Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste (review)

Chewing gum was foremost an American invention, Michael Redclift tells us in Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, a brief yet serious and engaging book that details how chewing gum came to occupy a distinct place in the rise of American consumerism. Perhaps nothing signified the triviality of consumerism as chewing gum. It possessed what Redclift calls an "ephemeral quality," it was an easily replicable mass product, and provided instant gratification. This ephemerality was complicated by the product's ambiguities: it was chewed but not eaten, "mundane yet enjoyable." Yet, it also served to flaunt authority and signify individuality in unique and potent ways. These polysemic qualities were exploited if not produced by the inventiveness of American advertising.

The commercial success of chewing gum would not have been possible without chicle, the resin produced by the chicozapote tree, a plant native to the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. Chicle gave chewing gum clearly superior chewing qualities. It is Redclift's purpose to relate the consumption of chewing gum to the production of chicle by unveiling the origins of the exploitation of the chicozapote tree and exposing the primary economic relationships that informed its production, occluded in America, as they were, by the great distances separating the geography of production from that of consumption. As such, the economic and political nexus between the United States and Mexico takes center stage in the narrative, exposing the disparities of power that grounded this relationship.

At the heart of the story are the Mayans of Yucatán. After resisting domination from colonial rule for centuries, the demand for chicle empowered the native Mayans, who, acting as intermediaries, sold the resin to American businessmen in order to finance their armed rebellion against the Mexican state. Yet, the promise of liberation was short-lived and its ending catastrophic for the natives of Yucatán. American business incursions into the forest only served to appreciate the value of the forest in the eyes of the Mexican state. In the same year when the chewing gum trust was established in the United States—1901—the Mayans were defeated by the Mexican army, ending their dream of autarky.

Furthermore, in the 1920s, chicle production attracted nonMayan immigrants to Yucatán, complicating the ethnic landscape of the region and its social relations. Redclift details the oppressive working conditions of the chicleros, whom he likens to American sharecroppers: neither peasants, nor proletarians. Their role in clearing the forest not only accelerated radical shifts in land-use patterns, but also damaged the tropical ecology of Yucatán and the Mayan way of life. By the 1930s, Mayan resistance had been channeled into modern forms of social organization such as cooperatives, while nonMayan chicleros had become politically bound to the Mexican government. As Redclift asserts, the period of 1900 to 1950 marked the disappearance of the Mayan from the political landscape of the Revolution.

A most crucial factor in the defeat of Mayan resistance was the production of synthetic bases that were to eventually replace chicle in the production of chewing gum. Nothing else conveys the power of Redclift's analytical method as the manner in which he connects indigenous resistance, commodity flows, and, of all things, bubble gum. The author relates how Walter Diemer's fabled demonstration of a new commercially usable bubble gum to a room full of office workers in August 1928 in the United States led to the use of synthetic bases in chewing gum production, signaling the end of an entire way of life in Yucatán. Only the opening of new markets for natural products in Asia, especially Japan and Korea, and a renewed interest in natural forest products during the last decade of the twentieth century, revived chicle production, although never to the levels it enjoyed before.

Chewing Gum is not merely an addition to the growing literature on the flow of commodities from producer nations to consuming publics separated by wide expanses of land. Yet...