Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico
Cultural Anthropology 23(3):429-452
Peter S. Cahn
Since the 1980s, Mexican leaders have
followed other Latin American
countries in pursuing neoliberal economic policies designed to
stimulate foreign investment, reduce public spending, and promote free
trade. Recent studies of indigenous movements and popular protests
challenge the idea that these market-based economic reforms enjoy a
broad consensus and suggest that elites impose them by force. By
turning the focus to middle class Mexicans, I argue that some nonelite
sectors of society avidly welcome the reign of the free market.
Although they do not profit directly from unregulated capitalism, the
middle class looks to neoliberalism to ensure access to the material
markers of class status. The rising popularity of multilevel marketing
companies in Mexico, which glorify consumption and celebrate the
possibilities of entrepreneurship, demonstrates the appeal of
neoliberalism to citizens fearful of diminished purchasing power. By
tying consumption to globalized free markets, neoliberalism does not
need coercion to win acceptance. Keywords: multilevel marketing,
neoliberalism, middle class, consumption, Omnilife, Mexico
Responding to financial crises in the 1980s, the Mexican government
adopted a neoliberal economic model designed to reduce public spending
and to encourage foreign investment (Skidmore and Smith 2001: 248). The
shift away from state-owned companies and protectionist trade barriers
accelerated into the 1990s with the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement. Even though these structural changes failed to prevent
future economic instability, all subsequent Mexican presidents have
pursued the same policies of privatization and free trade.
International lending organizations and the United States have
championed these measures in Mexico, the rest of Latin America, and
literally the entire world, but many of the citizens affected by these
shifts have not. Recent studies examining the consensus that has
developed around neoliberalism reveal that its ascent has rarely been
democratic (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2005; Klein
2007). Wherever leaders have imposed unregulated capitalism, they have
done so by ignoring, co-opting, or violently repressing dissent.
Anthropologists heeding the call to study neoliberalism critically
(Hoffman et al. 2006:9) have done so mostly by focusing on zones of
resistance. In this article, I consider why some neoliberal subjects
welcome the radical reshaping of their relationship with the state.
A little noticed effect of Mexico’s neoliberal turn at the end of the
1980s was the arrival of multilevel marketing (Xardel 1993:107). These
companies, represented at first by Amway and Herbalife and soon
blossoming into dozens of homegrown imitators, sell products wholesale
to registered distributors, who offer them at retail prices through
face-to-face transactions. Avon, a pioneer of direct selling, had
operated in Mexico since the 1950s, but it compensates its
representatives on a single level, that is with the profit on marking
up product prices (Ramírez Tamayo 1995). The companies lured by
Mexico’s new business-friendly climate reward distributors not only for
products sold but also for new sellers enrolled. Under this dual
commission system, top representatives report million-dollar annual
incomes and inspire others to join with tales of European vacations and
expensive cars. In 1996, several leading companies formed the Mexican
Association of Direct Selling (AMVD in its Spanish acronym) with 60
members, 88 percent of whom used a multilevel structure
(Gutiérrez Zúñiga 2005:32).
According to business analysts, multilevel marketing companies’
fortunes run counter to economic cycles, expanding in places where the
economy contracts (Roha 1991). Becoming a direct seller requires no
previous experience, no formal education, and little startup capital,
so it is particularly attractive when other forms of employment are
scarce. Moreover, companies like Amway emphasize their anticorporate
style by empowering workers to be their own bosses and set their own
hours. But unfavorable economic conditions are not enough to explain
the growing popularity of multilevel marketing in developing countries
like Mexico (Biggart 1989:172). As Ara Wilson (1999:402) discovered in
Thailand after the economic crisis of 1997, multilevel marketing
attracted new recruits because its rhetoric of entrepreneurship and
decentralization resonated strongly with the logic of the neoliberal
solutions the country pursued. That millions of Mexicans, like their
Thai counterparts, seek to realign their work lives along neoliberal
lines rather than resist the dismantling of social welfare protections
suggests that neoliberalism’s imposition may not require coercion.
Esperanza is one of the three million distributors of Omnilife
nutritional supplements in Mexico. Between 2003 and 2006, I conducted
fieldwork with over 50 current and former members of the Omnilife sales
force in the central–western state of Michoacán. Although the
company likes to showcase the top earners in its promotions, the vast
majority of distributors resemble Esperanza, who rarely receives any
commission checks for her work. As I followed her through different
phases of her career with Omnilife, I observed how completely Esperanza
had internalized the tenets of neoliberalism: the free market rewards
every entrepreneur without limit and individuals should help themselves
rather than look to government handouts. Even as her efforts to cash in
on capitalism’s promise faltered, she refused to fault the system.
Rather, she blamed herself and vowed to redouble her efforts to promote
Omnilife and its products.
Her commitment to Omnilife is consistent with the tenets of
neoliberalism, which holds that if unencumbered by government
interference, individual participants in the market will determine the
most efficient arrangement of resources. In practice, however, this
laissez-faire approach has only widened levels of inequality because
capital accumulation favors elites who already have access to markets.
The uneven effects of neoliberalism have become visible in agricultural
states like Kansas, where free trade has enriched giant corporate food
processors while pushing small farmers into bankruptcy. Yet, the
producers most adversely affected by free market policies are the ones
most likely to support the politicians who promote the ruinous reforms
(Frank 2004:76). Esperanza’s case presents a similar paradox; she has
embraced an economic model in which she is poorly positioned to
compete. If, as Thomas Frank argues, heartland politicians secure the
votes of those they harm by erecting a smokescreen of cultural issues,
Omnilife sells Esperanza on neoliberalism by offering nebulous promises
of access to consumption.
