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Indelible Inequalities in Latin America
Insights from History, Politics, and Culture
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4734-7
Chapter One
Latin American Inequalities
New Perspectives from History, Politics, and Culture PAUL GOOTENBERG
As an introduction to this volume, this essay broadly paints Latin American inequalities onto their larger canvas of politics and scholarship. Latin America's historically defining inequalities cry out for newer and sustained kinds of historical, political, and cultural analyses, ones to complement the largely social and structural-reformist frameworks common to past understandings of inequality. This introduction then charts the way to a series of bold essays written by a working group of inter-American scholars that, from a variety of disciplinary angles, grapples with the task of thinking anew the many dimensions and legacies of indelible inequalities.
The Weight of Inequalities
Latin America is in fact a critical region for the global study of inequalities. Neither the poorest nor the most culturally divided region of the world, Latin America is by far the most unequal. By standard social indicators (cross-national Gini coefficients), Latin America is much more unequal than Asia, Africa, and of course the post-industrial West (Inter-American Development Bank [IDB] 1999). These measurements derive from wage differentials and thus overlook other material factors (such as wealth or the instability of work) that further skew the region's opportunity structures. In a vivid daily sense, Latin Americans live and see these disparities in how they do politics, build urban spaces, work the land, join new and older social movements, experience crime and environmental stress, and access educational, nutritional, healthcare, legal, cultural, and media resources. The problem lies not simply in the existence of rampant poverty in the region-during the last decade, some 210 million (or 40 percent of) Latin Americans fell in that category of distress-but in the more conveniently ignored other part of the problem: the region's extraordinarily wealthy and politically sheltered upper classes. The wealthiest 5 percent of the population hoards a quarter of total income, making some nations-such as Brazil or Guatemala-among the most unequal places on earth (IDB 1999; Korzeniewicz and Smith 2000). Few exceptions stand out against the typical Latin American pattern. Only Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Trinidad support reasonably egalitarian societies in the region, and even relatively developed economies such as Argentina and Colombia have recently experienced sharp increases in social inequality, which has ignited internecine conflicts and governability crises. Even Cuba, after its flurry of initial revolutionary redistributive programs, has suffered renewed inequality over the last decade (during its post-Soviet crisis), replete with new signs of racial and gender discrimination. Latin America's inequalities are not just or simply a matter of underdevelopment, poverty, or bad policy-they run much deeper.
Since the very birth of European colonialism, Latin America has likely been the zone of the sharpest global inequalities-the veritably eternal land of contrasts-between privilege and destitution. Historical evidence remains impressionistic, though historians have long grasped the larger picture. Caste divisions born from the Spanish Conquest (in Mesoamerica and the Andes) and African slavery (in Brazil and the Caribbean) hardened during centuries of colonialism; through the advent of two dozen independent republics and the liberal export-capitalism of the nineteenth century, such inequalities eventually transformed into class, cultural, and citizenship differentials, but carried forth anew (Burns 1983; Thurner 1997). Twentieth-century modernities (urbanization, mass culture, industrialism), active liberation movements (agrarian-reform, populist, democratic, and revolutionary), and now globalization, neoliberalism, and even emergent reactions to them have done little to change Latin America's historical inequality, despite the high hopes invested in all these ideas and programs (e.g., Eckstein [1977] 1988). In fact, from the 1980s to the 1990s Latin America suffered deepening social gaps, during the so-called lost decade of development, with no clear sign of relief at the start of the twenty-first century. Latin American inequality is a disturbing paradigm for the resilience of oppressive and dysfunctional social systems.
The key words "durable inequality" come from the renowned sociologist Charles Tilly's recent book of that title (1998). Tilly challenges scholars and citizens alike to confront the centrality of inequalities in modern societies: "categorical inequalities," shaped by relational processes, boundary making, and resilient social bonds. Inequality assumes a bewildering array of concrete forms: of wealth, income, and opportunity; of gender, race, age, region, and ethnicity. Hierarchies of power, education, technology, language, culture, honor, beliefs, and influence pervade individuals, groups, and nations, perhaps more than anytime in history. Tilly's book is part of a new movement to reclaim, in subtle ways, the methodological vitality of the social in cultural and historical analysis, as a foil to the methodological individualism of mainstream North American social science and to some variants of the "cultural turn." However, with his stress on relational structures, Tilly himself tends to downplay the cultural, historical, or global dimensions of inequality.
