Buying into the Regime

Grapes and Consumption in Cold War

Chile and the United States  Heidi Tinsman
 BUYING INTO THE REGIME +

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-
counters seeks 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 Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings re-
lated to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged,
and reshaped.
 Grapes and Consumption in Cold War
Chile and the United States HEIDI TINSMAN

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014

© 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.
isbn 978-0-8223-5520-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5535-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Grape industry—Chile. 2. Chile—Foreign economic relations—United States.
3. United States—Foreign economic relations— Chile.
I. Title. II. Series: American encounters/global interactions.
hd9259.g7c55 2014
382′.41480983—dc23
2013029332
 In memory of my father,
r. hovey tinsman jr.
★

And for my mother,

margaret neir tinsman
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ★ ix
Introduction ★ 1

one
The Long Miracle
Collaborations in the Chilean Fruit Industry, 1900–1990 ★ 25

two
Fables of Abundance
Grape Workers and Consumption in Chile ★ 64

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 Chile ★ 207

Epilogue ★ 255 Notes ★ 267 Bibliography ★ 331 Index ★ 349

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Buying into the Regime marks 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 Review and 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 area and region in ways espe-
cially relevant to historians. Ulrike and I cotaught the University of California’s
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. Ulrike’s sharp insights
concretized why feminist analysis must be central to any serious project on
“the world.” It was also Ulrike who taught me the importance of studying
disconnections as well as connections in transnational dynamics. While col-
laborative work is given more lip ser vice 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 Regime is also the product of the rich intellectual environ-
ment at the University of California, Irvine. The Department of History’s
leadership in developing world history as a dynamic research and teaching
field provided an inspiring place to craft a transnational project. I thank
Ken Pomeranz, Steven Topik, Bob Moeller, Jon Wiener, Mark Poster, Jeff
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 O’Toole, Emily Rosenberg,
and Vicki Ruiz. Colleagues in the Department of Women’s Studies distinctly
shaped 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 Jiménez, 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 Vicuña at
Universidad Diego Portales; Soledad Zárate at Universidad Alberto Hurtado;
Vanessa Schwartz at the University of Southern California; Wally Goldfrank at
uc Santa Cruz; Margaret Chowning at uc Berkeley; Gonzalo Leiva at Universi-
dad Pontifícia Católica 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 this
work 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 uc Pacific Rim Re-
search Program, the uc Institute for Research on Labor and Education, the uc
Humanities Research Institute, and the uc Irvine School of Humanities.
I thank Gonzalo Falabella and participants at the former Casa del Tempo-
rero for sponsoring my original fieldwork in Santa María, Chile.

x ac know ledg ments

 This is a project heavily based on oral histories and interviews, so I am
indebted to the many people who shared their perspectives, stories, and
contacts. In Chile, special thanks to Ericka Muñoz, Olga Gutiérrez, Selfa
Antimán, María Elena Galdámez, María Tapia, Olivia Herrera, Daniel San
Martín, the Sindicato Interempresa de Trabajadores Permanentes y Tempo-
reros de Santa María, and Confederación Unidad Obero Campesino. I am
also grateful to Ronald Bown at the Asociación de Exportadores de Chile,
Jorge Valenzuela, Constantino Mustakis, and José Luís Ibañéz. In Califor-
nia, I especially thank Bruce Obbink of the California Table Grape Associa-
tion, John Pandol, Darrel Fulmer, and Rick Eastes. At the United Farm
Workers of America, special thanks to Irv Hershenbaum and Roman Pinal.
Thanks also to Jono Shaffer. My work on the U.S.-Chile solidarity movement
owes much to Tim Harding, Fernando Torres, Jaime Salazar, Paul Chin,
Steve Volk, and Nora Hamilton.
This project benefited hugely from the opportunity I had to direct the
University of California’s Education Abroad Program in Santiago de Chile
between 2007 and 2009. Thanks to the students who pushed me to ask new
questions for a generation once removed from Latin America’s cold war.
Thanks to colleagues and friends who welcomed my family and supported
my work: Carmen Gloria Guiñez, Verónica Pomar, Maricarmen Leyton,
Soledad Falabella, Javier Couso, Miguel Kaiser, Sarah Chambers, Claudia
Mora, Elaine Acosta, Carolina Stefoni, Lucía Stecher, Consuelo Figueroa,
and Patricia Reyes.
Finally, I thank my family for their love and presence in my life. Erik
Kongshaug, always my keenest reader, edited the entire manuscript, and
steadied me in times of trial. Our sons, Arlo and Noel, gamely embraced
their early education in Chile and nearly always reminded me about what is
most important. This book is dedicated to my parents. My father died before
its completion but would have appreciated it. As a small businessman, he
was always remarkably interested in my critiques of capitalism. His commit-
ment to building community taught me much of what I know about democ-
racy. My mother introduced me to feminism and continues to model through
her own activism and public service how much women can change the world.

