The term reproductive rights encompasses so much in U.S. history, from the right to an abortion to the right to have children. All women, no matter their race or socioeconomic status, have these rights. Yet many women in Connecticut, despite living in one of the healthiest states in the nation, experience this human right being challenged by forces within and outside their control.
Many of these women give birth to children with low or very low birth weight (LBW). A LBW birth is defined as an infant weighing less than 2,500 grams (5 pounds, 8 ounces) at birth. The rate of LBW births is closely associated with infant mortality rate. If the children survive past their first year of life, then LBW puts them at a higher risk for certain diseases as they grow up, like cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, epilepsy, learning disabilities and ADHD. The risk for disease increases the lower the child’s weight at birth.
The burden of LBW births is disproportionately suffered by Black and brown women all over the US, including in Connecticut. From 1990 to 2006, the CT Department of Public Health tracked the percentage of LBW births among Black, Latina, and White women. Consistently, Black women had the highest rates of LBW births, Latina women experienced the second highest, and White women the lowest. In this 16-year time period, while the racial disparity between Black and White women has narrowed, this is mostly due to the increasing rate of LBW births among White women. The number of LBW cases for women in general varied by location as well. In 2008, the city of Bridgeport had 53 more cases than expected, New Haven had 55, and Hartford had a staggering 83.
As previously mentioned, higher rates of LBW births is correlated with higher rates of fetal death. Out of 1000 births, from 1990 to 2006 in CT, White women had a rate of 1.40 fetal deaths, Latina women had a rate of 1.82, and Black women had a rate of 2.90. The rate of fetal death for Black mothers is more than two times higher than for White mothers. CT public health and policy interventions must address this pressing human rights issue.
There are many upstream factors (as opposed to downstream or immediate factors) that affect a woman’s likelihood of having a LBW birth. Some of these factors include: late or no prenatal care, maternal age at pregnancy, and chronic or pregnancy-induced hypertension. Travel even further upstream, there are factors like medical racism, housing segregation, community violence, lack of quality education and low income, which are all a result of the racism and violence built into and sustained in US institutions and systems. Consequently, even when access to care is provided to low-income communities, or when the mother of color is well-educated and of higher-income, the racial disparities in rates of LBW births still persist.
Many of these factors are social determinants of reproductive health. They can be organized along the lines of an obstetric life-course theory. At the top or beginning of a woman’s life, we find the disadvantaged environment that white supremacy and structural racism created and enforces. This encompasses housing segregation, poverty, mass incarceration, insufficiently-funded schools, and the strained relationship between the medical community and the Black and Latinx communities. Deprived environments lead to lack of access to quality care, higher rates of teen pregnancy, chronic hypertension, obesity, mental illness, and chronic stress. Finally, the accumulation of insults on the body and spirit that she has endured often results in preterm birth, LBW birth, and poor health outcomes for her child. Those outcomes will affect the children’s children, too, and the cycle continues.
In order to break this cycle, we need to stop treating poor health outcomes like they are primarily caused by “individual behaviors and attitudes”, and put much more focus on the structural determinants of health. We need to financially and mentally invest in community health centers, in anti-racism training for health care professionals and of course, in the communities themselves. We need to stop the criminalization of Black and brown people and the violence that the prison industrial complex does to families.
Black and brown mothers’ and their babies’ lives matter. Their health matters. Their flourishing matters. Listen up, Connecticut.
I used to think my mother didn’t understand what revolutions meant at all. Then I remembered that the beginning of her life was in the midst of societal upheaval, a political revolution, and civilian warfare: China’s Cultural Revolution.
She and one of her sisters went to live in the country with their uncle during this time. My mother was 10 or 11. There was no way to contact her parents back in the city, where her parents stayed indoors to avoid stray bullets flying around, or avoid harassment by those who claimed her mother was a traitor. On the way to her uncle’s, my mother recalls people shooting at the train. One women was shot through the window. Other dead men lay on the ground beside the train tracks.
She and her sister stayed in the countryside for months, walking miles to the train station every week to see if the train had come in, to see if they could go home. There was no meat to eat that whole time. It got so bad that at one point, her uncle’s family killed their pet dog. My mother sat with her cousin as he cried in another room, while everyone else ate, starved of protein.
