Trad5_Prices

Prices and Values: New Perspectives on the Cost of Living Problem in Twentieth-Century Latin America❧

University of Miami, United States

https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit87.2023.01

Received: September 2, 2022 / Accepted: September 28, 2022 / Revised: November 2, 2022

Abstract. Objective/Context: This work considers how historians have investigated the problem of the cost of living in twentieth-century Latin America. Their investigations have collectively expanded our sense of how social groups in different historical moments have imagined, calculated, and coped with the cost of living. Methodology: The article draws on a wide corpus of research from fields such as economic and labor history, as well as the study of the welfare state, nationalist movements, gender relations, consumption, and poverty. It incorporates findings from various case studies, including the author’s research on the First Peronism (1943-1955) in Argentina. Originality: The text identifies and explores three major tendencies in recent work on the cost of living in Latin America: the creation of new forms of social scientific expertise and knowledge about quotidian economic life; the political contests among a wide range of actors over living standards, inflation, and related concerns; and the impact of mass consumption on cost-of-living struggles and conceptions of social wellbeing. Conclusions: The article situates the studies in this dossier within a wider historiographical context while also pointing to future avenues of inquiry and cost of living issues that merit closer attention.

Keywords: consumption, cost of living, inflation, poverty, welfare.

Precios y valores: nuevas miradas sobre el problema del costo de vida en América Latina durante el siglo xx

Resumen. Objetivo/Contexto: Este trabajo aborda la forma en que los historiadores han investigado el problema del costo de vida en la América Latina del siglo xx. El conjunto de investigaciones analizado permite ampliar nuestra comprensión acerca de cómo grupos sociales en diferentes momentos históricos han concebido, calculado y enfrentado el costo de vida. Metodología: El artículo se basa en un corpus de trabajos de investigación en los campos de la economía y el trabajo, así como en el estudio de la historia del estado de bienestar, los movimientos nacionalistas, las relaciones de género, el consumo y la pobreza. Asimismo, incorpora hallazgos tomados de diversos estudios de casos, entre los cuales se incluyen investigaciones previas del propio autor sobre el Primer Peronismo (1943-1955) en la Argentina. Originalidad: El texto identifica y explora tres grandes tendencias en trabajos recientes sobre el costo de vida en América Latina: la creación de nuevas formas de conocimiento de las ciencias sociales sobre la vida económica cotidiana; las contiendas políticas de un amplio abanico de actores en relación con el estándar de vida, la inflación y otros problemas asociados; y el impacto del consumo masivo frente al costo de vida y las concepciones acerca del bienestar social. Conclusiones: El artículo ubica los estudios de este dossier dentro de un contexto historiográfico más amplio, a la vez que señala posibles caminos futuros de investigación y temas vinculados al costo de vida que ameritan mayor atención.

Palabras clave: bienestar, consumo, costo de vida, inflación, pobreza.

Preços e valores: novos olhares sobre o problema do custo de vida na América Latina durante o século 20

Resumo. Objetivo/contexto: neste trabalho, é abordada a forma na qual os historiadores têm pesquisado sobre o problema do custo de vida na América Latina do século 20. O conjunto de pesquisas analisado permite ampliar nossa compreensão acerca de como grupos sociais em diferentes momentos históricos conceberam, calcularam e enfrentaram o custo de vida. Metodologia: este artigo está baseado num corpus de trabalhos de pesquisa nos campos da economia e do trabalho, bem como no estudo da história do estado de bem-estar, dos movimentos nacionalistas, das relações de gênero, do consumo e da pobreza. Além disso, incorpora achados tomados de diversos estudos de caso, entre os quais são incluídas pesquisas prévias do próprio autor sobre o Primeiro Peronismo (1943-1955), na Argentina. Originalidade: no texto, são identificadas e exploradas três grandes tendências em trabalhos recentes sobre o custo de vida na América Latina: a criação de formas de conhecimento das ciências sociais sobre a vida econômica cotidiana; as disputas políticas de um amplo leque de atores quanto ao padrão de vida, a inflação e outros problemas associados; o impacto do consumo massivo ante o custo de vida e as concepções acerca do bem-estar social. Conclusões: este artigo situa os estudos deste dossiê dentro de um contexto historiográfico mais amplo, ao mesmo tempo que indica possíveis caminhos futuros de pesquisas e temas vinculados ao custo de vida que merecem mais atenção.

Palavras-chave: bem-estar, consumo, custo de vida, inflação, pobreza.

Introduction

How much does it cost to live at any given moment? What does one need to live with dignity? These old questions have garnered newfound importance in the present. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the gap between the unmet needs of most “essential workers” and the comforts enjoyed by more privileged groups, clearly revealing the contradictions of how our economic systems create and concentrate value. In various world regions, the cost of living has been a key factor in the emergence of new protest movements. The inhabitants of Santiago, Cali and other Latin American cities have demonstrated against the rising cost of consumer necessities, higher taxes, and cuts to public services, problems that are the most visible symptoms of the profound frustrations produced by extreme social inequality. In recent times, inflation has shot up across the globe due to disruptions in supply chains, monopolistic power in certain industries, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among other factors. While the rising cost of fuel prices has provoked anxiety among car drivers, higher food prices could worsen hunger among the planet’s most vulnerable populations. Looking toward the future, new challenges loom. The growing concentration of wealth and the automation of labor are stoking worries across the world about how an increasing percentage of humanity will make ends meet.

The cost of living has also attracted keen attention from historians. This timing cannot be attributed to any miraculous powers of foresight on their part since pandemics and other world events move at a speed far faster than the pace required to produce academic publications. That this dossier appears precisely when the cost of living is front page news across much of the globe is somewhat of a coincidence. Yet not entirely. The fact that some historians have been drawn to the problem of the cost of living—examining it from different angles and with new approaches—suggests that there is something in the topic of deep relevance beyond merely chasing the latest headlines. In seeking to understand our contemporary moment, researchers have considered past struggles to make ends meet in commercialized societies and efforts to achieve greater economic justice. Their findings have the potential for a deeper understanding of current predicaments and, one hopes, will inspire fresh thinking about the possibilities for change moving forward.

