https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2040-6801
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
During the 1920s and 1930s, a new wave of mass consumer culture swept through the United States, fueling a fad for modern and exotic objects to display at home. Department stores stuffed their massive showrooms with new home decor styles, such as the exciting textile patterns industrial designer Ruth Reeves created following her ethnographic collecting trip to Guatemala in 1934. Although scholars have shown how powerful transnational corporations, such as the United Fruit Corporation, shaped exploitative large-scale neocolonial economies in Central America, I argue that individual consumption of indigenous culture transformed middle-class white women into stakeholders in new destructive patterns of U.S. imperial expansion in Latin America. This article historicizes the development of racial capitalism and shows how individual acts of cultural appropriation and consumption of indigenous material culture were transformed into collective practices of racial and gendered exploitation to restore U.S. cultural and economic vitality through empire during the Great Depression.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Lisa L. Munro
Lisa L. Munro is a historian of modern Central America and the Resident Director of the Mérida, Yucatán study abroad program for Central College (Pella, Iowa). She holds a PhD in history from the University of Arizona (2015). Her work examines the relationship between Guatemala and the United States in the 1930s and transnational constructions of indigeneity. Her research interests include the cultural history of archaeology, science and pseudoscience, neoliberalism, human rights, and, state violence.