Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804769346
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804769341
- Pub. Date:
- 02/02/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804769346
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804769341
- Pub. Date:
- 02/02/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804769341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2010 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ethnic Entrepreneurs
Identity and Development Politics in Latin AmericaBy Monica C. DeHart
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6934-1
Chapter One
Emergent Ethnic Landscapes
IN 1996, THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER at the Inter-American Conference of Mayors in Miami, Florida, lauded a Guatemalan indigenous organization's Maya philosophy and method as a strategy from which "everybody in the development business could learn." When Mexican president Vicente Fox visited the United States in 2006, he met not only with state officials but also with leaders of Mexican migrant associations and Mexican community business leaders in four key states. He advocated for comprehensive immigration reform in the United States-a policy on which his political legacy with constituencies on both sides of the border rested. In 2007, George Bush ended his tour of Latin America by loading crates of lettuce with members of an indigenous agricultural cooperative in Guatemala. He praised its members, who partnered with Walmart to export their products to the United States, as a model of how free trade could promote development throughout the region.
Each of these encounters draws our attention to how international organizations, nation-states, non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and grassroots communities all converged on a familiar but refigured actor as the key to advancing development in Latin America at the turn of the millennium. This new development agent, whom I have called the ethnic entrepreneur, took multiple forms-including indigenous community residents, working-class migrants to the United States, and elite Latino diasporas-all of whom were seen to embody values, relationships, and forms of knowledge deemed particularly useful for the community-based, participatory development paradigm applied throughout Latin America. In a landscape marked by state decentralization, regional free trade agreements, high levels of transnational migration, and remittance-dependent national economies, the qualities imputed to ethnic actors took on a particularly strategic air. These actors were seen to embody unique local knowledge and morality, including enduring solidarity with kin and relations of mutual trust and reciprocity with fellow community members. Combined with their enterprising community-based self-development efforts, their growing technical and market-based expertise, and, especially in the case of migrants, their propensity for risk-taking, the actors defined as ethnic entrepreneurs promised more efficient, effective, and sustainable development possibilities for both their local communities and their countries of origin.
In order to understand the emergence and effects of the ethnic entrepreneur, this book traces the changing contours of development practice in Latin America with an eye toward how it has put ethnic cultural difference to work for development. First, it asks why and in what circumstances ethnic subjects have been identified as essential agents of economic development. In other words, why were rural indigenous communities that had historically been identified as regressive obstacles to national development now seen as important resources for it? What changes within these indigenous communities and also within the regional political economy in which they were embedded facilitated this transformation? Second, the book raises questions about how the mobilization of ethnic cultural identity and practice for development solidifies, challenges, or transforms the way that ethnic agents themselves perceive their own identity, their community, and their development goals. For example, how does an initiative promoting Latino community solidarity and collaboration across borders both produce and also problematize what it means to be Latino for different kinds of project participants? In examining these intersections between identity and development politics, the book posits knowledge as a crucial arena for the fashioning of both ethnic difference and its convergences with increasingly professionalized and even corporatized development sensibilities and practices. Therefore, it questions what kind of knowledge is associated with ethnic cultural difference and why that knowledge is seen to support global and regional market integration, even as it is articulated as a counterpoint to those same market structures.
The analysis is based on a multisited, longitudinal, ethnographic study of three development projects between 1995 and 2006. The projects include a self-declared ethnic development initiative pursued by a Maya indigenous organization in rural Guatemala, a United Nations-sponsored program aimed at recruiting diasporic Latinos to the task of development in Latin America, and a collaborative venture between a Maya organization and Walmart to produce spa products for global sale. Collectively, these initiatives highlight dynamic configurations of what constitutes ethnic difference, who is perceived to embody it, and why it is valuable for development. As such, they underscore not only how ethnic difference has been put to work for development, but also how development practice has served as an important space for defining ethnic difference. Furthermore, they draw attention to the changing meanings of entrepreneurism at work in the field of development and their relationship to ethnic subjects in particular. By looking at the distinct sensibilities and practices identified as entrepreneurial-be they opening a successful "chain" of development initiatives, migrant risk-taking and investment in "home" communities through collective remittances, or the repackaging of ethnicity as a niche commodity for global consumption-we can see how individual development practitioners, indigenous communities, and Latino migrants come to represent diverse ethnic and entrepreneurial forms. Through them, I explore the implications of different actors' efforts to mobilize ethnic difference as a tool for producing effective and moral solutions to the problem of development.