That said, historical research on the cost of living hardly represents a unified movement with a clear agenda. Instead, researchers interested in such matters owe their primary allegiance to other fields. Those who have gravitated to these issues include economic and labor historians, but also individuals interested in the history of the welfare state, nationalist politics, household consumption, and poverty, among other subjects. Quantitative analysis of price and wage levels is the preferred approach in some circles, but recent works have shown a strong desire to widen the scope of inquiry. Historians have delved into the behavior of consumers, the worldviews of social science experts, the design of policies for market regulation and, most broadly of all, the politics of daily economic life. Their investigations have collectively expanded our sense of how human beings in different historical moments have imagined, calculated, and coped with the cost of living.1

This dossier showcases several ways that historians have pondered these questions. The essays included in this issue adopt various perspectives on the problem of the cost of living, but they share key features, including their emphasis on the twentieth century. Of course, worries about being able to afford one’s daily bread are not exclusive to the modern era. Yet the past century witnessed a dramatic expansion in the sheer number of people whose wellbeing depended principally on their monetary income and the distribution of commercial goods and services. Hundreds of millions of rural people left their homes for seemingly better opportunities in the growing cities or were displaced by war, dispossession, and environmental crises. In ever-more proletarianized societies, preoccupation with the cost of food, housing, education, health, and other areas of expenditure became central to both public life and everyday interpersonal interactions.

In geographic terms, the dossier is focused primarily on Latin American cases, reflecting, in part, the submissions received to the call for papers. This orientation, too, is not entirely coincidental. Although the cost of living has garnered attention from historians across the world, Latin American societies are particularly well suited for studying such matters. Rising prices and pinched incomes have been a perennial challenge in much of the region, and the bouts of hyperinflation suffered by its residents have acquired global notoriety. Countries like Argentina have the dubious honor of being world leaders in inflation for extended periods of time.2 No less important, if sometimes overlooked by outsiders, is that Latin America has been a major site of innovation in thinking about the causes and potential solutions to cost of living problems. Political responses have included diverse state-led efforts to regulate commerce and elevate living standards as well as everything from revolutionary efforts to create anti-capitalist alternatives to neoliberal campaigns to impose free market doctrines. Over the past generation, Latin American governments have blazed new trails by experimenting with conditional cash transfers and other distributive policies aimed at addressing the income needs of poorer residents. Meanwhile, the region’s inhabitants have devised a vast repertoire of strategies for expressing their discontent when state measures have fallen short and for living their lives under the inflationary pressures of modern times.

To set the stage for the dossier, this essay offers a selective tour through the latest historiographic and methodological trends. Since the study of the cost of living draws on multiple fields, summarizing each of these vast literatures is impractical. Instead, I have chosen to highlight three tendencies that feature prominently in the articles that follow and in recent research more broadly. The first concerns the study of how twentieth century social scientists devised new concepts and forms of knowledge for appraising aspects of quotidian economic life. These tools proved highly influential, and they were appropriated by state officials and popular movements of different ideological leanings. The second area of inquiry highlights the wider political contests surrounding the cost of living. Historical actors struggled to impose order on ever-expanding commercial forces, in some cases by articulating new types of rights and forms of citizenship. The third tendency addresses the ways in which emerging mass consumption in regions like Latin American shaped debates about social inclusion. Although many saw the cost of living problem in terms of a basic basket of essential goods, the rise of new consumer aspirations encouraged actors to envision welfare and economic participation in different terms. To ground this discussion of the three trends (and albeit at the risk of self-promotion), I draw on a few concrete examples from my own research on the consumer politics of the “dignified life” during the First Peronism (1943-1955) in Argentina. Next, I offer a few specific remarks about the essays included in the dossier, before closing with final reflections on where future research on the cost of living might be headed.

Knowing the Cost

People have kept an eye on price fluctuations and attempted to stretch meager budgets for time immemorial (or at least as far back as money has existed). These concerns were matters of survival to many, but also topics of interest to those in positions of power. Ruling classes might benefit from the rising costs of the resources they controlled, yet they also realized that too quick a climb might provoke popular unrest. Public authorities intervened, with greater or lesser enthusiasm depending on the historical context, to manage the supply of foodstuffs and other essentials. As the bureaucratic capacity of governments increased in the modern period, so, too, did the desire to monitor key aspects of daily production, labor, trade, and consumption. One by-product of such curiosity was the invention of the very concept of “the economy” as a catchall for these different areas of activity—a term that, it should be recalled, was borrowed from household spending (as in “to make economies”) and then applied to the macro level. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the growing ranks of social scientists employed in government, business, universities, and other institutions amassed new forms of knowledge about the quotidian aspects of economic life. Older technical terms like “inflation,” which had been used narrowly in reference to the money supply, were repurposed to broader ends and became a common part of the political vocabulary.

These social scientific tools have a history, one that researchers over the past generation have illuminated with far greater clarity, revealing the motivations behind their use and assessing their impact as they became ubiquitous features of public life across the globe. One famed example are the surveys of household consumption patterns conducted by the Ford Motor Company and the International Labor Office beginning in the late 1920s. As Victoria de Grazia has shown, the Ford-ilo surveys represented a novel attempt to compare purchasing power across more than a dozen European countries.3 That one of the world’s most powerful consumer goods manufacturers and one of its leading agencies for gathering social scientific information collaborated together is telling enough: their interests may have diverged greatly, but the survey organizers shared a desire to gain a clearer picture of household spending. Social scientists in Latin American countries were not far behind in campaigns to gather data on the cost of living. Official statistics have long served as the raw material for quantitative analyses of price and wage fluctuations in economic history. Recent studies, however, have also borrowed approaches from the new cultural history to ask critical questions about these forms of knowledge.4

Take, for instance, a set of surveys of working-class household budgets conducted in the 1930s and early 1940s by Argentina’s Labor Department.5 How labor officials defined the “average” working-class family reflected fundamental assumptions about the social order—most notably, an idealized heteronormative division of labor should be a single male wage earner and a female caretaker of children and household needs. Although this ideal did not reflect the lived experience of many laboring households, who depended on help from extended families and the contributions of child and adult female wage labor to augment incomes, the inability to achieve a “proper” division became a central source of anxiety for reform-minded groups in this era. Equally as revealing are the conclusions not reached and questions not asked by experts. Despite pinched budgets, these “average” families nevertheless purchased, made, and otherwise obtained a significant variety of foodstuffs and garments. In this case, the Labor Department’s surveys showed that working-class men, not women, were the biggest users of consumer goods such as clothing. These overlooked findings went against the era’s conventional wisdom about gendered norms of consumption, but they offer insights both into household practices and the worldview of those engaged in assessing the “social question.”

