Why and how Latin America remains a highly unequal region are the questions guiding this volume. The collection is stimulating, insightful, and diverse but coherent. First, it adds to the call for more dynamic, long-term and multidimensional approaches to the study of inequality in the region. Second, the book presents thoughtful material drawing from various disciplines and methodologies. Third, five case studies offer substantiated evidence of the multidimensional character of inequality, and how it is reproduced and becomes so resilient. Finally, the use of Charles Tilly's concept of ‘categorical inequalities’ characterised by relational and identity-bounding structures provides a solid framework to distinct articles.
Paul Gootenberg and Luis Reygadas introduce the discussion in two individual chapters. The central argument is that economic disparities in the region are closely coupled with other forms of inequality, which are constantly constructed. Reygadas stresses the historical embedding of colonial class differences that were constructed to a large extent on the basis of ethnic, racial and gender distinctions. For instance, he claims that spatial distance between societal groups is a social construction rather than an accident of history. The interweaving of ethnic variables with economical and political facts created a particular geographic distribution of peoples in each country, which in turn reproduced old ethnic and class imbalances into spatial inequalities. Overall, the opening articles explain the nature of these categorical inequalities, socially, culturally and historically constructed, setting the scene for the interdisciplinary case studies that that lie at the heart of the book.
Coming from different epistemic traditions, using diverse methods, and drawing on particular cases, the articles converge in the examination of ‘relational structures’, in particular bounded identities and their effects on the creation and recreation of ‘indelible’ inequalities in the region. The studies of Jeanine Anderson and Margaret Gray are based on ethnographic interviews in the community of Pamplona Alta in Peru and in New York's Hudson Valley, respectively. Lucio Renno's chapter, on the other hand, is based on a large quantitative dataset representing a sample of national voters in Brazil. In turn, whereas Odette Casamayor analyses inequality by exploring artistic expressions in Cuba, Christina Ewig carries out a historical analysis of health policy in Peru. In addition, the five case studies show similar mechanisms driving the reproduction of inequalities. A common account is how the overlapping of different categorical inequalities, such as ethnicity, class and gender, tends to shape and organise the distribution of factor endowments, social capital and diverse attitudes of exclusion and self-exclusion.
In addition, the five case studies show substantiated evidence of the multidimensional character of inequality and its resilience. Ewig stresses the weight of pre-existing inequalities such as the triad of class, ethnicity and gender in the formation of the health system in Peru. By articulating ‘external’ bounding pairs like female/male, indigenous/non-indigenous and elite/popular classes with ‘internal’ categories that divided the groups into contaminated/clean or infected/healthy groups, health policy ended up reproducing rather than reducing inequalities over time. To be targeted by a public health official meant to be racially stigmatised. But ethno-racial factors were not the only carriers of stigma; diseases were also associated with extreme poverty, poor living conditions and being of rural or peasant origin. Over time, the overlapping and interlocking of these constructed categories resulted in the construction of a highly unequal health system that reinforced previous inequalities: a ‘sanitised’ social security health system with higher-quality services for a selected white-mestizo, urban, formal male group of workers and an under-budgeted, chaotic public health system with low-quality and constrained services for the rest of the population.
Casamayor makes a similar argument in her analysis of racial inequality in post-Soviet Cuba. The resilience of racial inequality and the official denial of it (as the revolutionary regime claimed to have eradicated racial inequality forever) denote, as in the analysis of Ewig, the strength of mechanisms of reinforcement. Once the state could no longer sustain the illusion of an egalitarian society, the economic disparities which became pronounced in the 1990s, in conjunction with the new structure of opportunities for racial groups, reinforced and transformed old stigmas. Blacks were associated with illegal markets, delinquency and prostitution.
Anderson's analysis of persistent poverty in Pamplona Alta also sheds light on how inequalities endure even through the projects that poor people built on their own to overcome their disadvantages. She argues that the poor see themselves as a distinct category from the rest of Peruvian society. For instance, the effects of a ‘complex illiteracy’, together with the lack of synergies of social programmes, constrained people in their ability to overcome poverty and to avoid attitudes of predation and misrecognition, reproducing their position of disadvantage. Projects targeted towards poor people are restricted to certain spheres of the economy, to certain social relations and to a particular geographical range. Poor people cannot or can only rarely locate their ‘projects’ on larger stages, argues Anderson. Poor people's projects can achieve significant success, but are not destined to reach or cross the projects of the wealthy and the powerful. The poor and the wealthy are more likely to advance in parallel, and so disparities are maintained along the way.
Lucio Renno shows how factor endowments tend to reconstruct the barriers that impede certain groups from overcoming their disadvantaged place. His analysis of lack of voice in Brazil reflects an accumulation of inequalities that cut across different realms of life: sectors with narrow access to information are the same as those historically excluded from access to several other resources. The informational bias favours richer, whiter males, affecting the distribution of various other political resources simultaneously. Poor blacks and women are also less prone to engage in politics and actively to obtain information. Moreover, the informational and participation gap caused by income and gender differentials clarifies the mechanism through which clientelistic relations perpetuate the cycles of exclusion.
The final case study of the volume, by Margaret Gray, shows how inequalities in Latin America are not only resilient but can also spread and emigrate. In her study of Hudson Valley farmworkers, she shows how inequalities are not fading away with migration; moreover, they are acquiring new forms in the northern hemisphere. Gray illustrates how categories such as race may change across borders, but they continue to reproduce inequalities, for instance, between citizens and non-citizens, between native-born people and immigrants, and between the racial majority and minorities.
The interdisciplinary unveiling of inequality-related categories in the book provides a toolbox for continuing to rethink inequalities in the region, as Javier Auyero points out. However, it would have been interesting for the book to have engaged with the economics literature on group inequalities by Glenn Loury and Frances Stewart. The book also lacks a discussion of the different inequality triggers that emerge from the case studies. For Ewig, the driver is the culture of governments that thought to bring health services to rural and provincial areas as part of colonisation and civilisation processes. For Casamayor, it is the failure of the state in sustaining the equalising policies and the official denial of racial inequalities when a new economy emerged in Cuba. For Anderson, it is a mix of deliberate and unintended actions carried out both by the poor and by the agents that are supposed to help them. Hence, it can be the culture, the economy, the politics of the powerful, or most likely all of these, in different doses for particular cases. Either way, the book provides a brilliant account of how inequality is coupled with interweaving categorical groupings such as ethnicity/race, class and gender. The indelible marks of these categorical inequalities help towards a better explanation of the durability of inequality overall in Latin America.