Latin American inequality is certainly durable in Tilly's sense, as well as being historically, socially, and culturally "constructed," which suggests the unnatural origins of hierarchy and subordination. But we prefer in this volume the guiding term "indelible inequalities," which underscores the human agency and culture at play in their creation and perseverance, their complexity and camouflage beyond stark categorical divides, and their fluid and peopled possibilities of change. Historically, indelible legacies are difficult to erase, but they are not structurally ordained or inevitable. Indelibility also implies that inequality is no longer the sole domain of model-building and data-crunching social scientists. But neither can indelible inequality be wished away, from the other academic shore, simply by a new critical discourse or a postmodern imagination, as useful as these may be for overcoming teleological understandings of poverty, development, or progress (Escobar 1995). In cultural-history terms, recognizing the indelibilty of inequalities may help unveil the larger commonalities behind ephemeral or essentialized fissures of racial, class, or gender discrimination and difference. It is also a move, one hopes, beyond the often non-analytical particularism of academic "identity politics" (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) and its analogous new "ethnic politics." Foucauldian-inspired cultural studies has heightened awareness of culturally construed, power-laden realities, and those insights are useful to grasp why inequalities continue to pervade social, cultural, and political edifices. A focus on inequalities interrogates how diverse societies and cultures have reproduced (tolerated and elided, contested or altered) hierarchy over the long term. Study of indelible inequalities helps center the social, historical, and cultural issues at the heart of Latin American studies, but not as a monolithic paradigm or research agenda.
Inequality is now a global concern. If the twentieth-century world was marked by fundamental struggles over the "color line" (race and colonialism) and the conflict between capitalism and socialism, the new century may well be defined by multiple global struggles over inequality. Concerned international organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank (Iglesias 1992; IDB 1999) and the World Bank (Stiglitz 2002; de Ferranti et al. 2004), economists and social scientists, agenda-setting foundations, and prescient public thinkers are beginning to trace the new profile of this global dilemma. Inequalities are not fading away with twenty-first-century "globalization"; in fact, it is quite the opposite, with most observers predicting that disparities will widen along with global informational processes of change, which generally lower labor costs and reward high-tech, capitalized, and educated strata and migrants both within and between nation-states. For example, intensified global migration, rather than narrowing income and cultural gaps, has tended to create more heterogeneous pools of exploited minorities. Significantly, unlike eighteenth- or nineteenth-century humanism and liberalism, the current wave of historical globalization barely tries to legitimate itself by making universal equality claims, beyond equal access to markets, regardless of equity outcomes. This agnostic stance is now evoking an intellectual and ethical backlash. Such global cultural fragmenting and its rationalizers have not escaped the notice of respected sociocultural analysts (such as Appadurai, Harvey, and Jameson), who read the postmodern global condition precisely in terms of these intensifying and kaleidoscopic inequalities.
Another factor in play is steeply rising inequality (and a growing tolerance for such) in the United States, which already holds the position of an outlier in post-industrial societies. In the so-called New Economy since the 1980s, 47 percent of income gains accrued to the top 1 percent of families (Wolff [1995] 2001; Lardner and Smith 2006). With the erosion of its mid-twentieth-century fiscal policies, industrial base, and blue-collar working class, the United States now has a wealth-distribution profile that approaches those of Latin America, with the upper 5 percent hoarding nearly half of all national assets. Illustrative of the social impact of these developments, average life expectancies in the United States, while longer, are now demonstrably more unequal. These shifts have occurred alongside the abandonment of hard-won socialwelfare policies, freer hemispheric trade (North American Free Trade Agreement and its emulations), and the arrival of a new generation of unskilled immigrant workers, most of whom are refugees from Latin American and Caribbean inequalities and who are forming new classes of categorical inequalities. The United States's own global cities (Sassen 1991) now exhibit Third World extremes, with homelessness, hunger, street bazaars, resurgent diseases of poverty, and the specter of terrorism. A flurry of academic critiques of North American inequalities (Jacobs and Skocpol 2005) note the paradox, so familiar to Latin Americanists, that social distances have widened in the same era as the expansion of individual rights (civil rights, multiculturalism, gender equity), and that rising inequalities are, Latin American-style, eroding prospects for political equality and the democratic process in the United States. Inequality has become an open topic of debate in major political campaigns, with those who speak out on the issue being labeled "populists." The Latin American experience governing harsh inequalities may have much to say now to North Americans, and also about the possible linkages between Latin Americans and North Americans.