My mother’s two oldest sisters and brother were in a different countryside, far away, with the rest of the young adults getting a “rural education” mandated by Mao’s government. She didn’t see them for years. They didn’t get to finish high school.
China has changed a lot since then. The Cultural Revolution opened up the nation to the West, and “development” ensued. My mother benefitted from it. She was later able to become the first person in our family to go to college, and then the first person to immigrate out of China. However, the trauma never left her. It became ingrained in her, and accounts for much of her personality and worldview. I’m trying to figure out now how exactly it has affected her.
Decades later, her American-born daughter (me) is part of a huge movement pushing for the construction of a new (RADICALLY BETTER) society. While she had no choice but to go through such a construction (and destruction), and clearly doesn’t want to go through something like it again, I choose everyday to be a part of it. Frankly, our different world-views cause heated arguments sometimes. Cause them often, lately. She supports others’ involvement in BLM and social activism, but doesn’t want me to be involved. This deeply disturbs me.
However, I remind myself that I can’t keep being angry with my mother everyday. It’s not healthy, and it’s not nurturing. Additionally, when she tells me, “Don’t do politics, it’ll only make you miserable!”, I have to remember how social upheaval was one of her first traumas. Social upheaval was the beginning of her life.
But y’all? Let’s make this revolution a better one. No matter how racist, how misguided, how clueless our parents can be, we OWE it to them, to build a better world off of their legacy and on their shoulders. I know I owe my mother the world twice over. Even if she doesn’t fully understand America and the urgent need for change, she always taught me to be loving and to stand for what’s right.
Let’s get it right this time. Let’s build that world where traumas like my mother’s can be healed, not systematically repeated.
On this day, it’s Black Out Tuesday. I initially was going to write a piece on how reproductive capacities of black women are once again under attack through mass incarceration. However the current political times have me thinking a lot about advocacy and activism. What it should look like and whose responsibility is it.
Well, my answer is probably going to be controversial but when has anything I said not been controversial.
I’m tired. I’m tired of black people saying the same thing. And going out in the streets and pushing for our rights and receiving the same results.
It’s time that white and non black minorities make a conscious effort to eliminate anti-blackness.
Because to be completely honest, it’s not going to happen if y’all don’t get on board.
I went to a protest in my hometown for #BLM. When I decided to go, I couldn’t help but think of what would happen if it turned violent. Would I be able to come back home? Would I need to use my body as a shield to protect my brother?
Imagine my surprise when 90% of the people at the protest were white and non-Black minorities. At first I was annoyed and angry. Was this just another ploy for social clout? But as I cheered and stood in silence with them, I realized the power of the image being depicted to passerby. WHITE PEOPLE WAKE UP. ITS OUR PROBLEM TOO!
Seeing white counterparts protesting made other whites feel comfortable vocalizing their support. Including a college aged white girl who drove around our protest several times fist in the air playing NWA’s Fuck the Police and an older white gentleman starting a chant for George Floyd.
However as we are rallying along racial lines, I can’t help but see the lack of intersectionality on gender. People seem to have already forgotten about Breonna Taylor. And our queer black women and men.
Even though most protesting are women, pictures mostly depict men at the frontlines. Emphasizing that as we progress towards justice we must not forget that we need to consciously act against ALL the evils in this patriarchal, Heteronormative, cisgender society.
That we all have a part to play and the show must go on!
In Earth Beings (2015), Marisol de la Cadena talks about Mariano and his ayllu, which includes humans and non-human ‘earth beings’ like Ausangate. In-ayllu practices and events--like how Ausangate won the war against the invading Spainards--don’t create historical events, de la Cadena explains. The Western notion of ‘history’ divides ‘human’ and ‘nature’, and is limited to the literate, the profane, the secular, the scientific, the state. Thus, despite the magnitude of power Mariano and his ayllu yield in their worlds, many if not most of their existence is unseen, unrecorded, regarded ahistorical in the Western ‘modern’ world.
You know what feels ahistorical to me?
The radical queer future I want to live.
Can a future be historical if it hasn’t happened yet? What does “happen” mean? If it happens within my mind or my heart, does it still qualify as an event? If ‘it’ is the realization of desire, of new ways to flourish, of more possibility, ‘it’ must qualify as an event. Right? ‘It’ is shared and overlapping with dreams from communities of queer folk around the world. I have evidence for that on social media, in movies and in conversations with my friends.
