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Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2025

Pablo Pryluka
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Abstract

Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America offers a comparative social and economic history of South America’s developmental decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In the aftermath of World War II, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile implemented state-led strategies to secure economic sovereignty, raise living standards, and expand domestic markets. These policies made durable goods such as refrigerators, automobiles, and televisions increasingly available, yet access remained uneven across class, gender, and racial lines. By the 1960s, these commodities had become powerful symbols of modern well-being.

The dissertation examines how people experienced this transformation and how new forms of consumption reshaped ideas of welfare, citizenship, and inequality. By the decade’s end, it was clear that the developmental state could not deliver social mobility or universal access to modern comforts, leading to widespread frustration. Policy makers, marketing experts, and intellectuals debated how to “rationalize” consumption—deciding which needs should be guaranteed for all and which reflected elite privilege.

Keywords

Latin Americaeconomic developmentconsumption

Information

Type
Krooss Prize Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 2025 , pp. 1156 - 1163
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Business History Conference

Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America examines how state-led development projects designed to expand welfare through mass consumption reshaped understandings of well-being and material necessity. After World War II, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—like many other Latin American nations—implemented developmentalist strategies seeking to ensure economic sovereignty, raise living standards, and broaden domestic markets. While these policies led to the greater availability of new durable goods, which in turn became symbols of modern comfort, access to them remained uneven among social groups, and the extent of class, gender, and racial inequality differed sharply across the three countries. By the late 1960s, it had become clear that the developmental state could provide neither genuine social mobility nor universal access to this new standard of living, leaving consumers’ expectations unmet. Confronted with these limitations, policy makers, marketing professionals, and intellectuals engaged in a debate over the rationalization of consumption: which needs should be universally satisfied, and which represented fabricated desires of privileged sectors?

Economist Albert Hirschman, one of the most influential thinkers in development economics, explored this dynamic in his 1973 article “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development.” Writing at a time when disillusionment with developmentalism was spreading, Hirschman proposed the now classic metaphor of the “tunnel effect.” He imagined a traffic jam inside a tunnel, a situation that naturally provoked irritation among the drivers. Suddenly, one lane began to move forward, which at first inspired hope among those waiting in the other lane—surely, their turn would come next. Yet after a few minutes of watching the “fortunate” line advance, the drivers left behind grew even more exasperated than before, when no one had been moving at all. Having glimpsed progress, their expectations rose, only to be replaced by frustration when their own cars remained still. They felt that some external force or unfairness was holding them back. For Hirschman, this allegory encapsulated what happened when economic growth under developmental policies produced widening inequalities. In the early stages, people tolerated these gaps, reading them as signs that prosperity might eventually reach everyone. But as time went on and the promise failed to materialize, hope gave way to resentment. The growing frustration of those excluded from the benefits of growth thus became a central political problem.Footnote 1

In developing his argument, Hirschman treated income as a stand-in for personal satisfaction. Developing Consumers, by contrast, shifts attention from income to consumption itself. It asks how perceptions of modern comfort and durable consumer goods evolved in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the 1950s and 1960s. Over these two decades, an expanding array of new products—refrigerators, washing machines, cars, radios, motorcycles, televisions, and vacuum cleaners—entered the domestic landscape, transforming the daily routines of those who could afford them. It was, in essence, a consumer revolution built around durable goods. These items became omnipresent: they filled advertisements and stood at the center of state developmental efforts aimed at fostering their local manufacture. Gradually, both public and private spaces were increasingly occupied by new appliances and vehicles, which redefined everyday life not only for their owners but also for those who longed to possess them.Footnote 2

From the wide range of durable goods that proliferated during these decades, Developing Consumers concentrates on three of particular social and economic relevance: refrigerators, cars, and televisions. Refrigerators redefined the organization of domestic life and the rhythms of household labor. They were also the first appliances to require a constant supply of electricity, linking consumption directly to energy infrastructure. The spread of refrigerators, moreover, signaled the postwar maturity of the electric appliance market. As they evolved from a luxury item into a staple of the modern kitchen, refrigerators illustrated how ideas about durable goods could shift dramatically within two decades. Automobiles, in turn, not only reshaped mobility and helped integrate national economies but also became powerful markers of social status. Car ownership brought the notion of the middle class to the forefront: after the 1960s, owning an automobile came to represent the passage from working-class origins to upward mobility. The car industry itself stood as a flagship of import-substitution industrialization in Latin America, allowing us to view the region’s industrial history through the lesser-studied lens of consumption. Finally, televisions transformed access to information and entertainment, gradually displacing radio as the emblem of mass media over the 1960s. By bringing moving images into the home, the new medium captivated marketers and advertisers alike. Yet for nationalist critics and cultural purists, commercial television epitomized a new instrument of ideological domination, igniting public debates about consumerism and the fabrication of false needs.