This study analyzes how these seemingly disparate actors all became visible within the space of development as a new type of subject, rather than analyzing indigenous actors and Latino migrants in terms of their relationship to specific community or state politics in Guatemala or the United States, respectively. I argue that this new subject reflected the reconceptualization of ethnic cultural difference as a productive development resource relative to neoliberal development norms such as decentralization, privatization, and self-enterprise. I focus special attention on the role that class and gender inequalities have played in shaping different actors' ability to represent the genuine forms of cultural difference assumed to constitute the ethnic entrepreneur. I argue that these forms of inequality become especially salient in light of the increased material and political stakes for asserting authentic ethnic difference within neoliberal development practices.
Indigenous community development activists that I worked with in Totonicapán, Guatemala, embodied the ethnic entrepreneur in their efforts to preserve indigenous, rural community lifestyles through a pragmatic and selective retrofitting of Maya ethnic and market-oriented development practices. They had founded the organization CDRO (Cooperation for Rural Development of the West) in 1984 with the goal of promoting local self-development through the operationalization of Maya cultural principles and practices. By the late mid1990s, CDRO figured prominently in the Guatemalan development landscape for this innovative ethnic methodology, which included a successful microcredit network, a natural medicine production plant, and a community institutionbuilding program. These successful ventures had positioned CDRO's indigenous leaders both as important interlocutors in state development policy and as savvy administrators of CDRO's million-dollar institutional budget.
Not limited to indigenous actors in Latin America, the ethnic entrepreneur could similarly be said to define both working class and professional actors associated with emigration from Latin America, despite their quite distinct geographic and class locations in the United States. For instance, George González, a second-generation Mexican-American technology market analyst from the western United States, was just one of the many ethnic entrepreneurs that filled the halls of the United Nations headquarters in New York during the inauguration of a Digital Diaspora for Latin America project in 2003. He and the other Latino professionals recruited to this project were presumed to embody both the market acumen and a moral obligation to "brothers and sisters" in Latin America that could be put to work for development in the region. These assumptions ostensibly linked González and the Colombian-born lawyer also seated at his table as fellow Latinos. Despite the stark contrast in the class, ethnic, and geographic positioning of González and his professional counterpart relative to their rural, indigenous Guatemalan peers, a primary assumption behind the Digital Diaspora project was that professional Latinos would have an affinity with and link up to grassroots initiatives like CDRO as part of a broader Latin American ethnic community. These assumptions raised the question of how and why ethnic difference was being put to work for development as well as how the new forms of mobilized ethnic identity resonated with different actors' definitions of identity and community.
CDRO's project provides one strategic lens through which to examine these questions because it highlights convergences between the rise of indigenous social movements in Latin America during the 1990s, concurrent processes of political and economic transformation of Latin American states, and global efforts to protect and foster indigenous rights. CDRO's efforts to mobilize an explicitly Maya K'iche' ethnic identity1 as the foundation for development emerged in the context of a broader Maya revitalization movement in Guatemala that gained international attention with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 reception of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Guatemalan state was in the process of signing a historic peace accord, bringing an end to thirty-six years of armed conflict. And following in the footsteps of many other Latin American countries during the 1980s, Guatemala was embarking on a process of democratization, state decentralization, and intensified trade-based development. In this context, CDRO sought not only to provide a culture-based development strategy in its affiliated K'iche' communities, but also to potentially replace the Guatemalan state as the local provider of healthcare, education, and other development services. The organization pursued this mission by pairing traditional cultural concepts such as the pop (woven mat)-which emphasized collectivity, reciprocity, and universality-with ambitious economic enterprises such as a regional microcredit initiative.
By 2006, however, CDRO had abandoned some of these previous, explicitly ethnic projects in order to produce a line of spa cosmetic products that it marketed globally via Walmart. This new initiative was remarkable in that the spa products bore no signs of their indigenous origins, but rather sought to accrue value within a global niche market as universal, cosmopolitan products. Through this elision, CDRO's ultimate purpose was to finance the reproduction of the rural ethnic community in the new regional free trade economy. What are we to make of this bold new venture in terms of what it says about the relationship between ethnic difference and development practice? Does the switch from more traditional ethnic products to seemingly universal ones mark a radical shift in ethnic development strategy and/or in the identity of its practitioners? Or does it simply reflect the natural evolution and culmination of CDRO's basic philosophy? In the chapters that follow, I examine CDRO's innovative ethnic methodology, its programmatic success in the rural communities, and its subsequent popularity with both the Guatemalan state and international donors in order to answer these questions and to illustrate the dynamic relationship between indigenous identity and development politics at work there.