But with my closest kin, who I spend most of my waking hours with, the evidence cannot exist. What I really fear is that my queerness is an “excess” (de la Cadena) to the heteronormative ‘reality’ that it seems the majority of people around me are living. This excess, if never acted on, will drift off into a-historicity, never an event, an ontological impossibility-- to them anyway. That’s why I feel more compelled to act on it than ever. During quarantine, I often feel as though my identity is sand slipping through my fingers.
To be more precise, queerness in a nurturing sense doesn’t exist for my mother and company. For lesbians, gays, and transgender people (she does not seem to know more beyond that), she thinks about social rejection and about living in an unnatural way. Queerness definitely doesn’t exist within the dreams she dreams for my sister and I. Yet, ironically, from being of and growing up with my mother, this queer force of wide open love has grown within me. I am so much my mother and everything she’s taught me, and the translation of her into the US context I grew up in... is the queer Asian American that I am.
Queer... as in... imagining more possibilities than originally proscribed. Queer as in confronting all about racism and patriarchy that is not okay. Queer as in not being afraid to ask for more safety / happiness / flourishing than seemed available to my mother and sister.
What is ‘it’ really? Is it worth clinging on to right now? Is it foolish to cling at all?
Equivocation, Partial Connections and Radical Difference
Marisol de la Cadena’s Earth Beings is a wonderfully eye-opening ethnography. I learned about Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s term “equivocation”, what being partially connected might mean, and how to do difference radically. These concepts seem really important for anyone doing qualitative or ethnographic research or thinking with identity politics. I will use these concepts in other posts, so I wanted to describe them here.
“[an equivocation is] a failure to understand that understandings are necessarily not the same, and that they are not related to imaginary ways of ‘seeing the world’ but to the real worlds that are being seen” -- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004)
“As a mode of communication, equivocations emerge when different perspectival positions -- views from different worlds, rather than perspectives about the same world -- use the same word to refer to things that are not the same.” -- Marisol de la Cadena (2015, 110)
“On things that are partially connected, John Law writes: ‘The argument is that ‘this’ (whatever ‘this’ may be) is included in ‘that’, but ‘this’ cannot be reduced to ‘that’’... To paraphrase: my world was included in the world that my friends inhabited and vice versa, but their world could not be reduced to mine, or mine to theirs... And rather than maintaining the separation that the difference caused, we chose to explore the difference together.” -- Marisol de la Cadena (4).
“I learned to identify radical difference as a relation... the condition between us that made us aware of our mutual understandings but did not fully inform us about ‘the stuff’ that composed those misunderstandings...” -- Marisol de la Cadena (63).
“Difference that is radical-- or what the “self” cannot recognize or know without serious runakuna intermediation...” --Marisol de la Cadena (100).
~ ~ ~
de la Cadena, Marisol (2015). Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004). Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation”. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2(1), Article 1.
The following piece was written in Fall of 2019, for my Flourishing seminar and before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Mary Waters’ Black Identities, she uses Cornell and Hartmann’s conception of ethnicity, a “narrative” about our history and place in the world, to distinguish black American and West Indies identities. This conception helps answer the questions, Why aren’t Asians considered a threat to white America? Why don’t Asians have the same level of solidarity as Black Americans? Why don’t we collectively have solidarity with Black Americans?
Asians, especially East Asians, are mostly voluntary immigrants in American history. Just like Waters observes about West Indian immigrants, Asians might feel that, “What I suffer here is temporary. I might not be valued here, but I have a place elsewhere where I am valued. I am different, but not the opposite. My efforts to succeed will be met with a proportionate level of success. Thus, I shall work hard and teach my kids to work hard. And all will be well”. Their ethnicity tells a comforting and even empowering narrative about themselves.
In contrast, involuntary immigrants, the enslaved, might think, according to Waters, that the discrimination and mistreatment they receive is permanent. There is no “elsewhere” and their identity is defined in opposition to their enslaver. To achieve their flourishing, they must come together in solidarity to overcome the institutions of the oppressive majority.
