally dovetailed with American cultural trends that radically ques-

tioned the value of processed food, drawing symbolic alliances with coun-

tercultural moves to get back to the garden and New Left critiques of meatand dairy industries.


17/39

introduction 5

Buying into the Regime also examines the desires and consequences of

Chilean fruit workers consumption. The fruit industrys rapid expansion af-

ter 1973 brought a host of allegedly modern and urban goods to communities

that most Chileans considered traditional, rural, and campesino(peasant).14

Rural ways of life did not so much disappear as dramatically transform. De-cisions over whatto buy and whohad a right to buy it were daily negotiations

among women and men. Most women fruit workers insisted on maintaining

control over at least part of their earnings. They regularly criticized men for

not contributing enough to household budgets. Men often welcomed womens

earning power, appreciating the televisions and stoves these wages bought.

But a great many menand womenbitterly lamented that men ceased to be

breadwinners in ways they had been just recently.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chiles democratic governments, including

that of Allende, undertook significant land-reform projects that expropri-

ated almost half of Chiles agricultural property and distributed massive

amounts of property and jobs to campesino men heading families. Chiles

agrarian reform effectively abolished the countrys centuries-old haciendas

and peonage labor arrangements, replacing them with mixed systems of

government-managed estates, cooperatives, and private farms. Agricultural

wages more than tripled between 1964 and 1973. Government programs

encouraged campesino men to see themselves as their own bosses, family

providers, and producers for the nation. They urged campesina women to

become modern housewives who supported their childrens education and

volunteered in community development. This all changed with the 1973 coup.

Government-run estates were dismantled. Small farmers were forced to sell

land for lack of credit and access to technology. The militarys strict mone-

tarist policies and repression of unions sent wages plummeting to half their

1972 value. As the fruit industry expanded, men in Chiles primary agricul-tural region, the Central Valley, increasingly accessed only temporary wage-

labor jobs, making womens seasonal employment in fruit-packing plants

more crucial to family survival. Paradoxically, the increased vulnerability

of daily life gave women more bargaining power in their relationships with

men, forcing changes in how rural people thought about work and family.

Buying into the Regimeis especially interested in how consumption oper-

ates as a terrain of political struggle. Consumption is not itself inherently

good or bad. It is a social relationship between people, mediated by things thatare made, and endowed with meaning, by people. The gendered negotiations


18/39

6 introduction

between Chilean women and men over who had the right to buy what were

always politicalnegotiations about power and authority in families and

communities, between individuals and generations. Sometimes negotiations

hooked up to struggles against military rule or conditions in fruit-packing

plants. Often they did not. Daily decisions about who should buy what, andwhat that meant, usually did not make explicit claims about Pinochet or

neoliberalism, either for or against. This did not make such acts un-political.

Families increasing need for womens wages, coupled with womens deter-

mination to decide how that money was spent, signaled an erosion of mens

control over women inside and outside the family. Buying gifts of clothes

and cosmetics became important to womens solidarities with other

women, especially fellow workmates. Buying a second-hand stove or televi-

sion could help a woman secure better cooperation, or at least grudging

concession, from a spouse. Few women saw such changes as liberating,

given their connection to intensified poverty and repression. Nonetheless,

new consumer practices represented a redistribution of power. They consti-

tuted an everyday politics that women and men experienced in the most

immediate and personal ways.

But consumption also operated as a politicized terrain in struggles

over Chiles military government. When sizeable prodemocracy movements

emerged in the 1980s to challenge Pinochet, the participants constantly talked

about consumptionmostly in negative ways. The regimes critics bemoaned

how neoliberalism and consumer culture had destroyed Chiles traditional

cultures or anesthetized people to political action. Activists worried that

consumerism was a particular problem for women, who presumably spent

more time shopping and sitting in front of the television. And, indeed, the

military legitimated its power through claims that it had brought unprece-

dented amounts of consumer goods to families and that it especially hadbenefited women. Prodemocracy advocates countered that neoliberal dic-

tatorship had made Chile a grossly unjust society. They argued that only a

minority of Chileans benefited from the consumer boom, while most lacked

the things they needed or had been seduced into wanting things they did

not need.

Many prodemocracy activities and arguments revolved around the idea

of inadequate consumptioneither the notion that there was not enough

to go around or that some forms of consumption were morally bankrupt.Either way, Chiles lack of democracy was to blame. The Catholic Church,


19/39

introduction 7

an early critic of the militarys human rights atrocities, became increasingly

vocal about the evils of poverty and social inequality associated with un-

regulated capitalism and political repression. The church called for stronger

unions to defend workers salaries and dignity. It sponsored communal soup

kitchens and consumer cooperatives to feed people and rebuild communities.Chiles labor movement, brutally repressed after the 1973 coup, reemerged

in the 1980s and joined ranks with new social movements of unemployed

people, shantytown residents, feminists, and students. Collectively, the prode-

mocracy movement tied Chiles dictatorship to the widespread lack of basic

consumer necessities, such as food and housing. The slogan Bread, roof, and

liberty! became a rallying cry against Pinochet in massive demonstrations

that wracked streets in Santiago for almost a decade. Even human rights

groups, which successfully galvanized international criticism of torture and

secret executions, expanded their mission to include the human right to a just

livelihood.15When Pinochet was finally forced to step down in 1990, it was

partly because his claim to have created consumer plenty had been so chal-

lenged by prodemocracy critiques.16

Consumption was also a terrain of struggle in the United States. Agri-

businesses in California worked aggressively to convince Americans that

food such as grapes were aesthetically and nutritionally superior to frozen and

canned goods. They proposed that unlike so-called industrial food, fresh

fruits and vegetables came from Mother Nature. Grapes were harvested off

the vine. Somewhat differently, Chilean fruit-export companies labored to have

their grapes accepted inside U.S. markets as technologically up-to-date

produced by Chiles ultramodern fruit industry and so clean that Chilean

grapes need not be considered from the third world. Marketing from both

Chile and California emphasized that grapes were healthy, capitalizing on

the many critiques of commercial food processing circulating in the UnitedStates by the 1970s. Vegetarians, hippies, urban radicals, commune residents,

and other counterculture groups equated prepackaged food with fakeness

or even plastic. Consumer rights advocates such as Ralph Naders Public

Citizen argued that lack of food-industry regulation made many meat and

dairy products unsafe to eat. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned

that consumption of excess fat, sugar, and salt increased heart disease and

strokes.17

Chilean and Californian agribusiness answered back to these anxiet-ies, arguing that grapes were fresh, made without additives or industrial


