ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the arrival of the first enclosed shopping centre in a Latin American city – Paseo Las Mercedes in Caracas, Venezuela in 1956 – and the subsequent dispersion of this retail phenomenon across South America, highlighting the important role that Nelson Rockefeller played in its proliferation across the continent. It traces the relationships that existed between the ideologies underpinning the retail project in different Latin American countries, and discusses connections between the implementation strategies that were employed on the continent. Embodying the Americanization of daily life, the spread of shopping malls in Latin America provoked a stream of intellectual criticism, concerning their socio-cultural and political effects as well as their aesthetic attributes. Through the analysis of cultural practices, political alliances with the military dictatorship and the involvement of renowned local architects, the ‘retail colonizers’ were able to morphologically and symbolically adapt the enclosed shopping mall to the Chilean context.
