Consumption In Cold War Chile Research Articles

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States. By Heidi Tinsman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 376, $26.95.

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States. By Heidi Tinsman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 376, $26.95.

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States by Heidi Tinsman (review)

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States by Heidi Tinsman (review)

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States, by Heidi Tinsman

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States, by Heidi Tinsman. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xiv, 363 pp. $26.95 US (paper). If the first three-quarters of the twentieth century belonged to the apple, orange, and banana, the past forty years have been the age of the grape. In the 1970s and 1980s, after a two-decade decline in grape consumption, North Americans began eating a lot more of the vine-grown fruit, which was now available year round. Yet few realized that their winter grapes came from Chile, where dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was promoting fruit export as part of his brutal neoliberal economic model. Fewer still imagined the role grapes played in connecting debates over consumption, labour rights, gender equality, and democracy in Chile and the United Which leads us to Buying into the Regime, Heidi Tinsman's brilliant and idiosyncratic addition to the burgeoning literature of commodity history. And while readers may be familiar with the controversial of the US industry and its associated banana republics in Central America, the transnational story of grapes is far less known. At the beginning of the book, Tinsman declares her study a history of the relationship between Chile's fruit-export industry and the growing appetite for grapes in the United States. (p. 4) Yet it is far more than that. Emphasizing how consumption, in all of its guises, operates as a terrain of political struggle (p. 5), she seeks to bridge the fields of American and Latin American studies. It sounds ambitious, and it is. Whereas Tinsman's first book, Partners in Conflict (2002), focused on the dynamics of gender and labour in the 1950s and 1960s within Chile, this second book represents a bold foray into global and transnational history. Tinsman's methodology is as diverse as it is rigorous, a fact she underscores by organizing her chapters thematically rather than chronologically. Drawing upon archival and oral sources in Chile and the United States, including her own interviews, she offers a stunning range of connections and insights. In her account of the development of the Chilean fruit industry, for example, she shows how the grape export boom usually credited to the Pinochet regime had its structural roots in the earlier agrarian reform. She likewise traces the connections between the California and Chilean grape industries that facilitated the entry of Chilean grapes into the US market, particularly as the California Table Grape Commission began marketing grapes to women as a natural snack in the health-conscious 1970s. …

Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. xi + 363, £71.00, £17.99 pb.

Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. xi + 363, £71.00, £17.99 pb.

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Heidi Tinsman. Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States.

Heidi Tinsman. Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States.

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Journal Article Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States Get access Heidi Tinsman. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. xiv, 363 pp. Cloth, $94.95. Paper, $26.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 3, December 2014, Pages 1006–1007, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau559 Published: 01 December 2014

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States. By Heidi Tinsman (Durham, Duke University Press, 2014) 363 pp. $94.95 cloth $26.95 paper

Buying into the Regime is a fascinating history of grapes and consumption during the Cold War, focusing specifically on the close relationship between the United States and Chile. That single export tied the two countries together in numerous and sometimes counterintuitive ways from the 1960s to the 1980s. The result, in Tinsman’s hands, is a narrative of dictatorship, democracy, and contestation.That the book consciously avoids simple answers makes it an especially welcome addition to the literature on the Cold War in Chile. Consumption is not simple. For example, many labor activists in the United States and Chile decried globalization and market-driven economic policies. Yet, those in the United States believed that local producers, not large firms, should grow grapes. A labor leader in Chile who recognized that small Chilean farms could not produce enough for export, however, remarked, “Workers need to get together and let their voices be heard. But I hope Americans are still planning to eat Chilean grapes” (261).Tinsman details many such contrasts and contradictions. For example, inter-class connections did not foster straightforward protests against the military government even though the rationale of human rights was universally accepted. The United Farm Workers and Chilean organizations were often at cross-purposes: “Chile solidarity activists understood theirs as a fight against authoritarianism abetted by U.S. foreign policy and neoliberal capitalism. Members of the ufw saw theirs as a fight for civil and labor rights within an existing U.S. capitalist democracy” (204–205).Academics from the United States have a place in this variegated history. The Chilean grape industry grew substantially under the market-driven economy of the military government, but it owed its existence to the state-driven policies of the Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende administrations. Universities in the United States played important roles in both governments: Researchers from the University of California, Davis, gave Chile extensive agricultural assistance during the 1960s, and economists educated at the University of Chicago created the policy architecture for Chilean grapes to be exported during the 1970s and beyond.As Tinsman points out, consumption was central to the historical development of the grape export industry and the long-term responses to it. Depending on vantage point, eating (or choosing not to eat) grapes could denote support for a government, opposition to a government, general nationalism, protest against a repressive global economic system, support for labor, and/or recognition of the human costs of feeding the United States. Those perspectives shift if you are a Chilean or if you are a U.S. citizen, and if you are eating fruit from Chile or from the United States.Tinsman concludes the book with reference to the present, the Occupy movement in the United States and the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile reviving a focus on inequality as a pressing problem. Given the book’s lessons, we should expect activists in both countries to struggle in their attempt to maintain substantive connections.