20/39

8 introduction

intervention. Advertisements for grapes especially targeted women, who

did the vast majority of family shopping and who were presumed to be

most interested in health and diet. By the 1980s, supermarket commer-

cials addressed Todays Working Woman, who wanted the convenience

of a quick snack as well as a slim body. Images of grapes as food that madewomen sexy morphed into feminist messages that grapes were for indepen-

dent women. Grapes were also marketed to the modern man who accepted

his wifes career and wanted smart, affectionate children. Grapes were good

for you. And they were good for you because they were freshbrought

directly to the consumer as unprocessed food, cultivated under the purist

conditions.

The women and men who labored in California vineyards had other ideas.

Under the leadership of Chavez, the ufwlaunched a series of consumer boy-

cotts of grapes from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The union argued that

grapes were not good for anyone, nor were they unmediated gifts of nature.

Grapes were poisoned with pesticides and made with the blood and sweat of

farmworkers, most of whom were Mexican American or Mexican immi-

grants. The ufwwas heavily influenced by African American civil rights

struggles as well as the antipoverty organizing of progressive Christians and

the New Left. The ufws boycotts explicitly tied social justice for Mexican

American workers to the self-interest and morality of U.S. consumers, a ma-

jority of whom were white. Activists argued that if grapes were toxic for

California farmworkers, they were also bad for American families. Only

strong labor unions defending socially just working conditions could make

grapes safe to eat.

Connections between social justice and American consumption were also

raised by activists inside the United States who were protesting Chiles mili-

tary dictatorship. Following Allendes overthrow in 1973, a loose-knit Chilesolidarity movement emerged from an alliance of leftists, academics, religious

institutions, labor unions, and Chilean refugees. Boycott Chile! became a

rallying cry in protest demonstrations, music concerts, and political lobby-

ing aimed at raising public awareness about Chile and changing U.S. foreign

policy. Activists urged U.S. consumers to stop buying Chilean imports, espe-

cially grapes, as well as wine, wood, and fish. They also advocated a compre-

hensive U.S. trade embargo against Chile until the military regime ceased

violating human rights and accepted a return to democracy. The Chile soli-darity movement built on the strong condemnation of U.S. imperialism that

had fueled antiVietnam War protests, but the movement applied this to


21/39

introduction 9

Latin America, where the United States had a much longer history of mili-

tary intervention. Activists blamed the Nixon administration for bringing

Pinochet to power and condoning regime atrocities. Following Ronald

Reagans election in 1980, U.S. government support for military efforts to

eradicate Marxism in Central America became overt. The Chile solidaritymovement became a template for wider protests of U.S. policy in Nicaragua,

El Salvador, and Guatemala.18Boycotts of Central American coffee and cloth-

ing paralleled the Boycott Chile! campaigns, urging U.S. consumers to see

personal choices as tied to the fate of Latin Americans. The concept of fair

trade, which became central to activism around globalization in the twenty-

first century, emerged with force in the U.S.-based solidarity movements

with Chile and Central America. Many Americans heeded calls to become

more conscious and activist about their foods origin. But they ate more

grapesimported and domesticthan ever before (see figures Intro.1 and

Intro.2).

Transnational Turns

Buying into the Regimetells stories that weave back and forth between Chile

and the United States. It is an argument about the connectionsand some-

times the disconnectionsthat mutually shaped Chile and the U.S. during

the cold war, not a comparative history of how life in Chile was different from,

or similar to, that in the United States. The book engages recent debates about

world history and transnational studies that emphasize the need to look

beyond the framework of single nations or discrete regions defined by area

studies (Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa).19The book especially contrib-

utes to new writing about the Americas that challenge the idea of a stark

difference between the North American experience (primarily stories aboutthe United States) and that of Latin America (presumably all of it).20Buying

into the Regimeconsiders how the histories of Chile and the United States

were linked and impacted one another. Chile and the United States did not

have the same experience with grapes, consumption, and the cold war. Rather,

the way that grapes transformed politics and consumption in each place

flowed from cultural, economic, and social dynamics operating across na-

tional borders and any neat division between North and South America.

Buying into the Regimeseeks to reverse the gaze of how Latin America andthe United States are considered in relationship to each other. We are long

accustomed to seeing the United States as acting uponLatin America, as an


22/39

1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1992

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

PoundsPerCapita

Total

Domestic

Imported

Year

figure intro.1Annual per capita grape consumption in the United States,

195092. Compiled by author from data published in Alston et al., The California Table

Grape Commissions Promotion Program,1112.

Year

1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1994

1000

800

600

400

200

0

MillionsofPounds

Total U.S. GrapeImports

Imports fromChile

Imports fromMexico

figure intro.2Origin of grape imports to the United States in pounds. Compiled

by author from data published in Alston et al., The California Table Grape Commissions

Promotion Program, 1112.


23/39

introduction 11

imperialist power, liberal benefactor, or both. When thinking about the cir-

culation of commodities, it is commonplace to imagine Latin America as

responding to outside demands and cultural models emanating from, or im-

posed by, a far more powerful United States or Europe. In such formulations,

Latin America produces products for a voracious North Atlantic, import-ing or emulating tastes first developed in the North. Buying into the Regime

asks what it means that Chileans were actors inside the United States

businessmen who aggressively pushed grapes, networked with California

agribusiness, and courted U.S. shoppers with promises of health and sleek

bodies. Likewise, the book asks what it means that Chilean peasants and

agricultural workers were modern, twentieth-century consumers develop-

ing new tastes and negotiating complex relationships to imported washing

machines and televisions. Such questions seek to disrupt the automatic logics

underpinning hierarchical binaries of North America versus South America,

urban versus rural, consumers versus workers, modern first world versus abject

third world.

