The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (review)

There are many studies of the effect of resource dependence on national political economies, but most focus on the relation of commodity booms to economic growth and good governance. Miguel Tinker Salas's The Enduring Legacy offers a different approach: a cultural history of the Venezuelan oil industry. Venezuelan society, he argues, was shaped through much of the 20th century by the broad cultural influence of the oil companies and through it by the values and lifestyle habits of their foreign, mostly North American, employees and their families. The privileged sites of this influence were the oil camps, the company towns built by the transnational subsidiaries near their production facilities. He concentrates on the western oil-producing region around Lake Maracaibo.

The term 'camp' applies equally to the frontier towns that sprang up during the early production phase and to two later developments, the project-like housing for Venezuelan and foreign manual workers, and the gated communities for foreign professionals and their families. In one of the latter, resembling American suburbs, the author himself grew up, the son of an American engineer and a Venezuelan lab technician who met at work. In these camps, American families attempted to recreate the middle-class life they had left at home, with schools, churches, Scouts, baseball teams, cocktail parties, and imported goods for sale in the company commissary. The camps were also home to Venezuelan professionals hired increasingly over the course of the 20th century, who were socialized to American corporate values. Tinker Salas's argument is that the oil industry "broadly influenced the formation of social and political values evident among [Venezuelan] oil workers, intellectuals, and members of the middle class. The industry's residential complexes were a social laboratory." (xiii)

He shows that new consumption patterns and new corporate values were transmitted in the camps. But his argument is broader: for most of the 20th century, many people in and out of the oil industry viewed it as the key to modernization: adopting its mentality and investing its revenues, Venezuela would develop its infrastructure, diversify the economy, and provide social benefits to the poor population.

Underlying this vision were several hidden agendas. The oil industry's practices reinforced the prevailing racial divisions within Venezuelan society, offering opportunities for upward mobility to light-skinned people with higher education while keeping the largely dark-skinned, whether Venezuelan or immigrant, manual labour force down. They imposed a gender and family division of labour imported from the middle class of the United States that prescribed traditional roles for women. So did Venezuelan customs, but the imported norms broke with the traditional Venezuelan pattern by relying on the nuclear family rather than an extended family of supportive relatives. The oil companies also relied on the nuclear family for social control. As the single men who were the earliest immigrants to the oil industry drank, gambled, and consorted with prostitutes copiously, the companies decided to build facilities for married men and their families. Wives who formed social networks in the camps offered a source of stability.

Most important, the companies promoted a particular vision of modernization. They presented themselves as essential to assure the efficient management of oil production. Their vision was of capitalist modernization tied to the work ethic and the companies' profit margins. The premium placed on individual responsibility meant that neither social justice nor the welfare of the majority of the population was ever an important consideration.

In claiming that the oil camps had such a broad cultural influence, the author does not examine other possible sources. It is true that in the postwar period new consumption patterns and, even more, consumption ideals spread through the upper and middle strata of Venezuela, but this may have been due as much to closer commercial relations with the US and, even more, television, as to the direct influence of the companies. He does not offer evidence that the camps were the main source.

The companies, in close collaboration with the State Department...