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Chewing Gum in the United States and Mexico: the everyday and the iconic. Michael Redclift

Introduction This paper brings together a number of disparate literatures, and seeks to illuminate recent research on materiality, economic development and cultural production. My focus - the political economy of chewing gum – is an unusual one, that is largely ignored by mainstream studies of twentieth century consumption in the United States (Lebergott 1993, Brown 1994). The story of chewing gum, often celebrated as the quintessential ‘American invention’, has been confined to children’s books and trade association pamphlets (Young 1989,Wardlaw 1997,Gustaitis 1998, Icon Group 2000). Chewing gum is rarely celebrated by intellectuals, and the following exchange is not untypical of the response some make to the subject. It was broadcast on British Channel Four News, on September 4, 2001: (Interviewer) Jon Snow (on the publication of The Bulgari Connection, a novel by Fay Weldon, sponsored by the jewellers of that name) ‘Is there any product with which you would not be associated?’ Fay Weldon ‘Wrigley’s chewing gum might be a problem…’

Notwithstanding Fay Weldon’s opinion, chewing gum remains a central item of personal consumption, especially in the United States. Last year American kids spent more than half a billion dollars on chewing gum. In Mexico, the original source of the gum base from which commercial chewing gum is derived, it is pivotal for understanding children’s cultures.

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In this paper I want to examine the history of chewing gum in the United States and Mexico, and to re-assess its cultural importance. During the 1930s and 1940s chewing gum became a global commodity, and in some respects came to stand for the United States. However, manufactured gum in this period was largely sourced from the Yucatan peninsular in Mexico, where the production of chicle assumed enormous strategic and political importance at the time. This history has subsequently been ignored. One of the objectives of the paper, then, is to compare these parallel cultures of consumption and production, in Mexico and the United States. In doing so it draws on the literatures of consumption and political economy, and the role of social inclusion and exclusion in global spatial relations, and in developing national cultural practices (Sahlins 1976, Bourdieu 1977, 1984, Miller 1987, Mintz 1985, de Vries 1976).

It is suggested that we need to examine the parallel processes of consumption and production, as parallel cultural universes, which are organised spatially, often within clear ‘national’ parameters. The paper argues that the practices of consuming and producing gum can be viewed as processes of ‘disclosure’ and ‘appearance’ in everyday life. It examines different categories of space – both national and ‘commodified’ space – and different constructions of history.

On the one hand, space is defined in such a way that the effects and implications of systems of production and consumption can be ‘distanced’: distanciation is the term sometimes employed for this process (Held and Thompson 1989, Redclift 1996). On the other hand, the

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way that history is constructed lends weight to these spatial distinctions. In writing the history of chewing gum one is struck by the difference between the history of ‘events’, and the cultural identities to which these events have given rise. The history of chewing gum in the United States is celebrated in popular culture; that of chicle production in Mexico is largely tacit and ignored. These concepts of space and history, it is argued, are located in asymmetrical relations of power, which point to different ways of constructing ‘significance’, politically and culturally.

Something for nothing… It is sometimes said that ‘..there is no such thing as a free lunch’. Chewing gum suggests the opposite. As the Web pages of the Chewing Gum Manufacturers express it ..“ People have enjoyed chewing gum-like substances in many lands and from early times..” (http://www.wrigley.com/gum/began.htm). Many of these substances were thickened resin and latex derived from trees, sweet grasses, grains and waxes. In the United States chewing gum seems to have been very common from the beginning. In New England the colonists learned from the native population, how to chew the gum-like resin that formed on spruce trees when the bark was cut. Lumps of this spruce gum were sold in the eastern United States during the early nineteenth century, making it the first commercial chewing gum. Tom Sawyer shared his companion’s gum in the Missouri of the early 1850s.

At about this time, sweetened paraffin wax was beginning to be popular, and eventually exceeded spruce gum in popularity. It was first marketed by John Baker Curtis, who established a factory for making gum in Portland, Maine in 1852. The supply of spruce

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trees, however, was insufficient to meet demand, and trees were being cut for pulp. Paraffin wax was usually ‘foul tasting’, and found no lasting market in the United States.

