Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America Joseph L. Scarpaci Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America. Monica C. DeHart. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 192 pp., photos, notes. $21.95 paper (ISBN: 10-0-8047-6934-6). Cultural anthropologist Monica C. DeHart offers up seven short chapters, two of which were previously published in earlier reincarnations, about topics that should [End Page 179] interest geographers working in Latin America and the Caribbean. The work builds on research conducted over a decade and supported by respectable institutions (Inter-American Foundation and Fulbright-Hayes, among others). Language training in K'iche' also promises some real insight into the local Guatemala scene where Spanish is a second language for millions. The broader context for this book is riveting for anyone interested in small firms, cooperatives, entrepreneurship, and politics in the region. A common assumption is that indigenous peoples are not significant agents in driving job creation and increasing the standard of living in their communities. Kinship, local knowledge, and communal links might deter modernity. In fact, indigenous peoples are often cast as disenfranchised and powerless, though the rise of Evo Morales, Rigoberta Menchú and other 'indigenous leaders' in the Americas has refocused attention on native peoples. DeHart seizes on the idea that firms and governments can actually use ethnic difference as a comparative advantage in development projects. She is also concerned about the extent to which neo-liberal development policy erodes the micropolitics of development and identity. We learn that corporate social responsibility provokes responses among different (Guatemalan) ethnic groups in ways that are not anticipated. The first chapter, "Emergent Ethnic Landscapes," proffers anecdotal evidence that political leaders recognize the importance of ethnic workers toiling together in the free-market context. To wit, George Bush ends his 2007 Latin American trip with a photo opportunity of him in Guatemala loading crates of lettuce at an indigenous agricultural cooperative that was helped by US AID seed money. Vicente Fox's visit to the USA a year earlier included visits to leaders of Mexican migrant associations as well as U.S. officials. A decade before that visit, the Inter-American Conference of Mayors met in Miami and praises a Guatemalan indigenous philosophy from which "everyone in the development business could learn". DeHart calls these reconfigured development actors "ethnic entrepreneurs" who share a community-based participatory development paradigm. She draws on just three cases to highlight their value: 1) a Mayan organization in rural Guatemala, 2) a U.N.-sponsored program that recruits diasporic Latinos to engender development throughout Latin America, and 3) a relationship between WalMart and a Mayan organization to produce spa products. Herein lies the weakness of DeHart's pithy tome: a case of three begs the datainference ratio and calls into question the use of "Latin America" in the book's title for what is largely Guatemalan based. On top of that, the writing is often opaque and jargon ridden. While critical theory can illuminate and deconstruct, three briefly described cases would seem to stretch the ability to generalize significantly about either entrepreneurship, ethnic identity, or development politics in Latin America. Essentially, the author posits whether ethnic identity is a barrier to capitalism (e. g., is it anti-liberal); and the answer is that it is not. She asks "both how ethnic difference is produced through development discourse and practice to mark certain populations as potent development agents, and how differently situated subjects within those populations debate, reconfigure, and even reject those forms of difference as a the basis for their development agency" (14-15). DeHart's concern about Foucault's arguments regarding the imbalances of power and knowledge were not particularly illuminating. For example, in describing a 1999 meeting of a community organization in San Miguel, Guatemala (pp. 122-128; though on page 125 she refers to it as San Pedro), the conveners distributed tables and charts to the audience to explain the community development council's recent actions. DeHart criticizes the council's pointing to their financial accountability. She interprets the handing out of the statistical compendium as a "hegemonic interpretation of numbers," [End Page 180] and then proceeds to cite three...