Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and hope in Latin America, edited by Javier Auyero, 2024 University of Texas Press
If inflation can be sticky, inequality can be stickier.
A large body of accumulated evidence over at least a century has shown that income mobility has an intergenerational character, even if social mobility research itself has only really blossomed in the last 25 years.
It is this persistence of inequality that has become the subject of most interest to scholars.
As the US labour economist Alan Krueger wrote in 2012 in what is now considered a definitive statement about income inequality in advanced Western societies: “Higher income inequality would be less of a concern if low-income earners became high-income earners at some point in their career, or if children of low-income parents had a good chance of climbing up the income scales when they grow up. In other words, if we had a high degree of income mobility we would be less concerned about the degree of inequality in any given year.
“But we do not. Moreover, as inequality has increased, evidence suggests that year-to-year or generation-to-generation economic mobility has decreased.”
The “Great Gatsby Curve”, popularised by Krueger to support his work on Barack Obama’s council of economists, is an important contribution to economic thought.
This observation based on hard data indicates that countries that had more inequality across households also had more persistence in income from one generation to the next—that is, it speaks of the limits facing citizens in their potential to achieve upward mobility.
Krueger’s analysis was dedicated to growing levels of inequality in the US, but this was no bleeding heart liberalism. It was in fact dedicated to rescuing the American Dream, by suggesting that the economic mobility promised by this capitalist fantasy became harder to achieve as inequality deepened.
The factors Krueger put forward as explanations for this were characteristically technical—technology itself; the role of the financial sector; increased globalisation; a decline in union membership; and the erosion of progressive tax policy. His was, in short, a classic economistic examination of inequality, observing its stickiness and advancing loose postulates about its causes.
In this he was in good company. At one level his work can be seen as a contemporary example of something Marxism has long observed—that inequality and poverty are functional components of capitalism, which of necessity creates inegalitarian social structures in order to maintain and reproduce an industrial reserve army.
To Marxists, inequality must be transferred from one generation to another through factors that prevent members of a class escaping the environment within which they spend their lives. Hence, inequality and poverty cannot be eradicated without a revolution—that is, without a fundamental change in the mode of production.
Non-economists have also examined inequality—an influential example was The Spirit Levelby the British epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson published in 2009—thereby generating a large corpus of studies on its consequences for health, violent crime, and life satisfaction.
What remains puzzling, however, and tends strongly to support the Marxist argument, is that despite a growing body of evidence that inequality fuels social ills, instability and geopolitical tensions, it continues to rise across the world. It is, as Zia Qureshi a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute argued last year, the major issue of our time.
Even more puzzling perhaps, according to Lucía Macchia, Anke Plagnol and Nattavudh Powdthavee, is research on attitudes toward inequality suggesting that citizens in more unequal countries are less concerned about it than those in fairer countries
Their work suggests that, alongside established evidence suggesting that a belief in meritocracy often accompanies the level of inequality in a society, there is also evidence that people care about where they stand in the hierarchy of earnings in a workplace and derive more satisfaction from being at the top in more unequal societies, where the pursuit of rank and status is more likely to be seen as desirable.
These studies based on attitudinal data certainly make progress in trying to answer why people tolerate inequality, but they are still limited in their nuances.
Another, less objective, approach is ethnographic, and this can offer valuable insights about perceptions of and attitudes towards inequality that are likely to be more context-specific and culturally informed.
Latin America is perfect for such studies as a region characterised by persistently high levels of social, economic, racial-ethnic, and environmental inequalities.
As Alison Coffey and Javier Auyero note at the start of Portraits of Persistence: “As such, it has long been understood and represented as a continent where poverty and luxury boom side by side, and where social exclusion plays an outsize role in shaping life outcomes.”
This collection is dedicated to the puzzle of persistence and how it is confronted: how and why do people legitimise or challenge the inequities—the structural oppression, discrimination, interpersonal violence, or bureaucratic manipulation—that they experience?
It proceeds by recreating the lives in detail of 14 subjects across Latin America in order to explore their actions and experiences and how these are underpinned by sentiments that range from angry resentment to fatalism, caution and sometimes, stubborn optimism.
