This essay analyzes a Japanese court’s criminal conviction of a Peruvian shipmaster for abusing Chinese contract workers and the subsequent release of all Chinese passengers except a lone girl. Using the case as a lens onto gender dynamics within the coolie trade to Latin America, I argue that overlapping patriarchal practices made Chinese contract labor overwhelming male and prioritized men in debates over freedom. The María Luz trials upheld women’s domestic sexual bondage while condemning men’s enslavement.

This essay explores the impact of new consumer cultures on rural women in Chile's fruit-export sector during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, 1973–1990. It challenges the longstanding assumption that the “consumerism” associated with Chile's neoliberal makeover was overwhelmingly reactionary in its political consequences and debilitating for working-class communities in particular. It argues that while new consumer cultures emerged within, and sometimes exacerbated, conditions of extraordinary exploitation and want, consumption was also a site through which women fruit workers challenged family patriarchy and created new forms of community with each other. Taking the central valley province of the Aconcagua Valley as its focus, the essay examines women's enthusiasm for the proliferation of imported commodities such as ready-made clothes, makeup, televisions, refrigerators, and electronic music devices, whose availability resulted from employment in the fruit-export sector as well as new sources of consumer debt. It concludes that while such new consumer desires and practices positioned rural women as validating certain aspects of the military's modernization project, it simultaneously encouraged women to resist necessarily linkages between “authoritarian” and “modernity” and to embrace gender ideals that were quite oppositional to those the regime promoted.

Since the late 1970s, US and European consumers have enjoyed year-round availability of fresh grapes, pears, apples, and peaches in their local supermarkets—fruits that, in the winter months, come disproportionally from Chile. As the authors of Women and Agribusiness: Working Miracles in the Chilean Fruit Export Sector make crystal clear, this First World bounty is made possible through international agribusiness's hyper-exploitation of predominantly female labor in the Third World. Chile's highly profitable fruit-export industry was nurtured during Augosto Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1989), which promoted a radical liberalization of the economy and ruthlessly silenced a once powerful rural labor movement. Women comprise just over half of the estimated 300,000 temporeros/as (temporary workers) who labor for poverty wages under seasonal contracts in the industry's orchards, vineyards, and fruit-packaging plants. By the mid-1980s, the fruit industry's profits reached a half-billion dollars, making fresh fruit Chile's third most important source of foreign currency and prompting The Wall Street Journal to hail Chile's “economic miracle.”