ac know ledg ments xi

 Iquique

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ACONCAGUA
San Felipe Santa Maria

VALPARAÍSO Los Andes

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SANTIAGO
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 CALIFORNIA
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UNITED STATES
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map.1 ★ Chile: Provinces and cities of the Central Valley. (left)

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

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 industry’s appeal
to women’s presumed desire for convenience and autonomy. In the very years
Americans grew more obese—the country was dubbed a fast-food nation for
Americans’ love of hamburgers and fries—they became obsessed with health
food, ate more blueberries and broccoli, and worried about vitamins and
toxins.1 Calls 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.2 But
after 1970, growth in the U.S. appetite for grapes outpaced that for all other
fruits.3 Grapes also earned political notoriety. Successive consumer grape
boycotts led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (ufw) aspired
to improve the lives of California’s mostly Mexican American and immigrant
agricultural laborers. Although the ufw had many victories, getting people
to stop eating grapes for long periods was not one of them. By the year 2000,
Americans consumed three times as many grapes as they had three decades
earlier.4 Grapes 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 by
a 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.5 By 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 Chile’s econ-
omy during General Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year military dictatorship.
Between 1973 and 1990, Chile became the world’s first poster child for neo-
liberal restructuring, a model that other developing countries embraced, or
were compelled to embrace, in the following decades.7 In 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 regime’s
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 before—
sugar, coffee, bananas, chocolate—the circulation of Chilean grapes in U.S.
supermarkets was propelled by miserable wages and systemic violence south
of the border.9 By 2001 the labor conditions that had existed in Chile during
Pinochet’s 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

2 introduction
War II, the United States celebrated consumer abundance as the hallmark of
capitalism’s moral preeminence over socialism. In 1959, U.S. Vice-President
Richard Nixon famously boasted to the Soviet prime minister, Nikita Khrush-
chev, that the typical U.S. suburban kitchen—complete with state-of-the-art
appliances and modern food products—exemplified American freedom.10
Nixon’s insistence that such a domestic, female space symbolized U.S. prow-
ess invoked the superiority of U.S. nuclear families, where men worked in
technologically advanced industries making consumer goods that simulta-
neously empowered and protected women as modern homemakers. Over
the next thirty years of superpower jockeying, the United States repeatedly
claimed that liberal capitalism ensured the privacy and spiritual integrity the
family in contrast to socialist totalitarianism.11 Other countries would natu-
rally choose the U.S. model if given the liberty to do so.
Latin America was a primary site of U.S. campaigns to promote capital-
ism and democracy as alternatives to communism. The United States poured
billions of dollars into development projects that promised to bring Latin
Americans’ lifestyles closer to those of their northern neighbors. Chile had a
privileged place in these efforts, receiving proportionally more aid in the
1960s than any other country. But in 1970, Chileans chose to elect a Marxist
president—Allende—who was committed to building socialism through con-
stitutional means. In 1973 Chile’s democracy was destroyed by the U.S.-backed
military forces sworn to protect it. Other Latin American countries followed
suit. By 1976 sixteen Latin American countries were governed by the armed
forces.12 As Chilean grapes and other Latin American goods began to appear
with greater frequency in U.S. stores, it again seemed that American con-
sumer plenty was based on exploiting Latin American neighbors rather than
sharing the American Dream.
But Chileans were also consumers. During the Pinochet regime, Chilean
markets opened up to a flood of imported clothes, food, cosmetics, furni-
ture, household electronics, and automobiles from Asia and elsewhere in the
Americas. Chile’s upper and middle classes shopped in new malls selling
Nike tennis shoes, Sony Walkmans, and Johnnie Walker whisky. Supporters
of military rule boasted that Chileans had American lifestyles. One particu-
larly avid fan, the economist Joaquín Lavín, famously dubbed these consumer
changes a “Quiet Revolution” that had fully integrated Chile into global mo-
dernity. Lavín celebrated that Chileans wore the latest international fashions
in leather sneakers and T-shirts, and that they were likely to own televisions,
refrigerators, microwave ovens, even cars. By age fifteen, Lavín boasted, the

