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Chapter 4 analyzes how rumberas and rumberos move beyond the stages of folkloric display and maximize their economic agency within the limits of religiously endorsed and gendered roles and responsibilities. While market-oriented reforms put Black peso-poor households at a systemic disadvantage, religious duties and networks afford them resources to “save their families.” Desenvolvimiento, a notion of development tied to spiritual obligation, potential, and interdependence, provides a bottom-up counterpoint to the national development plan (plan de desarollo), rather than arguing for more inclusion within it. This close analysis of how rumberas and rumberos labor across normative conceptions of the religious and the commercial, the public and the private sector, also reveals how gendered norms of embodied devotion and divine reciprocity shape the different capacities that poor Black people leverage to navigate shifting market logics.

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