Empire by Emulation: Local Business Elites, U.S. Consumer Culture, and Brazil’s Short American Century

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, the defining institutions of North American consumer culture arose in Brazil: Hollywood cinema distribution, commercial radio, advertising agencies of national reach, department stores, glossy advertiser-supported magazines, supermarketing, television, and the shopping mall – all were introduced during these years.  But the processes by which they were introduced involved far more than the imposition of alien institutions by a commercial imperium at the height of its power.  In many cases, it was Brazilian business elites who were the key actors and agents in introducing elements of a characteristically “American” consumer culture to their country.  Traveling to the United States (made much easier after the beginning of Pan American Airways’ Clipper service in 1934) and keeping up with the latest developments there through reading the leading U.S. trade publications gave these elites – advertising men and women, retail merchants, media magnates, public-relations “experts” – a familiarity with aspects of North American culture that they admired and some of the means by way to reproduce them in Brazilian settings.  Their endeavor was so successful that by the late 1960s, there remained little that was recognizably “American” about the goods, services, and structures introduced over the course of the preceding decades.  U.S.-style consumer culture, by its appeal, ubiquity, and apparent usefulness, had become Brazilian.  Indeed, it had contributed in very real and lasting ways to the making of modern Brazil and of Brazilian modernity.