Cold War Toys examines playthings manufactured, promoted and commercialised in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. Establishing connections and conversations with toys produced in earlier periods, including nineteenth-century dollhouses and building blocks created in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García, it goes on to analyse, among other items, construction sets made in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, scale-model household appliances distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation, and more recent figurines such as the Latin American versions of G.I. Joe and Latin Barbie dolls.

The book approaches toys as dispositifs – cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements, and philosophical propositions of Latin America’s Cold War. Drawing on a rich compendium of objects, many inspired by European or US brands, it shows how South American toys incorporated local characters, designs, messages, and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring new identities. These and other original artefacts are examined variously as commodities from a once-flourishing industry, as works of art, originators of cultural myths, and as training tools for Cold War childhoods. They are also seen as undervalued expressions of children’s material culture, imbued with the collective memory of a turbulent and contested era.