Chewing Gum

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Not long after the Civil War, three-time Mexican president and Alamo victor General Santa Ana introduced chicle--a rare ingredient from Mexico that was the basis for what would become chewing gum--to a Staten Island inventor. Both were down on their luck, and little did they know that their chance meeting would help create an icon of the modern age. A functionally useless product that simply makes us happy, gum popped onto the American scene with a bang, quickly becoming an icon for baseball, movie stars, adolescent rebellion, and "attitude." A barometer of modernity, it was one of the first products to be advertised on billboards--a scheme hatched by the Wrigley brothers of Chicago.

But there was another side to the story as well. For not only was gum a mass culture archetype, it helped fuel a long indigenous revolution in the jungles of the Yucatan. And ironically enough, it was gum manufacturers like Wrigley who ultimately funded the Mayan Indians who collected the chicle as they fought for autonomyfrom the Mexican government.

In Chewing Gum, Michael Redclift deftly chronicles the growing popularity of gum in the U.S. alongside a fascinating history of peasant revolution led by charismatic Indians in the jungles of southern Mexico. Until the 1950s, the production of gum relied on the chicle harvested by Mayans. For seventy-five years, demand had steadily grown across the world. After World War II, however, synthetic gum replaced chicle, putting many of the "chicleros" out of work and ending a colorful epoch. Today, due to the current rage for "natural" products, chicle has made a comeback in a new role as natural chewing gum.

Vivid and absorbing, Chewing Gum is at once an American cultural history and an emblematic cautionary tale about the how the resources that fuel modern pleasures often come from scenes of violence, chaos, and oppression.

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