Cold War Toys examines a selection of toys manufactured, promoted and commercialized in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. The book approaches toys as ‘dispositifs’ – cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements and philosophical propositions of a contested and turbulent period. It presents a rich compendium of manufactured objects – many inspired by European or U.S. brands – that incorporate local characters, messages, designs and materials through a process of ‘creative adaptation’, thereby acquiring an identity of their own.

Although the book follows a broadly chronological order that aligns with the history of toys during the Cold War and its aftermath, its analysis also moves back and forth in time: from building blocks made in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García to those commercialized in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government; from nineteenth-century dollhouses to toys distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation in the 1950s; from toy soldiers to Latin American versions of G.I. Joe. These and other playthings are examined in part as commodities pertaining to a once-flourishing industry, but also as creators of cultural myths, training tools for Cold War childhoods and objects imbued with memory.