****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Grapes are a staple in the produce sections of North American grocery stores serving as bluish-purple contrast to bright oranges, bananas, and apples. However, it was not until an aggressive marketing campaign in the 1970s that they gained hegemony over the unsuspecting North American consumer. Heidi Tinsman's Buying into The Regime outlines this surprising ascent of grapes into lunch boxes across the United States. Tinsman takes a unique transnational approach to analyze this long path, a path set by entrepreneurs connecting the North and South Pacific of the American continents, farm workers trapped in poverty, and technocrats under both Allende and Pinochet.By taking a transnational approach to Grape consumption in the U.S. and the grape export industry in Chile Tinsman transcends the boundaries of both the nation-state and academic disciplines by incorporating aspects of history, Latin American studies, and U.S. American studies. Subverting the traditional view of U.S.-Latin America relations as the U.S acting upon Latin America by showing the ways that Chilean entrepreneurs were able to enter into and dominate the U.S. market. The beginning of the book illustrates how the cultivation of a symbiotic relationship between Chilean and California fruit growers laid the groundwork for government policy to put Chile on the fruit exporting map. Working as a kind of agricultural ISI Frei and Allende's expansion of fruit production to generate foreign currency, stimulate new industrial technology, and reduce dependency on imports allowed the industry to take off shortly after Pinochet's coup.Tinsman does not only outline this relationship from the perspective of elites and entrepreneurs she also examines how workers in the fruit export viewed these changes by focusing on their consumption habits breaking with traditional studies of the Latin American working class which focus on their roles as producers but ignore their roles as consumers. Many of these workers were women looking for liberation from patriarchal subservience, but this liberation would not come in the form of Popular Unity's socialism but in the form of wages in a neoliberal fruit exporting industry. Tinsman demonstrates that these wages empowered women farm workers to take control of their lives and meet their basic necessity but also to live lives that were not that different from their counterparts in the first world with television and blue jeans.Tinsman continues providing a gender perspective on the history of the grape industry by examining how starting in the early 1970s US women were the target of the grape industries aggressive advertising campaign. Her incorporation of how the California Table Grape Commission's slogan "Grapes the natural snack" was used to target women, who were perceived as more health conscious and more likely to buy groceries than men. But the campaign went beyond simply targeting women to adapting to the changing social relations and gender norms that were taking place at the time with the ads moving from targeting women as housewives to targeting them as modern independent professionals who need a quick healthy snack. Tinsman demonstrates how the California Table Grape Commission's consumer marketing campaign oddly complimented that of Chilean exporters who emphasized the modernity of Chilean grapes. Displaying Chile's supposed first-world status through the women in their a by showing white workers as opposed to the hypersexualized exoticization of women in Fruit Export ads from other parts of Latin America.Buying into The Regime also breaks with a traditional view of marketing and consumerism by analyzing the role of consumerism through the lens of social activism and boycotts. Tinsman contrasts the efforts of two contemporary California boycott movements the United Farm Workers (UFW) Wrath of Grapes anti-pesticide boycotts with la Casa Chile's anti-Pinochet Chilean product boycott. By contrasting these two movements she shows that while in some cases the boycotts were targeting the same product, grapes, but did not ever join up. In the case of the United Farm Workers, this made sense because by expanding their grape boycott campaign to include Chilean grapes they would be extending their resources beyond changes that they were actually capable of making in the working conditions for California Farm Workers. She also points about that because of the localized nature of Casa Chile boycott it mostly served to educate the Bay Area public about the political situation in Chile and the impact that the United States government had in creating that situation. However, given the fact that both campaigns were unsuccessful at meeting their goals Tinsman leaves the reader wondering whether their linking up could have helped generate solidarity between supporters of both movements.Tinsman closes the book by analyzing the movement for democracy in Chile and it's interaction with the Fruit export industry, two things that might seem very distinct but actually interacted throughout the Pinochet dictatorship. This is most dramatically displayed by a story of a cyanide filled grape that entered the United States halting Chilean produce exports to North America putting in jeopardy the democratic transition following the vote against Pinochet's dictatorship and causing massive cross-class protests in support of the Chilean fruit export industry. However, these relationships went beyond the dramatic into the quotidian where pro-democracy activists from across the former Popular Unity spectrum interacted with Farmworkers through union often contesting their views on consumerism. However, with the advent of the no vote, many of these pro-democracy activists would use consumerism to show that Chile's innovation was not incompatible with democracy.Buying into the Regime is a groundbreaking study on the political economy of late-twentieth-century Chile showing the agency of both the working class through consumption and exporters in aggressively expanding their business opportunities outside of Chile. It will be a great resource for students of Cold War politics and Chilean history but also points Latin Americanists towards a progressive path to view consumption, not as an excess of capitalism but as a legitimate form of cultural expression by marginalized communities. This book will continue to be a must-read for both environmental historians and Latin Americanists for years to come.