Consumption, as Jean and John Comaroff point out, is “the invisible
hand, or the Gucci-gloved fist, that animates the political impulses,
the material imperatives, and the social forms … of capitalism in its
neoliberal, global manifestation” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:294). For
the struggling middle classes in Latin America, maintaining the
accustomed level of consumption has become the last relic of their
tenuous hold on respectability. Esperanza used to be a comfortable
member of the Mexican bourgeoisie, but when her husband fell ill, there
was no support system to buffer her fall. In Omnilife’s prominent
display of luxury goods, she sees her opportunity to recover the
material affluence she and her family used to enjoy. Multilevel
marketing, consistent with its roots in neoliberal capitalism,
celebrates consumption and effaces production. Omnilife and its
competitors leave vague the process of designing and manufacturing the
supplements and instead emphasize consuming them consistently. Even the
work of multilevel marketing downplays physical labor by reducing the
business plan to an outgrowth of consumption: take the drinks and
recommend them to others. By consuming the beverages diligently,
distributors believe they will generate profits to enable them to
purchase the trappings of middle class status. That the distributors
rarely earn the money necessary to support their consumption goals does
not always deter them. Many choose to leave the business, but they are
replaced by others who seek a self-help solution to their financial
problems. Like neoliberalism itself, multilevel marketing wins
adherents by persuasion, not coercion.
FIRST ENCOUNTER: SELLING MIRACLES
An unusual invitation arrived one day in 2000 when I was living in
Tzintzuntzan, a small community in the heartland Mexican state of
Michoacán. A white piece of paper slipped under the door read,
“We invite you to drink coffee. We will talk about how to improve your
health.” Next to an icon of a steaming cup of coffee appeared a list of
illnesses that the meeting would address: diabetes, skin problems,
gastritis, colitis, rheumatism, anemia, fatigue, headaches, anxiety,
and learning problems. I did not know the hosts well, but I was curious
what kind of beverage cured so many problems. When I appeared that
Saturday afternoon, the couple greeted me by offering a cup of coffee
and a plate of a cooked vegetable called chayote. They had arranged a
display on a side table consisting of a dozen white boxes and bottles
with purple labels. Joining us on the covered porch were the couple’s
teenaged daughter, a young girl, five adult women, and a voluble,
gray-haired woman named Esperanza.
Esperanza introduced herself as a representative of a nutritional
supplement firm called Omnilife. She asked each of us our names. When
it was my turn, Esperanza declared dramatically that I resembled her
brother. “My brother went to Chicago to work and had an accident on the
job. He came back to Mexico to recover, but he died five months later.
I wish I had the products then to save him.” This remark and newfound
intimacy with the speaker convinced me and the other guests to listen
intently. Esperanza continued, interspersing our names into her
practiced spiel. She described how the company mixed ancient herbal
remedies with the most advanced technologies to create a line of about
80 vitamin-fortified powders. Holding a company magazine, Esperanza
flipped through pictures of smiling representatives who healed
themselves through copious consumption of Omnilife drinks. “We’ll be
honest with you. God is the only one who cures you, we just help.”
Esperanza made the sign of the cross, brushing the crucifix chain
around her neck.
Omnilife, the most prominent Mexican-based multilevel marketer,
manufactures a range of nutritional supplements designed to stimulate
weight loss, raise immunity, and strengthen bones. Turning to the
display of bottles on the table, Esperanza described the benefits of
several of the products. The hostess, taking notes, asked a few
clarifying questions about the proper dosage of each item, but no one
else spoke. Reaching the final product on the table, Power Maker,
Esperanza shared her own testimony. “This is a mix of grapefruit and
seafood. It will be used to nourish Olympic athletes. It relieves
fatigue and, for men, multiplies the quality and quantity of sperm,”
she said with a grin.
My husband suffered an automobile accident we
thought was going to be fatal. A rib pierced his liver. He had a total
body infection and went into a
coma. Six doctors told me I’d be a widow. But God hadn’t said so. I
gave him Power Maker and took it myself. He got better. I
lost weight, it cured my menopausal pains, and I
realized my arthritis was gone.
To illustrate the miraculous qualities of Power Maker, Esperanza
offered a coda to her testimonial: “One day while I was playing
basketball with my grandchildren, I felt a somersault in my stomach. It
turns out I was five months pregnant—after menopause! The little girl
you see here is mine.” Esperanza’s faith in the products required no
scientific confirmation, just personal experience. For her, consuming
the powders dissolved in liquid could almost literally raise the dead
and cause a type of immaculate conception.
Endowing consumable items with sacred qualities, I would later learn,
was a fixture of multilevel marketing. By interpreting Omnilife’s
vitamins through a Christian lens, Esperanza lifted the products out of
the realm of crass materialism. She offered the powders to us not as an
instrumentalist ploy to enrich herself, but rather as a tool enabling
us to achieve the same improvement that she had. In this way, the work
of itinerant selling lost its association with dishonest flimflam
artists and took on the mantle of religious respectability. All
successful Omnilife distributors borrowed the before-and-after language
common to Protestant testimonials of rebirth (Cahn 2006:136). Their
experiences confirmed that proper consumption could yield similar
transformations for anyone who drank the vitamin beverages. Esperanza’s
faith in the products exemplified what David Chidester, referencing
Tupperware, another prominent multilevel marketer, calls “plastic
religion” (2005:61). Like the flexibility of plastic, Omnilife’s
vitamins glorified the possibility of changing oneself to fit the ideal
of a new kind of person.
