The Ambivalent Thematics of Commodity Fetishism in Contemporary Latina/O Narrative Fiction

Abstract

One of the chief cultural dynamics in the contemporary United States is the omnipresent commodity fetishism that drives its consumer society, so it comes as little surprise that this figures prominently in the attempts of much contemporary U.S. Latina/o fiction to come to terms with the social milieu of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States. This essay argues that Helena Maria Viramontes’s Miss Clairol, Sandra Cisneros’s Barbie-Q, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao each manifest a deep-seated ambivalence towards commodity fetishism: an awareness of how the agency to break with traditionalist modes of being and some measure of cultural assimilation might be achieved through engagement with fetishized attributes commodities place on offer, yet one that is tempered by an appreciation of the dangers such as alienation and cultural homogenization that also proceed from immersion in a world defined by commodity fetishized relations.

Keywords:

• commodity fetishism
• consumer society in Latina/o literature
• Miss Clairol
• Barbie-Q
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Notes

1. This incipient social order was variously resisted – anthropologist Michael Taussig observes in his study The Devil and Commodity Fetishism how semi-proletarianized workers in the Andes contested the inroads of commodity fetishism via mythic stories of contracts with the devil (Bethell 1996, 126).

2. ‘Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose qualities are “at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible. The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce’ (Debord 1995, 26).

3. Andy Warhol famously played off these associations of Campbell’s soup within the spectacle commodity system in his series of Campbell’s soup can paintings of the period during which Viramontes’s story takes place.

4. This same process is evident in the proliferation of thrift and dollar stores that has taken place in the wake of the neoliberal erosion of the American middle class.

5. U.S. residents of Latin American descent make up a disproportionate amount of the nation’s poor: as of 2012 25.6% of this population lives in poverty, as opposed to 15% of the general population (‘Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage’ 2013).

6. At the same time, the references in the text to the doll’s melted, non-biodegradable plastic foot and the smoke still rising from the incinerated toy warehouse are redolent of the ecological ravages of rampant consumerism that are most intensively visited upon the poor who live in close proximity to the polluting factories that produce its goods and the garbage dumps that house its detritus and hazardous waste products – cf. Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011).

7. The central role popular culture plays in Oscar’s identity formation is particularly evident in the scene in which he returns to live in his mother’s home after college and replaces his ‘childhood posters’ with ‘his college ones’ as a testament to his personal evolution (263) and the scene in which he experiences a profoundly existential sense of alienation when he finds that the fantasy games he cherishes have been replaced with newer ones, that consumer patterns had shifted and ‘his Age was coming to a close’ (269–70).