In addition to reading familiar sources in new ways, researchers have devoted considerable attention to tracing the circulation of ideas, methods, and experts associated with the study of living standards and costs. While international conferences provided one avenue through which reformers learned of the latest practices, there were more informal networks of friendship, educational training, and personal connections at work as well. The axis between U.S. and European social experts in the twentieth century has been by far the best studied.6 Left-leaning specialists had their own circuits of communication (overlapping in some cases with the networks forged by socialist parties) that allowed them to keep tabs on counterparts across the world. But new research is illuminating the full extent of these social scientific movements within Latin America and along certain pathways to other regions. In the case of the previously mentioned Labor Department surveys, one of the figures responsible for them was Miguel Figuerola, a Spanish immigrant who cut his teeth drafting labor regulations in the rightwing nationalist Primo de Rivera regime and went on to hold ministerial positions in Perón’s Argentina.7 In the Lusophone world, the 1930s witnessed frequent exchanges between corporatist ideologues, policymakers, and thinkers in Portugal and Brazil during the António de Oliveira Salazar and Getúlio Vargas dictatorships.8

Those with expertise in cost of living matters were increasingly pressed into public service in response to major crises that defined the midcentury era. Their knowledge about everyday commerce, wages, and budgets was called upon with greater urgency as a result of the disruptions produced by two world wars and the Great Depression. Across the globe, government authorities implemented emergency price controls on essential consumer goods to cope with this turmoil and provide stability to agricultural producers. These measures opened the door for thinking about other forms of regulation that could address unmet household needs and elevate living standards. In the Americas, the Mexican Revolution’s 1917 Constitution offered a sweeping vision of social rights and economic nationalism that captivated the attention of observers elsewhere. The fascist and corporatist experiments of interwar Europe provided inspiration to some seeking to create stability under hierarchical orders and to enhance coordination among government, labor, and business. The New Deal in the United States offered yet another example of how state policies could address problems of unemployment and poverty, as did the wage increases and commercial regulations employed by Popular Fronts and left-leaning coalitions in France, Chile, and other nations. During World War ii, planning became a new buzzword among Latin American experts looking to minimize the disruptions of the war and prepare for what promised to be a challenging postwar transition.9 All these trends contributed to multiplying the presence of social scientists in government and to raising the visibility of the tools they had devised. Notions of “living levels” and “standards” quickly became part of the language of statecraft, eventually spreading through propaganda and the mass media to become commonplace terms for most citizens.

In the postwar world, the types of experts that had proposed solutions to cost of living problems in earlier periods were drawn into campaigns for national development. Reformers from various academic, business, and public service backgrounds gave way to university-trained economists, whogained prominence in efforts to guide modernizing forces. New circuits linked economists in different regions of the world, including through programs of technical assistance. Historians have explored the formation of these networks, which acted as conduits for alternative ways of thinking about the cost of living problem, human welfare, and regulation. As part of the Alliance for Progress, U.S. experts who had learned their trade during the New Deal traveled to places like Colombia to advise on development projects in the 1960s.10 Organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund embarked on similar missions, creating new routines for gathering information and establishing connections among officials in multiple countries.11 By the 1960s, the economists associated with the United Nation’s Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (cepal) became another force shaping thinking about development. As far as the cost of living in Latin America was concerned, the period witnessed lively debate among economists over the root causes of inflation. On one side were the “cepalinos” and others who stressed structural factors rooted in Latin America’s peripheral position in the world economy and the characteristics of land tenure and backward agricultural sector. On the other were the so-called “monetarists,” who attributed blame to government overspending and policy measures targeting popular constituencies that fanned a wage-price spiral.12 The discussion of inflation’s origins shaped not only the interventions of Latin American states in this postwar era, it also exerted an intellectual influence over wider debates concerning development and dependency across the world.

In addition, the problem of inflation was a key element in the formation of a new community of economic experts that reached prominence from the 1970s onward. Neoliberalism was, in part, a response to anxieties related to the rising cost of living and the instability associated with it. Its adherents promised to tame prices—and, on a few occasions, succeeded— if at the enormous social cost of aggravating inequalities and redistributing income away from working-class populations. Here Latin American historians have explored the circulation of ideas and making of networks of expertise, while documenting the dire consequences of neoliberal ideas in practice. Particular groups of economists, like Chile’s infamous “Chicago Boys,” have received the lion’s share of attention, but recent research is beginning to show how neoliberal ideas spread among groups on the center and left of the political spectrum, shaping their understanding of what could be done to redress cost of living problems in their societies.13 Talk of regulation and social entitlements did not disappear entirely during the neoliberal heyday, but the emphasis shifted to individual notions of economic freedom and consumer satisfaction and away from questions of collective welfare that had animated social politics for most of the twentieth century.

Terms like “inflation,” “standard of living,” and even abstractions like “the market” became an almost inescapable part of how contemporaries explained the problems of making ends meet. Whether the authority enjoyed by establishment economists is finally eroding, as some observers have lately claimed, remains to be seen. Perhaps subsequent decades will give rise to new types of experts, almost certainly ones better attuned to the ecological aspects of economic life and the mass extinctions looming over humanity. But there is little doubt that public life in the past century in Latin America and other world regions would have looked and sounded very different without the contributions of economists, state planners, labor statisticians, and others wielding social scientific knowledge about prices and incomes.

Rights, Demands, and Mobilizations

Contributing to the actions of governments at all levels, experts played a key role in the politics of the cost of living. But they were by no means the only ones involved. Recent studies on the history of the cost of living have showcased a wide range of actors engaged in such political contests. One major line of inquiry in Latin American history has centered on the relationship among governments, popular movements, and citizens in efforts to satisfy material needs at the household level. Historians concerned with these matters have sought to gain a clearer view of how different groups sought to exert pressure on state authorities and expressed their frustrations in the public arena. Such research has analyzed the modes of protest and activism employed by labor unions, neighborhood associations, women’s organizations, and other groups, as well as the strategies of individuals as petitioners and supplicants seeking to improve their lot. Thanks to these studies, we have fresh insights into how and why the cost of living became such a politically charged issue across much of Latin America during the past century.