Chewing gum might not have been recorded in the history books, had it not been for the meeting between the ex-Mexican President Santa Ana, and the American inventor, Thomas Adams, in New York in the 1860s. Santa Ana, like many of the Mexican soldiers whom he had so unsuccessfully led into battle in Texas, used chewing gum based on chicle, derived from the sapodilla tree, found in Yucatan, Mexico. (Santa Ana has victory at The Alamo, and the death of Davie Crockett, to his name, but otherwise managed to lose almost half of Mexico’s territory to the United States in the course of thirty years, in the mid-nineteenth century).

Adams bought a ton of chicle from Santa Ana, convinced that it could be used for the tyres of coaches, as a substitute for rubber. The story of how he discovered it could be chewed has reached almost mythic proportions that it is almost certainly untrue. It is said Adams was in a drug store in New York when a young girl came in and ordered Curtis’ White Mountain paraffin gum from the owner. After he had tried it, Adams became convinced that he could produce something much better from chicle. Within a year he was manufacturing gumballs, gum sticks covered in coloured paper, and a gum-making machine. He managed to add flavours, particularly liquorice (‘Black Jack’) and, by the 1880s had more than two hundred and fifty employees.

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Chewing gum had already proved that something extracted from nature, free at the point of extraction, could be flavoured and marketed successfully. The next stage in the saga is characteristically absurd. A chewing gum maker called William J. White had put mint flavour into gum, by mixing it with corn syrup (chicle alone would not absorb flavours very successfully). The gum he produced was called, appropriately ‘Yucatan’, and became an instant success, enabling him to build a fifty-two room mansion in ‘Millionaires Row’ in Cleveland, Ohio. White’s coup de grace was to visit England in 1898, and manage to push a stick of his gum into the hands of the Prince of Wales (after 1901, King Edward VII) who, by all reports, was staggered by the American’s effrontery. White was not worried: he immediately cabled New York to say that the British monarchy had already tried, and liked his gum…

Chewing gum, it was clear, was about ‘added value’. You needed to add flavour to the raw product, but you also needed to package it in a convenient form and, above all, you needed to sell it. The next significant figure in the story understood this implicitly. William Wrigley is credited with saying: “Anyone can make chewing gum.. selling it is the problem”. Wrigley elevated the marketing of gum to an art form. In 1891 William Wrigley, the founder of the company which still dominates chewing gum manufacture, arrived in Chicago from Philadelphia. William’s father was a soap manufacturer, who also made baking powder as a by-line. In time he found that the baking powder was more popular with shopkeepers than the soap, and switched to supplying baking powder as the main product. Chewing gum he ‘gave away’ with each packet of baking powder. Two packets of chewing gum accompanied

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each packet of baking powder, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the nation soon took chewing gum to its heart.

By 1893 William Wrigleys contracted the Zeno Gum Corporation to make chicle-based gum, which he identified as far superior to paraffin wax. He introduced the two main brands still available today - Wrigley’s ‘Juicy Fruit’ and ‘Spearmint’- and set out to market the product with an industry never before witnessed, even in the United States. Times Square in Manhattan was decked out with placards and electric signs, a huge innovation at the time, costing over one hundred thousand dollars. Wrigley’s then sent free samples of their two major brands to literally millions of storekeepers and salesmen. Perhaps most famous in their advertising armoury, was the mile-long sign of one hundred and seventeen billboards between Atlantic City and Trenton, New Jersey.

Wrigley’s broke other conventions. In 1915 they advertised through re-writing Mother Goose rhymes, in praise of chewing gum – ‘Jack, be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack, run to get your Wrigley’s stick’ – which set the pattern for the next century. Nothing was inviolate; no frontier of ‘taste’ was secure from the Wrigley’s onslaught.

By 1910 Wrigley’s had already become the largest purchaser of advertising in the United States. The next step was to link chewing gum, in the public mind, with other popular forms of recreation. Wrigley’s produced the first ‘chewing gum cards’, boosting the profile of the Chicago baseball team; an idea which had been used to sell cigarettes since the 1880s. On the strength of marketing campaigns such as this, William Wrigley, who proved to be a

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relatively enlightened employer, had a mansion constructed - the ‘house that gum built’ – in Chicago.

One of the challenges that Wrigley’s faced, from the beginning, was that chewing gum might prove a very ephemeral fashion, susceptible to the whims of the wider economy. Chewing gum, unlike tobacco, did not have physically addictive powers; it might, like nutmeg in eighteenth century Europe, simply lose its appeal (Milton 1999). However, unlike nutmeg, chewing gum was never credited with extravagant medicinal powers, and its popularity withstood economic depression. William Wrigley had argued in 1907 that “..people chew harder when they are sad”, and was persuaded to spend more on advertising, not less, during economic downturns. When he eventually died in 1932 Wrigley was one of the ten richest men in the United States.

