"Virtually all of the scholarship on identity sees it as something that comes from the bottom-up. Martinez Novo recognizes the popular side of identity formation, but also looks at the process from the top down. How do more powerful actors-state institutions, intellectuals, elites, NGOs, etc.-try, in an imperfect and messy way, to mold collective identities? Martinez Novo not only poses this rather interesting problem, but investigates it with an innovative methodology and supports it with sound scholarship."
-Steve Striffler, author of In the Shadows of State and Capital