This consumer revolution also transformed the ways in which goods were advertised, distributed, and purchased. The industrial expansion of the postwar decades poured unprecedented amounts of money into the advertising sector, while the rapid growth of television broadcasting amplified the industry’s profitability. Commercial airtime on TV became the most expensive form of publicity, and agencies’ revenues soared accordingly. At the same time, new domestic firms emerged in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, at times rivaling the earnings of global giants such as J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, and Lintas. The influx of capital coincided with the adoption of modern marketing research tools designed to probe consumer preferences. From the popularization of survey studies to the spread of focus groups and in-depth interviews, advertising professionals and pollsters invested heavily in understanding their audiences. Although they often drew on official statistics, they also built their own databases on income levels, purchasing habits, television ratings, and print circulation. This growing body of data both captured and molded contemporary attitudes toward consumption. Admen used it to design persuasive campaigns and to promote new commodities. Newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio, and television—all became saturated with commercial messages. The consumer revolution, in short, deepened the market’s presence in everyday life.

As the study and targeting of consumers evolved, the systems of distribution and retailing underwent parallel transformations. Manufacturers and merchants invested heavily in strengthening and expanding their sales networks. In some cases—such as Frigidaire or Volkswagen—foreign companies transplanted dealership models they had refined abroad. The growing organization of resellers and the hosting of dealers’ conventions sought to standardize sales methods and customer service practices. As these firms extended their reach across national markets, they also faced the challenge of maintaining a consistent brand identity, particularly beyond the major cities. Retailers, especially in Brazil, mirrored these efforts. They built more sophisticated administrative structures, trained specialized sales staff, and redesigned their stores to make them more appealing to potential buyers.

Finally, the widening availability of consumer credit provided the financial backbone of this revolution. The incorporation of new social groups into the expanding markets for household appliances and automobiles depended in part on the development of novel mechanisms to finance purchases. Credit came from a wide range of sources—banks, nonbank financial companies, neighborhood credit societies, manufacturers, credit card firms, and retail stores. Although the scale and reach of these systems varied among the three countries, one common feature stood out: by the mid-1960s, roughly half of all appliance sales were made on installment plans.

By the late 1960s, both the kinds of durable goods being purchased and the patterns of consumption themselves had changed profoundly. These transformations elevated the political and economic significance of consumer demand: not only were larger segments of the population now affected by fluctuations in the consumer goods market, but private consumption also became a key driver of economic growth. As a result, consumer politics moved to the center of developmental debates. Attempts to satisfy popular expectations led policy makers to adopt measures that eventually produced severe macroeconomic imbalances. Meanwhile, new economic doctrines, championing free-market liberalization and austerity as remedies to those imbalances, began to gain influence. In this way, the very evolution of consumption practices ended up undermining the developmentalist project it had once sustained.

Scope and Historiographical Intervention

Developing Consumers spans three countries over nearly three decades, with a particular emphasis on the 1950s and 1960s—the core years of Latin America’s industrial transformation. The Great Depression marked a turning point in the region’s political economy, bringing to a close the export-led boom that had shaped growth since the 1870s.Footnote 3 It also accelerated trends that had already emerged during World War I: the deterioration of the terms of trade, a surge of import substitution driven by the collapse of U.S. and European imports, and a sharp decline in the inflow of foreign capital. The continuation of this substitutive industrialization after the Depression fostered large-scale rural-to-urban migration, stimulating the rise of an industrial working class and, in some contexts, the consolidation of an emerging middle class.Footnote 4

After World War II, industrialization ceased to be an experiment and became an explicit state-led development strategy. Economic protectionism took shape through trade restrictions, targeted fiscal incentives, and redistributive policies.Footnote 5 By stimulating domestic demand, this model of industrialization depended on the incorporation of new consumers into national markets. Yet by the late 1960s, the very dynamics that had sustained growth generated new tensions between income redistribution, popular expectations of maintaining or improving living standards, and the necessity of balancing external accounts through higher exports or import reductions. In some cases—most notably Argentina and Chile—these contradictions culminated in acute economic crises that paved the way for military regimes combining authoritarian rule, political repression, and the dismantling of key institutions that had supported the developmental state. In others, such as Brazil, military governments postponed economic liberalization by resorting to massive foreign borrowing, taking advantage of the global financial expansion that followed the oil shocks.Footnote 6

The narrative arc of this dissertation concludes between the late 1970s and the onset of the 1982 debt crisis, the moment when the era of developmentalism and industrial expansion came to an end. Transformations in the global economy, together with the economic policies imposed by domestic dictatorships, ushered in a new historical era. On the international front, this meant a wider liberalization of financial markets and global trade; on the domestic level, it entailed austerity measures, the dismantling of industrial protectionist frameworks, and a sharp rise in external indebtedness. These shifts profoundly reshaped income distribution and the forms of international integration adopted by these countries—changes that, in turn, redefined both patterns of consumption and the expectations attached to them.Footnote 7

