Neoliberalism

In the age of globalization, neoliberalism has become something of a trendy watchword to describe current economic and social developments arising, arguably, in the 1970s. These characteristics range from the widening gap between rich and poor to questions on privatization and immigration. We see it in Néstor García Canclini’s claim that the only identity available now is that of consumer, where popular narratives “custom-fit” subjectivities into a cultural industry that only wants to profit from it (Canclini 2001: 93). We see it in the way the rising border wall between the US and Mexico seems to contradict the establishment and continuance of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the mobility of capital. We see it in the gentrification of poor neighborhoods where the displacement of peoples is hidden behind rhetorics of development and progress. We see it in literary representations of the struggle between race, ethnicity, and class status for Latinos/as. But what exactly is neoliberalism? Neoliberalism, primarily, is understood as a socioeconomic development

coming from two major economic movements. It initially extends from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century classical liberalism and/or laissez-faire economics, which is generally characterized as the goal for less government in the economy so that individual freedoms could fully prosper. However, it is also a response to postWorld War II Keynesianism and/or embedded liberalism, which is often defined as a system in which the state is given free rein within the market to influence the welfare of its citizens and its own economic growth. Neoliberalism evolved from the internationalism created by the Bretton Woods Agreements (1944), which established a monetary management system (i.e., the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)) to set fiscal relations between industrialized states and ultimately made the US dollar the international currency. Theorizing these economic movements and events, Michel Foucault saw this “new” economic paradigm in the 1970s under two perspectives: the German definition and the American definition. On one hand, he examines how German neoliberalism indicates a change from a state that regulated the market to “a state under the supervision of the market” (Foucault 2008: 116). On the other hand, he argues how this shift is an epistemological transformation of labor into capital, from the American perspective (Foucault 2008: 223-33). The “neo” here, then, is a bit misleading since it is neither a brand new conception of the socioeconomic landscape in the late twentieth and early

twenty-first century, nor is it necessarily a critical response to its earlier macroeconomic cousins. It is a transformation (both ideologically and pragmatically) of the relationship between social relations and market objectives. Identifying localized market objectives in New York City through the gentrifica-

tion of East Harlem, Arlene Dávila defines neoliberalism as “the rubric of economic and urban development policies that favor state deregulation, that is, decrease in state involvement accompanied by privatization and free market approaches, all in the guise of fostering more efficient technologies of government” (Dávila 2004: 9). Dávila is pointing to the very fine line between classical liberalism’s direct call for less government and neoliberalism’s more oblique approach. Neoliberal doctrine paints the movements toward privatization as developing more proficient (and less bureaucratic) government. For instance, neoliberalism tells us that privatizing healthcare would open up those resources in a nation-state, and the corporations managing this healthcare can now govern people’s relation to doctors, treatment programs, and medical technology without the hindrance of state bureaucracy, jurisdictions, and limited tax distributions. But, for Dávila and many other critics of neoliberalism, this cause-effect relationship between deregulation and efficiency that we are supposed to accept without question is not so clean cut. Instead, the doctrines of neoliberalism are often at odds with its actual practices. Theorizing the gap between doctrines and practices, David Harvey argues that

neoliberal doctrine is in tension with the pragmatics of neoliberalization. He examines how neoliberalism tries to make the practices of market monopoly or market failure unrecognizable from its theories (Harvey 2005: 21). By this, Harvey illustrates the pervasive and deceptive common sense that “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (Harvey 2005: 3). By reducing these ideas to the level of common sense, these economic moves become perceived as normal and out-ofthe-question. This is perhaps why Robert W. McChesney believes that “Neoliberalism’s loudest message is that there is no alternative to the status quo, and that humanity has reached its highest level” and/or reached the end of history with “widespread satisfaction with the status quo” (McChesney 1998: 15). From the US perspective, the status quo or normalizing aspect of neoliberalism has been interrogated popularly in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), where he analyzes why citizens consistently vote against their own interests. From a Latin American perspective, Julia Paley’s work Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movement in Post-Dictatorship Chile (2001) questions how the Chicago School libertarianism of Allende’s Chile were again financed after Pinochet’s government and sold under the ideologies of “freedom.” Both of these works illustrate the way neoliberalism operates by being normalized into everyday culture. But the doctrines of neoliberalism that reduce market objectives to a common-