The ‘American Invention’ By the end of the 1930s chewing gum, the ‘American invention’, was an American addiction. During the Second World War serious shortages in many of the components – chicle was still used as the principal gum base – hampered the production of chewing gum. Sugar, peppermint and spearmint were rationed during wartime, and supplies of gum latexes from the Far East dried up. In fact a ‘pink market’ in pre-War gum developed on the streets of American cities. Wrigley’s rose to the challenge with characteristic flair, taking all their main brands off the market in the interests of the war economy, and introduced just one brand in their place – ‘Orbit’. Soon American streets were plastered with advertising

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hoardings, showing a Wrigley’s Spearmint packet, which proclaimed: ‘REMEMBER THIS WRAPPER…’

When the usual Wrigley’s brands reappeared gradually, in 1946 and 1947, crowds lined the streets to buy them. Only the U.S. forces had been provided with Wrigley’s regular brands during the conflicts in Europe and the Pacific. This proved to be another stroke of marketing genius; anybody who harboured doubts about the patriotic and necessary nature of chewing gum was silenced. The American GI received chewing gum with his field and combat rations throughout the War. Wrigley’s argued that chewing gum helped to combat thirst, helped concentration, and freshened the mouth. This had been the argument in 1918 when the American Red Cross supplied four and a half million packets of gum to the forces in France, after threats that the water had been poisoned. The same arguments were deployed during the Gulf War of 1991 when contractors for the United States Department of Defense also supplied gum to the American forces.

During the conflict American kids were deprived of their usual supply of chewing gum, on which they spent four and a half million dollars in 1941.. In 1946 a Texan importer of candy, Andrew J. Paris was shown on the cover of ‘Life’ magazine, as a national hero, having imported five thousand tons of chicle from four Mexican factories. After the war Wrigley’s reaped the benefits of the peace, as consumption increased by five hundred per cent, but as far as Mexican producers were concerned the ‘writing’ was already on the ‘wall’. The shortages of chewing gum base during the War had forced manufacturers to develop synthetic gum resins, which gradually replaced chicle as the gum base.

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Chewing gum may have started as a ‘free good’, like water and air, but it gradually developed into one of the most heavily advertised products in the United States. It had been marketed without a price, in the 1880s, but had become almost ‘priceless’ in the following fifty years – something for which there was, literally, no substitute. Chewing gum had become as necessary as soap and, arguably, as ‘useful’ (Lebergott 1993) since ‘use’ can only be attested by market demand. Chewing gum had been condemned by school teachers in the United States in its early years; by the 1990s it was being distributed to some children as a reward for good behaviour.

Chewing gum had also become ‘iconic’. It had come to represent ‘America’ to civilian populations in Europe during the War, deprived of most daily conveniences, and who coined the catch-phrase of wartime London “…Got any gum, chum”. Chewing gum was associated with ‘cool’, in the forces and in the movies. Humphrey Bogart chewed gum in ‘Casablanca’, and by 2001 Vogue magazine was still reporting that Sarah Jessica Parker, the principal ‘actor’ in the highly successful Sex In the City television series, demonstrated she was “..still a real New Yorker”, by the way she chewed gum during an interview.

Chewing gum was associated with the trappings of success, in sport and popular entertainment. Between 1929 and 1933, at the time when sales of chicle to the United States were hit by the Great Depression, a small part of the ‘American Dream’ seemed to have faded away. A Mexican author commented, subsequently, that: “chewing gum was one of the small pleasures which American families easily

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(Anda Gutierrez 1982, 114). Wrigley’s had proclaimed that ‘We Will Be Back’, and fears that the American public would desert the product during the War proved unfounded. Deprivation often concentrates sensual preferences, and may not alter tastes. Chewing gum was a success of ‘association’ – institutionalised practices that the public shared with Bogart and Bacall, baseball stars and fashion icons. Post War, the swapping chewing gum cards became the perennial occupation of the ‘baby boomers’ ; it replaced other vices with mastication, soon after sweet rationing ended in 1951 in Britain.