This does not mean that Chileans and U.S. Americans operated on even

playing fields. U.S. domination in the Western Hemisphereeconomic, cul-

tural, political, and militaryalways mattered. In developing fruit exports,

Chileans looked frankly to the United States, especially to California, for

technology and university training. They benefited hugely from U.S. aid and

investment. The U.S. military and economic support for Pinochets seizure

of power directly enabled Chiles radical neoliberal makeover. During the

dictatorship, Chilean workers became exploited in new ways. They ate poorly

and were malnourished, even as their labor allowed U.S. consumers to eat a

healthier diet. In considering these dynamics, the task becomes not only re-

versing the gaze but also seeing in multiple dimensions. Buying into the Regime

seeks to simultaneously recognize and decenter U.S. power by bringing theUnited States into a story about Chiles impact inside U.S. borders.

Buying into the Regimebuilds on traditions and new developments from

both Latin American studies and U.S. American studies. As a history of Chiles

grape-export industry, the book draws on strongly materialist paradigms in

Latin American studies for thinking about commodity trade, labor exploita-

tion, state formation, economic development, and imperialism. As a history

of consumption, Buying into the Regimeengages wide debates in U.S. Ameri-

can studies about popular culture as a locus of political power, resistance,and the production of gendered and racial difference. This is not to say that

Latin American studies has ignored culture or that U.S. American studies


24/39

12 introduction

has no materialist tradition or interest in the state. Rather it recognizes

that as academic fields very much consolidated during the cold war, Latin

American studies and U.S. American studies have different assumptions

about their objects of study and ask different questions.21

Latin American studies has long been concerned with accounting forLatin American difference from the United States and Europe, the impact of

global inequalities, the roots of authoritarianism, and the viability of democ-

racy. This made Latin American studies inherently comparative and transna-

tional from the start, concerned with relationships between world regions

and richer and poorer countries. By contrast, one of the great innovations of

U.S. American studies was taking culture as an analytical object, focusing

on formations internal to the United States (the only country in the U.S. acad-

emy to constitute its own area study). Precisely because of its self-assigned re-

sponsibility to map the specificity of the U.S. nation, U.S. American studies

vigorously engaged questions of gendered, racial, and sexual difference raised

by the social movements of the 1960s and after. U.S. American studies have

been especially generative of the linguistic turn that urged scholars to see

culture and language as contested fields of political power. In recent years,

both Latin American studies and U.S. American studies have gone in new

directions. Latin American studies has had an outpouring of work on gender

and race, bringing cultural analysis to bear on enduring materialist com-

mitments to political economy. U.S. American studies now more often looks

abroad to consider how U.S. society was shaped by projects of empire, world

war, negotiated borderlands, and frontiers.

Buying into the Regimebridges these different perspectives but aims to

do more than mix and stir. It proposes that writing a transnational history

of Chile and the United States involves writing about how area-studies para-

digms have differently constructed the United States and Chile, and the bookrethinks those models. For example, sophisticated traditions of Latin Amer-

ican studies about U.S. imperialism have often worked to eclipse the entre-

preneurial role of Latin American business or suggest that a passion for

neoliberal economics was always thrust upon Latin America from abroad.

Likewise, the consideration within U.S. American studies of Latin Americans

impact inside the United States often begins at the border (or in the border-

lands) with studies of immigrants or the figure of the Latino.

Buying into the Regimes argument that Chilean businessmen played keyroles in marketing grapes within the United States draws on the traditions

of Latin American and U.S. American studies but also critiques their limits.


25/39

introduction 13

To similar ends, the book contends that Chilean fruit workers had complex

relationships to consumption. Latin American studies has produced a bevy

of fine labor histories. But they rarely consider peasants and workers as con-

sumers; this is a lacuna that unwittingly constructs consumption as a luxury

of the privileged classes and first world.22

In a reverse way, the outpouring ofexcellent work in U.S. American studies on American consumer culture

rarely contemplates links to the lives of workers outside the United States and

almost never to the ways such workers are also consumers of goods coming

from abroad.

Buying into the Regimetakes a transnational Americas dynamic as its ob-

ject of study. It does not reject older area-studies questions. It proposes that

new frameworks are necessary and that they render different stories and

arguments about the past. The nation-states and national histories of Chile

and the United States are very present in this book. The goal of transna-

tional studies or world history should not be to declare the nation-state

irrelevant nor compel us always to see commonalities. It should be to high-

light how national and regional differences are created through dynamics

that develop across borders.

The title of this book, Buying into the Regime, is a rhetorical question. The

book argues that struggles over gender and work inside Chile were insepa-

rable from the ways that Chilean authoritarianism enabled new consumer

tastes outside Chile, such as the U.S. appetite for grapes. This, in turn, em-

phasized Chileans as consumers of commodities exported from other coun-

tries. The answer to who buys into the regime? is banal: everyone. But

what the question means and to whom it applies becomes differently rele-

vant when asked from multiple perspectives.

Considering Consumption

Consumption is important for rethinking old ways of seeing Latin America

and the United States. For many years now, consumer culture has been a

central topic in studies of the United States and Europe, and it is being ex-

plored more fully elsewhere.23While historians insist that acts and meanings

of consumption are ancient, they pay particular attention to the commodities

circulated by capitalism after the sixteenth century. Scholars hotly debate

when mass culture begins. They have distinguished between consumptionas an analytical category and consumerism as a particular set of meanings

attached to consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving


26/39

14 introduction

mass production and use of goods. There are passionate disagreements

about whether consumer culture constitutes alienation and illusion, fetish-

ism and displacement, or self-transformation and creation of community.