By far the most sustained interest in these topics has come from the field of labor history. This is largely, of course, due to the importance of trade unions in venting anger at low wages, high prices, and other cost of living related problems. Even in periods such as the early twentieth century, when unionization levels were modest across most of Latin America (with some notable exceptions in certain industries and locations), organized labor transformed what some considered merely private economic dilemmas into issues of collective importance through strikes, boycotts, rallies, and the press. In addition to demanding a greater share of the value generated by their labor, some groups experimented with alternatives to mainstream commerce, such as setting up consumer cooperatives to distribute goods at a lower price to working families. Historians have shed light on female activism and the question of how gendered norms informed the demands and tactics of the labor movement. In other cases, researchers have opted for community-level studies and oral history projects, which allow a finer-grained portrait of working people in a given place and time.14

As governments devised new responses to the standard of living question during the past century, they created openings for working people to press for greater action. State measures to manage the cost of living began modestly in early twentieth-century Latin America, often in the form of limited nutritional aid or localized social programs in a given municipality or province. The 1930s served as a point of inflection in much of the region, as the Great Depression, the outbreak of World War ii, and the domestic political consequences brought by these crises encouraged state experiments that pushed at the boundaries of liberal-republican traditions. The immediate responses early in the 1930s to the global economic crisis veered to the corporatist right in some countries (as during the short-lived General José Félix Uriburu dictatorship in Argentina) and in more labor-friendly reformist directions in others (as during Colombia’s Alfonso López Pumarejo’s administration). Although often the goal was to shore up existing political orders and economic systems, in some countries attempts to regulate everyday exchange and enhance the state’s role as social regulator went further.

Two cases that have attracted particular attention from historians are the Popular Front years in Chile (1936-41) and the Estado Novo in Brazil (1937-45). The former saw a widening of state-led efforts to secure a measure of well-being for working-class Chileans, including through more ambitious forms of labor legislation, nutrition programs, and price controls, among other initiatives. Recent studies have offered a critical appraisal of these efforts, recognizing the achievements and expectations raised by these reforms, while also exposing the limitations of how state officials and their allies in civil society envisioned social change. Although new hopes were stirred, old structures of economic power remained resistant to modification and, even among most progressives, reform frequently went hand-in-hand with a desire to shore up the patriarchal family as the bedrock of society.15 By contrast, the Estado Novo delivered less in material terms to working Brazilians and was from the start based on a more hierarchical model of a corporatist state, where the national government would ensure social peace by repressing perceived threats (including many leftist labor activists). This impulse, however, led officials to design responses to the problem of inflation and wartime shortages that represented sources of popular discontent. State regulators devised price control and profit margin rules that sought to ensure a “just price” in commerce. These measures were not just for show, as hundreds of Brazilian merchants accused of price gouging were fined or ended up behind bars. But regulatory efforts left much to be desired, as underscored by the complaints that poured into government offices decrying the rising cost of living and lax enforcement of inspectors.16

Elsewhere in the region, midcentury political movements went further still in pursuit of ideals of economic justice. In predominately agrarian societies, land reform understandably became a major focus for those seeking these aims, as during the Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) and Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954) administrations in Mexico and Guatemala. The cost of living may have been secondary compared to aims of redistributing wealth and boosting production, but advocates of land reform aspired to elevate the living standards of peasants and rural laborers, while creating a surplus that could improve the lives of urban workers as well. In other cases, the spending power of popular households became a matter of utmost political importance. Nowhere was this more so than during the first Peronist era (1943-1955). Some of the reasons stemmed from Argentina’s characteristics, especially its rising levels of industrialization, heavy concentration of populations in urban areas, and the trappings of mass consumer abundance.

In my own research on this period, I have tried to illuminate the contest over living standards from the vantages of Peronist authorities, their supporters, and their opponents. Peronist visions of a “dignified life” (to borrow an oft-repeated phrase from the regime’s propagandists) blurred the lines that we as historians normally draw around the social welfare and mass consumption.17 The national government spearheaded efforts to redistribute wealth toward working people and, during the initial postwar boom, succeeded in these aims. Yet continuing to deliver on these promises proved difficult, particularly as inflation spiked in the late 1940s and economic conditions turned more adverse. Ordinary citizens employed tactics to secure their share of the “dignified life,” in some cases by making personal contact with resource holders and, in others, by publicly demanding their rights as workers, housewives, and citizens of the New Argentina. It is precisely this mixture of state-led campaigns to mobilize the populace and to implement an authoritarian model of national consensus, combined with measures that eased pressures on working households and afforded them a greater sense of participation, that made the First Peronism at once so resonant and polemical.18

Despite the unique features of Peronism, similar methods for addressing cost of living concerns were employed across midcentury Latin America. As we have seen, price controls and related commercial regulations expanded in countries like Chile and Brazil during the 1930s. Peronist actors built on existing wartime controls in Argentina and turned them into an arena of mass politics. Perón declared a formal “Guerra al agio” and declaimed in the media frequently against speculators, who he blamed for high consumer prices. In turn, Peronist supporters denounced merchants suspected of violating the rules, while also protesting through personal letters and group petitions about the inaction of enforcement agents. The regime also became involved in efforts to provision goods directly to consumers, including through a chain of retail stores operated by the Fundación Eva Perón. Within other political frameworks, governments in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere in Latin America experimented with alternatives to the commercial provisioning of basic consumer goods and services, as a way to target the urban popular classes.19 Not surprisingly, these interventions were not warmly received by merchants large and small, who accused the state of trampling on their economic liberties and offering unfair competition. At the same time, it proved a constant challenge to balance the wellbeing of urban sectors envisioned as the protagonists of modernization with the needs of rural populations and producers who supplied the food and commodities upon which these economies often depended.

