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

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.