Such disputes echo larger arguments about the merits of capitalism itself.24

Regardless of their differences, the best discussions recognize consumptionas a social relationship that generates hierarchies and differences of power.25

This makes it possible to see consumption as political, something people fight

over, basic to everyday experiences of power.

Until recently, Latin American history has looked little at consumption.26

It has focused more on production: Latin Americas provision of raw materi-

als to the world, the development efforts of the state or foreign companies, and

Latin American workers resistance to exploitative conditions. When consump-

tion enters the story, its analysis is usually subordinated to other agendas. But

Latin American history has paid plenty of attention to political struggle, the

contested nature of social power. Its virtual fixation with class relationships

to the state has made workers and peasants the protagonists in national nar-

ratives. Certainly U.S. labor history has done the same. But a good many

histories about U.S. consumption focus on middle-class and elite lives or

discuss mass culture as a stand-in for consumer practices of most Ameri-

cans.27Scholarship on the United States overwhelmingly looks at internal

dynamicsstruggles for inclusion, mobility, change, expression, and oppres-

sion within the U.S. nation. With the exception of labor history, studies of

U.S. Americans consumption say little about production: where, how, and by

whom consumer goods are made. This reiterates dichotomies between work-

ers and a leisure class, abetting the notion that the United States consumes

what other people in the world only produce.

Studies about food in the United States have been strikingly uninterested

in workers.28

Compelling critiques about the rise of corporate agricultureand industrial food processing say little about those employed in food indus-

tries. They tend to romanticize home cooking and womens (or servants)

domestic labor that preceded foods corruption.29Few studies of U.S. food

look at goods imported from abroad. Most ignore the long tradition in Latin

American studies of tracing commodities as they journey from colonies or

peripheral countries to the kitchens of the metropolitan core.30But to be

fair, historians of commodities often have shown only cursory interest in

consumptionwhat people actually do with the goods that travel and whatthey mean.


27/39

introduction 15

Histories of Chile suffer from a different problem. Many discussions of

the Pinochet years emphasize consumption as a wholly new phenomenon

created by military rule. They have been especially concerned with the impact

of internationally circulated goods on workers and women. But consump-

tion is mostly seen as a bogey helping keep the dictator in power. Criticsbemoan how Chilean working-class militancy was diluted by desires for

American consumer goods and upper-class lifestyles projected by television.31

Chilean women are depicted as especially susceptible. It was women, after

all, who in Allendes last year, marched down the streets of Santiago banging

empty pots in protest of socialisms failure to prevent food lines and con-

sumer rationing. On the eve of the 1973 coup, large groups of women paid

personal visits to military leaders, ridiculing them as chickens and beseech-

ing them to put on their pants and save the fatherland from Marxism.32

These foundational moments of female complicity against democracy haunt

scholarship on the military period, making it diffi cult to see Chilean women

as other than reactionary housewives. In contrast, arguments about Chilean

workers (usually taken to be men) apologize for a failed class mission. The

Chilean labor movement was initially silenced by violent repression. When

unions remerged as part of the prodemocracy movement in the 1980s, they

never recovered the same protagonism enjoyed under Allende. More funda-

mentally, most unions accepted neoliberal capitalism as a fait accompli for

the future.

The observation that one of Pinochets greatest triumphs was to identify

consumption as a neglected site of legitimacy is crucial to understanding

neoliberal authoritarianism and the force of its legacy. Likewise, arguments

that, under dictatorship, mass consumer culture can illegitimate democratic

claims offers a counterpoint to the literature on U.S. consumption, which

despite its variety and nuance, tends to see consumption as a form of par-ticipation in civil society. Conceptually, studies of Chile under military rule

draw more from Marxist debates on European fascism precisely because the

hypermodernity touted during Pinochets regime was so tethered to democ-

racys collapse rather than its spread.

But consumption and consumer culture in Chile during military rule were

never just reactionary. The meanings created by goods circulating among

people were not fixed or invented wholesale by the military or their U.S.-

trained economic advisors. Like other social relationships, consumption isproduced within particular relations of power and produces new ones. It is


28/39

16 introduction

best seen a contested terrain, or a field of force.33We might evaluate whether

particular forms of consumption are good or bad for those involved

emancipatory or exploitative, generative of new meanings, productive of

continuity, and so onbut not whether consumption in the abstract is virtu-

ous or not.Buying into the Regimeaddresses consumption as an analytical category, a

site where acts of using and giving meaning to goods shape social relation-

ships. In a distinct way, the book examines how politics of the cold war elabo-

rated ideas about consumerism and consumer culture that endowed particular

goods (grapes, televisions, cosmetics) with different values. In Chile the

Pinochet regime celebrated the mass circulation of imported goods as proof

of its legitimacy. Consequentially, the regimes opponents were urgent to

denounce consumerism as a handmaiden to political tyranny. The foreign

origin of consumer goods was especially important and undergirded argu-

ments about whether consumerism made Chile modern or newly victimized

it by imperialism. In the United States, by contrast, debates over consumer

cultures of food often assumed that the growing availability of fresh fruits

and vegetables, however unequally distributed, flowed from the countrys

natural endowments and internal farm economies. Where the foreignness of

food products mattered, their availability in U.S. markets often affi rmed the

cosmopolitanism of American shopping options.

Engendering Transnational Histories

Gender is a crucial analytical category for writing transnational histories.

Despite a certain wariness between feminist studies and world history, schol-

ars of gender and sexuality have long explored concepts that are central to

thinking about global dynamics, including the social production of borders,difference, and inequality as natural facts.34Feminist materialist questions

about work and gendered divisions of labor have much to offer world histories

of commodities, trade, empire, and comparative state formation. Gender is also

key to rethinking relationships between world regions and what constitutes

region or area to begin with. The historic claims of the United States on

Latin America have often been characterized by contemporary actors (and

scholars) as a masculine authority (Uncle Sam) alternately seeking to seduce

a feminine Latin America through trade, or to discipline unruly and childishLatin American men with military force. Transnational histories that chal-

lenge unidirectional frames upend such binaries.


