Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Indigenous Movements

Abstract

Más que un indio (More Than an Indian): Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala. By Charles R. Hale. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 292. $34.05 paper. The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay. By René D. Harder Horst. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. xi + 224. $50.05 cloth. Who Defines Indigenous? Identities, Development, Intellectuals, and the State in Northern Mexico. By Carmen Martínez Novo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 187. $23.95 paper. Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia. By Nancy Grey Postero. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 294. $26.05 paper.

The four books under review address several of the most compelling issues that have arisen following the democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s in Latin American countries with indigenous populations. The main concerns shared by the authors, all anthropologists, are indigenous mobilization, indigenous-state relations, and official multiculturalism. Reforms that sought to bring marginalized indigenous populations into the political process receive particular attention. The paradox of neoliberal multiculturalism, according to Charles R. Hale, “is that a progressive response to past societal ills has a menacing potential to perpetuate the problem in a new guise” (12). The reforms “intended to heal the rift between the state and the populace,” writes Nancy Grey Postero (220), did not work as planned, and the books reviewed here seek to understand why. Although the authors address several other topics, I focus on how they deal with indigenous organizing, neoliberal ideologies and policies, democratization, and the role of structural racism. The differences among the books are substantial, as a result of different research sites and the various interests, methodologies, and research scope of the authors.