After an hour and a half, the group disbanded. Most of the adult women
bought a box of the coffee-flavored weight-loss drink, but I demurred.
Although the coffee I sampled tasted pleasantly sweet, it did not
produce sufficient health miracles to justify my spending $30 for a box
of 20 servings. Undaunted, Esperanza told me that I could enroll in
Omnilife to purchase products anywhere in Mexico or the United States
at a discount. Our hosts in Tzintzuntzan had enrolled recently. The
wife remarked that she had been a direct seller of Jafra cosmetics for
ten years, but she tired of having to deliver orders on credit, then
make repeated visits to coax payments from clients. By contrast, orders
for Omnilife must be paid in full before delivery, guaranteeing that
she never goes into debt herself. Her husband reported an easing of his
back pain after taking Omnilife’s Power Maker supplement. He estimated
that they spent $100 a month on Omnilife products, not including travel
expenses to the wholesale store in Morelia, the state capital. Although
they had yet to realize any profits from multilevel marketing, they
shared Esperanza’s confidence that they would earn supplemental income
while saving money on medicines.
That few distributors ever achieve the promised prosperity does little
to discourage new recruits from dreaming. When the unlikelihood of
great wealth becomes apparent, many enrolled members quit the company
or switch to another one. Annual turnover rates in the industry
commonly top 100 percent, indicating that even the replacements for
dropouts leave the company (Wotruba et al. 2005:92). The high attrition
rates do not mean that all the distributors who remain achieve
profitability. One survey of active Amway distributors in the United
States found no relationship between commitment to the organization and
overall financial success (Johnston 1987:136). Most distributors
resemble Esperanza. Despite their identification with the company and
adherence to its suggestions, they have yet to build networks that will
allow them to stay at home and receive passive income. Still, they
continue to radiate self-confidence to others while investing more time
in recruiting people and more resources in consuming products.
SECOND ENCOUNTER: REVEALING A CRACK IN THE FAÇADE
Three years after I first met Esperanza over coffee and chayote in
Tzintzuntzan, I encountered her fortuitously in the state capital
Morelia. Walking near the Omnilife wholesale center, I noticed a corner
store painted in vivid purple and yellow, the distinctive colors of the
Omnilife logo. From the street, though, it appeared to be a taco stand
catering to the lunchtime crowd of professionals. I stepped in,
planning to ask if the owners had any connection to Omnilife, when I
saw Esperanza in an apron behind the griddle. She greeted me effusively
and offered me a plate of tacos. Few customers came by, so she joined
me at a table to catch up on each other’s activities. She told me again
how I reminded her of her brother and reiterated how she wishes she had
known about the Omnilife supplements when he was alive. In January
2003, she opened this support center for members of her organization,
sharing space with a daughter’s eatery. In the evenings, the tables
turned into display cases for Omnilife products and the chairs became
seats for participants in training sessions.
She proudly pointed to a map attached to a bulletin board on a wall of
the room. It showed the route of the Black Sea cruise that she and 800
other Omnilife distributors had enjoyed several years before. The
company rewarded her and her husband with the all-expenses paid trip
for consistently reaching sales targets. The highlights of the vacation
for her, she told me, were visiting Jerusalem and meeting so many
devoted distributors. Such benefits kept her motivated to do the hard
work of sharing the supplements and seeking recruits. She opened her
agenda book to show me pages filled with scribbled notes about clients.
She boasted that she had traveled to remote villages simply to sell two
packets of supplements because her clients’ improvement meant more to
her than a profit. “I’m in love with Omnilife,” she gushed.
She shared with me the story of how that love began. In 1992, her adult
daughter suffered a severe case of chicken pox. When a doctor came to
treat her, the medicine sent her daughter into shock. Desperate for a
quick remedy, the doctor wanted to administer a mixture of two Omnilife
products, “Super Mix” and “Dual-C.” Esperanza was skeptical. Omnilife
was only a year old then, and she had never heard of the company. The
concoction smelled foul, “ground dog would have smelled better,” she
quipped. Yet, she gave permission to administer it, and within four
minutes her daughter had regained normal levels of blood pressure and
sugar.
Fully recovered, her daughter paid the $20 fee to enroll and also
signed up her mother as the first member of her downline. As the wife
of a prosperous small business owner, Esperanza didn’t feel it
necessary to sell the products or recruit others. She remembers that
she placed her children in private schools and used to send her driver
to do errands for her. When her husband suffered his near-fatal
accident, however, he was out of work for over three years, and the
family went bankrupt. She turned to the products both to heal him and
to replace the missing income. Though her husband regained mobility, he
never returned to working, so Esperanza’s pastime became a full-time
commitment. Over a decade of recommending the products, she has built a
network of 66 distributors around the state. Though she lived in
Morelia, she spent several days a week visiting smaller communities
throughout the state giving orientation sessions to the company and its
products.
As the conversation continued, however, Esperanza revealed a chink in
her exuberant demeanor. At first she dedicated her time to selling
Omnilife’s products for an immediate profit. Her dedication won her the
use of a Volkswagen Beetle (on which she painted the Power Maker logo)
and access to credit from Omnilife to purchase a home, but also
required her to put in long hours holding house meetings like the one
where we first met. Next, she focused on recruiting distributors to her
downline, but it turned out even more arduous to motivate the members
of her network to maintain high purchase levels. Commissions from her
network totaled only about $150–$200 a month.
