Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: (510) 642-4766
enriquez@berkeley.edu
Laura Enríquez principal interest is in the possibilities and dilemmas inherent in social transformation in Latin America. She has approached this interest through the lens of agriculture, whether in the shape of agrarian reform, food policy, or more general policies related to production in this sector of the economy and those who engage in it. Her research sites have been Nicaragua and Cuba, where she has engaged in interviewing and ethnography to study these topics.
Enríquez first two books were broadly concerned with the impact of the agrarian reform that was carried out in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government between 1979 and 1990. She looked at the effect it had on the economy as a whole, as well as the ways in which it influenced the political perspective of agrarian reform beneficiaries. In addition, she examined the shift in food policy in post-1990 Cuba, and the country's larger process of agrarian transformation, as its socialist government attempted to survive the collapse of its key trade partner - the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.
Enríquez is currently writing a book, tentatively titled "Pathways from Socialism: Small Farmers in the Economic Reshaping of Nicaragua and Cuba," which brings her research on these two countries together in an analysis of the different strategies that each government pursued in the post-1990 period to address its economic crisis, and the impact they had on small farmers. These strategies reflected the overall political economic orientation of their respective governments: in Nicaragua, the emphasis was on bringing about a rapid retreat from socialism, and in Cuba, it was on reconfiguring socialism. The book also places Nicaragua's and Cuba's small farmers in a comparative light, analyzing the similarities of these two cases with those of small farmers in Russia and China. And, it situates this discussion at the intersection of the theoretical debates concerning "the transition to the market" that is taking place in former socialist countries - in particular the issue of whether this transition has led to more or less inequality - and the future of the peasantry with the expansion of capitalism in agriculture.
