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While microfinance has sometimes been excessively praised, it is now sometimes overly criticized, particularly for being too commercial. It is thus time to question its legitimacy, and this article aims to contribute to this debate. For this purpose, the authors first present a framework of analysis inspired by the work by sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski. They then explain the different trends in Latin-American microfinance, they confront recent statistics on the industry with these trends and finally confront the collected data with the proposed theoretical framework.