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Encuentros Con El Yanqui: Norteamericanización Y Cambio Cultural En Chile, 1898–1990

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3824344

1527-1900

Brian Loveman,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

Stefan Rinke's history of “encounters”—real and symbolic—between Chile and the United States ranges from theories of cultural and technological diffusion to multifaceted sociopolitical history of twentieth-century Chile. Considered in detail are the “interiorization,” appropriation, and transformation by Chileans of the growing economic, technological, cultural, and political influences of the United States, called norteamericanización in Chile, Americanization in Europe (p. 19). Rinke intends the book as a case study (Chile) of the impacts of the “complex processes of transnationalization and globalization” in Latin America (p. 17).Translated into Spanish from the original German (Begegnungen mit dem Yankee: Nordamerikanisierung und soziokultureller Wandel in Chile, 1898–1990 [2004]), Encuentros con el yanqui offers deep history of the periods 1900–1930 (labeled by Rinke the transnational phase) and 1970–1990 (labeled the new globalization). These periods are viewed through lenses as diverse as travel accounts, radio programs, cinema, music, popular magazines, newspaper editorials, television, and the recommendations of American advisers to various Chilean governments. Economic encounters include American investment, business operations in Chile, and labor relations in foreign-owned mines, factories, and public utilities. Although the focus is on reception of, modification of, and resistance to American influences, almost none of these were strictly binational—thus the term “transnational” for the first period and “global” for the later period, when there were intensified contacts between the two countries (p. 525).Rinke goes well beyond the extensively studied expansion of US presence in Latin America after World War I and the ambivalent responses of Latin Americans and Chileans to American influences. The changing ideas, images, and perceptions in Chile regarding the United States are documented profusely, citing stereotypes and representations of “the Yankee” in newspapers, magazines, movies, comic strips, and superbly chosen caricatures and photographs from Chilean media. For the post–World War II period, studies by Chilean social scientists and survey research on Chilean public opinion are incorporated into the analysis.Norteamericanización was simultaneously applauded and resisted by different groups of Chileans at distinct historical moments. Benjamín Subercaseaux, in Retorno de USA (1943), noted that stereotypes of the United States ranged from “heaven on earth” to “imperialist octopus” (p. 271). The norteamericanización process was filtered by changing national political contexts, ideological polarization, and cleavages in international politics. The nationalist Catholic Right, Social Christians, and Marxists were highly critical, for different reasons, of US political, economic, and cultural influences, whether new dances such as the Shimmy and Charleston in the 1920s or domination of popular and children's media by US enterprises such as Disney in the 1960s and 1970s. Illustrative were Eduardo Labarca Goddard's Chile invadido: Reportaje a la intromisión extranjera (1968) and the best-selling Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic) (1971), by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.Despite criticism of the “American way of life,” the appeals of American consumer society never waned from the late 1920s, when Daniel de la Vega wrote in El Mercurio that “North American expansion is implacable. It imposes its commerce, it fills our streets with Fords [which began to operate in Chile in 1924], it has us admire its moralizing movies” (p. 178). This continued with the arrival of Coca-Cola to Chile in 1943, the installation of Apple in Santiago in 1980, and the diffusion of credit cards in the late 1980s (Diners Club, Visa, MasterCard, American Express). Such trends are examined in detail. Data is provided on the audiences within sectors and social classes of the Chilean population for American films; for example, Rinke discusses the reception of Rambo and of television series such as Dallas, Ironside, and Bonanza, among numerous others.Rinke offers a meticulously researched account of norteamericanización (50 pages of sources and bibliography, a treasure trove of footnotes for Chileanists as well as business, cultural, and social historians). Focus on norteamericanización sometimes elides the continuing, parallel, and overlapping European and regional vectors of social and political change. Technological innovation, multinational enterprise, changes in international law (the United States, unlike Chile, did not join the League of Nations), new political movements and ideology, and artistic, musical, and literary trends came to Chile also from Europe and its Latin American neighbors. The first song broadcast on Chilean radio (in 1922), “It's a Long Way to Tipperary,” was a British music hall number sung by soldiers during World War I. A British firm that created Radio Wallace in 1926 in Valparaíso is credited with transmission of Chile's first program for a child audience. American jazz made its mark, but the Argentine tango likely had as much influence on Chilean popular culture, from the time that Carlos Gardel first performed in Valparaíso in 1917. Prussian influence in the Chilean army persisted into the 1940s. Italian and Spanish fascism, even German Nazism, had strong appeal in Chile, especially in sectors of the political Right. Transnational Vatican activism in the 1920s and 1930s preceded significant American political influence (in 1924 a papal message was first heard on radio in Santiago), and the church's doctrines on the social question led to creation of the Falange Nacional and then the Christian Democratic Party (in 1957). These influences were certainly transnational but hardly instances of norteamericanización.Rinke is less detailed on the Cold War period prior to 1970 but notes that by the 1970s and 1980s it was difficult, if not impossible, to separate norteamericanización from the networks of globalization that encompassed most regions of the world. On the book's penultimate page, Chilean sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón is cited on Chile's accommodation to globalization: “We are, at the same time, adobe and computer, straw roof and color television, universal and differentiated consumption and indigence, barricades [barricadas, street protest], American blue jeans, indigenismo, rock culture, and human rights, all at the same time” (p. 534). Rinke concludes that modernization in Chile integrated a heterogeneous reality as the promises and contradictions of consumer society conflicted with a quest for national identity and authenticity. It is not clear how this made Chile different from other South American countries. Rinke's impressive research on twentieth-century sociocultural change in Chile suggests the need for extensive comparative research on the same topics in the rest of Latin America.