Throughout parts of Asia (notably Japan) and Latin America (where ‘Chiclets’ was ubiquitous) chewing gum became a popular pastime. It stood as the ‘American invention’; the everyday and the iconic. In a lucid passage of his classic study of sugar Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz describes the processes through which we give meanings to things, and he does so in a way that invokes the kind of spatial/cultural relations that lie at the heart of the history of chewing gum: “..But if humanity gives meaning to the objective world, with different sets of meaning for different human groups, one must still ask how this is done and by whom in any given historical instance. Where does the locus of meaning reside? For most human beings most of the time, meanings believed to inhere in things and in relationships among things and acts are not given but, rather are learned. Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention. To say this is not to deny individuality or the human capacity to add, transform, and reject meanings, but it is to insist that the webs of signification that we as individuals spin are exceedingly small and fine (and mostly trivial); for the most part they reside within other webs of immense scale, surpassing single lives in time and space.” (Mintz 1985, 157/158)

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As we shall see, however, the effects of these meanings and everyday practices, located as they are in time and space, are seen differently if we follow the history of the production of gum in the Mexican Yucatan peninsular, rather than its consumption in the United States.

Chicle production in Mexico: the political ecology of the forest frontier. Chewing gum was the first, and perhaps one of the most important, items of mass consumption in the twentieth century. Few other products of similarly iconic status – CocaCola perhaps, or the motor car - were present at the dawn of the century, reached such a wide audience so immediately, and embodied not simply a brand name but a new product. Chewing gum has another feature which distinguishes it. For about forty years (from about 1910 to 1950) chewing gum was principally composed of a substance which was extracted from the wild, and processed for human consumption. Chicle could not be cultivated. By mid century chicle was replaced by synthetic gum, which could be produced to order. This half century represented a ‘window’ in time, in which mass consumption in the United States was inextricably, and very specifically, linked with the fate of forest economies and peoples. The twentieth century history of Quintana Roo, and that of chicle, was written in that window.

The main constituent of Wrigley’s chewing gum was produced several thousand miles away on the Yucatan peninsular, in isolated camps in the tropical forest, where men climbed into the trees to cut, and tap, their resin. The silence, and lack of attention, given to the life and culture of the chicleros, (gum-tappers), demonstrates vividly the effective separation of a manufactured product from its origins, and the selective amnesia which besets extractive, primary economies in developing countries.

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There is only one published account of the life of these workers, outside the jottings of journalists, the classic study by Ramon Beteta, Tierra del Chicle. This was first published in 1937, republished in 1951, and subsequently ‘rediscovered’ in a new (1999) edition, by the State Government of Quintana Roo. Beteta’s book was originally written in the form of newspaper articles in 1929, after an official inspection of the conditions under which chicle was produced, in central and southern Quintana Roo. In his ‘Introduction’ to the 1999 edition Carlos Justo Sierra writes:

“Until the beginning of the twentieth century the land of Quintana Roo could be classified in the archives of ‘indifference’: owing to its distance from the capital, which might also be translated as ignorance and abandonment, on the part of the Federal Government…the dawn of the new century was characterised by the complete absence of a plan for exploiting natural resources in the peninsular..” (Beteta 1999, 12/13). Tierra del Chicle is unusual in that it seeks to provide a context, and an explanation, for the ‘abandonment’ of a vast army of primary producers, who lived, literally, at the margin of Mexican society. Most other accounts are less ambitious, and have passed through several hands. They very rarely make any but the most superficial mention of the economic dynamo which was driving the chicleros into the forest: chewing gum consumption in the United States.

Although the Maya had used chicle (which they called sicte) for centuries, the first immigrant chicleros arrived in Quintana Roo in about 1915, from the neighbouring zones of

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Veracruz, Chiapas, Yucatan state and Belize. They were attracted into the area by the increasing commercialisation of chicle, as production was boosted by external demand. 1

The commercialisation of chicle was also a significant process in providing the forest economy of Quintana Roo with greater freedom from the Mexican state and the Yucatecan elite. Ever since the Caste War had begun, in 1847, the Mayan peasants in the south and east of the Peninsular had been staging a major rebellion. At one stage the rebel Maya even petitioned Queen Victoria to join the British Empire.2This process had been boosted by the legions of rebel Maya (the Cruzoob) who, in the later stages of the Caste War, had used the income from selling chicle to boost their armies.