introduction 3
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 amenities—an elec-
tric iron, a blender, a stove—as well as buying occasional lipstick or blue
jeans for themselves. Men’s 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 Chile’s fruit-export economy
was never just happening in the Northern Hemisphere or Chile’s wealthy
neighborhoods.
Buying into the Regime is a history of the relationship between Chile’s
fruit-export industry and the growing appetite for grapes in the United States.
The book traces the emergence of Chile’s commercial grape sector in the early
twentieth century and the significant collaborations between U.S. and
Chilean governments in developing Chile’s 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 food
created. 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 meat
and dairy industries.

4 introduction
 Buying into the Regime also examines the desires and consequences of
Chilean fruit workers’ consumption. The fruit industry’s 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 what to buy and who had 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 women’s
earning power, appreciating the televisions and stoves these wages bought.
But a great many men—and women—bitterly lamented that men ceased to be
breadwinners in ways they had been just recently.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chile’s democratic governments, including
that of Allende, undertook significant land-reform projects that expropri-
ated almost half of Chile’s agricultural property and distributed massive
amounts of property and jobs to campesino men heading families. Chile’s
agrarian reform effectively abolished the country’s 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 children’s 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 military’s strict mone-
tarist policies and repression of unions sent wages plummeting to half their
1972 value. As the fruit industry expanded, men in Chile’s primary agricul-
tural region, the Central Valley, increasingly accessed only temporary wage-
labor jobs, making women’s 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 Regime is 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 that
are made, and endowed with meaning, by people. The gendered negotiations

introduction 5
between Chilean women and men over who had the right to buy what were
always political—negotiations 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, and
what 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 women’s wages, coupled with women’s deter-
mination to decide how that money was spent, signaled an erosion of men’s
control over women inside and outside the family. Buying gifts of clothes
and cosmetics became important to women’s 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 Chile’s military government. When sizeable prodemocracy movements
emerged in the 1980s to challenge Pinochet, the participants constantly talked
about consumption—mostly in negative ways. The regime’s critics bemoaned
how neoliberalism and consumer culture had destroyed Chile’s 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 had
benefited 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 consumption—either the notion that there was not enough
to go around or that some forms of consumption were morally bankrupt.
Either way, Chile’s lack of democracy was to blame. The Catholic Church,

6 introduction
an early critic of the military’s 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.
Chile’s 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 Chile’s 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.15 When 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 Chile’s 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 United
States 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 Nader’s 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

introduction 7
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 “Today’s Working Woman,” who wanted the convenience
of a quick snack as well as a slim body. Images of grapes as food that made
women sexy morphed into feminist messages that grapes were for indepen-
dent women. Grapes were also marketed to the modern man who accepted
his wife’s career and wanted smart, affectionate children. Grapes were good
for you. And they were good for you because they were fresh—brought
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 ufw launched 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 ufw was heavily influenced by African American civil rights
struggles as well as the antipoverty organizing of progressive Christians and
the New Left. The ufw’s 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 Chile’s mili-
tary dictatorship. Following Allende’s overthrow in 1973, a loose-knit Chile
solidarity 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 anti–Vietnam War protests, but the movement applied this to

8 introduction
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
Reagan’s election in 1980, U.S. government support for military efforts to
eradicate Marxism in Central America became overt. The Chile solidarity
movement became a template for wider protests of U.S. policy in Nicaragua,
El Salvador, and Guatemala.18 Boycotts 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 food’s origin. But they ate more
grapes—imported and domestic—than ever before (see figures Intro.1 and
Intro.2).

