During the last decades of the twentieth century, Latin Americans experienced two equally disruptive socioeconomic processes. Liberation theology and the clarion call of Vatican II inspired a range of socio-religious transformations, from local communities of resistance to Central American revolutions. Fused with Paulo Freire's educational pedagogy as a theological praxis, it brought socioeconomic dignity and hope to millions. Transnational neoliberalism soon followed this spiritual hermeneutic, as transnational corporations extended their influence into the farthest corners of the cheapest labor pools. Political states withdrew their responsibility from maintaining social safety nets, instead demanding individual responsibility over communal practice. The Washington Consensus of the 1980s hailed a new triumphant global economic order of neoliberalism as Coca-Cola found its way into baby bottles to ease the hunger pains of millions of Latin American children. This book addresses the interactions of these two processes at an intimate level through an exploration of a small women's cheese cooperative, the Virgen de las Nubes, in the small Ecuadoran community of Chillanes.

Jill DeTemple uses ethnographic fieldwork based on more than 100 structured and unstructured interviews. Placing gender analysis at the center of the story, she demonstrates the ways in which this group of mestiza women negotiated, used, interpreted, and challenged Catholicism, liberation theology, and assumptions about economic development at the local level. In so doing, the author argues that how these processes interact with local values and histories can tell us a great deal about global Catholicism and shifting economic structures under neoliberalism within social groups, as well as the nature of international development.

The book centers on the rise and fall of the cheese factory between 1998 and 2006. Through five chapters, it addresses the relationship between religion and development, highlighting the primary driving forces behind its success and ultimate failure. Chapter 1 discusses the impetus for the cheese cooperative, transforming the group of women from a knitting collective to cheese producers. The praxis of development and liberation theology emerges here as women were identified as the ideal targets for this economic development project. Chapter 2 identifies the paradox that characterized women as the ideal targets for development through an evaluation of how gendered presumptions of women's strengths and social capital ultimately reified gendered stereotypes rather than creating transformative liberating spaces for women.

Chapter 3 serves as the author's core argument as it uncovers the gendered tensions within the nexus of a liberation-derived development project (the cheese factory) and neoliberalism's emphasis on markets and the individual economic roles women were expected to assume. Even though the purpose behind liberation theology's economic projects was to address socioeconomic disparities, the projects were perceived to be gender-neutral. Therefore, as women adopted new responsibilities at the factory, they simultaneously faced the daunting burden of filling the social gaps left by neoliberal processes and an absent state. Although they benefited economically, they continued to bear the burden of domestic unpaid labor as well.

Chapters 4 and 5 chart the rise of the charismatic Catholic Church and its emphasis on the role of women within the family and sacramental practice in an apparent reaction to the politicized nature of liberation theology. Here the author emphasizes Catholicism's relationship with and impact on economic structures_, revealing that, just as neoliberalism realigned gendered roles within the economic world order, Catholicism was also privatized as a result of its interaction with capitalist markets (157). As neoliberalism moved many public services to the private sector in the name of efficiency over collective profits, an emphasis on sacramental Catholicism shifted identity from the collective to the individual.

Through the lens of the cheese cooperative women, DeTemple demonstrates the dissonance of the new world order, weaving the processes of liberation theology and its economic nemesis, neoliberalism, through a story that is at once both universal and particular. While the author makes it clear that these processes cannot be neatly defined, the rise and fall of a small cheese factory symbolizes the complexity of multifaceted processes of liberation theology, social capital, and gender within an emergent neoliberalism. As a result, this story addresses the very nature of communalism and individualism that has shaken one of the most collective institutions to its core.