Finally, there are both scholarly and real-world movements to contest inequalities, driven by the recognition that not all hierarchies are created by material conditions alone, with concerns such as gender, sexual orientation, nature, indigenous and cultural autonomy, and human rights. The contributors to this volume refer not only to the long-vaunted "new" social movements of Latin America (Alvarez and Escobar 1992) or to the developed world's motley antiglobalization forces, long laying low after 9/11. There are multiple voices: a decade-old post-Marxist discussion, rooted in Latin American labor and civic rights, of "open-economy social democracy" (Roxborough 1992; Castañeda 1993); and sociological specialists on inequality who call for the "high road to globalization" for Latin America, including equity, sustainability, and social-capital initiatives (Korzeniewicz and Smith 2000). There are surprising Latin American cases, such as Costa Rica, which have grasped equality-enhancing environmental and upgrading technological niches in the new global order; there are also the recent successes of Chile, a nation traditionally marked by inequality, in combining export dynamism with poverty-alleviation programs. During Mexico's post-2000 democratic transition, a devoted capitalist president, supported by key nongovernmental organizations (NGOS), embraced as a path out of Mexico's persistent inequalities micro-empresa experiments reminiscent of those of Peru's neo-capitalist intellectual Fernando da Soto (de Soto 1986), and gaping Mexican class divisions framed the controversies of the country's 2006 presidential election. The Brazilian president Lula de Silva's now second-phase social-democratic experiment is bringing the subject of inequality openly into an expanding public sphere; Bolivia's centuries-silent have-nots have somehow reached the apex of their wobbly state; whereas in Venezuela inequality politics dons a more traditional uniform. Inequalities are fueling the early-twenty-first-century return of Left-leaning and nationalist politics to Latin America, but it is unclear how much these new regimes will be able to do to redress the problems that generated them, given the political and economic constraints of the post-1980s global order (Hershberg and Rosen 2006; Drake and Hershberg 2006). But one cannot approach inequalities in the Americas from the dismal standpoint of the region's apparent stubborn social realities alone, in the spirit of "fracaso-mania"-the political economist Albert O. Hirschman's wise lament of Latin American policy fatalism (Hirschman 1972). One must also seek out and embrace emerging ideas, possibilities, or utopistics (Wallerstein 1998) of hope and change.
Shifting Scholarly Paradigms
Much has been said and written about inequality in the Latin American context. In the academy at large, the issue of inequality has suddenly assumed a central urgency: the 2008 Presidential Address of the American Historical Association was titled "Developing Inequality" (Weinstein 2008), the American Anthropological Association meeting of 2007 focused on inequality and difference, and the Latin American Studies Association adopted the keynote theme "Rethinking Inequalities" for its international congress in 2009. For Latin America, inequality may have been the overriding, if rarely explicit, motif of the region since 1492. Scholarly works also point to major omissions: the construction of inequality over long historical transitions, the nonmaterial bases of inequality, and the seemingly indelible politics and cultures of inequality.
In disciplinary terms, economists and political scientists staked out the most explicit studies of inequality and are among the most methodologically conservative of social-science researchers. During the mid-twentieth century, economics discourse on inequality was dominated by debate of the "Kuznets curve": the notion that developing countries faced a necessary trade-off between accumulation (or growth) and distribution. The policy lesson, taken all too well in Latin America, was that countries should throw themselves into rapid, large-scale development and only later worry about equity. In today's era of waning neoliberalism, paradoxically, an opposing view has emerged; investments in social and human capital or in democratic and micro-institutions are now believed to potentially spur economic growth. In part this reflects better knowledge, since no strong correlations were ever found between growth and inequality. It also reflects the example of East Asia, which with its more equalitarian postwar societies, and even distributional reform, managed to far outperform Latin America, at least until the late 1990s (Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Amsden 2005). Future studies will likely reinforce the idea that distribution is largely neutral to growth prospects, yet inequality still indirectly affects political stability, the sustainability of development, and the efficacy of the state. Among economists, a small group of Latin Americanists always valorized equity concerns. Developmentalists such as Rosemary Thorp, whose economic history of Latin America for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) focuses on the quality of growth and on social exclusion, draw from the Latin American structuralist tradition of the Comision Economica para America Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL). In a provocative classic essay Albert O. Hirschman shifted the dilemma to subjectivities: under what conditions do people long tolerate growing maldistribution? Do aspirations count in economic equations? (Hirschman 1981). There is plenty of new thinking to go around in economics. The Nobel Laureate Amartyra Sen is reconsidering development as qualitative enhancements of human capacities and freedoms (Sen 1999); retired World Bank economists offer sharp critiques of inequality-producing globalization (Stiglitz 2002); United Nations development agencies now routinely employ broad-based "human development" standards that encompass benchmarks for equality.
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