Whither Latin America?

The time is ripe to (re)consider Latin America from a holistic perspective. Not all would agree with the assumption by Katz, in his broad review of current events and tendencies, that Latin America can be treated a whole, but I think it is at least a good starting point. Katz poses two alternative overarching perspectives against which he advances his own positions. One is the post-neoliberal approach, for which the Washington Consensus is well and truly in the past and a more equitable development perspective beckons. The other, which is shared to some extent by Katz but from which he distances himself in the end, is the commodities consensus view, according to which Latin America is being re-primarized under a new global order that condemns the region to extractivism rather than production. Katz recognizes that in the present global crisis Latin America is not going the way of the 1930s. Much has changed, and, for example, as he argues, Brazil has more in common with Spain than with Ecuador. The “Empire” still rules, however, and Katz mentions the various U.S. bases and involvement in the misnamed “war on drugs.” Coercion is still seen as a major means for maintaining the subjection and dependency of Latin America.

In terms of politics, Katz counterposes the center-left governments of Kirchner (Argentina) and Rousseff (Brazil) to what he sees as the more radical governments of Morales (Bolivia) and Maduro (Venezuela) in terms that some might find somewhat simplistic. He places his hopes, however, in the ALBA countries led by Cuba and Venezuela and totally dismisses the prospects of the Mercosur led by Brazil and Argentina. Analytically this has considerable merit, but it is noticeable that his focus is on the nation-state and national governments and not on social movements and civil society (though these are of course mentioned).

I would advance an analysis somewhat different from what is a very informative and generally nuanced analysis of contemporary Latin America. The first area I would approach differently would be Latin America’s recent transnationalization through the processes described by the term “globalization,” which signaled the emergence of a new cultural political economy for the region. This has impacted even what we might consider politics and, in particular, unsettled the very meaning of “democracy.” The agents of neoliberalism and the activists of the transnational nongovernmental organizations, in different but sometimes complementary ways, redefined the political and democracy. A novel language for empowerment, self-help, capacity building, active citizenship, and so on, began to forge a new political subject beyond the state and acting on behalf of a normative civil society. Progressive social movements began to accept the politics of social adjustment, and the international nongovernmental organizations often appeared to be the social face of neoliberalism. Latin America’s hybrid condition and its characteristically fluid relations between economy, society, and politics tended to be set aside in this new dominant paradigm based on European/North American conceptions of representative democracy and a particular variant of a modern civil society. A plea for a return to nationalist economics and populist politics was not a surprising reaction to this alien vision of transnationalism.

There is, however, no essentialized Latin American identity that can be captured to create an alternative to neoliberal modalities of transnationalism. As García Canclini (2002: 39) has argued, “The transnationalization of the cultural political economy of Latin America has ruled out that essentialist-nationalist route.” The view of the world from Latin America has changed utterly since the 1950s. Our mental maps need to be transformed to take into account these complex transnational processes of transformation. Manichean nationalist solutions and simple anti-imperialisms will not help build a stable counterhegemonic politics. This is not to say, however, that a simple embracing of transnationalism and a facile cosmopolitan politics would answer the pressing needs of Latin America.

It is the movement of people both within and beyond Latin America that most clearly signals its new transnational status. Katz makes reference to this phenomenon but really only in relation to the growing economic importance of remittances and tourism, particularly in Central America. This is not just a reprise of the nineteenth-century immigration of rural workers from Europe but a multifaceted, multiflow movement of professionals, workers, students, bankers, and plain travelers. Certainly from the perspective of a global cultural political economy, the most noticeable flow is that of Hispanic-Latin-Amerindian peoples into the United States. Between 1960 and 2000 the number of people of Latin American origin in the United States increased fivefold, from fewer than 7 million to over 35 million. In 2012 there were 53 million “Latinos” in the United States, and it is estimated that this figure could reach 130 million by 2050. Since 2000 this population has outstripped the Afro-American population to become the largest “minority” in the United States by far. From a Latin American perspective, this is a diaspora larger than most individual countries in terms of population. This border-crossing segment of the population is constantly deepening hybridity in ways far more complex than mainstream “development and migration” discourses can account for. Transnational migration is not a simple flow from poor to rich countries, and much of it is South-South in character. Thus Venezuela today attracts many Latin American professionals in the same way that Argentina has historically acted as a pole of attraction for construction and domestic workers in the Southern Cone region. Nor can economic data alone account for the full impact of these flows both in the short term and, more important, in the long term. What does it mean for Uruguay that at the turn of the century more people were leaving the country than were born within its limits? What does it mean for Ecuador that perhaps one-fifth of its population today lives in Europe or the United States? Migration and its circular flows have become an integral element of what constitutes Latin America today, to the extent that it is not “complete” without taking into account the positive and negative impacts of that diaspora. To put it simply, the nation-state is no longer the main or default frame for identity formation. New voices from the margins are making themselves heard—women, indigenous and black minorities, migrants, peasants, and the new poor—and opening up a new kaleidoscope of prospects for social transformation.

Latin America is now part of the world, and the world is now part of Latin America. This leads us beyond conceptual schemas based on simple binary opposites. The national arena is no longer (if it ever was) the self-evident and self-sufficient container of all social and political activity. The global system—with its intensified flow of money, people, and ideas—is no longer something “outside” Latin America, an external reference point, as it were. Social and political relations are constructed in a more complex and contradictory manner. We now accept more readily the hybridity of the Latin American condition—in economic, political, social, and cultural terms—and the transnational character of the making and unmaking of hegemonic politics. What we can visualize is a Latin America immersed in a dense network of flows and exchanges, establishing a transnational cultural political economy far removed from any lingering notion of the nation-state as self-contained and self-sufficient.

I suspect that there is something more that separates the political economy approach from one based on the new cultural political economy. Human life can never be reduced to the material, and the spiritual dimension needs to be more valued if we are to understand contemporary Latin America. We need an unwavering commitment to human agency. The future is open, and society contains the capacity to articulate another world not based on exploitation, inequality, and oppression. In a world very much balanced between capitalist collapse and reaction and an alternative path as it was in 1930, it is time to rethink our future.

If we return now to the opening opposition between post-neoliberal and commodities consensus approaches that frames Katz’s problematic, we might now approach them differently and not as binary oppositions to be overcome in a “Hegelian” synthesis. I think that a cultural political economy approach focused on the realities of transnationalism and hybridity would result in a more nuanced analysis. I also think that a focus on social agency might produce a different picture of political prospects than one reduced to national governments and governors. In his recognition of the importance of transnational migration I think Katz is moving toward this new way of seeing Latin America. His critical review is sure-footed and provides much food for thought. We now need to hear different voices adding complexity and, for that matter, contradictions to the way forward for a continent in the throes of social transformation.