ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which historical understandings of mestizaje [racial mixing] and racial distinction are reproduced in Peru under meritocratic arguments linked to access to education, professional success, and leadership. This is produced in a context of neoliberal reforms in which emprendedurismo [entrepreneurship] is established as an ideal of Peruvianness, and in which economic growth and that of the middle classes transforms and blurs the barriers between social groups. In such a context, racial discourse is not nullified, but rather transformed in order to fit with ideologies that exalt merit and individual freedom. The hypothesis of this work is that entrepreneurship fulfills the role played by decency in the 19th century to legitimize and naturalize distinctions between a new “entrepreneurial,” urban, mestizo, and middle-class subject and its rural and indigenous counterpart. To address this question, this work is based on an analysis of advertisements of Peru’s second largest low-cost private university, as well as ethnographic information collected at the same institution.