sense status quo of social relations conflict with its practices. Harvey sees the true objective of neoliberalism’s common sense doctrine as an elaborate process to widen the gap between rich and poor in order to restore upper-class power: “[I]n the struggle to restore or establish a distinctive upper-class power all manner of twists and turns occur as political powers change hands and as the instruments of influence are weakened here or strengthened there” (Harvey 2005: 87). For instance, when we look at what happened during the 1973 New York stock market crash (what Harvey

considers the quintessential neoliberal moment), we can see the way the banks forced the state into bankruptcy in order to influence the state’s government to create new financial institutions for managing the city budget by cutting social programs, such as education, healthcare, public transportation, as well as disempowering unions (Harvey 2005: 45). By doing this, select institutions and CEOs were able to reroute capital in their own direction and for their own purposes. It is this distinguishing characteristic of neoliberalism that many believe makes neoliberalism particularly different from classical liberalism and Keynesianism: it is the restoration of power to an economic elite or upper class. Harvey believes this restoration of power was propagated “through international flows and structural adjustment practices” (Harvey 2005: 29-30) that rerouted money to a select few. The consolidation of class lines, however, is not “neoliberal” in itself. What makes

it neoliberal is, according to Aiwha Ong, how these class lines are governed. She defines “neoliberalism as a technology of governing” (Ong 2006: 9-10) and argues that it “recasts politics as mainly a problematizing activity, one that shifts the focus away from social conflicts and toward the management of social life” (Ong 2006: 178). The force of Ong’s definition is to think about the way Malaysian techniques of security, for instance, treat Indonesian female domestic workers as a threat to the social body. The state or host country can “fix” the problem of foreign migrant workers by keeping the borders open or closed, depending on the amount of public moral outrage or the economic well-being of Malaysia, while also enslaving migrant workers to their economic terms of cheap labor (Ong 2006: 204-5). Ong touches on a similar issue concerning the questionable governances over maquiladora workers moving between Tijuana and Los Angeles. So, where McChesney defines neoliberalism as the way “a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their professional profit” (McChesney 1998: 7), Ong demonstrates one of the ways in which this control is acted out within the social order. This makes neoliberalism the major framework in which social relations are shaped, disciplined, and governed. Social relations now refer to securing the poor in a position of labor capital and the rich in the position of the few and powerful. Yet, if we understand this free market economy to be about consolidating

class divisions and reducing subjectivities to a market logic, then the connection to literature seems purely metaphorical or allegorical. Arlene Dávila claims otherwise, “Neoliberalism is often connected with homelessness, poverty, residential segregation, and other indexes of inequality, yet ‘culture,’ a well-known instrument of entrepreneurship used by government and business, a medium to sell, frame, structure, claim, and reclaim space, is closely implicated in such processes and always in demand of closer scrutiny” (Dávila 2004: 9). Dávila’s argument for culture as equally important as issues of inequality in discussing the socioeconomic climate is perhaps where we might begin to see how literature and specifically Latino/a literature matters in discussions and conceptions of neoliberalism. Latino/a literature is precisely an artifact of “culture” that sells, frames, and structures these processes of neoliberalism. Some of the dominant features of neoliberalism that Latino/a literature exhibits and grapples with include privatizations and liberalizations of Latino/a markets and subjectivities, the way Latinos are commodities within a consumer culture,

narratives about the widening gap between rich and poor, and the immigrant experience from the perspective of crossing the border and from the perspective of cheap labor practices. Latino/a literature is a category of literature that is both contestatory and in contestation, where it resists the appropriations and homogeneity of the market but finds itself fulfilling the market’s desires for difference and niches. This literature, thus, not only shows us its own perspective on the current economic climate but also functions as an integral part of neoliberalism. By representing Latinos/as as both commodities and actors in the dissemination and consolidation of neoliberal doctrines and practices, this array of literature interrogates the way racialized and ethnic subjectivities play a very important role in the market logic. By looking at a condensed set of neoliberal features, I will explore the way a select group of Latino/a literature represents and emblemizes Latinos/as in this socioeconomic climate.