29/39

introduction 17

Gender is especially important to thinking about consumption as a trans-

national phenomenon. The idea that women are more susceptible to consumer

seductions than are men is hardly unique to stories about Chile. Indeed, de-

pictions of women as vulnerable to consumer capitalism have been common

in narratives about the United States and Europe.35

Dichotomous argumentsabout whether consumerism is good or bad for women plague these stories,

mirroring older debates about whether work or capitalism itself is liberating

or oppressive to women. Despite decades of feminist scholarship arguing

that womens relationships to jobs and purchasing power are every bit as dia-

lectical and complex as are mens, the category women continues to oper-

ate as a flat moral evaluation of entire regimes or systems. This casts women

as either victimized by or complicit with corrupting power. There is, for ex-

ample, a convergence between stories about Chilean women attracted to

Pinochets promises of plenty and stories about the decline of U.S. food quality

coinciding with womens entrance into the workforce and feminisms hostility

to housework.36

Feminists have vigorously challenged the pathology that haunts tales about

womens desire for goods. They insist that consumption can involve creativ-

ity and resistance as well as subordination, that men are no less shaped by

consumptions complexities than are women. Feminist scholarship has also

reframed understandings of class and what counts as meaningful political

struggle. It insists that family divisions of labor, such as womens respon-

sibilities for buying and using goods to reproduce children and spouses, is

inseparable from the divisions of labor between workers and employers that

produce profit and structure relations in factories and fields. Consumption

whether at home or in a tavern, a public marketplace, or a theaterproduces

value and social distinction between peasants and urban workers and middle-

class and elite people, as well as between men and women within and acrossclass. Consumption can contest gender relationships as well as bolster them.37

Feminist studies of consumption have widened the lens for considering

what is worth studying. Social and cultural histories now consider phenom-

ena such as fashion, leisure, eating, and sports as constitutive of class and

gender relations. Labor historians who look at consumption, be it daily working-

class routines or union boycotts, invariably bring more women into stories that

previously focused on men. Precisely because of womens historic responsi-

bility for families, women are more often found in social spaces and politicalmovements involving consumption. From a different angle, feminist scholar-

ship on imperialism and empire emphasizes how gender and consumption


30/39

18 introduction

structure everyday projects of rule. They consider how the circulation of

imperial commodities such as soap, tobacco, coffee, and sugar produced

rigid racial and gender hierarchies between colonizers and natives and

white female purity and the obligation of white men to protect it.38Relat-

edly, feminists have stressed how the popularization of exotic commoditieswithin Europe and the United States brought the empire home into wom-

ens domestic spaces.39

Tracing the gendered nature of how commercial goods move across the

globe asks us to think about class in new ways. Buying into the Regimeargues

that Chilean grape workers were consumers every bit as much as the shop-

pers who bought grapes in American supermarkets. Sexual divisions of la-

bor within Chilean households mattered as much as they did within U.S.

households in determining who bought what and why. But Chileans were

never the only workers who mattered to the story. In California thousands

of women and men labored in vineyards or otherwise supported families

who harvested grapes for the U.S. domestic market. Marketing campaigns

for grapes in the United States targeted Todays Working Woman (imag-

ined as a professional or white-collar employee) as well as the traditional

housewife, whose labor had long sustained families. Here the task of map-

ping the transnational connections of the grape industry demands linking

gender divisions of labor in production and consumption in multiple places.

Modes of Investigation

This book juxtaposes different methodologies in order to place different

national histories into dialogue. Each of the five chapters in Buying into the

Regimeexamines the significance of consumption and grapes according to a

different set of questions. Together the chapters argue that the consumptionof transnationally circulating goods was an important terrain of struggle in

the politics of the cold war. Definitions about which countries were developed

or modern hinged on claims about the things people consumed, constituting

a central framework for juxtaposing capitalism and socialism. Arguments

about consumption justified particular state projects (Chilean military rule,

U.S. foreign policy in Latin America) as well as challenged those projects

(Chilean prodemocracy movements, U.S. solidarity campaigns, ufw boy-

cotts). Selling grapes involved elaborate appeals by California and Chileanagribusinesses to U.S. anxieties and fantasies about food. Boycott campaigns

to get Americans to stop eating grapes sought to link social justice to con-


31/39

introduction 19

sumer choice and protection. On a daily basis, the struggles of Chilean women

and men to consume enough things, and debates over who should buy what

things, transformed family balances of power and gave women significant

roles in actions that questioned Pinochets legitimacy.

Buying into the Regimeis deliberately interdisciplinary. This flows in partfrom the books organization around very different topics, each requiring

particular analytical approachesethnographic, textual, sociological, quan-

titative. More fundamentally, the book is interdisciplinary because it engages

the distinct traditions of Latin American studies and U.S. American studies

for thinking about social power and narrating change. The book considers

different inquiries side by side, not so much to fuse techniques as to high-

light how meanings about Chile and the United States have been produced

historically.

Chapter 1, The Long Miracle, addresses the development of Chiles fruit-

export sector and its relation to U.S. institutions between the 1920s and the

1980s. The chapter employs techniques from social and economic history,

including feminist-materialist models for thinking about commodity pro-

duction and sexual divisions of labor. It stresses womens centrality to Chil-

ean agriculture long before Pinochet overthrew Allende. State-led economic

initiatives (including socialism) laid a crucial foundation for the fruit boom

of the military years. The chapter challenges the notion that Chiles neolib-

eral makeover sprang from a sudden shock therapy instituted by University

of Chicagotrained economists. Instead, the chapter traces older ties be-

tween California and Chilean agriculture, including significant numbers of

Chilean agronomists trained at the University of California. When consider-

ing the history of food, the California Boys may have been more important

than the Chicago Boys.

Chapter 2, Fables of Abundance, examines what the new forms of con-sumption emerging during Chiles military regime meant for fruit workers.

