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Although Juicy Fruit gum was introduced
to North Americans in 1893, Native Americans in Mesoamerica
were chewing gum thousands of years earlier. And although in
the last decade biographies have been devoted to salt,
spices, chocolate, coffee, and other staples of modern life,
until now there has never been a full history of chewing
gum.
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Chicle is a history in four acts, all of them focused
on the sticky white substance that seeps from the sapodilla
tree when its bark is cut. First, Jennifer Mathews
recounts
the story of chicle and its earliest-known adherents, the Maya and Aztecs. Second, with the assistance of botanist
Gillian Schultz, Mathews examines the sapodilla tree itself,
an extraordinarily hardy plant that is native only to
Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Third, Mathews presents the
fascinating story of the chicle and chewing gum industry
over the last hundred plus years, a tale (like so many
twentieth-century tales) of greed, growth, and collapse. In
closing, Mathews considers the plight of the chicleros, the
extractors who often work by themselves tapping trees deep
in the forests, and how they have emerged as icons of local
pop cultureportrayed as fearless, hard-drinking brawlers,
people to be respected as well as feared.
Before Dentyne and Chiclets, before bubble gum comic strips
and the Doublemint twins, there was gum, oozing from jungle
trees like melting candle wax under the slash of a machete.
Chicle tells us everything that happened next. It is
a spellbinding story.
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