Begegnungen mit dem Yankee: Nordamerikanisierung und soziokultureller Wandel in Chile (1898-1990) (review)

The published version of his Habilitationsschrift, Stefan Rinke's ambitious study analyzes Chilean views of U.S. cultural influence across almost an entire century. In English, its title would be "Encounters with the Yankee: North Americanization and Socio-cultural Change in Chile, 1898-1990." The author particularly emphasizes the first three decades, which he calls the "transnational phase," and the phase of new globalization since approximately 1970.

Rinke shows convincingly that the United States came to represent modernity for most Chileans during the transnational phase. After World War I, U.S. companies took advantage of the absence of European competition to push their products onto the Chilean market, where they became synonymous with material progress. At the same time, human connections increased in the form of visitors as well as U.S. white-collar employees in the mines. As the author demonstrates, Chileans hybridized and contested U.S. culture in the contact zone that they inhabited. U.S. cultural imperialism met with staunch resistance among conservative Chileans, who believed that U.S. culture represented moral decline. After the onset of the Great Depression, Chileans also witnessed the adverse consequences of close economic ties with an industrial power. As a result, the decades following the transnational phase witnessed an attempt to limit the dependence of the Chilean economy and culture on the United States and other industrial nations.

Even as the socialist regime of Salvador Allende highlighted the culmination of this attempt at greater economic and cultural independence in the period 1970-1973, however, Chileans found themselves more intimately engaged with U.S. culture than during the transnational phase. Factors contributing to these closer cultural relations include the advent of mass communications, the sending of U.S. economic assistance workers, and particularly the rise of popular culture on a massive scale. The bloody coup of General Augusto Pinochet in September 1973 not only ended Chile's experiment in socialism, but it also accelerated this process of ever-closer cultural relations between Chileans and North Americans, even as Pinochet displayed a strident nationalism, in part to paper over the differences between his political system and that of the United States (not to mention to make his people forget about the assistance his regime had received from Washington). For example, he once justified his own military regime by saying "nosotros somos distintos a los Estados Unidos. Nosotros somos latinos y ellos anglosajones" (p. 569). United States influence hence crept into all aspects of Chilean politics by defining what was "Chilean" and what was "foreign."

Because of the nature of the topic, as well as the length of the period studied by the author, the book primarily draws on published primary sources such as newspapers, journals, and pamphlets. However, Rinke has also done exhaustive research in Chilean and U.S. archives. Perhaps the only other repository the author might have considered visiting is the British National Archives, as the holdings of the Foreign Office offer fascinating commentary on U.S. cultural expansion and its Latin American reception. This book represents the new international history at its very best, demonstrating cultural interplay across many levels in an unequal relationship. Rinke's detailed study successfully shifts attention from the state-to-state level to individual, corporate, and institutional actors, revealing the contact zones in which U.S. and Chilean culture interacted. It is to be hoped that it will be available in English and/or Spanish very soon, as it deserves a wide audience.