The types of market regulation and consumer politics ushered in by the midcentury generation of populists and nationalist movements created frictions. But these trends became even more contentious in those countries embarking on socialist revolutions from the 1960s onward. The intensity of Cold War contests was one reason why, but so, too, was the ambition of political movements that sought to create alternatives to capitalism through more sweeping forms of redistribution, control over commercial forces, direct distribution to consumers, and centralized management of economic life. High living costs were one of many grievances tapped into by Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries in Cuba during their rise to power. Their remarkable early success in elevating living standards on multiple fronts through new labor policies and social programs soon encountered obstacles, including domestic opposition, the disruptions caused by the U.S. embargo, and their own disastrous missteps with state planning. For members of the social majority, the Revolution had at once reduced the pressures of living costs while aggravating problems of shortages and control over resources. Recent scholarship on 1960s and 1970s Cuba has shed new light on these everyday matters and their political significance, offering a more nuanced view of how even committed revolutionaries at the grassroots level chaffed at the inability to resolve these problems. Researchers have also considered how living conditions were experienced by groups with different gender, racial, occupational, and geographic backgrounds.20

The cost of living also proved a flashpoint for political contention in other socialist experiments, like the Allende years in Chile. Despite the substantial differences with the Cuban case, here, too, the story is one of redistribution and strong improvements in living standards for laboring folk, coupled with intense opposition and turmoil in the consumer marketplace. Inflation was not a new problem in Chile, but rising prices and shortages became major issues of mobilization for those challenging the Unidad Popular government. Conservative middle-class women took to the streets to play the part of victimized housewives. The brutal dictatorship that followed sought to gain legitimacy, in part, by promising the end the “chaos” of economic life that its backers had assisted in creating. The centrality of these issues to this traumatic period perhaps helps to explain why many Chilean historians have gravitated toward the study of consumption, food politics, price controls, and related matters, exploring not only their significance during the Allende and Pinochet eras but also the roots of these conflicts in earlier eras.

Of course, people have taken to the streets to voice their dismay at inflation, alleged government inaction, and economic woes in vastly different political contexts. In Latin American history, researchers have examined the dynamics of popular protests across time and place, ranging from a long tradition of food riots to more recent demands for presidential impeachment. Such public displays are an essential component of the politics of the cost of living, and much can be learned by looking closely at the causes of these outbursts, the participants involved, the targets of ire, and the responses from authorities. Thanks in part to the process of neoliberal reform, the 1980s and 1990s represent an era of many such protests across Latin America, and anger at high living costs was a factor in anti-dictatorship movements in places like Pinochet’s Chile. In other political contexts, moments like the store lootings that precipitated the early end of the Alfonsín administration in Argentina and the 1989 Caracazo that shook the establishment in Venezuela feature prominently in the collective memory of those who lived through such turmoil.

As this brief survey suggests, recent works on the politics of the cost of living have explored a variety of encounters between state authorities, business forces, and ordinary citizens. One concern running through many of these studies is the unevenness of efforts to redefine the terms of economic inclusion. The questions of whose needs are legitimate and which groups merit assistance—and which do not—have shaped these political contests. As researchers have shown, programs to shield vulnerable households from need have, in practice, benefited some groups more than others. Certain social types, such as the male breadwinner, have been at the forefront of attention, even as women, in their roles as housewives and workers, have been instrumental to cost of living activism. The unevenness has often mapped onto regional imbalances between city and country, or between certain regions within a given nation—differences that can reflect racialized notions of backwardness and modernity. Some occupational categories, such as farmworkers and female domestic servants, have often been excluded from labor legislation, social welfare programs, and other measures aimed at improving living standards. Although the measures created to address rising costs were not open to all, this did not prevent wider sectors from finding ways to express their frustrations and, in some cases, from participating in larger movements to seek redress and pressure authorities into greater action.

Getting and Spending in a Consumer Age

Both experts marshalling social knowledge and a spectrum of political actors have attracted the interest of researchers concerned with the cost of living. To these we must consider a third tendency in recent studies: namely, to approach the subject from the vantage of the history of consumption. Researchers have explored the numerous ways that consumption features in the worldviews of those struggling with material pressures, expressing their discontent, and dreaming of a better life. This trend is part of a larger wave of scholarship on the history of consumption. Previously confined to geographic areas like Western Europe and the United States, the study of consumption in Latin America has attracted greater attention over the past few decades.21 Whereas Latin Americanists had long acknowledged the importance of the region as a producer of commodities like sugar, coffee, or bananas that were exported for consumption elsewhere, they have turned to examine the patterns of consumption within the region’s countries. Some have followed the lead of anthropologists and sociologists in the study of everyday practices at the community level. Other authors have published studies centered on everyday material culture in the long sweep of Latin American history, as well as books profiling the rise of new domestic consumer goods industries in specific nations during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.22 A subset of works in this field of inquiry speak directly to the dilemmas associated with the disconnect between growing consumer abundance in modern times and the challenges faced by many residents of Latin America in participating fully in an increasingly commercialized world.

One line of inquiry has focused on the strategies employed by historical actors for coping with the shortfall between consumer desires and material means. As one might suspect, debt features prominently in these discussions. From the colonial period to the present, credit has taken many forms, from neighborhood shops that extended weekly or monthly tabs to loyal consumers they personally knew to more formal schemes offered by department stores and large commercial establishments. Pawnshops provided another means for ordinary people to turn material possessions into cash, often in order to address immediate survival needs, to bridge the gap until they were paid for their labor, or to settle other debts.23 At the same time, researchers in economic sociology have delved into the specific ways that working people draw distinctions between different types of spending—the mental accounting that goes into uses of money, whether intended for consumer “luxuries,” needs, or debts to be repaid. Some actors are drawn to the allure of self-help and get-rich-quick schemes, seeking once and for all to escape the grind of labor and the challenges of earning enough to satisfy material wants.24

In tandem with studies on these aspects of debt and consumer spending, other historians have looked to at forces that stoked appetites for more. They have examined the emergence of modern advertising, a process that involved reworking earlier merchant practices with the latest best practices emanating from advertising centers like New York. In some cases, the arrival of foreign companies marked a turning point in the history of advertisement in Latin American countries, as firms like Sears and Coca Cola introduced new methods for reaching potential customers and shaping the dreamworlds of popular-sector households.25 Hollywood and other foreign culture industries played a crucial role in this regard, although domestic filmmakers in Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere also played their part in disseminating depictions of material comfort and pleasure.