According to Montalvo Ortega (1988) the economic independence of the rebel Maya, and the cash earned from chicle, enabled them to separate themselves from Yucatan as a whole: “many continued a subsistence economy, others began to work for the chicle companies in the region”.(Montalvo Ortega 1988, 312). Another study, recently undertaken by Ramos Diaz (1999) demonstrates the extent to which the rebel Maya were even willing to enter into agreements with the gum manufacturers and their intermediaries, in this period. He comments that: “The first decade after the Mexican Revolution (1910) saw ..an unusual collaboration between the rebel Maya and new business entrepreneurs from the Yucatan Peninsular…The expectations that were awakened by the commercialisation of gum drew the Indians and businessmen together. The Indians 1

Chicle resin is derived from the tree of the chicozapote (Manilkara zapota) which grows to about ten to fifteen metres in height, and a metre and a half diameter. This tree has a wide canopy in the jungle, and the wood is red in colour. It produces a sweet, perfumed fruit (chicozapote) with large seeds, which are eaten and carried by birds and animals. Trees require ten years to reach maturity, when they can be ‘bled’ for their latex, which is collected and boiled to reduce moisture. (EQR 1998, 90/91). 2 The Caste War in Yucatan lasted at least half a century, indeed it has never been officially concluded. Remnants of the

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came out of their isolation; the businessmen overcame some of their prejudices. When the boom reached its end the eastern coast of Yucatan would never again be the same; the commerce in gum had transformed the urban features of the region, and given rise to powerful new social groupings…” (Ramos Diaz 1999, 174).

From 1920 onwards the production of chicle in Quintana Roo increased dramatically. In the process it helped to produce a new class of extractive workers, who were neither fully proletarian nor fully ‘peasant’. It is a paradox that the product which provided their livelihood, and which was consumed by the North American masses as a staple of twentieth century urban life, was gathered in Yucatan under conditions of growing ecological vulnerability and social marginality.

The forest encampment: the everyday reality of the chiclero. The life of a chiclero was one of enforced isolation. Between the months of September and January the chicleros lived in the forest, in camps constructed in forest clearings. In each camp lived an average of fifty to sixty workers, dividing their time between the extraction process, and the preparation of the chicle for the market. The chicleros were contracted through the ‘enganche’ system, not dissimilar to that employed in Latin America from colonial times: they were each paid a small advance, from which they bought supplies, including their utensils. In some cases the men brought women and family members with them to do the cooking and organise the domestic side of the camp.

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In the early morning the workers left the camp, and only returned at dusk. They spent the day tapping a succession of trees, averaging about four or five a day (EQR 1998, SEP 1982). Saturday afternoons and Sundays were spent boiling the resin in collective pots, to reduce the moisture and make the gum more malleable, and transportable. The chicle was initially poured into sacks, which had been treated with soap to avoid the gum sticking to the side. Later the gum was made into balls, and the balls were formed into wooden moulds, for easier storage. Each of these moulds weighed approximately eight to twelve kilos.

The workers were paid at the end of each six month period in the jungle, when an account was made of the amount of resin they had harvested, and their ‘advance’ was subtracted from this amount. In effect, they were ‘tied’ to the contractor, and more or less permanently in debt.

The conditions of work for most chicleros could hardly have been more fragile and vulnerable. In the forests they were prone to illness and infestations; particularly the ‘chiclero ulcer’, which resulted from being bitten in the inner-ear chamber by an insect which lived in the leaf canopy. There was also a real danger of falling from trees, snake bites and periodic diseases, which swept through the camps. Finally, alcoholism, as might be imagined, was a problem, and in 1929 the Federal Government introduced a law in the territory of Quintana Roo, prohibiting the sale of alcohol.

The conditions of existence of the chicleros working in Yucatan during the first decades of the twentieth century provides a vivid contrast with the ‘message’ which commercial

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chewing gum so effectively communicated. The workers in Yucatan were poor, indebted, and exposed to enormous risks in their work and daily lives. In addition, they were pohysically isolated in a very hostile climate and environment and, as impoverished migrants, powerless to improve their conditions. The forests in which they worked were being carved up by concessionaires, most of them foreign, whose contracts were with labour contractors and a number of militant Mayan chiefs, fighting to preserve their land from the Federal Government.3 The frontier inhabited by the chicleros in Yucatan probably had something in common with that of the United States, in an earlier period. However, the forest frontier in Mexico lacked the ideological resonance that has come to be associated with the American ‘West’. It seemed to demonstrate the impoverishment of the individual, rather than the triumph of individualism, and prepared the way for new forms of social organisation, and socialised production.

