Democracy and (In)equality: Community Activism and Democracy in a Time of Retrenchment

Mary Louise Pratt remarked that “building democracies and ending inequality are ultimately what is at stake” for the writers in a recent anthology on Latin American social movements.1 Indeed, these might well be described as the goals of virtually all movements for progressive social change. Further, while, in the words of Evelina Dagnino, “a hegemonic building of democracy” has emerged as the major project of Left movements in Latin America, that project, in turn, treats the “politico-cultural understanding of differences” as a necessary prerequisite to the creation of democracy, i.e., of a political community that can incorporate those differences in a more egalitarian fashion.2