Sensing her frustration, I suggested, repeating what I had read in
company literature, that attending guest lectures with visiting
distributors and semiannual corporate rallies could be inspiring.
Esperanza dismissed the idea: “We’ve already been to many events.” I
mentioned that some distributors have expanded their business by
visiting other parts of the state. “Where haven’t I gone?” she
countered. The only additional wisdom I could think to offer her was,
“Take more product.” She responded that she drank five water bottles
full of the dissolved powders each day. When I returned to Morelia a
year later, in 2004, I found that her support center had become a
bakery, and the landlord told me that Esperanza had left no contact
information. I suspected that she had added to the company’s high
turnover rate.
THIRD ENCOUNTER: CONFRONTING CRISIS
I returned to Morelia for seven months of fieldwork in 2005. Local
Omnilife leaders hosted a guest speaker once a month in a rented hotel
ballroom. The speakers tended to be high-level distributors from across
Mexico, known as “diamonds,” who explained their strategies for success
using PowerPoint presentations. Typically, the events drew an audience
of a couple hundred, both first-timers interested in learning more
about the company and veterans eager for tips on how to grow their
business. A guest speaker had been scheduled for the first weeks of my
stay in Morelia, so I paid the $3 to attend. When I reached the hotel
lobby, I saw a crowd of people waiting expectantly for their guests,
tickets in hand. One of them was Esperanza. She welcomed me with a hug
and told me that she has invited several potential recruits to the
talk. She encouraged me to go inside so as not to miss the speaker, but
promised to see me after the event.
In the crush of people exiting the three-hour talk, she and I failed to
connect, but I had her business card this time, so I called her a few
days later to set up a meeting. She invited me to her house that
evening, giving me directions on public transportation. She apologized
that she could not drive me because she no longer had the Beetle. Her
row house was in a residential neighborhood abutting the mountain that
marked the southern periphery of the city. Originally all the homes
shared an identical yellow façade, but some owners had added a
carport or repainted. Esperanza’s home had not benefited from such
remodeling. She ushered me up a narrow staircase to a landing where she
displayed family photos alongside a portrait of Pope John Paul II. This
led to a cramped living room/dining room. A large wooden table filled
the center of the room, leaving only a slender space to reach the
bookcases pushed against the wall. The compact kitchen adjoined the
main room, illuminated by a single window criss-crossed by metal bars.
Esperanza finished the tour by showing me one of the two bedrooms (her
husband was asleep in the other) and the bathroom in the back of the
flat.
Esperanza offered me a glass of water to which she added a measure of
Omnilife’s Thermogen Tea, and then served herself. She tore off squares
from a roll of paper towels, jokingly calling them “Czech napkins.”
This play on words relied on the similarity between “Czech” and chueco,
the Spanish word for “crooked.” It also reflected her good-natured way
of dealing with privation. After thirteen years, Esperanza’s devotion
to multidevelopment had not rewarded her with material success. She
referred to the presentation by the visiting distributor earlier in the
week. “You saw the same slides I did. If I follow all those rules to
the letter, why am I not a diamond? My check has gone down 60 percent.”
I ventured that perhaps the design of the compensation plan limited the
number of distributors who could generate large incomes. Esperanza
brushed aside this idea. “The system works elsewhere. Why aren’t the
checks falling in Guadalajara, Veracruz, and Mexico City?” She then
answered her own question: “Your sponsor is the example. Distributors
in Morelia don’t feel comfortable in the support centers. The centers
are arid. The system is very good. It’s charisma that matters.” When
her own support center folded, she calculated that she lost about
$8,000, “down the toilet.” She set a bad example for her network by
spending the money she earned from retail sales of the product instead
of reinvesting it in the business. “I ate the goose that lays the
golden eggs,” Esperanza mused.
After closing the support center, Esperanza redirected her energies to
retail sales. She would load a sampling from Omnilife’s line of
premixed beverages and colas into a cooler, douse them with ice, and
then wheel them on a cart through the municipal marketplace. Manual
labor like this helped her win the cruise to Europe when she first
enrolled in the company, but it required physical strength. One day in
2004, while lowering her cart of products from a city bus, Esperanza
slipped and fell. As she recounted the accident, she stood up from the
table to lift her pant leg, exposing her still swollen knee. “I have
trouble walking. I can’t carry heavy things. My life changed.” Once
more she turned to show me her daily planner. Scribbled appointments
filled the weeks preceding her accident, but pages of blank lines
followed it.
Without the income from reselling, Esperanza faced economic crisis. Her
commission check from Omnilife dwindled to about $10 every two weeks
once the company deducted payment for her home loan. Her savings
account held barely $20, not enough to pay the utilities. “I’ve hit
bottom. Do you want to see?” She stood up, walked to the refrigerator,
and opened the door. I saw three eggs and a wedge of cheese amidst the
empty shelves.
My participation in Omnilife’s relentlessly optimistic training
sessions did not provide me with a ready response. I asked, haltingly,
“What will you do now?” Esperanza regained her confidence: “This is the
moment to begin again as if we’ve just signed up for the first time.
