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 the implications of those processes 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 healthcare 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 hip-hop and other transnational cultural currents. Exploring the dilemmas of Latin American inequalities as they are playing out in the United States, a contributor looks at new immigrant Mexican farmworkers in upstate New York to show how 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 "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."--John Coatsworth, Columbia University

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	248
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	Duke University Press
Fecha de Publicación	2010-10-21
Dimensiones	9.1" x 6.1" x 0.6" pulgadas
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	Si
Temas	Estudios Hispanos/Latinos, América Latina

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.