ABSTRACT
The concept of “neoliberal multiculturalism” has been in circulation for two decades, and the phenomenon it describes for perhaps a decade more. The key to understanding neoliberalism’s venacularization as an epithet, the encapsulating culprit of economic inequality and social suffering, at least in Latin America, is its repackaging as the “Washington Consensus.” Neoliberalism in Latin America generally came with a commitment to the procedural trappings of electoral democracy, with material incentives for adherents and selective repression for those who resisted, and justifications that combined remnants of the utopian allure with bare-bones pragmatism. Appropriately deployed, the notion of neoliberal multiculturalism should be an invitation to explore the heterogeneity, driven by two central propositions: dominant actors and institutions aligned with and empowered by the principles of neoliberalism also tend to endorse a limited cluster of multicultural rights; the resulting fusion – neoliberal multiculturalism – leaves unchallenged, and often more deeply entrenched than ever, pervasive relations of structured racial inequality.