Collective organisation of the forest economy After 1929 the price of chicle fell, with the onset of the Great Depression, and with it the volume of gum exported. In 1929 over two million kilos of gum were produced in Mexico; by 1933 this had fallen to about three hundred thousand kilos. Changes in the international economy also provided the lever which served to radicalise the Mexican Revolution, and the eventual drive to collectivisation under President Cardenas, in the late 1930s, and early 1940s, when most of the world was at war.

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The most important of these Mayan leaders was ‘General’ May, who effectively controlled southern and central Quintana Roo from the beginning of the century until 1929. Nobody could take out chicle from the region unless it had passed through the hands

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As elsewhere in Latin America the world economic crisis brought more national coherence to government policies in Mexico. Quintana Roo, and the east of the Yucatan Peninsular, were no longer viewed as a belligerent and largely irrelevant wilderness. The importance of chicle was such that the territory suddenly ‘appeared’ on the map. The Maya in the zone blamed General May for the fall in prices, and May was forced to sign an agreement with the Governor of Yucatan which, among other things, guaranteed the free movement of traded goods in the region. The limits of each concession would be respected and, provided that the Mexican Government was satisfied that there was no contraband, land titles, schools and other urban services would be provided. It was also agreed that federal officials, rather than Mayan rebels, should administer punishments in the zone. For their part the Mayan villagers promised not to hand the British flag in their villages, and to halt contraband traffic with Belize to the south.

In the 1930s the conditions of the chicleros began to improve slightly. The heavy hand of General May, and similar caciques in the north of Quintana Roo, was replaced by the evangelising but turbulent rule of the post-revolutionary Mexican state. Co-operatives were quickly established among chicleros, with the idea of freeing them from the exactions of intermediaries and contractors, and offering the prospect of direct sales to the chewing gum manufacturers. The first of these co-operatives, made up of nineteen workers, was established in the community of Pucte in August 1935, but soon co-operatives were established throughout the zone, in Quintana Roo, Belize, south and east Campeche and northern Guatemala.

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The land map of Quintana Roo was being transformed. The Governor of Yucatan (Quintana Roo was still, officially, a ‘territory’) Rafael Melgar decided to collectivise large estates in the region, and began by bringing one of them to the newly established agrarian commission. This process contributed to the creation of new co-operatives, such as El Porvenir and Rancho Viejo, some of them with extensive amounts of land. These co-operatives acted as consumer co-operatives, enabling the chicleros to buy food for members at lower prices. Conflicts also broke out between co-operatives contesting land, and seeking to support, or oppose Quintana Roo’s absorption by the state of Yucatan.

The size and organisation of the new co-operatives was determined by apparently arbitrary factors. It is said that President Cardenas began by asking his advisors how many hectares of forest were needed to support a single chiclero family, and was told that 420 hectares would be sufficient. Following this Cardenas encouraged the establishment of co-operatives, calculating their size by multiplying membership by land area. By 1937 “..chicle production in Quintana Roo was practically socialised in its totality..” (EQR 1998, 99).

By the early 1940s chicle production was experiencing a new boom, thanks to the demand from the United States for wartime rations. New concessions were made to foreign companies, to extract chicle and hardwoods from the forest. Although these companies were obliged to employ members of the Sindicato de Chicleros, the methods used to extract the latex, and the clear-felling of the forests, removed their most valuable resources. In June 1943 representatives of the chicle co-operatives even visited the United States to “..discuss

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and defend the price of chicle; one of the most appreciated ‘wartime materials’ in the United States” (EQR 1998, 101).

Disclosure and appearances in everyday life This account of the history of chewing gum in the United States, and chicle in Mexico, documents a series of parallel events, and leads one to consider the ‘significance’ of each narrative. In some respects chewing gum provides an illustration of what Mintz described as a process of ‘extensification’. Writing about sugar Mintz wrote that: “More frequent and greater consumption – with the addition of new food uses and new occasions for consumption, each of which forged and consolidated particular meanings – (served to) deepen (the) everyday quality..” (Mintz 1985,122). Mintz records that as sugar became a part of the popular diet, and no longer confined to ceremonial and upper class usage, its significance was recast. Sugar became associated not only with the past, with traditional ceremony and ritual, (which he termed ‘intensification’) but with the everyday present.

The use of sugar for mass consumption was linked, of course, to the labour process, in which consumers were located. He adds that: “There seems no doubt that sugar and its by-products were provided unusual access to working-class tastes by the factory system, with its emphasis on the saving of time, and the poorly paid but exhausting jobs it offered women and children”. (Mintz 1985, 130).