This chapter is intensely ethnographic, drawing heavily on oral histories and

the insights of cultural anthropology and literary criticism. It argues that

consumption became a terrain where women challenged mens authority in

the family. Women often made decisions about what to buy without men

and lay claim to privileges formerly associated with men. Men and women

bought different things with their earnings and invested them with different

meanings. Whereas men provided household budgets for food and rent,womens wages more often bought the electric appliances, furniture, and cos-

metics associated with imported consumer culture. This linked women


32/39

20 introduction

more closely to regime economic policy even as the transformation in womens

relationships with men radically challenged the militarys idealization of

patriarchy.

Chapter 3, The Fresh Sell, shifts attention to the United States. It ex-

plores the separate and joint efforts of California and Chilean agribusinessesto market grapes to U.S. consumers by promoting fresh and healthy eating.

The chapter combines a history of advertising with a feminist analysis of

consumer culture. It argues that both Chilean and Californian marketing

targeted women, blending quasi-emancipatory messages about female auton-

omy with older ideas about womens concern with family and attractiveness

to men. But Californian and Chilean strategies also differed. While agribusi-

nesses from California stressed that grapes were products of Mother Nature,

unsullied by industry or artifice, Chileans celebrated the considerable tech-

nology and labor required to produce fruit. Chileans emphasis on industrial

modernity sought to establish Chilean grapes essential sameness to Califor-

nia grapes. It simultaneously distinguished Chilean grapes as more hygienic

than fruit from elsewhere in Latin America. Importers and distributers of

Chilean fruit inside the United States eagerly collaborated with Chileans in

pushing the idea that Chilean grapes were identical to Californian grapes

because Chile itself was more like California and Europe than Latin Amer-

ica. Chilean grapes circulated within U.S. markets as whitened products,

deliberately distinguished from tropical fruit and other Latin exotics.

Chapter 4, Boycott Grapes!, is also primarily about events inside the

United States. It compares consumer boycotts led by the ufwto the U.S.-

based Chile solidarity movement that also organized boycotts against grapes

and other Chilean imports. This chapter relies the most on the traditions of

comparative history, the side-by-side presentation of seemingly distinct sto-

ries. It draws on the different traditions of U.S. American studies and LatinAmerican studies on social movements. Boycotts offered radical challenges

to the notion that grapes were fresh and good for you. Activists insisted that

American consumers take responsibility for the conditions under which their

food was produced. The chapter also explores the irony that ufwand Chile

solidarity boycotts of grapes had very little contact with one another, despite

the extensive connections between California and Chilean fruit industries.

Such lack of connection sprang from how the cold war differently constructed

U.S. and Latin American political struggles. Whereas the ufwunderstood itsmission in terms of labor and civil rights inside the U.S. nation, Chile soli-

darity activists focused on the United States as an imperialist force abroad.


33/39

introduction 21

Chapter 5, Not Buying It, returns to Chile to explore consumption and

prodemocracy movements against Pinochet in the 1980s. The chapter com-

bines ethnography and archival research on popular mobilization to challenge

the widely held view that consumer culture during the military dictatorship

served mostly reactionary purposes. Arguments about consumption were cen-tral to criticisms about how Pinochet had failed Chile, either because a ma-

jority of Chileans did not have enough of the things they needed (such as

food) or because the things that they did have (such as television) were de-

structive to democratic values and authentic Chilean culture. Consumption

was also important to concrete organizing, such as forming soup kitchens,

consumer cooperatives, housing committees, and unions. Women fruit work-

ers assumed leading roles in prodemocracy activities, especially ones asso-

ciated with the Catholic Church and labor movement. Female organizing

became a basis for criticizing mens discrimination and violence against

women as well as for protesting military rule.

The subjects taken up in these chapters could each be the topic of their

own book. At times it may seem that incommensurable topics are being asked

to speak to one another, a comparison of apples and oranges. There is also the

question of what is left out. Buying into the Regimedoes not have chapters on

what consumption meant to fruit workers in California or the same detail

on the California grape industry as on Chiles. Californias grape workers

enter the story as part of more specific chapters about marketing grapes and

the ufws boycott. Similarly, Buying into the Regime does not employ the

same methodologies for what might be considered similar questions. The

books claims about what grapes meant to U.S. women and men who bought

them are based not on ethnography but on interpretations of marketing lit-

erature and studies of American consumer behavior. As a transnational proj-

ect, Buying into the Regimeinevitably constructs new exclusions. It leaves outCanada, a crucial part of the Americas that also imported millions of pounds

of grapes from Pinochets Chile and was an important site for ufwboycotts.

The book mentions only in passing that Chilean grapes circulated beyond the

Western Hemisphere: in the Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan,

and especially Europe, the last of which was also a stronghold of anti-Pinochet

activism.

Buying into the Regimedoes not pretend to be the whole story. No story

ever is. No matter what its scope, every study chooses some objects over others,producing a bounded framework. The silences and omissions of a work also

produce meaning. Although commonsensical, it seems necessary to repeat this


34/39

22 introduction

maxim in the case of transnational studies and projects in world history.

The point is not just that there are limits to the reasonable size of a good

book (which there are) or daunting practical impediments to doing research

in multiple languages (which there are). But these are not inherently lesser

problems in area studies generally or in national history, or even in localhistory and mircohistory.

The fundamental challenge of a transnational project is to juxtapose ob-

jects of study from different fields or traditions to bring new understandings

into view. Buying into the Regimeintentionally focuses on Chiles relationship

to the United States (rather than to other places) to emphasize how U.S.

American studies and Latin American studies have mutually generated a

range of assumptions about consumption and production, imperialism and

dependency, North and South. Chilean fruit workers are the primary con-

sumers addressed in this book because third-world workers are most assumed

to be excluded from, or exploited by, global consumer culture. American con-

sumers appear in the book less in terms of their own transformations and

political struggles (which have been more thoroughly addressed by others)

than as targets of advertising campaigns and consumer boycotts where Chil-

eans had active roles. It is not that other stories are less important or would

not contribute to the story, but the choices made here are part of the books

methodology.

