Orlove and Bauer examine three categories of goods in Chile from around 1850 to the Depression of the 1930s: wine, hot drinks, and domestic architecture. In this period, French grape varieties and French styles of wine-making grew in popularity, and coffee and tea, associated with Europeans, with cups and saucers, and with refined patterns of drinking, replaced the traditional beverage, yerba mate, sipped from a gourd and straw that passed from mouth to mouth. The changes in housing style, especially for upper and middle class families in cities, led to a segregation of space, with less mixing of social classes in private homes, more or less simultaneous with the rise of clubs and theaters restricted to the wealthy. These new goods spread down the social hierarchy to varying degrees, allowing middle classes and even some of the poor to participate in the consumption of European goods that the richest people displayed in great abundance.

Authors' e-mail: bsorlove@ucdavis.edu and ajbauer@ucdavis.edu