Coffey and Auyero write: “Bringing together life history interviews with long-term ethnographic engagement, the contributors offer us finely crafted accounts that speak not only to the structures that shape contemporary life but also to the nuanced ways people experience them.
“How does inequality feel in the minds, hearts, and bodies of people who live it? How do everyday people make sense of the challenges they face? And how do these circumstances influence what people imagine to be possible?”
This is a valuable approach: as they note, while the social sciences in and about Latin America have thoroughly explored objective inequalities and the factors that cause them, when it comes to understanding the varied cultural forms in which people experience and cope with multiple and intersecting inequities and the many ways they are legitimised or questioned, much empirical work remains to be done.
Portraits, therefore, does what it says on the can: it gives this issue a human face that “invites readers to examine this lived, subjective dimension of social inequality”, while in each case offering an informed insight into such issues as gendered and racial discrimination, drug-trafficking, the penal system, insecurity etc.
We are introduced to the remarkable Soraya, a petty drug dealer or mulera in a violent Nicaraguan barrio, who provides a fascinating and original insight into the gendered aspects of trafficking in Latin America.
We meet Maíra, a strained human rights activist in Vila Belém in Rio de Janeiro tortured by her son’s dealings with dishonest, violent police and harsh, racist justice and penal systems. The burden she carries trying to keep him out of jail takes a heavy psychological toll.
Rodrigo is a Mexican security entrepreneur providing protection and intelligence services for the elite, navigating pervasive corruption in the judicial system and behind the scenes “grey” activities required by his wealthy clients. In a country marked by dramatic levels of inequality, his role is an apt metaphor for the contrasts that divide Mexican society.
In this chapter, Eldad Levy also provides a fascinating insight into Rodrigo’s formation that equipped him for his involvement in the Mérida Initiative and thence his private security work—his studies in Israel.
The role played in US security imperialism in Mexico by Israel—a major exporter of security and surveillance services to Latin America—clearly gave Rodrigo the contacts and openings with which he was to develop his career.
We encounter Aurelia of Cooperativa Río Teaone barrio in Esmeraldas, Ecuador—emblematic of the informal neighbourhoods in Latin American cities—an Afro-Ecuadorian woman cheerfully trying to create a home in an area with water blighted by contamination from a petrochemical complex. She is emblematic of environmental racism.
We get to know the thoughtful Ezequiel, a member of Argentina’s unemployed workers’ movement (piqueteros), in a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires once home to a dynamic working-class community but broken by neoliberal reform and the country’s perennial indebtedness.
What is fascinating, and instructive, about Ezequiel is that he is not political: his activism is almost a nostalgic reflection upon a way of life now lost.
Marcos Emilio Pérez writes: “Through his everyday work, he materialises a particular sense of morality centred on the (increasingly uncommon) experience of blue-collar labour, a gendered breadwinner-homemaker family structure, and old-fashioned ideas of community life. For him and numerous others, piquetero organisations allow the persistence of an idealised proletarian lifestyle endangered by the undermining of the material conditions that made it possible.”
Other personalities equally worthy of attention are profiled in this collection, and ultimately there is no single, overarching conclusion—that would not be possible in a work of this kind.
But these personal portraits tell us both about broad social processes at work in Latin America, while also providing moving insights into the hopes, achievements, and misfortunes of real people, like us, living in very unequal societies.
In that respect, this collection belongs to a long tradition of “testimonio” literature that elevates the voices of those who live on the margins of society. To its credit, it seeks to paint portraits without the heavy contrasts of theoretical debate.
Readers might therefore ask, says Auyero, where is the theory in all this?
“And they are right to speculate, because we intentionally submerged extant scholarly work on vigilance, violence, collective action, gangs, politics, state bureaucracy, and other topics so as to facilitate reading by different, wider audiences. But although not foregrounded in the chapters, theories are everywhere as principles of pertinence and protomodels of the phenomena at hand.”
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Categories: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, North America, Peru, South America