Review: Octavio Pimentel. Historias de Éxito within Mexican Communities: Silenced Voices, reviewed by Shane Teague

In much traditional discourse on success, there is an undercurrent of objectivism. Pseudo-empirical conceptions of economic success, which grant economics an undue status as an objective metric by which to measure cultural superiority, tell the comfortable, the wealthy, and the privileged that some cultures are just better by virtue of their production. This false objectivity justifies the reification of White European American (WEA) values and only those values by reducing time-honored ideas about success in certain communities to excuses for those communities’ poor performance and, as in the extremely regrettable case of the present day in the United States, using that incongruence between definitions of success to subjugate and demonize those communities’ who do not share WEA values.

 

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