Blending a National Body: Race, Modernity and the Licuadora in 1950s Peru

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

Whzzzzzz. La licuadora. Unlike many kitchens in the United States, the blender in Peru is understood as a marker of a properly outfitted kitchen and is a mainstay in most kitchens. Many dishes, increasingly celebrated as food heritage, rely on the blender’s ability to pulverize and frappe foods into creamy salsas that can then be poured over rice or potatoes. This, of course, has not always been the case.

Electrified domestic appliances first started to reach mass audiences in Peru in the 1940s and 1950s. Advertisements in magazines, cookbooks and pamphlets marketed vacuum cleaners, television sets, toasters, refrigerators and fancy ranges to middle and upper class women in the nation’s capital. The blender was part of this consortium of electrified modernity aimed at the domestic sphere that sought to bring timesaving and convenience through mechanization and processed foods. The Osterizer brand was particularly popular in Peru and was promoted as a well built, easy to clean machine that was capable of converting “ ‘hours’ of work in the kitchen, to ‘minutes’ of true pleasure.”

Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, this paper asks what role domestic appliances played in the construction of Peruvian modernity during the 1950s? In particular, how were women and gendered forms of labor manifested, and foundational, to the desire for a modern nation? If, as research has demonstrated, domestic appliances have been understood as “electric servants,” how were race and national ideals of mestizaje represented and constituted through a popular and pervasive domestic technology like the blender?

Author

• Amy Cox Hall, Amherst College