Transnational Turns
Buying into the Regime tells stories that weave back and forth between Chile
and the United States. It is an argument about the connections—and some-
times the disconnections—that 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).19 The 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 about
the United States) and that of Latin America (presumably all of it).20 Buying
into the Regime considers 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 Regime seeks to reverse the gaze of how Latin America and
the United States are considered in relationship to each other. We are long
accustomed to seeing the United States as acting upon Latin America, as an

introduction 9
 figure intro.1 ★ Annual per capita grape consumption in the United States,
1950–92. Compiled by author from data published in Alston et al., The California Table
Grape Commission’s Promotion Program, 11–12.
8

6
Pounds Per Capita

3
Total
2
Domestic
1
Imported
0
1960

1990
1980
1950

1970

1992
1965

1985
1955

1975

Year

figure intro.2 ★ Origin of grape imports to the United States in pounds. Compiled
by author from data published in Alston et al., The California Table Grape Commission’s
Promotion Program, 11–12.
1000

800
Millions of Pounds

600
Total U.S. Grape
400 Imports

Imports from
200 Chile
Imports from
0 Mexico
1960

1990
1980
1950

1994
1970
1965

1985
1955

1975

Year
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 Hemisphere—economic, cul-
tural, political, and military—always 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 Pinochet’s seizure
of power directly enabled Chile’s 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 the
United States into a story about Chile’s impact inside U.S. borders.
Buying into the Regime builds on traditions and new developments from
both Latin American studies and U.S. American studies. As a history of Chile’s
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 Regime engages 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

introduction 11
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 for
Latin 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 Regime bridges 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 book
rethinks 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 Regime’s argument that Chilean businessmen played key
roles in marketing grapes within the United States draws on the traditions
of Latin American and U.S. American studies but also critiques their limits.

12 introduction
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 of
excellent 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 Regime takes 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.23 While 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 consumption
as an analytical category and consumerism as a particular set of meanings
attached to consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving

introduction 13
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 consumption
as 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 America’s 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.27 Scholarship on the United States overwhelmingly looks at internal
dynamics—struggles 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 agriculture
and industrial food processing say little about those employed in food indus-
tries. They tend to romanticize home cooking and women’s (or servants’)
domestic labor that preceded food’s corruption.29 Few 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.30 But to be
fair, historians of commodities often have shown only cursory interest in
consumption—what people actually do with the goods that travel and what
they mean.

14 introduction
 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. Critics
bemoan 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 Allende’s last year, marched down the streets of Santiago banging
empty pots in protest of socialism’s 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 difficult 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 Pinochet’s 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 Pinochet’s regime was so tethered to democ-
racy’s 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 is
produced within particular relations of power and produces new ones. It is

introduction 15
best seen a contested terrain, or a field of force.33 We might evaluate whether
par ticular forms of consumption are good or bad for those involved—
emancipatory or exploitative, generative of new meanings, productive of
continuity, and so on—but not whether consumption in the abstract is virtu-
ous or not.
Buying into the Regime addresses 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 regime’s 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 country’s
natural endowments and internal farm economies. Where the foreignness of
food products mattered, their availability in U.S. markets often affirmed 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.34 Feminist 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 childish
Latin American men with military force. Transnational histories that chal-
lenge unidirectional frames upend such binaries.

16 introduction
 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 arguments
about 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 women’s relationships to jobs and purchasing power are every bit as dia-
lectical and complex as are men’s, 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
Pinochet’s promises of plenty and stories about the decline of U.S. food quality
coinciding with women’s entrance into the workforce and feminism’s hostility
to housework.36
Feminists have vigorously challenged the pathology that haunts tales about
women’s desire for goods. They insist that consumption can involve creativ-
ity and resistance as well as subordination, that men are no less shaped by
consumption’s 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 women’s 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 theater—produces
value and social distinction between peasants and urban workers and middle-
class and elite people, as well as between men and women within and across
class. 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 women’s historic responsi-
bility for families, women are more often found in social spaces and political
movements involving consumption. From a different angle, feminist scholar-
ship on imperialism and empire emphasizes how gender and consumption

introduction 17
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.38 Relat-
edly, feminists have stressed how the popularization of exotic commodities
within Europe and the United States “brought the empire home” into wom-
en’s 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 Regime argues
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 “Today’s 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
Regime examines the significance of consumption and grapes according to a
different set of questions. Together the chapters argue that the consumption
of 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 Chilean
agribusinesses to U.S. anxieties and fantasies about food. Boycott campaigns
to get Americans to stop eating grapes sought to link social justice to con-

