Consumer culture is a topic that was slow to find a purchase among historians of Latin America. The explanation for this may be rather simple: students of postcolonial Latin American history assumed that the great majority of the population in Latin American societies had little disposable income and thus lived outside or on the margins of the forms of consumerism that emerged in the US and Europe with the rise of the middle class. But as historians of Latin America have come to recognize not just the substantial presence of middling classes in twentieth-century Latin America, but also the many ways in which the urban and rural poor interacted with consumer culture despite their severely limited means, we have seen the publication of a number of major studies on this topic. Some commodities previously seen as owing their existence to overseas demand are now understood to have gained their initial commercial foothold in Latin American consumer markets. Working-class households are seen as struggling not only to secure food and shelter, but also to purchase small luxuries that allow them to exhibit taste and respectability. Marketing strategies that smacked of Americanization, previously derided as vulgar impositions, have been subjected to new modes of interpretation that emphasize both the transformation of commercial culture in Latin America but also the agency of Latin American businesspeople, advertisers, and consumers. In other words, Latin Americanists have taken up the topic of consumerism, but have done so in a way that reflects the particular circumstances of consumers and markets in the region.

Recently, two leading figures in the field of Brazilian history, James Woodard and Seth Garfield, have turned their attention to the themes of consumerism, commodity circulation, and marketing in Brazil, though they have approached these topics through very different points of entry. Woodard’s 2020 monograph, Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century, is a sweeping study of the transformation of Brazilian commercial and cultural life from the 1920s to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the impact and reception of US-style marketing, and how the dissemination of new ways of attaining status and distinction altered both the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, Garfield’s forthcoming book (slated for publication Fall 2022) takes a long durée approach to a peculiarly Brazilian product. Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant, traces the history of guaraná from its cultivation and ritual use by the Sateré-Mawé people of the Amazon, through the various attempts to make it a profitable export commodity, to its eventual “triumph” as the most beloved soft drink in contemporary Brazil and a marker of Brazilian national identity. This roundtable brings together three scholars who have published innovative and important works on consumerism and marketing in Latin America—Heidi Tinsman, Bryan McCann, and Eduardo Elena—who will comment on the contributions of the Woodard and Garfield books and discuss the significance of these different approaches to consumer capitalism for the field of Latin American history.