Global Finance and the International Monetary Fund's Neoliberal Agenda: The Threat to the Employment, Ethnic Identity, and Cultural Pluralism of Latina/o Communities

This Article places recent Lat-Crit scholarship in an institutional and inter-disciplinary context. It serves not just as an indictment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agenda of structural adjustment and liberalization. It also questions the positioning of Lat-Crit scholars to remain silent or complicit with the IMF's agenda. Canova provides a counter-narrative that is rich in historical revisionism, heterodox economics, and sociological conclusions. His recognition of the global unemployment crisis - made largely invisible by orthodox economics and flawed government measurements - is combined with existential insights about the nature of underemployment on the formation of individual identity and cultural pluralism. Originally entitled "Put the Crit Back Into Lat-Crit", but changed to its less controversial title due to pressure from leading Lat-Critters, the Article closes with a discussion that links the tension between acquiescence and critical distance among legal scholars to similar tensions within policymaking institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.