18 introduction
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 Pinochet’s legitimacy.
Buying into the Regime is deliberately interdisciplinary. This flows in part
from the book’s organization around very different topics, each requiring
particular analytical approaches—ethnographic, 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 Chile’s 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 women’s 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 Chile’s neolib-
eral makeover sprang from a sudden shock therapy instituted by University
of Chicago–trained 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 Chile’s 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 men’s 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,
women’s wages more often bought the electric appliances, furniture, and cos-
metics associated with imported consumer culture. This linked women

introduction 19
more closely to regime economic policy even as the transformation in women’s
relationships with men radically challenged the military’s 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 agribusinesses
to 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 women’s 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 ufw to 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 Latin
American 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 ufw and 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 ufw understood its
mission 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.

20 introduction
 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 men’s 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 Regime does not have chapters on
what consumption meant to fruit workers in California or the same detail
on the California grape industry as on Chile’s. California’s grape workers
enter the story as part of more specific chapters about marketing grapes and
the ufw’s boycott. Similarly, Buying into the Regime does not employ the
same methodologies for what might be considered similar questions. The
book’s 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 Regime inevitably constructs new exclusions. It leaves out
Canada, a crucial part of the Americas that also imported millions of pounds
of grapes from Pinochet’s Chile and was an important site for ufw boycotts.
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 Regime does 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

introduction 21
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 local
history 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 Regime intentionally focuses on Chile’s 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 book’s
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 India’s 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 globalization—from 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 Regime proposes that many of the concerns in the twenty-
first century about globalization were forged during the cold war and par-

22 introduction
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 Chile’s emergence, under military dictatorship, as one of
the world’s most neoliberal nations. Building economies that exported to a
wider world market was fundamental to both U.S. and Chilean visions of
modernity 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.

introduction 23
 NOTES

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 Commission’s Promotion Program, 11; Susan Pollack and Agnes
Perez, Fruit and Tree Nuts: Situation and Outlook; Yearbook 2008, report from the
Economic Research Ser vice, U.S. Department of Agriculture, October 2008.
4. Alston et al., The California Table Grape Commission’s Promotion Program, 11.
5. cepal, La cadena de distribución y la competitividad de las exportaciones latino-
americanas, 60.
6. The Asociación de Exportadores de Chile (Chilean Exporters Association)
reported that Chile exported 506,188 metric tons of table grapes during the 1997–98
harvest. Asociación de Exportadores de Chile, Catálogo de la Industria Frutícola Chilena
(Santiago: Asociación 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
Company in Costa Rica; Jiménez, “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 tv dinners
and frozen orange juice. Historians have long stressed this exhibit’s 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. Lavín, The Quiet Revolution, 90.
14. Campesino derives 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. Campesino is 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 Americas and Radical History Review: Our Americas
Cultural and Political Imaginings no. 89 (Spring 2004).

268 notes to introduction

 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 Regime were 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, Doña María’s 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, It’s 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; García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadnos; Jélin, “Las relaciones sociales
del consumo”; Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov, Fragments of a Golden Age; López 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.”

notes to introduction 269

 28. See Daniel Bender and Jeff rey M. Pilcher, “Editor’s Introduction: Radicalizing
the History of Food,” Radical History Review no. 110 (Spring 2011): 1–7.
29. Especially see Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s 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 Marín, El Consumo me consume; and P. Silva, “Modernization, Consum-
erism, and Politics in Chile”; Raúl González Meyer, “Reflexiones sobre el consumo:
Más allá del lo privado y más acá de la condena,” Revista de Economía y Trabajo, no. 11
(2001): 207–34.
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, “It’s a Man’s
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 Women’s 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.

270 notes to introduction