Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Foreword: The Paradox of Inequality in Latin America / Eric Hershberg xi
Part I. New Approaches, Old Disciplines
1. Latin American Inequalities: New Perspectives from History, Politics, and Culture / Paul Gootenberg 3
2. The Construction of Latin American Inequality / Luis Reygadas 23
Part II. History, Subjectivity, and Politics
3. Health Policy and the Historical Reproduction of Class, Race, and Gender Inequality in Peru / Christina Ewig 53
4. Incommensurable Worlds of Practice and Value: A View from the Shantytowns of Lima / Jeanine Anderson 81
5. Inequalities of Political Information and Participation: The Case of the 2002 Brazilian Elections / Lucio Renno 106
Part III. Culture across Borders
6. Between Orishas and Revolution: The Expression of Radical Inequalities in Post-Soviet Cuba / Odette Casamayor 139
7. How Latin American Inequality Becomes Latino Inequality: A Case Study of Hudson Valley Farmworkers / Margaret Gray 169
8. Afterword: Funes and the Toolbox of Inequality / Javier Auyero 193
Bibliography 199
About the Contributors 221
Index 223

Promotional Information

Essays on inequality in Latin America, analyzing historical causes, scholarship, and policymaking

About the Author

Paul Gootenberg is Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University and the author of Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug.

Luis Reygadas is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad AutÓnoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, MÉxico. He is the author of La apropiaciÓn: Destejiendo las redes de la desigualdad.

Reviews

"This book will remind readers that just as we cannot talk about democracy without tackling exclusion, we cannot make sense of justice without understanding inequality. In Latin America, hierarchies of many types have reproduced in many ways. The essays in this volume illuminate this plural past, where dichotomies coexist with challenges to them, where disparate relations persist despite their fluidity. It is a provocative and field-opening volume."oJeremy Adelman, Princeton University "Inequality in virtually all its multifaceted dimensions and in extremely varied surroundings does indeed appear to be an 'indelible' characteristic of contemporary Latin American society. Conventional literature tends to treat the issue either in strictly economic or political economic terms, or in ways that suggest invariant deficiencies. This collection explores it in a more complex and intellectually satisfying way, by treating inequality as 'relational,' following the thought of the late Charles Tilly. This approach opens up the phenomenon of inequality to a much broader range of descriptive and analytical strategies, aptly illustrated by the diversity of approaches represented in this volume. "oJohn Coatsworth, Columbia University