There are no other options. I hit bottom, but only by hitting bottom
can you rise again. It’s like a diving pool. You have to hit the bottom
to push back up. We’ll take off again with Omnilife by opening another
support center.” I wondered how this support center would be different
from the earlier failed one. She seemed to have thought about this
already: “This time we’ll work by multiplying people. With my injured
leg, I can’t work as before, but it doesn’t matter. If the conditions
are cold, I’ll heat them.” Pressing gently, I asked at what point she
would conclude that Omnilife did not work for her and move on. Pointing
to the bottle of Thermogen Tea, she answered, “This doesn’t fail. We
do.” In spite of the mounting evidence that Omnilife’s business plan
did not generate sufficient income, Esperanza refused to blame the free
market system.
She had already identified a potential site for her new support center
near the wholesale store. To make the $340-a-month rent feasible, she
intended to share the space with eight other distributors. They would
all contribute to the publicity, but take turns holding meetings with
their networks of distributors. The plan had the additional benefit
that Esperanza’s youngest daughter, the Omnilife miracle child, would
be entering secondary school near the proposed location. She, her
husband, and her daughter would make the support center their home,
further cutting expenses. So far, five distributors have expressed
interest. Esperanza planned to visit a notary to draw up a contract for
the business partners to sign while she looked for three more people to
join. When I finished my glass of tea, Esperanza encouraged me to sign
on as a coleader of the support center. I explained that I did not have
any distributors in my network to train nor would I be in Morelia for
very long, but these rationalizations did not make her rescind the
offer. We left my participation vague as we said goodbye.
FOCUSING ON RESISTANCE
My inability to coax Esperanza to temper her commitment to Omnilife or
at least to acknowledge flaws in the company’s structure frustrated me.
As part of my research, I enrolled as an Omnilife distributor to gain
access to training sessions and promotional materials, but I never sold
products or recruited others to join my network. Nor did I ever abandon
my skepticism about the company’s claims to foster financial and
physical health. The powders contained little more than artificial
sweetener and some vitamins, nothing potent enough to treat serious
illness or to compensate for the lack of universal health care.
Similarly, the promise of financial independence seemed a poor
substitute for salaried work with guaranteed protections. Omnilife
distributors bragged that they could set their own hours, but they were
reluctant to admit that they earned money only when the parent company
did. Because the majority of distributors were women like Esperanza,
who combined the arduous work of selling with ongoing household duties,
Omnilife’s rhetoric of freedom seemed particularly disingenuous.
Indeed, all over Latin America, the unfulfilled freedom promised by
neoliberalism has sparked angry protest. Indigenous populations have
been particularly vocal in their resistance to the adoption of free
market capitalism. Suzana Sawyer (2004) eloquently chronicles the
ongoing battle of indigenous organizations to challenge the Ecuadorian
government’s embrace of neoliberal policies. Their protests against
foreign the privatization of resources erupted into violent uprisings
several times during the 1990s. More than a contest over material
resources, these struggles represented an attempt by indigenous peoples
to rewrite the national narrative to favor pluralism over transnational
corporate capital. In this way, Sawyer argues, neoliberalism contains
the seeds of its own destruction: “Globalizing forces have exacerbated
political, economic, and social inequalities while simultaneously
provoking the proliferation of oppositional identities and
counter-dreams” (2004:16). Far from a foregone conclusion,
neoliberalism is an uncertain project under threat from indigenous
alternatives to the elites’ vision of society.
Anthropologists have documented similar movements across Latin America
that seek to contest the inevitability of neoliberalism. Contributors
to a collection of essays about the impact of structural adjustment
policies on Latin America stress that Latin Americans “display a
remarkable resiliency and creativity in their engagements with
neoliberalism” (Phillips 1998:xii). It is too simplistic, they argue,
to see marginalized Latin Americans as powerless victims of a hegemonic
effort to advance the interests of the privileged few. Duncan Green’s
overview of the spread of neoliberalism across the continent includes a
three-page chart listing the long history of protests that have arisen
whenever Latin American countries have imposed austerity measures
(Green 1995:167–169). The signing of NAFTA, that cornerstone of
neoliberal philosophy, was one of the catalysts for the violent
outburst of the Zapatistas in southern Mexico (Nash 1994). Postero
(2005), following Yashar (1998), interprets the popular uprising in
Bolivia in 2003 as addressing not just material needs but also the role
of civil society in determining whether the country follows neoliberal
reforms.
Reports of courageous resistance to efforts by elites to weaken social
welfare programs and to privatize collective resources illustrate how
foreign the tenets of neoliberalism seem to many Latin Americans. At
the same time, many upwardly mobile citizens find the tinge of the
foreign attractive. They associate their own governments with
corruption and failed economic recovery and believe that tighter
integration with a globalized free market will lift them to greater
affluence. When leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ran
for president of Brazil in 1994 on a platform of maintaining state
monopolies, he lost to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who advocated a
neoliberal economic plan. In her perceptive study of the Brazilian
middle class, Maureen O’Dougherty discovered that for many voters,
“Brazil’s problem was not capitalism, but bad government, national
business, and consumers.” They favored the free market because, as an
international entity, it was free from interference by corrupt local
politicians (O’Dougherty 2002:202).
Even as economic crisis in the 1990s forced members of the Brazilian
middle class to trade salaried white-collar jobs for commission-based
sales positions, they fought to retain the markers of class identity.
