Tinker Salas, Miguel. The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela.

Hall, Michael R.

Tinker Salas, Miguel. The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Traditional studies of the Venezuelan oil industry during the twentieth century, while providing a focused analysis of the impact of the foreign-dominated oil industry on the nation's economy, have failed to address the cultural and social impact of the oil industry on Venezuela's people. According to historian Miguel Tinker Salas, traditional studies have failed to demonstrate how "the evolution of the foreign-controlled enterprises reshaped the lives of those employed by them and how oil influenced the social and political environment" (p. vii) of the nation as a whole. The Venezuelan oil industry, like other foreign-dominated economic activities in Latin America, unleashed significant cultural, social, and (frequently) racial change throughout Venezuela. Tinker Salas posits that the Venezuelan oil industry "remains the central component of the Venezuelan economy and has been a decisive factor in the evolution of social and class structures since its development in the early twentieth century" (p. 1).

Three foreign corporations--the Creole Petroleum corporation (a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Royal Dutch Shell, and Mene Grande (a subsidiary of Gulf Oil) dominated the Venezuelan oil industry during the twentieth century. Tinker Salas asserts that the campos petroleos [residential communities for the foreign and domestic oil workers established by the foreign companies] were "the most important stage for the profound economic, social, and cultural changes that Venezuelans experienced after the discovery of oil" (p. 4). The foreign oil companies established educational and recreational activities for the oil workers and their families. According to Tinker Salas, this amounted to "an unparalleled degree of social engineering" (p. 4). As such, the oil industry employees and the nation's emerging middle class "developed a vision of a modern Venezuelan nation rooted in the social and political values promoted by the industry" (p. 5).

Tinker Salas, a professor of history at Pomona College, conducted multi-archival research in preparation of the book under review. His interest in the topic, however, is personal as well as academic. Tinker Salas was born in one of Venezuela's campos petroleos. His father, an American from California, and his mother, a Venezuelan from the interior, provided him an education in the bi-lingual environment created by the foreign oil industries. This experience provided the author with numerous contacts, as well as first-hand experience, that facilitated his research of the impact of the oil industry on Venezuelan cultural and social development.

In general, The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela follows a thematic, rather than a strict chronological, approach. In order to understand the extensive cultural and social change that the oil industry unleashed, Tinker Salas begins his study with an overview of western Venezuela, the locus of the Venezuelan oil industry, before the development of the oil industry. After a discussion of the establishment of the campos petroleos, the author describes in great detail the monumental impact that the new communities had on Venezuelan society. The foreign oil companies imported black Caribbean workers to supplement the American, British, and Venezuelan labor force. The presence of these black Carribean people "brought to the surface deep-seated racial attitudes in Venezuela, further challenging the myth of racial equality" (p. 107). Tinker Salas highlights the role that expatriate women had on Venezuelan society and the emergence of a Venezuelan middle class imbued with the values of American society.

The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela is a welcome addition to the study of Venezuelan history. The book is part of Duke University's American Encounters/Global Interactions series edited by respected scholars Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg. The series, which seeks to provide new interpretive frameworks on the extensive American presence in Latin America during the twentieth century, is concerned with the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders as well as the interrelatedness between the global and the local. Tinker Salas successfully demonstrates that the foreign-dominated oil industry in Venezuela did not function as an isolated enclave of an export-led economy. The Venezuelan oil industry influenced the creation of new social, cultural, and political values among the oil workers, the emerging middle class, and the nation's intellectuals. Significantly, the campos petroleos were "a social laboratory where [the oil] companies promoted labor practices, notions of citizenship, and an accompanying worldview that favored their continued operation in Venezuela" (p. xiii).

Michael R. Hall

Armstrong Atlantic State University