W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

What determines what you buy and how you consume it? Most likely these most basic actions were ingrained in you by the way you were raised through adulthood – what anthropologists call “enculturalization” into your social surroundings.But what if you were uprooted from everything that is familiar and plopped down someplace totally unknown to you? Let’s say you arrived in Tucson, AZ, from somewhere in Mexico or Central America. How would you know what to buy?

Of course, in Tucson you could find friends of a like background who would help guide you to familiar foods and necessities. But you want your family to fit into your new homeland – you want to act like an American. But without a local US mom and dad, who would teach you what a “white bread” American (now just as likely “whole grain”) would buy?

We will get to what I believe is the answer shortly. But, first, there is the traditionally assumed answer in sociology and anthropology: the “melting-pot” model. If you move from country A to country F, you will keep some A behaviors and adopt some F behaviors; so you will become a C blend in the middle. And the longer you stay in country F, the more you will adopt from F, and the more readily you will blend into F.

The Garbage Project investigated this “blending” model using household refuse, because nothing tells more unvarnished details about what you really consume than your rubbish. The Garbage Project examined refuse data it had recorded from [1] low and middle income neighborhoods in Mexico City (collected in 1980 and 1983), from [2] neighborhoods in Tucson where large numbers of Mexican-Americans have emigrated over the past 30 years, and from [3] Tucson neighborhoods with very high percentages of Anglos [who the Census Bureau calls “Whites”] during the same dates.

[I want to make two points forcefully here. First, I am well aware that not all Hispanics in Tucson are Mexican-Americans; but the majority are, so I will refer to them as Mexican-Americans rather than Hispanics. Second, I know that many of the oldest US resident families in Tucson are Mexican-Americans, but very large numbers of Mexican-Americans are relatively recent arrivals. Many Anglo Tucsonans are also recent arrivals, but they come largely from other US cities that share many US-style patterns of consumption.]

We wondered whether the refuse – especially food debris and packaging – from neighborhoods with a high proportion of Mexican-Americans would reflect a blending between Mexico City and Tucson’s Anglo population?

What we found in the refuse in the Mexican-American areas was not a blending at all, but instead something very different from what we had expected, with few direct similarities to either Anglo Tucson or to Mexico City. What does that mean?

Let’s Take a Look . . .
The Garbage Project researchers found the most interesting results among six types of foods (and drinks), all with strong and differing attitudes associated with them in mainstream Mexican and United States cultures --- meats, breads (sliced and tortillas), breakfast cereals, caffeine drinks, soft drinks, and convenience foods.

All households in Tucson ate far more red meat than residents of households in Mexico City. Tucson Mexican-American households, on average, are about 25% larger than Tucson Anglo households, so we expected that they might buy as much red meat as Anglo households. Still, we were quite surprised that households in Mexican-American neighborhoods bought more than double the quantity of red meat purchased by homes in Tucson’s Anglo neighborhoods. Now you can answer that nagging question, “Where’s the beef?”

Clearly, Mexican-Americans in Tucson have continued the pattern of tortilla consumption, but in contrast to Mexico City residents, the majority of their tortillas come in packages. This is evidence of cultural persistence as well as adaptation to the time-consciousness of their culture of residence. More interestingly, Tucson Mexican-Americans do not lie somewhere between Tucson Anglos and Mexicans in respect to white bread. Rather, Tucson Mexican-Americans buy about the same quantity of sliced bread of Tucson Anglos; but Mexican-Americans buy mainly white bread, while Anglos buy as much dark bread as white. Tucson’s Mexican-Americans seem to be developing a new cultural style of their own.

With regular dry cereals, Tucson Mexican-Americans follow the “melting pot” model, falling between the high consumption of Tucson Anglos and the low consumption by Mexicans. But a third style appears again with respect to high-sugar dry cereals (those for which sugar is listed as the first ingredient), where purchases are by far the highest in Mexican-American household refuse.

Clearly, Mexicans are the biggest consumers of coffee. Yet, when tea and coffee consumption are combined, Mexican-Americans end up being the biggest consumers of caffeine products, followed by Mexicans, and then Tucson Anglos. Mexican-Americans also consume far more regular (non-diet) soft drinks at home than either of the other two groups, followed by Tucson Anglos and then Mexico City residents.

Not all US-style convenience foods are readily available in Mexico, and the “take out” foods from street and farmer’s markets’ food stands leave few traces in household refuse. As a result, Mexico City cannot be compared to Tucson in these areas of home food consumption. In the US, the refuse remains of convenience foods -- prepared soups, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, ready-to-serve fruit and vegetable juices – and take-out meals are readily recordable. And households in Mexican-American neighborhoods consume more of all of the above than do households in Anglo neighborhoods.

The most important implication of these findings is that the consumption behavior patterns of Mexican-Americans cannot be viewed as somewhere along a straight line between Mexicans and Anglos. In fact, in many cases the consumption patterns of Mexican-Americans are unlike those of either their culture of origin or their culture of residence.

But why?
At the beginning, I said that newcomers arrive without any knowledge of local customs. That isn’t quite accurate. Everyone, just about everywhere, has learned about how Americans live their lives from two intimate visual sources – movies and television. How Americans in movies and on TV eat, drink, dress, drive, and consume in so many other ways is viewable at anytime day or night to those foreigners with the appetite.

So what does this all mean?
Have you heard of the term “placement”? It means that when an actor imbibes a soft drink, instead of sporting a “generic” non-readable label like it did in the movies in the forties and fifties, now a brand name such as “Coke” or “Pepsi” (that’s placement right there) stands out plain as day for all the movie’s viewers to see. Placement funds movies and it also “enculturates” viewers. Movie placements and TV’s much more direct ads for all kinds of foods, beverages, and more, present forceful messages about American consumption patterns.

And what do new-comers to a society do with these messages? I, along with many other anthropologists, sociologists, and market researchers, believe that they use the media messages they have assimilated over the years as road maps to how to consume like a US resident. To paraphrase one researcher in the field, Raphael Patai, “immigrants are like native-born residents, only more so.”

Those of us born in the US know that what we see in movies and on TV isn’t really the way most of us live our lives. Most immigrants don’t know what is typical and what isn’t, so they take the movie and TV portrayal of the “American Dream” as their model and create a whole new US lifestyle around it.

But immigrants are not the only ones who pay attention to what they see in movie,s and on TV, and in ads everywhere. All of us do --- more and more as these images invade every nook land cranny of our lives. Just because we know that what is being depicted isn’t the way we live doesn’t mean we don’t want to live that way too. That’s why the rate of change is increasing in momentum daily.

Thus, in my opinion, “American” consumption and discard patterns for both native-born and immigrant “Americans” are no longer being set by cultural traditions. They are being set by an agenda of imaging and advertising that is becoming more and more globalized – this is the “Hollywood Model of Globalization.”

As globalization picks up speed, as I believe it surely will, we will all be immigrants in an unfamiliar world that is not Kansas or Tucson, and not even New York or Mexico City or Tokyo. I wait in wonder to see what we will take from the media and mold into a new globalized consumption style.

[The Tucson-Mexico City comparisons of Garbage Project data were originally published by Professor Melanie Wallendorf (UofAZ) and Michael D. Reilly (UofMT)]

Archeologist and Contributing Editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - July/August 2005