Another point of entry into consumption and the cost of living has been to focus on that most essential category of consumables: food. The origins of national cuisines and questions of transculturation have predominated, but historians have also considered the challenges of putting food on the table and the ways that economic pressures have affected what people eat. Rising prices for staple goods or particularly valued foodstuffs can have enormous repercussions. Governments have sometimes tried to mitigate inflation and shortages—whether those caused by natural disasters like droughts, political disruptions, embargos, or the consequences of state agricultural policies—by encouraging consumers to eat less of a given good and more of an allegedly healthier, cheaper alternative. Eat less beef and more pasta, or less of this fish and more of this one, the authorities intoned. Despite appealing to patriotic sacrifice, these propagandistic entreaties faced great headwinds, as consumer preferences have proven hard to modify in the short term. Along with the impact of commercial advertisers for food manufacturers, they helped to accelerate changes in how popular households thought about health, food, and wellbeing and, in some cases, how they spent their money.26

During the Cold War, the problem of abundance amid high inequality captured the imagination of both the defenders of capitalism and its critics. Modernization theorists held that regions like Latin America suffered from a “revolution of rising expectations:” thanks to mass culture, audiences could see the higher level of material comforts enjoyed by residents in other parts of the world like the United States, or even by more affluent minorities in their own societies. For some, the solution was to implement development strategies that would let Latin American countries “catch up” with the leading consumer societies of the West. Other observers drew the opposite conclusion, arguing that affluence elsewhere was a function of the immiseration and exploitation of populations in the Third World. Accordingly, they advocated a vision of the good life predicated on revolutionary nationalist and socialist alternatives, which would deliver greater wellbeing to members of the social majority, while rejecting the consumerist values broadcast from countries like the United States. One expression of these Cold War oppositions was the swirling controversies around the threat posed by “Americanization” in Latin American societies. Accusations of cultural imperialism co-existed, however uncomfortably, with a growing fascination with the foreign and a national appropriation of certain cultural forms, like rock music and youth clothing fashions.27

That the array of goods and services on offer in Latin American countries has expanded exponentially is without question; so, too, is the fact that consumerist desire has featured prominently in many of the major political transformations of this era. As Heidi Tinsman has shown in the Chilean case, promises of consumer plenty justified the restructuring ushered in by the Pinochet regime. The reduction of tariffs enabling a flood of cheap foreign-made clothing and manufactures did make certain categories of goods more accessible to many. Yet the concentration of wealth and widening inequality ratcheted up the material pressures on working-class individuals. Tinsman’s study reveals how these changes impacted gender relations withing laboring households: female laborers drawn into new export-oriented industries in areas like fruit harvesting became less dependent on husbands and men for their income, which in some cases was directed to purchasing consumer goods. Yet the satisfaction derived from such spending was counterbalanced by the frustrations of increasing indebtedness, regimented labor routines, and an inability to attain higher levels of consumption.28

At the same time, researchers have considered the importance of consumption and of cost of living concerns to the making of middle-class identities.29 While a few have looked at the lifestyles of the filthy rich, most studies in this vein have profiled the lives of the comfortable, but still vulnerable middling sectors. Rather than fighting against rising prices for basic survival, the pressures faced by middle class groups are a question of a fierce competition to maintain or improve one’s status, including by keeping up with the norms of consumption enjoyed by one’s peers. Researchers have examined the difficulties of meeting these expectations for urbanites in times of rapid inflation or during moments of economic crisis. Others have considered the phenomenon of the shrinking middle class, in some countries the consequence of neoliberal reforms aimed at cutting the size of the public sector and opening the economy to foreign trade. By contrast, studies of consumption have considered the impact of new practices and spaces of consumption on middle-class identities. They track, for instance, how the emergence of shopping malls in Bogotá and cities across the region have emblematized the social transformations and signature forms of inequality experienced in recent decades.30

Over the past century, changing consumer aspirations and practices have thus helped redefine the contours of the “good life” for the inhabitants of Latin American countries, even among those sectors excluded from the commercial bounty of goods, services, and entertainments on offer. Historians have only begun to delve into these phenomena but have already uncovered new insights about how different social sectors managed obvious contrasts between consumerist abundance and the dilemma of living costs. Much remains to be understood about how consumer expectations shifted with the changing tides of inflation, transformations in the job market, and other economic trends.

Conclusions: the Dossier and Beyond

The four articles in this dossier address, in their respective ways, the three broad historiographic tendencies in recent works on the cost of living described in the preceding pages: 1) social knowledge and state policy; 2) popular activism, labor, and mass politics; and 3) consumption. In some cases, one area of inquiry stands out, while in others the discussion ranges across these areas in innovative ways. Each article is rooted in a specific national history (that of Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay), while at the same time engaging with the wider scholarship on the cost of living and related concerns elsewhere in twentieth-century Latin America and other geographic and temporal fields. These essays were received in response to the call for papers and went through a rigorous peer review process based on anonymous external evaluation. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons not all the studies received were able to be included in this dossier; one hopes that many of these important works will be published elsewhere.

In the dossier’s first article, Jaddiel Díaz Frene approaches the cost of living from an unexpected angle. His study looks at the social impact of the introduction, during the early 1900s, of the phonograph and related technologies for playing recorded music in Mexico. Díaz Frene asks us to consider how economic constraints and spending power shaped access to the new “talking machine.” Rather than assuming that this foreign manufactured good was a plaything for the rich, this study documents how the phonograph became a presence on city streets and in shops and homes. It asks us to explore often overlooked questions: how much did these devices cost, who could afford them, and how did people obtain and use them to different ends? For some, buying a sound machine represented the acquisition of a useful tool to earn a living. By reconstructing this social and economic context in greater detail, this article encourages us to think about how cost of living concerns can inform inquiry into the history of technology and consumption in Latin America more broadly.

The second article shifts attention to the politics of commercial regulation in Chile between the 1930s and early 1970s. The author, Joshua Frens-String, illuminates the emergence of a “price control state” in Chile, which reflected efforts by state authorities to safeguard living standards and popular demands for the satisfaction of essential needs. The article then explores how and why this regime began to show increasing signs of stress over time. New thinking about the structural causes of inflation, attributed to the backward nature of Chilean agriculture or the asymmetries of global trade, started to challenge an earlier emphasis on speculation and merchant greed. These tensions came to a head during the tumultuous final years of the Allende era. In tracing this historical arc, Frens-String’s study makes a methodological contribution by bridging the history of economic policy with the history of how Chile’s popular classes grappled with the costs of everyday consumption.

