Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture (review)

Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture. By Arnold J. Bauer (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 245 pp. $59.95 cloth $17.95 paper

You are what you eat, or wear, or better yet, what you eat and wear, as well as where you live. So Bauer reminds us in this engaging and graceful treatment of five centuries of material life in Latin America. For Bauer, consumption, and it is consumption that he emphasizes, takes on added significance in the history of Latin America. In the confused and fissiparous notions of identity that evolved after the European conquest, the goods to which people had access or aspired—what they wore, where they lived, what they could wear, and where they could live—had more than symbolic weight. Physical appearance was hardly definitive; after generations of intermarriage, the terms "Spaniard" and "Indian," let alone the more esoteric ones immortalized by the colonial casta paintings, meant little. People might tell you what they thought they were, but in the order of things, money, or what money bought, spoke louder. Goods efficiently defined and maintained social boundaries as well.

Bauer opens with a sympathetic and knowledgeable survey of the material world of Latin America before conquest. That it was a complete civilization in every way is beyond dispute, although historians, geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists have taken more than two centuries to reassemble what Christian Europe so effectively sundered. Nevertheless, Bauer understands that the "conquest" was a measured one, leaving much of everyday life and its artifacts unchanged, even in a world turned upside down. Yet the locus of power had shifted decisively, and, with it, the material definition of prestige. The early moments of Miguel Hidalgo's 1810 insurrection against the "evil government" of the Spaniards in Mexico involved a bloody assault against the municipal granary of Guanajuato, a place where the quintessentially Amerindian cereal, maize, was stored in a fortress of unmistakably Castillian design. The economy may have been at bottom Indian, but it was, alas, no longer the Indians' to control.

As Bauer notices, the standards for prestige altered sensibly in the nineteenth century. In the colonial period, the metropolitan models were largely Mediterranean, Islamic, or even Asian in origin. With the coming of independence, English and French examples came to hold sway in dress, cuisine, residence, and manners, at least for the small elites perched uneasily atop a mass of indigenous and mixed-race peoples. If progress was a European import, the muscle, blood, and sinew that paid its price were home grown. In this tension, the uneasy balance between "civilization" and "barbarism" so often rehearsed by nineteenth-century writers, Bauer finds the essence of what he terms "modernizing goods"—those things, mostly imported, that helped to resolve the racial and cultural ambiguities of neocolonial society.

Although the mania for things foreign eventually succumbed to financial constraints in the twentieth century, the economic nationalism that Bauer finds at the heart of the import-substitution process had limited success in changing what people—especially ordinary people—wanted to consume. Yes, Latin Americans made their own shoes and their own blue jeans, but no, they never esteemed them as highly as things made overseas. And Coca-Cola may have been, as a friend memorably called it, "the black waters of Yankee imperialism," but he drank it all the same. Agreements like nafta succeed because they provide access to the goods that people really want, not what left-leaning intellectuals think they should have.

Bauer's book is a charming, if modest, contribution to the study of material life in Latin America. Classroom teachers will find it very useful and there is plenty for specialists as well. As for me, I learned that Bauer thinks Pan Bimbo (a sort of Mexican Wonderbread) unspeakable; McDonald's, inedible; and polyester clothes, unbearable. De gustibus, no?