These questions and issues bother me constantly because I identify with the group, “people of color” (POC); those who are non-white and cannot ever pass for white; those who are against white supremacy and structural racism; those who, as a group, cannot flourish with these forces in place. Some may say, because I don’t look Black or brown, I am not a POC, but I disagree. I am not white, and will never pass for white. Even though my own suffering from racism cannot compare with Black Americans, I have still suffered and am always vulnerable to the whims of white supremacy. POC is a new ethnic/racial category that can have a narrative of collective oppression under white supremacy. It has immense power for collective action for change, if united under it. The problem is getting Asians on board (mainly the lighter-skinned and wealthier East Asian Americans).
It might seem that Asians are in a safe place now as the “model minority”, achieving more income and better health than other racial minorities. Asians seem to fit in the US’s social hierarchy between Black/brown and white. Unlike Black people, we don’t have racism against us enshrined pervasively in America’s legal system and institutions. However, we have some. America wasn’t always the way it is now; the racial landscape of laws and sentiments changes. Remember the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps. Remember the anti-miscegenation laws and the pamphlets helping white soldiers distinguish between “good” chinks (Chinese) and “bad” chinks (Japanese). Our privileged status is PRECARIOUS. That’s why it is vital that Asians work in solidarity with Black and brown communities to bring down all forms of structural racism. Only that way, will we truly be safe. Their struggles are our struggles. We have to see it that way.
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Fast forward to 2020, COVID-19 happens. The message of this piece is more urgent than ever.
Watch The Grapevine’s video, The Relationships Between the Black and Asian Community, Quarantine Edition.
The strength of a society’s institutions is determined by how they treat the most vulnerable members of society. The U.S.’s current immigration system is clearly broken because it criminalizes and punishes people given the least rights in our society: undocumented immigrants. Militarized border enforcement, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) are three major parts of the broken system that contribute to unnecessary suffering and exploitation of immigrants today. The makers of these policies rush to place the burden of punishment on migrants, without honestly examining the crime being punished for. Is crossing the border really a crime, and if not, should immigrants be the ones shouldering the burden of responsibility?
The Burden of Institutional Punishment
Despite the fact that many people crossing the Mexican-U.S. border are parents with children left in the U.S. and asylum seekers, the border is treated like a war zone. Immigration restrictionists talk about Mexican immigrants as “invaders” and “reconquistadors”, demanding that more U.S. taxpayer dollars need to go towards border security to keep migrants out. By expanding the border wall, migrants are redirected towards perilous landscapes, many meeting an untimely death.
Once people are able to settle in America, they face the challenge of obtaining a stable job within a safe workplace. IRCA was a policy passed in 1986 that had a short term positive effect on immigrants by providing legalization for several thousand undocumented immigrants, but had a long term negative effect by prohibiting companies to hire people with an undocumented immigration status. In the long run, this policy took power away from migrants desperately in need of work and put it into the hands of companies eager to cut labor costs and maintain a disposable workforce. IRCA has allowed companies to exploit people with an undocumented status through wage theft, no paid overtime, random firings, and many other abuses. Due to fears of deportation, undocumented immigrants don’t report these abuses as much as U.S. citizens might.
Undocumented immigrants fear the threat of deportation outside the workplace as well. IIRIRA was a policy passed in 1996 that expanded the kinds of offenses that immigrants could be punished for by detention and deportation; even petty theft could result in deportation. This has hurt many communities in America, as families are split apart and those who stay in the U.S. risk being plunged into poverty. Today, especially with the Trump administration, undocumented immigrants still live in paranoia that their world could be uprooted from beneath their feet at any moment.
Asking Why: Push and Pull Factors
These policies and rhetoric criminalize and dehumanize undocumented immigrants. Proponents and opponents of immigration often fail to pause and question the offense migrants are being punished for. If crossing the border is the crime focused on, shouldn’t we ask why a mass of people are desperately crossing the border into America, before we judge them? Before we pour thousands more dollars of taxpayer money into border enforcement? How different are political refugees from economic refugees, anyway? The current immigration rhetoric ignores what complex forces push and pull people to migrate. It assumes immigrants have violent intentions at worst, and at best, doesn’t question the philosophy to punish their very presence.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has had devastating effects on Mexico’s economy and people, especially agrarian communities. After Mexico’s government and economy were completely restructured to accommodate its northern neighbors’ conditions for participation in NAFTA, the U.S.’s GDP has steadily risen as Mexico’s has barely changed. Meanwhile, thousands of Mexicans, men and women, are migrating north, because traditional agrarian lifestyles that have sustained their communities for hundreds of years are no longer economically viable. This is a result of the US flooding the Mexican market with its government subsidized corn, which has plummeted the market price of corn, making it impossible for local farmers to make a living anymore. Additionally, NAFTA prohibited the Mexican government from buying local farmers’ crops and providing subsidies, setting up the farmers for failure. For many people, providing for their family and survival now requires working in America.