The Digital Diaspora project provides another angle from which to discern the different forms attributed to the ethnic entrepreneur, highlighting the role that international organizations, states, and corporations played in equating transnational migrants with certain entrepreneurial qualities and capacities. The definition of ethnic difference that emerged from this initiative shaped the project's proposed division of development labor across diverse communities in the region. Organized by Seattle-based nonprofit Digital Partners and sponsored by the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies (UNICT) Task Force, the Digital Diaspora for Latin America project sought to mobilize U.S.-based Latino professionals in the communications and technology industry and connect them with technology-based, grassroots development initiatives in Latin America. Modeled after an earlier initiative that paired Indian expatriates in Silicon Valley with development projects in India, this new Digital Diaspora effort hoped to bridge a pan-Latino community in the United States to promote development in what was perceived by organizers to be that community's homeland. Its inaugural event was attended by a wide variety of actors, including Latin American engineers or lawyers newly emigrated to the United States, second- or third-generation U.S.-born Latino professionals like George Gonzalez, non-Latino industry representatives from firms like Microsoft and Verizon, and Latin American-based bureaucrats. All participants thus belonged to multiple professional and ethnic communities within the United States, as well as exhibited varying degrees of connection to Latin America. This demographic diversity was an important reflection of the initiative's basic, and ultimately erroneous, assumptions about who counted as Latino and what their relationship to Latin America was.
Taken together, the initiatives undertaken by CDRO and the Digital Diaspora provide compelling illustrations of the emergence and often contradictory effects of ethnic entrepreneurs within translocal development practices. They illuminate how diverse actors in multiple locations and with distinct relationships to Latin America were similarly reimagined as valuable development subjects vis-à-vis their ethnic difference. After all, during the 1990s neoliberal economic and political reforms held sway across Latin America, characterized by efforts to decentralize and privatize Latin American state functions in order to promote efficient and transparent market-based development. In the process, both states and international organizations moved away from developmentalist, welfare-oriented strategies that targeted ethnic actors as objects of aid, toward strategies that recruited diverse kinds of ethnic actors as potent subjects of social and economic change. Indigenous community members in Guatemala, as well as migrants and Latino professionals in the United States became visible as legitimate development agents in this context because they were seen to essentially embody the localized, participatory, and enterprising cultural forms that global development norms sought to build on and reproduce. Consequently, CDRO and the Digital Diaspora's strategic redefinition and mobilization of ethnic difference were validated by the international development industry as exemplary forms of development methodology.
While I am positing the ethnic entrepreneur here as a new kind of development subject, the concept of the ethnic entrepreneur is not a new one. Indeed, a long trajectory of sociological research on immigrant communities in the United States has invoked this term to speak to the particular way that ethnic groups have organized economic relations, negotiated integration, and pursued upward mobility. In summarizing this genealogy, Min Zhou (2004:1041-42) describes two dominant analytical approaches to the ethnic entrepreneur: one that focuses on "middleman minorities who trade in between a society's elite and the masses" and another that highlights the coethnic entrepreneurial activity located in immigrant neighborhood or enclaves. These approaches thus take ethnic identity as a point of departure and theorize how that ethnicity shapes the type and degree of entrepreneurism that a group exhibits. Research on Native American communities in the United States has similarly highlighted a long tradition of entrepreneurial activity oriented toward the reproduction of corporate identity groups, especially in terms of more recent successes in the gambling industry; however, these studies have often problematized the notion of ethnic identity as an appropriate frame for understanding native cultural formations (see, for example, Cattlelino 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Perry 2006).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ethnic Entrepreneurs by Monica C. DeHart Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
1 Emergent Ethnic Landscapes 1
2 Pop or Fried Chicken: Redefining Development and Ethnicity 26
3 Remapping and Remitting Development 50
4 "Hermano Entrepreneur!" Constructing a Latino Diaspora across the Digital Divide 71
5 Welcome to Walmart!Corn and the New Community Business Model 94
6 Accounting for Development: Debates over Knowledge and Authority 120
7 Conclusions 140
Notes 149
References 165
Index 187