Ethnoracial Identity, Multiculturalism, and Neoliberalism in the Brazilian Northeast

Abstract

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the political landscape of Latin America began to shift away from what many would characterize as the dark days of neoliberalism. Scholarship on the relationship between neoliberalism and multiculturalism, which not long ago seemed to be going in circles,¹ has finally pushed some of us to consider that Latin America has begun to move beyond neoliberalism into an era we might call—for lack of a better term—“post-neoliberalism.” As prima facie evidence of this, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century countries across Latin America have elected left-leaning presidents on platforms opposed to neoliberalism, and popular leaders are calling upon their followers to “fight for the people” more than at any time since mid-twentieth-century populism.