A fascinating, provocative account of a South American journey uncovering the destructive spread of corporate globalisation.
Amaranta Wright was a young writer living in Miami when Levi's hired her to travel through Latin American, befriending teenagers and reporting back with details of their ideas, hopes, fears and aspirations. Initially, Amaranta saw the job as a means to travel around a continent she loved. But as time passed, the more sinister and divisive aspects of what she was being asked to do became apparent. Like the continent itself, she was in search of an identity, the realisation of which was constantly frustrated by the mechanics of corporate globalisation - its unspoken aim to reduce individuals to bullet points.
This is a compellingly humane portrait of a famously elusive continent in crisis - riddled with paradox, complexity, beauty and brutality. It is a book about the arrogance with which we in the West refer to 'developing' continents, the developed world's overbearing desire to turn people into consumers, and the methods employed to do this which are simultaneously seductive and repellent. It is about the cultural confusion that reigns when indigenous voices are silenced by the promises of inappropriately imposed dreams. An evocative, sensual and politically incisive book.