Aldo Marchesi addresses a related transformation in his article on the politics of welfare in twentieth-century Uruguay. As the author reveals, there was a remarkable consensus across the ideological spectrum in support of state action to provide “consumer articles of primary necessity” to the social majority. Using sources ranging from parliamentary debates to OIT reports, Marchesi examines how political actors sought to define basic needs in greater detail and adopted policy measures to regulate commercial activity over this extended period. The 1980s, however, marked a major departure with this tradition, as narrower notions of satisfying basic unmet needs replaced more inclusive, comprehensive understandings of social welfare. Marchesi looks at the reasons behind this significant conceptual shift and its lasting consequences on the politics of poverty in the contemporary era.

Finally, the dossier returns to early twentieth-century Mexico with an investigation by Joel Vargas on efforts to improve living standards in the aftermath of the Revolution. Although the right to a minimum wage was asserted in the 1917 Constitution, translating this powerful idea into practice proved difficult. Vargas shows how reformers challenged the largely improvised methods used early on to fix wage standards, which created large regional variations and notorious problems in enforcement. These activists did so by appealing to the supposedly neutral authority of the science of nutrition, which in theory could help determine a universal level of well-being to guide state policy. The article demonstrates how experts developed knowledge about the nutritional condition of Mexico’s population, seeking in the process to provide a supposedly firmer foundation upon which to determine the minimum wage.

As the articles included in this dossier demonstrate, the study of the cost of living invites diverse approaches. Moving forward, historians will no doubt continue to use tried and true methods as well as devising new ones. By way of closing, I would like to suggest three potential avenues of inquiry. The first consists of widening the focus of living costs to include spheres of household spending such as healthcare and education that have received less attention than consumer staples and daily shopping. Along these lines, historians might turn their attention to topics like the rise of social insurance systems, whether state-operated or privately-run, in which actuarial logics and understandings of risk reframed conceptions of the value of life. There is a wider story to be told as well about housing costs, one of the most pressing issues affecting the living standards in an increasingly urbanized region. In short, the history of the cost of living could encompass all these categories of household expenditure and not only those related with the essential demands of putting food on the table.

Another promising direction concerns the study of cultural reflections on topics like inflation and living standards. So far, most histories have remained confined to the world of the policymakers, experts, activists, and popular movements. Yet artists have also weighed in on the struggles for survival of laboring majorities and commercial pressures of modern life. Some have used humor to comment on such conditions through caricatures in print media or images splashed on city walls. To pick one last example from Argentina, consider an artwork by the visual and performance artist Oscar Bony called La familia obrera. First presented in 1968 to the public at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Bony’s piece consisted of posing three living human subjects—a working man, his wife, and their son— on a pedestal for hours on end like museum objects. A plaque informed the audience that the male breadwinner made double the wages sitting in the gallery as a living artwork than he earned in his industrial job as a skilled diemaker. Bony’s attempt to draw attention to the cost of living predicaments of the working class elicited the acrimony of critics and pressure from the country’s military rulers. Some researchers have delved into such artworks in search of historical insights, but they demand further consideration and to be placed in conversation with the existing literature on the cost of living.

Finally, researchers interested in the history of the cost of living might allow social conditions in the present to inform their agenda more overtly. There are good reasons why historians have focused on subjects like state policies targeting the income and consumer needs of male wage workers. But modernization-era expectations that rural to urban migration would lead to mass industrial employment simply do not match the lived experience of most Latin Americans. Much of the region’s population makes their living in that grey zone of urban activity we now call the “informal economy.” This has, to a greater or lesser degree, been the case in earlier eras, too. Thus, we need to devise approaches that also grapple with the experiences of how these wider “informal” majorities confronted living cost problems. Likewise, contemporary experiments with state-led distribution through income subsidies alert us to the importance of paying closer attention to how the popular sectors actually use money.31 Recent studies have helped us move beyond mathematical abstractions of inflation levels (important, to be sure) and closer to the grubby details of how people made money, spent it to meet various needs, and reflected on the scarcity and abundance of things around them. There is much left to be done, however, in coming to grips not only with price fluctuations but also the values that humans assign to these shifting conditions and to struggles of daily economic life.

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❧ I would like to thank Historia Crítica for the invitation to guest edit this dossier and recognize the work of all the authors who responded to the call for papers. On the editorial team, Santiago Paredes helped me take the first steps and Leidy Paola Bolaños Florido guided me throughout the process. Lastly, the critical eye and support of Ashli White were, as always, essential. The article was originally published in Spanish as: Elena, Eduardo. “Precios y valores: nuevas miradas sobre el problema del costo de vida en América Latina durante el siglo xx”. Historia Crítica, n.° 87 (2023): 3-25, doi: https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit87.2023.01