By the twenty-first century, the hazards and benefits of globalization would

replace the cold war as the dominant framework for thinking about world

politics. Latin America receded as a primary target of U.S. military interven-

tion and state-building projects, replaced by the Middle East. Islamic funda-

mentalism supplanted Soviet communism as the chief threat to capitalist

democracy. China and Indias capacity to craft their own successful versions

of neoliberalism made Asia a center for manufacturing and technology.Consumers all over the world ate food, wore clothes, and used electronics

made in countries not their own. The Internet and cellphones enabled aston-

ishing transfers of information, style, and opinion. Arguments about whether

such developments were good or bad shaped world debates about freedom,

sovereignty, social justice, and human rights. They were especially impor-

tant to new social movements that emerged around globalizationfrom the

many incarnations of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to criticisms of

the World Trade Organization and North American Free Trade Agreement.Buying into the Regimeproposes that many of the concerns in the twenty-

first century about globalization were forged during the cold war and par-


35/39

introduction 23

ticularly shaped by relations between the United States and Latin America.

The explosion of food choices for fresh and healthy eating in the United

States was tied to Chiles emergence, under military dictatorship, as one of

the worlds most neoliberal nations. Building economies that exported to a

wider world market was fundamental to both U.S. and Chilean visions ofmodernity and national security. Definitions of freedom and democracy or,

alternatively, injustice and tyranny spun around arguments about commod-

ities: how they were produced, circulated, and consumed.


36/39

Introduction

1. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; Fromartz, Organic, Inc.

2. See Pollan, The Botany of Desire; Sackman, Orange Empire; and Soluri, Banana

Cultures.

3. According to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, per capita

consumption of grapes almost quadrupled between 1971 and 1990, rising from 1.7

pounds to 7.6 pounds. By 2005 per capita grape consumption was 8.6 pounds. Per

capita consumption of bananas were numerically higher, rising from 19.3 pounds in

1976 to 24.4 pounds in 1990 and to 25.2 pounds in 2005. But comparatively, the rate

of growth for banana consumption was lower than that for grapes. Alston et al., The

California Table Grape Commissions Promotion Program, 11; Susan Pollack and Agnes

Perez, Fruit and Tree Nuts: Situation and Outlook; Yearbook 2008, report from the

Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, October 2008.

4. Alston et al., The California Table Grape Commissions Promotion Program, 11.

5. cepal, La cadena de distribucin y la competitividad de las exportaciones latino-

americanas, 60.

6. The Asociacin de Exportadores de Chile (Chilean Exporters Association)

reported that Chile exported 506,188 metric tons of table grapes during the 199798

harvest. Asociacin de Exportadores de Chile, Catlogo de la Industria Frutcola Chilena

(Santiago: Asociacin de Fruta Chilena, 2000), 43.

7. Free-trade zones existed elsewhere besides Chile and predated Pinochet,

especially in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, and parts of Asia. But Chile was the first

country to reorganize an entire national economy and its major political and social

organizations along neoliberal principles of privatized markets, fiscal monetarism,

and a privileging of international trade. See Winn, Victims of the Chilean Miracle?

8. On the commercialization of Chilean grapes during military rule, see Goldfrank,

Fresh Demand, and Harvesting Counterrevolution.

9. Studies on Latin American labor and the production of consumer goods for U.S.

and European markets include Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit

NOTES


37/39

268 notes to introduction

Company in Costa Rica; Jimnez, From Plantation to Cup; LeGrand, Living in

Macando; Minz, Sweetness and Power; Roseberry et al., Coffee, Society, and Power;

Soluri, Banana Cultures; Topik, Coffee; and Topik and Wells, Coffee Anyone?

10. This exchange took place in the Soviet Union at the opening of an exhibit on

U.S. culture and became known as the kitchen debate. The exhibit featured a model

of the interior of an American kitchen, replete with a refrigerator, dishwasher, and

electric blender, as well as modern American food products such as tvdinners

and frozen orange juice. Historians have long stressed this exhibits celebration of

American appliance technology and processed foods. However, also included in the

kitchen exhibit was as large bowl of fruit, testimony to the abundance of American

agriculture. Richard Nixon, The Kitchen Debate (July 24, 1959), in Richard Nixon:

Speeches, Writings, Documents, edited by Rick Perlstein (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008).

11. See Moeller, Protecting Motherhood; Oldenziel and Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen;

and Tyler May, Homeward Bound.

12. In 1976 there were military governments or authoritarian civilian governments

dominated by the military in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil,

Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the

Dominican Republic. The governments of Colombia and Venezuela largely depended

on military rather than constitutional power. Mexico and Cuba were one-party states

with various levels of authoritarianism.

13. Lavn, The Quiet Revolution, 90.

14. Campesinoderives from the Spanish word for countryside (campo). In its Latin

American context, campesino refers to a broad range of rural poor people, or people of

rural origin, including small farmers, tenants, landless agricultural workers, migrant

workers, and people from rural families who may make their living in urban areas

as servants or other employees. Campesinois most often translated into English as

peasant, but it connotes a much larger set of class relationships than does the classical

European definition of peasants as connected to small farming and land tenancy.

15. Hutchison and Orellana, El movimiento de derechos humanos en Chile.

16. Pinochet formally handed power back to an elected civilian president, Patricio

Aylwin, in March 1990. In 1988 Pinochet lost a national plebiscite that forced him to

hold elections in 1989.

17. See Belasco,Appetite for Change; Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty; and Levenstein,

Revolution at the Table.

18. The Chile solidarity movement built on still earlier solidarity movements with

Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. See especially Gosse, Where the Boys Are;

Green, We Cannot Remain Silent; and Lekus, Queer Harvests.