Not only have forces pushed people out of Mexico, but forces have pulled them into the U.S. as well. Many firms actively recruit Mexican and other Latinx immigrants to come work in the U.S. These corporations, like those in the poultry industry in the South, promise steady jobs with high pay and decent housing. When immigrants arrive at the workplace, though, they are often disappointed. Corporations are incentivized to recruit undocumented immigrants because undocumented immigrants have less rights and legal knowledge than most citizens, and the companies need a large unskilled labor force the native population provides insufficiently. Despite the exploitation and abuse many undocumented immigrants face, though, people still want to work in order to send remittances back home and pay off debts. Thus, the U.S. economy relies on immigrants and their precarious undocumented status. What we need is to enforce worker protections and rights for all, no matter what status, instead of promoting the exploitation of immigrants by greedy corporations.
Jaded Conclusions
Instead of taking responsibility for the role it has played in destabilizing other nations and acknowledging the exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor, the U.S. government... just sucks. It criminalizes, marginalizes, and punishes immigrants through a violent immigration and criminal justice system. These systems must be reformed! New policies must be put into practice that acknowledge why migrants migrate, fight corrupt corporate practices, and that build a more just North America. I hope someday soon, I can write about how U.S. immigration policy sucks... less.
Development and Immigration: Conversations about Immigration Need to Change
This piece was written in spring of 2019 for a course on migration. I discuss how development has contributed to the impoverishment and displacement of people from Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
In the U.S., the general public blames all our problems on immigrants. They’re taking American jobs! They’re terrorists! They’re criminals! What many Americans don’t know, is that their own government has played a large role in pushing immigrants out of their home countries and into the U.S. In Mexico and the Dominican Republic, the U.S. government has contributed to transforming their economy and government for the benefit of the U.S., and at the cost of many displaced families and individuals. If the American public had a deeper understanding of the social research on immigration and each sending countries’ historical backgrounds, the conversation would sound very different, and perhaps change for the better.
Mexico and the Bad Deal
As Massey writes in International Migration and Human Rights, “...international migration does not stem from a lack of economic development, but from development itself”, which “... disrupts existing social and economic arrangements… brings about the widespread displacement of people from customary livelihoods, creating a mobile population of wage laborers...” (p.27). People aren’t simply escaping primitive poverty. When modern production methods or markets enter their countries’ economies, many people can no longer afford to survive with their traditional livelihoods. Those with enough existing capital may be able to fold themselves into the developing market, but for most, wage work is their only option. To support their family, many people will go into cities or other countries where there are more work opportunities.
In the case of Mexico, the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) was an effort by the Mexican, U.S., and Canadian governments to promote trade among the three countries. Instead of creating economic prosperity in Mexico, Bacon describes how the free market agreement hit the agrarian, auto parts, maritime, and maquiladora workers egregiously. With the influx of US-subsidized corn, the agrarian community no longer could sell their crops nor afford to cultivate them. On top of that, with the NAFTA restrictions on government aid, the Mexican government was prohibited from intervening by buying the crops or subsidizing production. Thousands of auto industry workers lost their jobs when NAFTA disallowed laws “requiring foreign producers to use a certain percentage of local content… without this restraint, the auto giants began to supply their assembly lines with parts… often manufactured in other countries” (p.24). When NAFTA privatized Mexico’s shipping terminals, the ports were sold off to private foreign companies, plummeting local wages and slashing maritime jobs. Lastly, after NAFTA was established, thousands within the maquiladoras industry lost their jobs during U.S. recessions, when demand for maquiladora products went down. The Mexican and US economies were intimately intertwined with asymmetric power relations.
“Campesinos who lost their land found jobs as farmworkers in California ...[while] laid-off railroad workers travelled north, as their forebears had… when Mexican labor built much of the rail network through the U.S. southwest” (p.25).
