Indelible Inequalities in Latin America

Since the earliest years of European colonialism, Latin America has been a region of seemingly intractable inequalities, marked by a stark divide between the haves and the have-nots. This collection illuminates the diverse processes that have combined to produce and reproduce inequalities in Latin America, as well as some of their links to and implications for North Americans. Anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, and political scientists from North and South America offer new and varied perspectives, building on the sociologist Charles Tilly's relational framework for understanding enduring inequalities. While one essay is a broad yet nuanced analysis of Latin American inequality and its persistence, another is a fine-grained ethnographic view of everyday life and aspirations among shantytown residents living on the outskirts of Lima. Other essays address topics such as the initial bifurcation of Peru's health care system into one for urban workers and another for the rural poor, the asymmetrical distribution of political information in Brazil, and an evolving Cuban "aesthetics of inequality," which incorporates hiphop and other transnational cultural currents. Exploring the dilemmas of Latin American inequalities as they are playing out in the United States, a contributor focuses on new immigrant Mexican farmworkers in upstate New York to show how these undocumented workers become a vulnerable rural underclass. Taken together, the essays extend social inequality critiques in important new directions. Contributors: Jeanine Anderson; Javier Auyero; Odette Casamayor; Christina Ewig; Paul Gootenberg; Margaret Gray; Eric Hershberg; Lucio Renno; Luis Reygadas