19. For an overview of world history as a field, see Manning, Navigating World

History.Also see Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

20. On the Americas as an emerging area of study, see Greene, The Canal Builders;

Levander and Levine, Hemispheric American Studies; McGuinness, Path of Empire;

Shukla and Tinsman, Imagining Our Americasand Radical History Review: Our Americas

Cultural and Political Imaginingsno. 89 (Spring 2004).


38/39

notes to introduction 269

21. On uses of Latin American studies and U.S. American studies in framing work

on the Americas, see Tinsman and Shukla, Across the Americas. Many of the key

concepts presented in the introduction of Buying into the Regimewere first elaborated

in this coauthored chapter and in the book Imagining Our Americas, which I coedited

with Sandhya Shukla.

22. A number of excellent works address consumption as part of larger labor

histories. See especially Grandin, Fordlandia; James, Doa Maras Story; Klubock,

Contested Communities; and Putnam, The Company They Kept.However, as a whole,

consumption has not been a central analytical category for most labor histories on

Latin America.

23. The historical literature on consumption is vast. Influential works for this study

include Agnew, Coming Up for Air; Auslander, Taste and Power; Bronner, Consuming

Visions; Cohen,A Consumers Republic; Cohen,Making a New Deal; Cross,An All-

Consuming Century; De Grazia and Furlough, The Sex of Things; Enstad, Ladies of Love;

Frank, Purchasing Power; Glickman, Buying Power; Glickman, Consumer Society in

American History; Glickman,A Living Wage; Lears, Fables of Abundance; Peiss, Hope in a

Jar; Schwartz, Its So French!; Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl around the World; and

Wightman Fox and Lears, The Culture of Consumption.

24. The Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals originally associated with the

Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, played an early role

in arguing that consumer culture was a central terrain of political struggle. See

especially Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedermann and

translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap, 2002);

Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; and Hork-

heimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.Also see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of

Seeing; and Schwartz, Walter Benjamin for Historians.

25. See Appadurai, The Social Life of Things; Attfield, Wild Things; Bell and Valen-

tine, Consuming Geographies; Berman,All That Is Solid Melts into Air; Bourdieu,

Distinction; Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods; D. Horowitz, The Morality of

Spending; Jameson, Postmodernism; Lowe and Lloyd, Politics and Culture in the Shadow

of Capital; Miller,Acknowledging Consumption; Miller,Modernity; and Slater, Consumer

Culture and Modernity.

26. Works on consumption in Latin America include Baker, The Market and the

Masses in Latin America; Barr-Melij, Between Revolution and Reaction; Bauer, Goods,

Power, History; Bauer, Industry and the Missing Bourgeoisie; Elena, Dignifying

Argentina; Garca Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadnos; Jlin, Las relaciones sociales

del consumo; Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov, Fragments of a Golden Age; Lpez and

Weinstein, The Making of the Middle Class; Ochoa, Feeding Mexico; Orlove, The Allure

of the Foreign; Seigel, Uneven Encounters; Stillerman, Disciplined Workers and Avid

Consumers; Stillerman, Gender, Class, and Generational Contexts for Consumption

in Contemporary Chile; Super, Food, Conquest and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century

Latin America; Zolov, Refried Elvis.

27. For a critique of the early focus within U.S. American studies on elite and

middle-class consumption, see Agnew, Coming Up for Air.


39/39

28. See Daniel Bender and Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Editors Introduction: Radicalizing

the History of Food, Radical History Reviewno. 110 (Spring 2011): 17.

29. Especially see Michael Pollans In Defense of Food, The Omnivores Dilemma, and

The Botany of Desire.For a critique of Pollan and other critical writers about food, see

Deutsch, Memories of Mothers in the Kitchen. Even many of the more academic

histories of food give only passing attention to gender and labor. See, for example,

Belasco,Appetite for Change; R. Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table;

Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty.

30. The literature on Latin American history of commodities and labor is vast.

Important works for this study include J. Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico;

Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories; Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit

Company in Costa Rica; Clarence-Smith and Topik, The Global Coffee Economy in Africa,

Asia, and Latin America; Gootenberg,Andean Cocaine; Grandin, Fordlandia; Klubock,

Contested Communities; Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Putman, The Company They Kept;

Topik and Wells, The Second Conquest of Latin America; Soluri, Banana Cultures; and

Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom.

31. The most representative of this scholarship includes Moulian, Chile actual;

Moulian and Marn, El Consumo me consume; and P. Silva, Modernization, Consum-

erism, and Politics in Chile; Ral Gonzlez Meyer, Reflexiones sobre el consumo:

Ms all del lo privado y ms ac de la condena, Revista de Economa y Trabajo, no. 11

(2001): 20734.

32. Baldez, Why Women Protest; and Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile.

33. My understanding of consumption as contested terrain draws on discussions of

hegemony. See Roseberry,Anthropologies and Histories; and Williams,Marxism and

Literature.

34. On world history and gender studies, see Strasser and Tinsman, Its a Mans

World. Many of the ideas about gender and transnational history presented in this

book were first developed in this coauthored essay as well as in Strasser and Tinsman,

Engendering World History. Also see Wiesner, World History and the History of

Women, Gender, and Sexuality; and Nadell and Haulmann,Making Womens Histories.

35. De Grazia and Furlough, The Sex of Things.

36. Deutsch, Memories of Mothers in the Kitchen.

37. Important feminist work on labor and consumption include Cohen,A Consum-

ers Republic; Cohen,Making a New Deal; Cowan,More Work for Mother; Delphy,

Sharing the Same Table; Enstead, Ladies of Love, Girls of Labor; Frank, Purchasing

Power; Lamount, The Dignity of Working Men; Peiss, Hope in a Jar; and Porter Benson,

Household Accounts.

38. Alexander and Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic

Futures; Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Grewal and Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies;

Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States

Imperialism; McClintock, Imperial Leather; McClintock, Mufti, and Shoat, Dangerous

Liaisons; Renda, Taking Haiti; Rosenberg, U.S. Mass Consumerism in Transnational

Perspective; Seigel, Uneven Encounters; and Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.

39. See especially Hoganson, Consumers Imperium.