They defined their status through consumption, particularly of items
with a foreign provenance like trips to Disney World (O’Dougherty
2002:11). As the rate of inflation topped 2,000 percent, the only
resistance the Brazilian middle class mounted in the 1990s was to their
precipitous fall in the status hierarchy. They invested their hopes in
neoliberal reforms as a way to restore their consumption habits. Like
Barbara Ehrenreich found in her study Fear of Falling (1989), the
middle class uses consumption to enforce its separate status from the
lower classes, but lives in constant anxiety of losing the control
necessary to maintain the customary standard of living. “In this
class,” Ehrenreich concludes, “no one escapes the requirements of
self-discipline and self-directed labor” (1989:15). Esperanza, hedging
against the loss of her position as a business owner’s wife, felt this
demand acutely.
Defining membership in Mexico’s middle class depends more on perception
than on economic status. Even someone as financially precarious as
Esperanza can count herself part of the middle class when she contrasts
her family to the wealthy elite, on the one hand, and the marginalized
poor, on the other hand. Though “folk taxonomies” of class vary,
Mexicans on both sides of the divide vigilantly patrol the boundary
between the middle and lower classes (Levenson 2001:42–43). The
separation between proletariat and professionals becomes most clear in
their work. Lower classes perform manual labor while middle classes
engage in mental labor (Gutmann 2002:119). Despite the physical demands
of hauling Omnilife products through the market, Esperanza considers
her work a service, allowing her clients to call her “Doctor” and
tending them like patients. Maintaining her hold on that subtle
distinction takes increasingly large reserves of self-convincing.
Austerity measures implemented by the Mexican government since the debt
crisis of the 1980s undid the investment in social programs that once
made economic mobility possible after WWII (Rothstein 2007:34;
Williamson 2006:59). Multilevel marketing offers frustrated rural and
urban Mexicans the chance to ascend a new hierarchy unfettered by the
zero-sum calculus of market reforms (Frye 1996:33).
By examining the experience of the middle class in the face of economic
crisis, a different picture of neoliberalism emerges. Unlike the
determined protest led by the popular classes, the Brazilian families
who cling to trips to Walt Disney World as a rite of passage for their
children and Omnilife distributors like Esperanza who struggle to meet
their mortgage payments view the ascendancy of the market as an
opportunity. They are the heirs of what historian Lizabeth Cohen (2003)
calls the “Consumers’ Republic,” a marriage between mass consumption
and national prosperity forged in the United States after WWII and
exported to the rest of the globe. Michael Storper’s overview of late
twentieth century economic trends attributes the processes of
globalization to the rise of a consumer identity among middle classes
around the world. Many literally become “hooked” on consuming and
suffer when their purchasing power diminishes (Storper 2000:392).
Rather than a rational assessment of available resources, “the need to
spend whatever it takes to keep current within a chosen reference
group” drives consumption decisions for this status-conscious class
(Schor 1998:6).
Esperanza and other Omnilife distributors were less interested in
disrupting the national consensus on free markets than they were in
ensuring continued access to the goods and services that marked their
membership among the middle class. Images of attaining a middle-class
lifestyle through consumption first beguiled Mexicans as early as the
1940s with the arrival of U.S.-based department stores and advertising
agencies (Moreno 2003:12). Esperanza’s house in Morelia was just a
short walk from a shopping center with a Sears and a Wal-Mart–owned
grocery store. Scholars of shopping have shown how the ubiquity of
affordable goods at retailers like Wal-Mart holds out the promise of
middle class status for all (Zukin 2004:85). Even low-income girls in
urban Mexico aim to emulate the lavish quinceañera parties they
see in newspapers’ society pages and television soap operas (Napolitano
2002:132). The growth in the number of Mexicans who align their
interests and consumption habits with the middle class has enabled
Wal-Mart to become both the largest retailer and private employer in
Mexico (Lyons 2007).
The same demographic has also attracted the sights of multilevel
marketing companies. An industry executive pointed to Mexico’s rapidly
growing middle class as a reason the country ranks fourth in the world
in direct sellers (Bartlett 1994:217). An Amway official is even more
enthusiastic about Mexico’s potential market for his company: “A
growing middle class with increased spending power in this huge market
of 80 million consumers helps explain why Amway is so gung ho on Mexico
and has seen steady growth there since 1990” (Robinson 1997:115).
Despite its all-inclusive rhetoric, multilevel marketers depend on an
inexhaustible supply of underemployed members of the middle class who
seek to recover from economic downturns through supplemental work
(Jordan 2003). As C. Wright Mills presciently noted in his early study
of middle-class workers in the United States, “the salesman’s world has
now become everyone’s world, and, in some part, everybody has become a
salesman” (Mills 1956:161). Without the assurance of a salaried job,
members of the middle class become free agents who sell on commission,
fueling others’ needs for consumption to satisfy their own.
Omnilife aggressively targets those Mexicans with a tenuous grasp on
the middle class and nurtures their aspirations for consumption. Rather
than blaming the erosion of state support for the precarious financial
health of many Mexicans, company founder Jorge Vergara asserts that
replacing protectionism with the free market is precisely the solution
for achieving greater wealth. “Paternalism is an illness that has
infected Mexico for many years,” he wrote in an issue of Time magazine.
“Government subsidies and the expectation that the government must
solve our problems do us a disservice by discouraging inventiveness”
(Vergara 2001). Vergara enshrined his theory in Omnilife’s motto:
People helping people. To restore her lifestyle, Esperanza does not
need to seek a government handout, which would be incongruent with her
middle-class self-image. Instead, she can unleash her entrepreneurial
spirit by taking advantage of market forces to sell Omnilife’s vitamin
supplements and to build her own business. This path, assiduously
followed, leads to unlimited gain and a return to her previous
comfortable lifestyle.
