Books, Ripped and Torn

Ripped and Torn: Levi’s, Latin America and the Blue Jean Dream
by Amaranta Wright
Ebury Press (London 2005)
342 pp, £10.99 trade paperback

Amaranta Wright was born in Argentina to British parents, and followed the footsteps of her father, who at one time was the Reuters correspondent in Buenos Aires, into and out of corporate journalism. At one point she worked for the largest and oldest of Latin America’s English-language newspapers, the Buenos Aires Herald. Later, she worked in Miami with the online division of Gustavo Cisneros’s multimedia empire. Then Levi’s asked her to travel to a number of Latin American countries to interview hundreds of kids, find key attitudes that could help with marketing strategies, and thus help the company shore up a younger generation’s loyalty to the Levi’s brand.

This book is the microcosmic tale of globalization in our region, an insight into the Latin American strategies, thinking and alliances of one of the hipper US-based multinationals. It’s the story of a young woman’s disenchantment with the corporate world. Most important of all, it’s a study of various youth cultures across much of this part of the world, including Panama.

This is a UK edition of a book published by a Random House subsidiary, a work with typos and minor factual flaws which, in an exchange of emails between this reviewer and the author, Ms. Wright said will be corrected in future editions. (No, looking north from Paitilla doesn’t have you facing across the Pacific Ocean toward Nicaragua, nor does a southern view from the same spot put you facing land that stretches toward Colombia --- but these are common misconceptions about our country that even the highly paid editors of the snottiest corporate mainstream publications routinely miss.) People who don’t like Wright’s message will no doubt pounce on such things, because hers is a powerful and devastating social critique that they won’t be able to discredit by challenging it head-on.

Wright lays bare the haughty class prejudices, hardcore racism, and pervasive fear of the dominant Latin American classes, and the aspirations of the kids who don’t count in marketing plans. This book draws the distinctions between young people in Paitilla and El Chorrillo, and between the ways that Cubans in Miami and those in Cuba dance to the same musical genres. It takes you from the shopping mall world of Peru’s chicas plasticas to the different universe of young surfers from Lima’s slums. It helps you tell the salseros from the regueros, the pavitos from the vallenateros, the Ricoteros from the raperos --- and then some.

You visit the world of corporate marketing, and get a first-hand report that it’s not some unintentional gringo oversight that dark-skinned models don’t appear in ad campaigns aimed at Latin American countries with dark-skinned majorities.

Ripped and Torn may never get to Panamanian bookstore shelves. To the extent that the buyers are from the class of people who read La Prensa in the Union Club and think that the height of journalistic excellence is to be found in that newspaper’s Reseña Empresarial section, this work’s value is likely to be discounted. Moreover, those English-language books that make it to the stores here are ordered from the United States, not the United Kingdom.

Ah, but in this day and age you need not let the herd mentality, or yeyes who think that Disney World is the height of North American culture, filter what you get to read about Latin American culture. Books can be ordered online now, and even when bookstore buyers don’t get it, enough specific requests are usually sufficient to put a work that mystifies them onto the shelves. It’s worth your while to go well out of your way to lay your hands on Ripped and Torn.

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