A blessing and a curse: Oil, politics, and morality in Bolivarian Venezuela By MattWilde. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 236 pp.

It is not hyperbolic to argue that over the past quarter century, Venezuela has transformed in innumerable ways and at a dizzying pace. In the early years of the 21st century, Venezuela led Latin America's “pink tide,” a democratic shift toward leftist governments that dominated the region. From 1999 to his death in 2013, President Hugo Chávez tirelessly unveiled projects whose stated aims were to shift the balance of power in Latin America from wealthy elites to historically marginalized populations, including the poor, indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities, and women. Political conflicts were legion, probably unavoidable in such revolutionary moments, but undeniably intensified by polarization between the country's leftist leaders and their conservative opposition. Unfortunately, the global oil market bottomed out around the same time as Chávez's successor, Nicolás Maduro, took office, sending the country into a period of ongoing economic, political, and social upheaval. Most readers are familiar with what followed: hyperinflation, violent protests, humanitarian crisis, and mass migration. Scholars of Venezuela have struggled to effectively analyze society across this period, given the multifaceted nature of the country's struggles and the rapid pace of social change. This is one reason why Matt Wilde's book, A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela, is such an important addition to scholarship on 21st-century Venezuela. A Blessing and a Curse uniquely provides a longitudinal ethnographic analysis of daily life and politics during a period that spans the high and low points of revolutionary Venezuela. The author completed extensive, long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Venezuela's third-largest city, Valencia, from 2008 to 2017. The resulting work deftly integrates ethnographic attention to global economic flows, national social programs, community politics, and intimate family life as they play out in a poor neighborhood in Valencia. I know of no other ethnography of 21st-century Venezuela that provides both a longitudinal and multiscalar perspective on daily life and politics. In its holistic assessment of Venezuelan politics and society, the book serves as a model for how ethnography can integrate local, national, and global insights about morality and economic life (especially in the context of resource dependency). Wilde critically evaluates the challenges and possibilities of a revolutionary national politics unfolding at the ground level, contextualizing this process in the ongoing global history of colonialism and capitalism. The book focuses on how a national dependence on oil wealth bankrolled government efforts to reduce social inequalities while simultaneously undermining efforts at long-term moral and political transformations. The writing is compelling and detailed, and it complements the findings reported in other ethnographic monographs of Venezuelan society for the same period. The analysis and theoretical contributions are wide ranging, and they engage productively with both English- and Spanish-language scholarship. Wilde focuses on oil wealth as a driver of Venezuela's progress and problems, explicitly building on theoretical insights that Coronil (1997) developed in his book The Magical State. Venezuela possesses the world's largest petroleum reserves; in recent years, oil exports have composed over 90 percent of its GDP. Coronil argued that oil wealth enabled the state to appear almost magical in its ability to amass and distribute material resources, minimizing the cultural valuation of other industries and of labor in general. In Wilde's telling, oil wealth exuded less of a magical quality and more of a corrupting one, subtly poisoning Venezuelans’ understanding of their moral worth and values, even as it provided massive material benefits to communities during the high point of government spending under Chávez. He shows how local anxieties about antivalores, literally “negative values,” such as individualism, consumerism, and egotism, get attributed to the country's history of easily gained oil wealth and are seen to impede the production of socialist personhood. In addition to the moral problems that Wilde's interlocutors view as rooted in oil dependency, A Blessing and a Curse shows that leftist government projects to build radical participatory democratic processes were undermined by the government's monopoly on oil wealth. His ethnographic research reveals how difficult it was to cultivate autochthonous community politics when resources for projects were managed by state institutions and state actors. At the macro level, the Chávez and Maduro governments’ failure to diversify the economy beyond oil revenues kept the country in a position of economic dependence vis-à-vis a volatile global oil trade; as a result, Venezuela remained deeply embedded in capitalist logics even as it claimed to promulgate “21st-century socialism.” At the heart of this book's narrative live the members of an intergenerational, multifamily household in a Valencia barrio (poor urban neighborhood) he calls El Camoruco. The chapters chart a decade of highs and lows for people's lives, desires, and political engagements. Because Wilde stays focused on members of a single household, readers come away with a good sense of how poor and working-class Venezuelans experienced daily life as the country changed. Chapter 1 introduces the ethnographic setting, history, and theoretical framing of the book, while chapter 2 describes the members of the Hernández family, with whom Wilde lived and who serve as the center of action for the remaining chapters. Because the married couple who run this household are community activists and their household enjoys an elevated financial position compared to others in the neighborhood, Wilde observed grassroots political action and local social tensions from an insider's vantage point. The third chapter discusses the morally ambiguous effects of government social programs (known as “missions”) in El Camoruco. While they provide manifest benefits, including new educational opportunities, these benefits are often unevenly distributed. Chapter 4 addresses a major sociological puzzle during this period: why violent crime and youth gang membership continued apace amid marked reductions in poverty in urban neighborhoods. In this chapter, as in others, Wilde explains local happenings with reference to the broader contradictions of the petro-state: infusions of oil wealth improved material conditions but failed to transform the economy in ways that created employment opportunities. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 take an in-depth look at grassroots politics, exploring in intimate detail the possibilities and pitfalls of state-led experiments in participatory politics. These chapters offer ethnographic examples of the moral tensions surrounding leftist political activism in Venezuela during this period. Neither romanticizing nor dismissive, Wilde's analysis here shows how much energy, compromise, and sacrifice it takes to engage in long-term activism for radical social change, and how successes do not come easily, even in the context of state support and access to resources. The final two chapters (chaps. 8 and 9) discuss El Camoruco's struggles for survival and well-being in 2017, when hyperinflation, economic crisis, international sanctions, and ongoing political strife created a debacle that made the basic activities of daily life extremely stressful. Chapter 9 contains excellent analysis and recommendations for how contemporary Venezuela can inform emancipatory national and global political projects to transcend resource dependence and the legacies of capitalism and colonialism. A Blessing and a Curse is ambitious in its multiscalar analyses of both neighborhood political activism and of how resource dependency limits national projects to promote sovereignty and improve people's lives. Wilde maintains a balance between micro- and macroanalysis that I found inspiring. Readers interested in Latin American studies, the recent history of Venezuela, and the cultural anthropology of political activism, morality, or oil should read this book. Lively and teachable, this book would work well in an undergraduate Latin American studies course, especially one focused on revolution or community life. It would also make a welcome addition in graduate courses on the anthropology or social scientific study of revolution, oil, or morality.