Between Incas and Indians

Abstract

Inca Kola is the only national cola to outsell Coca-Cola in its own territory. This article situates the marketing and success of Inca Kola within broader theoretical debates on the relationship between the local and the global and underscores the usefulness of more nuanced understandings of the local by bringing to the forefront internal heterogeneity and local hegemonic discourses. I suggest that Inca Kola is successful in large part because it bridges the gap between the local and the global and the traditional and the modern by presenting an alternative to Coca-Cola's American-global modernity through the construction of a Peruvian-global modernity. I then complicate notions of the local by analyzing how the Peruvian-global modernity represented in Inca Kola's ads is internally hegemonic and suggest that Inca Kola's marketing is better understood in terms of its embeddedness in urban white-mestizo racial hierarchies.