The Emerald Handbook of Entrepreneurship in Latin America. Unelashing a Millenial Potential

Abstract

A preface commonly directly addresses the book topic, but sometimes a little bit of history on what was built before can give a better picture. Back in 2018, a vision was beginning to build up. I had just received a grant from the Mexican Government, in support to buy academic books and enrich my research library. Looking through the many options available, I began to see that there was a nascent interest in exploring and understanding entrepreneurship from the historical studies perspective, but there was a lack of books regarding this issue, at micro, meso, or macro levels. A couple of ideas began to cross my mind on how to approach this gap. So, I began to reflect on elaborating a book with a focus on my country, Mexico. Since my area was entrepreneurship, the search for a partner that could bring a historical perspective to the project began. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, a Mexican world-renowned historical researcher, was very kind and put me in contact with Araceli Almaraz Alvarado, who, without even knowing me, believed in the project and agreed to participate. In 2020, The History of Entrepreneurship in Mexico: Contextualizing Theory, Theorizing Context was published, a seminal effort not only for our country but also for the Latin American region and at a global scale, since there are very few books regarding this perspective. Once the first book was published, there was space for a second idea to take form. The entrepreneurial processes that the aforementioned book showed can be (of course, context-dependent) extrapolated more or less to the Latin American region. So, to understand better the diverse entrepreneurship dilemmas that our region faces under this new geopolitical order taking place in our era, a Handbook was proposed, focusing not only on the academic audience but also on others interested in this angular, vital issue of our time. It is indeed a critical junction.