Overall, the U.S. contributed immensely to the creation of a large population of Mexican people in need of work. With previous connections made under the Bracero program (1942-1964), many Mexicans followed the steps of their fathers and grandfathers who travelled to America to make a living.
And yet, with some twisted, sick logic, Mexicans are one of the most demonized groups in America.
US Meddling in the Dominican Republic
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof describes the historical relations between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic (D.R.). The US’s exploitative manipulation of the D.R. began with imperialism, and continued with the military support of the brutal dictator, Rafael Trujillo. However, later on, the US CIA armed a group that was against Trujillo’s policies, and who eventually assassinated him. D.R. was in chaos following the dictator’s death, and the U.S. further interfered by sending an American ambassador over to subdue any communist action and further conflict. Not only did the U.S. meddle from afar, but the U.S. military also invaded the D.R.’s capital, Santo Domingo, in 1965, four years after the death of Trujillo. When many Dominicans sought to escape the terrible political and economic circumstances, the U.S. government opened their doors wide, in order to maintain a friendly facade that would keep support for communism at bay.
The immigrants from Mexico and the D.R. are victims of negligent governments who put their own profits before people. How is it acceptable for the U.S. to vilify migrants and criminalize their efforts to live a better life? This, coupled with the brutal border protection efforts, travel bans, and detention of innocent people is hypocritical and callous. It is unjust! The US federal government tries to appear in control and maintain public opinion (whose?), while causing many innocent people to suffer.
How We Can Change Immigration Policy
Massey proposed that nations could “design programs to enhance immigrants’ connections to the sending society and to maximize their propensity for return migration” (p.40). Other solutions have been proposed, including one by the Center for Global Development, which U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres supported. Global Skill Partnerships are partnerships between firms and governments of a destination country and a sending country designed to train potential migrants from sending countries in skills needed by the destination country. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement because the destination country has access to skilled workers when in need, and the sending country has access to job opportunities for their working-age population.
However, we must change immigration policy for “unskilled” people who want to work as well. Massey’s insight, mentioned earlier, that “...international migration does not stem from a lack of economic development, but from development itself”, should make Americans take pause. If development is causing people to leave their home countries, is it actually good for the country? We need to reassess what “development” means.
Migrants from all around the world are embedded in systems of displacement and exploitation that the U.S. plays a leading part in. Within this current system of neoliberal capitalism and globalization, immigration simply cannot be stopped by detaining families and building walls. We need to understand why people migrate, and understand how we have much capacity to accept migrants. In fact, our country needs migrants. Our leaders like to speak of immigration as if capitalism isn’t related to it, as if capitalism doesn’t exploit it, but in reality, the U.S. is a member of an interdependent international community with uneven power distributions. Instead of staying lost in a delusion, the conversation about immigration must acknowledge history and the current research about what’s really going on.
My mother was an assistant dean at what would become one of China’s most prestigious universities. She was happy there, adored by her students and colleagues. Only a province away, her parents and siblings adored her as well. However, when my mother and father received the chance to immigrate to America, they both quickly took the opportunity and never looked back.
This seemingly insane life decision--that I still question her about to this day-- was grounded in the idea that my sister and I would have better opportunities in a more ‘developed’ country; that countries become more prosperous when they are dedicated to development. Certainly, having learned about the destructive nature of neoliberal capitalism, I’ve come to hold the development framework suspect. Yet, I didn’t realize that the framework and discourse are parts of coloniality, until I read Arturo Escobar’s writings on the “problematization” or “discovery” of poverty (1995).
Colonial/Western leaders maintain the hierarchy by defining, or quantifying, what a sufficient standard of living is, dictating who is ‘undeveloped’ or ‘developing’, and who is ‘developed’ in monetary terms. When the ‘problem’ is quantified, the ‘natural’ solution is to make numbers go up, i.e. grow the economy with any means necessary. Escobar points out how this has not worked. This discourse has only increased inequality and even worsened living conditions for many around the world.
What we need now, Escobar states, is not more development alternatives. We need alternatives to development. Transition designs... for the pluriverse. Like Buen vivir.
I try to explain this critique of development to my mother, and a bit about the alternatives, but she doesn’t understand. Or maybe, I don’t understand.
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Escobar, Arturo. 2012. The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development, in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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