Come and see Guatemala at Macy’s! Indigenous aesthetics and informal empire on display in the heart of the American home

During the 1920s and 1930s, a new wave of mass consumer culture swept through the United States, fueling a fad for modern and exotic objects to display at home. Department stores stuffed their massive showrooms with new home decor styles, such as the exciting textile patterns industrial designer Ruth Reeves created following her ethnographic collecting trip to Guatemala in 1934. Although scholars have shown how powerful transnational corporations, such as the United Fruit Corporation, shaped exploitative large-scale neocolonial economies in Central America, I argue that individual consumption of indigenous culture transformed middle-class white women into stakeholders in new destructive patterns of U.S. imperial expansion in Latin America. This article historicizes the development of racial capitalism and shows how individual acts of cultural appropriation and consumption of indigenous material culture were transformed into collective practices of racial and gendered exploitation to restore U.S. cultural and economic vitality through empire during the Great Depression.