While Developing Consumers adopts a regional perspective, its analytical units are national economies. This corresponds to what Charles Tilly described as an “encompassing comparison”—three national economies situated within, and shaped by, the broader dynamics of the world economy. Their similarities and differences, therefore, are partly the outcome of their distinct positions within that global structure.Footnote 8 The dissertation also engages with the methodological dilemmas raised by global history. Although the national economy serves here as the main unit of analysis, this choice is deliberate: both the international context—characterized by economic disintegration and protectionism—and the emergence of new developmental ideas in the so-called periphery made the nation-state a central site of economic planning and political imagination. At the same time, the research underscores the dense connections between business elites and state officials across Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, as well as the region’s integration into global markets for goods and capital. Through this combined comparative and connected approach, Developing Consumers offers a multiscalar narrative of the postwar economic boom that extends beyond the traditional Euro-American frame.Footnote 9

Indeed, Developing Consumers examines the crossroads between the histories of development and consumption. It contributes to the recent wave of scholarship within the “new histories of capitalism,” part of a broader historiographical renewal of economic history that gained momentum after the 2008 financial crisis. Expanding the scope of traditional economic history, this literature investigates the social and cultural dimensions of production, circulation, and consumption, while also foregrounding the histories of regional, social, gender, and racial inequalities that underpin economic processes.Footnote 10

Over the past decade, the history of development has undergone significant expansion.Footnote 11 Beyond intellectual histories of developmental thought, recent works have examined subjects as varied as foreign aid programs, the social impact of dam construction in Soviet Tajikistan, and the role of citizens in circulating development discourses in India.Footnote 12 In Latin America, the history of economic development has a deep and influential tradition, rooted in the structuralist framework of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and in dependency theory.Footnote 13 Yet in recent years, historians have revisited the developmental decades of the mid-twentieth century with new questions and approaches. Renewed attention to the economic and policy debates that sustained the developmental project has produced a series of studies exploring the intellectual and expert networks, international relationships, and political engagements of development advocates.Footnote 14 Another line of research has reexamined this period by combining an analysis of the institutional foundations of the developmental state with a more conventional economic and social history of industrialization.Footnote 15 By approaching development from the vantage point of consumption, this dissertation brings a fresh perspective to the material and everyday dimensions of development, showing how the expansion of domestic markets both motivated and constrained developmental policy. Moreover, its comparative framework highlights not only the distinct trajectories of the three national economies studied but also the connections and circulations that linked them within a broader regional and global context.

The second major field in which Developing Consumers intervenes is the history of consumption. In 2004, Frank Trentmann published a landmark article that helped redefine the field.Footnote 16 He noted that, during the preceding two decades, theoretical debates had overshadowed empirical research on the social and historical dynamics of consumption. Two notions in particular—“consumerism” and the “modern consumer society”—had dominated scholarly discussions. Trentmann argued that it was time to write histories of consumption rather than histories of consumerism. Nearly twenty years after that call, the field has expanded in multiple directions, examining the intersections of politics, citizenship, and consumptionFootnote 17; the evolution of marketing and advertisingFootnote 18; everyday consumption and retail practices; the global circulation of commoditiesFootnote 19; and the many entanglements between gender and consumption.Footnote 20

Over the past two decades, the history of consumption in Latin America has also grown considerably. The study of commodities and commodity chains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already formed a well-established field with deep roots in the region. While much of that scholarship traditionally focused on the export boom, recent works have turned their attention to imports and to goods consumed domestically.Footnote 21 For the twentieth century, research on advertising, consumer politics, and retail practices has opened new areas of inquiry that had long remained unexplored. These studies have not only reframed the social history of twentieth-century Latin America but also offered new insights into how the rise of mass consumption reshaped cultural identities during the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 22

Yet despite this steady expansion of the field, no study has systematically examined the links between developmentalism and consumption. Developing Consumers complements these narratives by incorporating consumers, businesses, and other private actors such as managers, retailers, marketers, and admen. By accessing corporate archives, mostly ignored by Latin American historians (General Electric, Philips, Peugeot-Citroën, Volkswagen, and others), this dissertation makes use of surveys on consumer preferences, sales information, and reports on national markets and investment opportunities. These sources reveal the hybrid nature of developmentalism, which involved both public and private efforts to mold consumer-citizens. In doing so, developmentalism mobilized citizens as economic agents; consumer satisfaction became the barometer of development success. By reconstructing statistical data on the spread of consumer access to durable goods, the growth of the advertising sector, and the inequalities that structured consumption, this dissertation sheds new light on how development was experienced and perceived from the standpoint of consumers themselves.