Should she fail to see the desired results, she cannot blame the free
enterprise system or the company products because they clearly worked
to raise Vergara’s standard of living. As he emphasizes in interviews
(Friedland 1999; Mora Tavares 2003; Zarembo 2001), Vergara faced a drop
from the middle class himself after being downsized from his real
estate job in the 1980s. He started several businesses that failed
before joining Herbalife, the multilevel marketer of weight loss
products, when it first expanded to Mexico. After learning the system,
he broke away to start his own vitamin company in 1991 with six
distributors and a $10,000 loan. From those inauspicious origins,
Vergara built an empire of consumption. He bought a Boeing 737, the
first of its kind in private hands in Latin America (Delaunay 2002).
Profits from Omnilife financed a spending spree that encompassed
professional soccer teams in Mexico, Costa Rica, and the United States
(Zeigler 2003), film production (Malkin 2003), and modern architecture
(Ouroussoff 2001).
Although Esperanza has not had close contact with Jorge Vergara, she
has observed first hand the affluence his first cousin, Pepe Vergara.
As one of the original six Omnilife distributors, Pepe traded a job as
an insurance salesman to begin peddling vitamin supplements.
Eventually, he constructed the largest and most profitable network in
the company, reaping commissions of over $1 million a year. He was at
the head of Esperanza’s lineage in Omnilife and has visited Morelia
several times to motivate the members of his organization. She recalled
that on his first trip, he arrived from Guadalajara by public bus. The
next time, he drove his own Mercedes-Benz. On his most recent visit, he
flew in his private plane. Once she and her husband attended a dinner
party for 120 Omnilife guests at Pepe’s elegant Puerto Vallarta beach
house complete with infinity pool. She remembered that she was full
even before the meal was served. She held her hands apart several
inches to indicate the size of the shrimp appetizers. She did not
begrudge Pepe his extravagances, though. Amidst such opulence, he
remained “humble,” unfussy, and willing to talk to anyone about the
business. This was the dream that motivated Esperanza to redouble her
dedication to Omnilife and insulated the company from criticism. She
counted on the capitalist markets to perform the same magic for her and
return her family to its previous patterns of consumption.
FINAL ENCOUNTER: REMAINING LOYAL
In the months that followed, I never received further information from
Esperanza about the support center. The week between Christmas and New
Year’s 2005, shortly before I left Morelia, I arranged to visit
Esperanza. She invited me to join her for breakfast and to accompany
her on a day of selling Omnilife product. Her knee was healing
gradually, allowing her more mobility and more opportunity to reach
potential customers. She had resumed visits to the large municipal
market six days a week, selling supplements to the vendors at their
stalls. She respected Sunday for religious reasons, but when the
financial need was great enough, she worked all seven days. On a good
day, she moved nearly $100 worth of product in six hours, pocketing a
40 percent profit. Other days, she netted just $15.
Esperanza wanted to take a bus to the market, but remembering her
earlier mishap, I volunteered to pay for the taxi. In the car, I asked
what happened with her plan to open a new support center. The business
plan, she answered blithely, called for a consortium of nine
distributors, but she could secure firm commitments from only two other
people. “The people of Morelia want things for free,” she said by way
of explanation. So she abandoned the idea, but spared Omnilife any
blame.
In any case, she had settled into a rhythm at the marketplace since
returning to regular retail sales in July 2005. In addition to the
steady income, Esperanza had enrolled four new distributors from the
market into her network. On the downside, the distributor that she had
enlisted to sell in the market during her recovery from the fall
continued to work the same route and had secured the loyalty of many
customers. Although a portion of her recruit’s sales will return to
Esperanza in the form of a commission check, she still complained that
the woman had “pirated” her clients.
If her leg bothered her, Esperanza did not show it. The marketplace
occupied several city blocks. An aluminum roof covered the cavernous
central portion, where the meat, fish, and food stalls were located. A
periphery of stalls offering music discs, clothing, pottery, plants,
and all manner of plastic goods ringed the main building under
protection of tarps (see Figure 1). Esperanza wound effortlessly
through the clogged, narrow aisles, leaving me to scurry behind. She
greeted everyone with effusive charm, but focused her sales pitch on
the merchants who watched over their booths. As aggressive as she could
be in pushing her products, Esperanza took seriously the charitable
mission emphasized in Omnilife. When one vendor complained of hormonal
problems, Esperanza sat next to her and listened carefully before
recommending which Omnilife products would serve her best. Esperanza
promised that she would return regularly to check on the client’s
progress. “We will work for you,” she reassured her.
This day, Esperanza had relatives staying with her, so she finished her
work at the market by three p.m. The shortened day yielded her 388
pesos in sales (about $37) from 26 different clients. Usually she had
to pay for her transportation, which involved two bus rides: from her
home to the Omnilife store to buy inventory, then from the store to the
market. Other expenses included the supplements she consumed herself
(“You have to put gasoline in the car,” she remarked) and food she
bought in the market. This day a metal piece broke off her battered
cart, so she would have to pay to repair it or buy another.
After more than three hours in the labyrinthine market, we emerged into
the sun. On the way out of the market, we encountered Esperanza’s
protégé, who carried a similar cart of Omnilife products.