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As sugar moved down the social hierarchy, and became an item of genuine mass consumption, its use and consumption took on new everyday meanings, related to the new social classes which used it.

At this point the comparison with chewing gum is acute. To some extent, of course, chewing gum as a mass produced item in the popular diet, was itself one of Mintz’s sugar-based products. Nevertheless, people had always chewed gum, rather than eaten it, and the practice in North America seems to have a history even prior to colonisation. The Native Americans in what was to become the United States, chewed spruce gum, just as the indigenous Maya in Yucatan chewed chicle.

What remains interesting is the way that the ‘everyday’ has been imbued with significance, in one case, and remains largely hidden from history, in the other. In the United States a relatively ‘insignificant’ act – chewing – came to be imbued with a number of cultural and ‘national’ qualities. With the passage of time, and the occurrence of wars, it became an allAmerican activity. In Mexico, on the other hand, the production of chicle has largely been forgotten, although its economic importance was once very considerable. In a similar way the cultural importance of chicle in Mexico, unlike the milpa (cornfields), or even henequen, has been largely erased from the historical map of Yucatan. The ‘significant’ has become insignificant; it lives in the memory of individuals, but is almost absent from published accounts of the society.

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The process through which systems of production and consumption are linked organically, and separated culturally, deserves close attention. A cultural practice that is celebrated in one society, was only made possible by a history that was undisclosed in another society. However, before drawing the lines between production and consumption along national divisions we might also note that it is a recursive process, in the sense used by Habermas (1971). Cultural production does not simply escape through an exit channel labelled ‘United States’; it is brought to mind through a series of cultural practices that can become global properties, not confined to one country. The dichotomy between production and consumption is not a simple dichotomy between Mexico and the United States.

Today on the streets of villages and towns in Yucatan, in Merida and Valladolid, as well as elsewhere in Mexico, children use chicle in myriad forms, in games and in piñatas, at children’s parties. Chewing gum is still manufactured in Mexico from the resin of the same tree exploited by generations of chicleros. And there are still some chicleros, perhaps two thousand, who tap the resin and pour it into moulds, mainly working in the remote regions of the Gran Peten and Campeche.

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References Anda Gutierrez, C. (1982) Quintana Roo: tres casos vivos, Union Grafica, Mexico City. Beteta, Ramon (1951) Tierra del Chicle, Editorial Mexico Nuevo, Mexico City. (Reprinted 1999, Gobierno del Estado de Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Q.R.). Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brown, Clair (1994) American Standards of Living 1918-1988, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. De Vries, Jan (1976) Economy of Europe in an age of crisis, 1600-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. EQR. (Enciclopedia de Quintana Roo) Volume 3. Juan Angel Xacu Maiza, Chetumal. Gustaitis, J. (1998) ‘The Sticky History of Chewing Gum’, American History, October. Habermas, J. (1971) Theory and Practice, Heinemann. Held, D. and Thompson, J. (1989) (eds) Social Theory of Modern Society: Giddens and his critics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Icon Group (2000).The 200-2005 World Outlook for Chewing Gum (Strategic Planning Series), The Chewing Gum Research group, New York. Lebergott, S.(1993) Pursuing Happiness: American consumers in the twentieth century, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Miller, D.(1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Milton, Giles (1999) Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: how one man’s courage changed the course of history, Sceptre, Hodder and Stoughton. Mintz, Sidney (1985) Sweetness and Power: the place of sugar in modern history,Penguin. Montalvo Ortega, E. (1988) ‘Revolts and peasant mobilizations in Yucatan: Indians, Peons, and Peasants from the Caste War to the Revolution’, in F.Katz (ed) Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: rural social conflict in Mexico,, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Ramos Diaz, M. (1999) ‘La bonanza del chicle en la frontera caribe de Mexico: indigenas y empresarios 1918-1930’, Revista Mexicana del Caribe,, 4(7) 172-193. Redclift,M.R.(1996) Wasted: counting the costs of global consumption, Earthscan.

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SEP (Secretaria de Educacion Publica) (1982) Quintana Roo: entre la selva y el mar, Mexico City. Wardlaw, Lee (1997) Bubblemania: the chewy history of bubble gum, Simon and Schuster, New York. Young, Robert (1989) The Chewing Gum Book, Minneapolis, Dillon Press.