Over the last decade-and-a-half, works like Hernando de Soto’s Otro sendero (1986) have focused attention on a phenomenon that is bringing significant change to Peru: the informal or black market economy. This ongoing, quiet revolution has infused the country with an energetic, entrepreneurial spirit—as well as desperately needed capital—and has created thousands of new enterprises and hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Because this revolution was spearheaded largely by Andean migrants to the coastal urban centers, it is transforming the traditionally subordinate relationship between the indigenous population of the Andean world and the creoles of the coast.
Los otros empresarios looks at this phenomenon from a sociocultural perspective. Through interviews with 20 small entrepreneurs in metropolitan Lima, Norman Adams and Néstor Valdivia attempt to define the cultural dimensions of informality by analyzing the motivations, values, and attitudes that guide the social and economic behavior of these participants. They conclude that the migrants’ success is to be attributed to attitudes and experiences acquired in their Andean home. Such traits as determination, self-reliance, hard work, parsimony, a sense of community, the ability to operate economically at a very low margin, and a certain mercantile tradition serve the migrants well in the creole world of Lima, where the culture denigrates manual labor, champions consumerism, and promotes dependence on the state.
Adams and Valdivia assert that the results of the informal economy’s dramatic expansion over the last two decades have been the insertion into the entrepreneurial class of people with little education and no social and economic connections, the transformation of Lima from ciudad palacio to ciudad productiva, the strengthening of capitalism, and the expansion of the popular classes’ influence in Peruvian politics. Politically, the “informals” tend to locate themselves at the center or center-left. In 1990 they rejected both leftist and rightist appeals in favor of a populism that guaranteed property rights as well as a departure from traditional politics. More than 70 percent of the people interviewed by Adams and Valdivia voted for Alberto Fujimori—attracted by his class and ethnic origin, his association with agriculture, and his call for hard work and economic progress.
The authors effectively challenge de Soto’s neoliberal assumption that the migrants behave in purely economic terms, and suggest that the migrants’ economic decisions are weighted by the sociocultural baggage they carry with them. The authors are less successful in discrediting their compatriot’s major assertions, that the cost of legality forces people of modest means to choose informality and that family and compatriot networks make the informal enterprises less efficient and less able to expand their markets. Nevertheless, Los otros empresarios represents an important addition to the literature on the fascinating subject of the informal economy. The work would have been considerably stronger had the authors used a larger number of subjects and allowed them to tell more of their own story.
