Secular pilgrimages: Cultural and economic influences of the United States in Chile during the Cold War and its aftermath

This study explores U.S. influence in Chile by following the exchanges between professionals in business management and literary intellectuals from the two countries. Both groups are considered as members of a privileged elite and their exchanges are conceptualized as alternative cosmopolitan projects that had distinct, even opposing, perspectives during the cold war. Using archival materials, speeches and writings of management associations and individual managers, as well as interviews with those involved in the exchanges, the study traces the consolidation of an international management movement led by the United States during the cold war and that movement's creation of institutional and individual allies in Chile. These exchanges encouraged the creation in Chile of a professional-managerial class and an array of institutional allies that mirrored those social changes seen first in the United States before WWII. In both the United States and Chile, the construction of this institutional model brought together actors from corporations, universities, foundations and government to manage a society oriented toward markets and consumption.; Sections of the dissertation that discuss the concurrent activities of the literary intellectual community analyze fiction and essays by these writers as well as their connections with U.S. institutions. These chapters discuss the Chilean literary intellectuals' negotiation of a complicated relationship with the United States, which offered them professional opportunities but represented forces opposed to the Latin American literary intellectuals' alliance with the radical left. The analyses of the Chilean fiction pay particular attention to critical representations of the world of business and management and the United States.; The study addresses the contradictions between Chilean national interests and participation in the networks that were dominated by the United States during the American century in both management and literary worlds. Later chapters describe the convergence of the management and literary worlds---or more broadly speaking the economic and cultural fields of production---in the post-cold war period. The dissertation argues that the Chilean case of U.S. influence in the second half of the twentieth century has produced a particularly pronounced version of the interpenetration of cultural and economic worlds that most theories of postmodernism have described. In addition, it argues that Chile is dislocated among its Latin American neighbors due to its especially strong orientation to the model of the United States.