References

1. Albert O. Hirschman, “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 4 (1973): 544–566. For understanding the historical context in which Hirschman wrote this essay, see Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 263–267.

2. On the history of market expansion and the incorporation of new social groups into mass consumption, see Lizabeth Cohen, The Class Experience of Mass Consumption. Workers as Consumers in Interwar America, in The Power of Culture. Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 135–162; Peter Scott, The Market Makers: Creating Mass Markets for Consumer Durables in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

3. On the export boom, see Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, eds., The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

4. On the early industrialization of Latin America, see Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Fernando Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina during the Export Boom Years, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, Industry and Revolution: Social and Economic Change in the Orizaba Valley, Mexico (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the effects of the Great Depression, see Carlos Díaz Alejandro, “Latin America in the 1930s,” in Latin America in the 1930s. The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis, ed. Rosemary Thorp (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984); Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight, eds., The Great Depression in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

5. Rosemary Thorp, “A Reappraisal of the Origins of Import-Substituting Industrialisation 1930–1950,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, no. S1 (1992): 181.

6. On the changes on the “neoliberal turn” in Latin America, see Jeremy Adelman, “International Finance and Political Legitimacy: A Latin American View of the Global Shock,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Carlo Edoardo Altamura, “Global Banks and Latin American Dictators, 1974–1982,” Business History Review 95, no. 2 (2021): 301–332.

7. For a general analysis of the crisis of development and the neoliberal turn, see Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo, El Desarrollo Económico de América Latina Desde La Independencia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 242–312. For national case studies, see the essays in the recent edited volume Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro, eds., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). On the 1982 financial crisis, see Carlo Edoardo Altamura and Juan Flores Zendejas, “Politics, International Banking, and the Debt Crisis of 1982,” Business History Review 94, no. 4 (2020): 753–778.

8. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

9. On the links and tensions between comparative and connecting histories from a global history approach, see Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 37–89.

10. The list of contributions that fit the new histories of capitalism is extensive. A key contribution to understanding the new challenges of writing economic history after the boom of cultural studies and the so-called linguistic turn can be found in Barbara Weinstein, “Developing Inequality,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 1–18. Jonathan Levy has explored the renovation that came with the new histories of capitalism and how it can illuminate new areas of economic life in this article, Jonathan Levy, “Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 483–510.

11. Joseph Hodge published the most thorough review of the historiography on development in a series of two articles. See Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 3 (2015): 429–463; Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7, no. 1 (2016): 125–174.

12. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Nikhil Menon, Planning Democracy. How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Among the most classic works on developmental ideas, see Heinz Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 2014).

13. Cristóbal Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (London: Taylor and Francis, 2010).

14. Amy Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development : Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Margarita Fajardo, The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022); Juan Odisio and Marcelo Rougier, Industry and Development in Argentina: An Intellectual History, 1914–1980 (New York: Routledge, 2023); Melissa Teixeira, A Third Path : Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).

15. See, for example, the essays in this edited volume Miguel Angel Centeno and Augustin E. Ferraro, eds., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Rise and Fall of the Developmental State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

16. Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 3 (2004): 373–401.

17. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, Governance, Consumers and Citizens: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics, Consumption and Public Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

18. Véronique Pouillard, La publicité en Belgique, 1850–1975: des courtiers aux agences internationales (Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2005); Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, eds., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Brian Jones and Mark Tadajewski, eds., Routledge Companion to Marketing History (Taylor and Francis, 2016); Jan Logemann, Gary Cross, and Ingo Köhler, eds., Consumer Engineering, 1920s–1970s: Marketing Between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

19. Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Erika Diane Rappaport, Sandra Dawson, and Mark Crowley, eds., Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Erika Diane Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Vicki Howard, “‘History of Department Stores: Introduction,’” History of Retailing and Consumption 7, no. 1 (2021): 1–8.

20. Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

21. Eduardo Elena, “Spinsters, Gamblers, and Friedrich Engels: The Social Worlds of Money and Expansionism in Argentina, 1860s–1900s,” Hispanic American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (2022): 61–94; Ana María Otero-Cleves, Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

22. See, for example, Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Ricardo D. Salvatore, “Yankee Advertising in Buenos Aires: Reflections on Americanization,” Interventions 7, no. 2 (2005): 216–235; Eduardo Elena, Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); Natalia Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Fernando Rocchi, “La sociedad de consumo en tiempos difíciles: el modelo estadounidense y la modernización de la publicidad argentina frente a la crisis de 1930,” Historia Crítica, no. 65 (September 2017): 93–114; James P. Woodard, Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Francisca Espinosa Muñoz, Justicia Material y Políticas de Consumo En El Gobierno de La Unidad Popular (1970–1973) (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023); Otero-Cleves, Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).