The two women kissed genially and inquired about each other’s Christmas
celebrations. Esperanza explained that she was leaving early to serve
lunch to a visiting relative. The other woman said that she would stay
on for another few hours to make the rounds of clients. Several colas
still remained in Esperanza’s cart. When we crossed the street to wait
at the bus stop, she offered one of the cans to me, popping open one
for herself. She showed no signs of fatigue or depression after the
frequent rejection she faced during the day’s rounds of the market. She
boasted to me that in the past she had even picked up clients while
waiting at the bus stop. As if to prove it, she called to a young woman
standing near us, “Would you like an Omnilife drink?” The woman
politely shook her head. Undeterred, Esperanza boarded the bus and
immediately asked the passengers what they would like to buy.
CONCLUSION: WELCOMING NEOLIBERALISM
The most vocal and sometimes violent opponents of neoliberalism in
Latin America have tended to be the dispossessed and marginal (Harris
2000:151). Legacies of colonialism and corruption have systematically
excluded them from sharing the benefits of the natural resources of
their countries, and, with neoliberal policies, they saw any prospect
for a more equitable distribution of wealth foreclosed. Anthropologists
who call attention to the ways indigenous communities and popular
classes have protested economic reforms that favor elites help to
correct the view that global capitalism is somehow inevitable or
adopted by unanimous consensus. Their research highlights the ways that
government leaders use coercion to impose a radical free market agenda
on dissenting citizens. What the focus on the margins leaves out,
however, is the range of responses that Latin Americans have exhibited
in the face of economic crisis (Hellman 1999). The rising popularity of
multilevel marketing indicates that one strategy has been to embrace
neoliberal reforms.
In the last 20 years, the multilevel marketing pitch has found
receptive audiences wherever people seek to alter their status. Young
women in rural Thailand, inspired by images of consumption through
television and magazines, join Amway to associate themselves with a
more glamorous world than the one their peasant mothers inhabit
(Fadzillah 2005:86). With their commission checks, the women buy blue
jeans, makeup, and shoes to reinforce their newfound sophistication.
Similarly, as Greece pursues greater integration with the European
Union, middle-class urban women draw on their participation in the
multilevel marketing of cosmetics to shift from traditional womanhood
to a more modern, entrepreneurial image (Moutsatsos 2001:152). The same
process of repositioning occurs among multilevel marketers in China.
There, multilevel marketing companies assure workers anxious about free
market reforms that “by purchasing a spot in a transnational network,
they could unfix the conventional notions of gender, rurality,
urbanity, and cosmopolitanism” that limit their upward mobility
(Jeffery 2001:28). Like Esperanza and her colleagues in Mexico,
multilevel marketers in countries that have adopted neoliberal economic
policies accept the reforms willingly and aim to harness them to raise
their standard of living.
Although it is obvious why captains of industry would welcome less
government regulation in their businesses, it is less clear why
middle-class Latin Americans would accept an economic system from which
they derive little profit. Without a state-sponsored safety net, they
have few options for maintaining their usual lifestyle in the face of
declining wages and corporate downsizing. One option would be to
economize and forego luxuries, but members of the middle class have
come to cling to consumption habits as central to their
self-definition. Multilevel marketers not only validate their dreams of
material goods, but also offer a system for making them reality.
Omnilife’s corporate publications feature photo spreads of successful
distributors in the mansions they bought with their commission checks.
Jorge Vergara often writes a welcome letter from his plane en route to
Antarctica or the Cannes film festival. In those concrete images of
success, Esperanza spied a brake against falling from middle class
status. All she had to do was become a diligent entrepreneur and allow
the market to reward her; that is, she had to assimilate the logic of
neoliberalism.
As Esperanza told me in her living room in 2005, she had no other
options. Although the skills of salesmanship that she had mastered in
Omnilife would transfer to another direct selling organization, her
hard-won network would not. In Michoacán’s formal economy, so
few job opportunities awaited high school and college graduates that
the state has become a primary exporter of labor to the United States
(Martínez 2001). Lacking formal education, she had little reason
for optimism. Applying for retail jobs in Morelia would be fruitless
because Mexican employers openly discriminate against older applicants
for work (Dickerson and Mandell 2006). Political protest did not enter
her mind because, like the rest of the struggling Mexican middle class,
she needed to earn money to support herself and her family. Even as it
exacerbates inequality, neoliberal capitalism holds out the promise of
increased purchasing power to upwardly mobile citizens who dedicate
themselves to playing by the market rules. As long as she and other
Omnilife distributors are motivated by the need to reach their desired
level of consumption, neoliberalism needs no violent push to win
acceptance.
NOTE
Acknowledgments. Grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the
University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences supported fieldwork
in Mexico.
Editor’s Note: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of articles
on Mexico, which also address issues of political economy: Ana Maria
Alonso’s (2004) “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje,’ Hybridity, and
the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism;” Alejandro Lugo’s (1990)
“Cultural Production and Reproduction in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico;” James
H. McDonald’s (1993) “Whose History? Whose Voice? Myth and Resistance
in the Rise of the New Left in Mexico;” and Laura A. Lewis’s (2001) “Of
Ships and Saints: History, Memory, and Place in the Making of Moreno
Mexican Identity.”
Cultural Anthropology has also published other articles on “the middle
class” in a range of national contexts, including Neeraj Vedwan’s
(2007) “Pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Consumerism, Brand Image,
and Public Interest in a Globalizing India;” Susan A. Reed’s (2002)
“Performing Respectability: The Beravā, Middle-Class Nationalism, and
the Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka;” and Mark Liechty’s
(2005) “Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in
Kathmandu.”
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