1 Although this article is focused on recent social, intellectual, political, and cultural studies of the cost of living, it would be absurd to ignore the fundamental importance of inquiry on subjects like inflation in the field of economics. A few points of departure on Latin American cases include: Jorge Schvarzer, La inflación en la América Latina (Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración, 1992). Sebastián Edwards y Mauricio Cárdenas, eds. Inflación, estabilización y política cambiaria en América Latina: lecciones de los años noventa (Bogotá: TM Editores, 1997). Nader Nazmi, Economic Policy and Stabilization in Latin America (Armonck, NY: M.E. Sharp 1996). Luiz de Mello, ed. Monetary Policies and Inflation Targeting in Emerging Economies (Paris: OECD, 2008).
2 According to one estimate, Argentina experienced the world’s highest and longest inflation from 1960 to 1994, at an average annual rate of 127 percent. Some neighboring countries were not too far off this pace. William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 220. Historical investigations on inflation in contemporary Argentina include: Gustavo Ernesto Demarchi, Los argentinos y la inflación (Buenos Aires: Nueva Generación, 1995). Joaquín Ledesma, El desconcierto argentino: hiperinflación (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad Católica Argentina, 2010). Santiago Chelala, La era de la inflación: política económica de las crisis argentinas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones B, 2014). Miguel Kiguel, Las crisis económicas argentinas: una historia de ajustes y desajustes (Buenos Aires: Penguin Random House, 2015). Claudio Bellini y Juan Carlos Karol, Historia económica de la Argentina en los siglos xx y xxi (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2020).
3 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth- Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
4 Three illustrative studies on the Chilean case are: Rodrigo Henríquez Vásquez, En “estado sólido”: Políticas y politización en la construcción estatal Chile 1920-1950 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2014). Ángela Vergara, Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Joshua Frens-String, Hungry for Revolution: The of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
5 Eduardo Elena, Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2011), 34-42. A Spanish language edition by EDUNTREF (Buenos Aires) is forthcoming.
6 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Mass., Belknap, 1998).
7 On other experts responsable for Peronist social policies, see: Patricia Berrotarán, Aníbal Jáuregui, Marcelo Rougier, eds., Sueños de bienestar en la Nueva Argentina: Estado y políticas públicas durante el peronismo, 1946-1955 (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2004). Anahi Ballent, Las huellas de la política: vivienda, ciudad, peronismo en Buenos Aires, 1943-1955 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Prometeo, 2005). Daniel Lvovich y Juan Suriano, eds., Las políticas sociales en perspectiva histórica (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006). Karina Ramacciotti, La política sanitaria del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2009).
8 Melissa Teixeira, “Making a Brazilian New Deal: Oliveira Vianna and the Transnational Sources of Brazil’s Corporatist Experiment,” Journal of Latin American Studies 50 n.º 3 (2018):1-29.
9 Patricia Berrotarán, Del plan a la planificación: el estado durante la época peronista (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi 2004). Daniel Campione, Orígenes estatales del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2007).
10 Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
11 Claudia Kedar, The International Monetary Fund and Latin America: The Argentine Puzzle in Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).
12 Margarita Fajardo, The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 73-107.
13 Alvaro García Hurtado, The Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Chicago Boys (Cambridge: Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1983). Manuel Délano, La herencia de los Chicago Boys (Santiago: Ornitorrinco, 1989). Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
14 This literature is truly massive. Some representative works in the field of Argentine labor, social, and economic history include: Jorge Schvarzer, “El régimen de regulación salarial en la Argentina moderna: aproximación a sus condiciones globales,” (Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración, 1977), 1-48. Mirta Zaida Lobato, La vida en las fábricas: trabajo, protesta y política en una comunidad obrera, Berisso (1904-1970) (Buenos Aires, Entrepasados/Prometeo, 2001). Paula Aguilar, El hogar como problema y como solución: una mirada genealógica de la domesticidad a través de las políticas sociales, Argentina 1890-1940 (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini, 2014). Luis Alberto Beccaria y Roxana del Luján Maurizio, “Mercado de trabajo y desigualdad en Argentina: un balance de las tres últimas décadas,” Sociedad 37, n.º6 (2017): 15-41.
15 Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Henríquez, En “Estado sólido.” Frens-String, Hungry for Revolution. Vergara, Fighting Unemployment.
16 Melissa Teixeira, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).
17 Elena, Dignifying Argentina, 84-186.
18 For a survey of these trends in the study of Peronism, see Eduardo Elena, “New Directions in the History of Peronism,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y El Caribe, 25, n.º 1 (2014): 17-40. Other studies on Peronist-era consumption include Natalia Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).
19 Enrique C. Ochoa, Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2000); Paulo Drinot, “Food, Race and Working-Class Identity, Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru,” The Americas, 62, n.º 2 (2005): 245-270.
20 Mona Rosenthal, Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Hanna Garth, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). María A. Cabrera Arús, “The Matter of Things: A Material Turn in Cuban Scholarship,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30, n.º 2 (2021):163-173.
21 For a guide to this emerging field, see the special issue dedicated to consumption of História Crítica 65 (2017), including the introductory essay by Frank Trentmann and Ana María Otero-Cleves, “Paths, Detours, and Connections: Consumption and its Contribution to Latin American History,” 13-28.
22 Néstor García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales de la globalización (México, D. F.: Grijalbo, 1995). Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History, Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Fernando Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina during the Export Boom Years, 1870-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Steven Bunker, Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012). Lilia Esthela Bayardo Rodríguez, Entre el lujo, el deseo y la necesidad: historia del gasto familiar y el consumo moderno en la Ciudad de México, 1909-1970 (Zapopan: El Colegio de Jalisco, 2018). James P. Woodard, Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping. Ana María Otero-Cleves, “Foreign Matches and Cheap Cotton Cloth: Popular Consumers and Imported Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, n.º 3 (2017): 423-456.
23 Marie Eileen Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
24 Ariel Wilkis, Las sospechas del dinero: moral y economía en la vida popular (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2013). Daniel Fridman, Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
25 Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Fernando Rocchi, “La sociedad de consumo en tiempos difíciles: el modelo estadunidense y la modernización de la publicidad argentina frente a la crisis de 1930, Historia Crítica, n.º 65 (2017): 93-114. Woodard, Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce.
26 María del Pilar Zazueta, “De Coca-Cola a Vampi-Cola: políticas, negocios y el consumo de refrescos y azúcar en México (1970-1982),” Apuntes de Investigación, n.º 22 (2012), 35-55. Rebekah Pite, La mesa está servida: Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo y la domesticidad en la Argentina del siglo xx (Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2016). Frens-String, Hungry for Revolution. Christiane Berth, Food and Revolution: Fighting Hunger in Nicaragua, 1960-1993 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
27 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Fernando Rocchi, “La americanización del consumo: las batallas por el mercado argentino, 1920-1945,” en Americanización: Estados Unidos y América Latina en el siglo xx, editado por María Barbero y Andrés Regalsky (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2003), 150-216. Valeria Manzano, Age of Youth: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
28 Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). See also, Inés Pérez, “Consumo y género: una revisión de la producción historiográfica reciente sobre América Latina en el siglo XX,” Historia Crítica, n.º 65 (2017), 29-48.
29 Brian Owensby, Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Maureen O’Dougherty, Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). A. Ricardo López-Pedreros and Barbara Weinstein, eds. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina: apogeo y decadencia de una ilusión (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009). Federico García Barrientos, Lujo, confort y consumo: Medellín 1900-1939 (Medellín: Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2014). A. Ricardo López-Pedreros, Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
30 Arlene Dávila, El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
31 For similar trends in contemporary Africa, see James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

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Eduardo Elena

Doctor in History from Princeton University (United States) and currently professor at the University of Miami. His publications include: Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, forthcoming in Spanish with EDUNTREF), Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, co-edited with Paulina Alberto (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and “Spinsters, Gamblers, and Friedrich Engels: The Social Worlds of Money and Expansionism in Argentina, 1860s-1900s,” Hispanic American Historical Review 102, n.º1 (2022): 61-94. edelena@miami.edu, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8135-2195