Moving on and Moving Back: Rethinking Inequality and Migration in the LatinAmericanCity
Introduction
A little over forty years ago, I studied two low-income urban neighbourhoodsin Guatemala City with the aim of exploring the social and political changes accompanying rapid urban growthand substantial rural-urban migration[1]. Guatemala City was then a relatively small city by Latin American standards and the country one of the poorest and most rural in Latin America.
The subsequent years have seen momentous changes in the general economic and political environment of Latin American cities, including that of Guatemala City, as a result of democratization and the switch from the predominant model of Important Substituting Industrialization (ISI) to one based on free market policies. From 2002 to 2005, I participated in a research project on the impact of these economic and political changes on poverty, inequality, and urban community organization in eight of the larger cities in Latin America.[2] This research project did not include Guatemala City; so to build upon my first urban research in Latin America, I decided to take advantage of Peter Ward’s current project on the evolution of low-income housing in Latin America by restudying the two Guatemala Cityneighbourhoods.[3]
I did so because I wanted to use my earlier data to explore longitudinally the meaning of urban change through the lives and perceptions of several generations of inhabitants, as has been done in other restudies of poor urbanneighbourhoods in Latin America.[4] I was also attracted to the restudy ofthe Guatemala Cityneighbourhoods as an opportunity to use the city and its poor neighbourhoods to explore and develop further the issues for contemporary urban research that my colleagues and I had identified in our studies ofthe eight Latin American cities. My aim was to ‘move back’ in order to ‘move on’.
There is no typical Latin American City and Guatemala was and remains, on various counts, an outlier among Latin American cities. In the 1960s, Guatemala was one of the least urbanized of Latin American countries and Guatemala City one of the least industrialized. Both comparisons remain true today. Guatemala City is also an outlier because of the high degreeof social, political and economicproblemsthat it faces: the persistence over time of high levels of income inequality, the relative absence of industrialization, lack of urban planning, high levels of informal employment, high levels of crime and violence, weak state institutions and the absence of state provided welfare. At the same time, Guatemala City,like other Latin American cities,is shaped by theglobal economic and communications system, by free market policies and by democratization. My aim is, thus, to use the similarities and differences between present-day urban organization in Guatemala and other Latin American cities to help identify what isparticular and what is general in the way that the contemporary urban poor in Latin Americamanage their environments. In this commentary, I will focus on what has changed in migration and in the ways in which people experience poverty and inequality.
The restudy of the two neighbourhoods consists of surveys,in-depth interviews with neighbourhood leaders, business people and long-time residents.[5]The original surveys in 1968 were done randomly, using housing maps to identify representative samples. New surveys have been carried out in both neighbourhoods that include socio-economic data on households, housing improvements and residents’ perceptions of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the neighbourhood. The new surveys aimed, as far as it is feasible, to use the addresses and data in the 1968 questionnaires as the basis for the new samples. It proved impossible to match the addresses in one of the neighbourhoods, Planificada; but we have used current maps to obtain a representative sample of similar size to the original. We also revisited families and informants that had been present when I did my original study in 1966 and 1968. We are now in the process of interviewing a sub-sample of the original inhabitants and their children to compile extended family histories of social and spatial mobility in the intervening forty years.
Caution will be needed since the two neighbourhoods, one originally a centrally located squatter settlement and the other a peripheral but legally settled subdivision, are only a small part of a city that has grown enormously both in population and in area. The two neighbourhoods are not representative of all poor neighboods in Guatemala, either in their socio-economic composition, nor in their location. Consequently, we are using micro-data from the 2002 Guatemalan Census to place our neighbourhood data in the broader urban context. One other important limitation to this restudy is the current climate of insecurity in Guatemala City. When I conducted my original field-work in 1966 and 1968, I could walk freely, day and night, in either neighbourhood. That is no longer possible. In one of the neighbourhoods, San Lorenzo, my colleagues and I now need to be accompanied by a neighbourhood leader when we visit to interview or attend meetings. In neither neighbourhood is it advisable to work at night.
I will first move back , placing the urbanization in Guatemala of the 1960s and 1970s in the Latin American context. Then I review what I and other researchers, working in different cities and countries, learnt about migration and inequality in the 1960s and 1970s. My discussion of the contemporary period first looks at the contemporary context of urbanization in Guatemala. Then I examine the significance of changes in urban migration patterns as Guatemala like other Latin American cities expels rather than takes in population. My discussion of contemporary inequality concentrates on the impact of new patterns of spatial organization and segregation that are possibly more malignant in Guatemala than elsewhere. Finally, I consider the ways in which the urban poor organize to adapt to the challenges of the new urban environment, including their relationships with external actors, whether governments or national and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
Urbanization, Migration and Inequality in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the mid-twentieth century, Guatemala had low levels of urbanisation compared with Argentina, one of the most urban countries of the time in Latin America, and Mexico, which had intermediate levels of urbanisation. Manufacturing industry growth[BR1] was weaker in Guatemala than in many other countries during the period from the 1950s to the 1980s of import substituting industrialisation policies (ISI) in Latin America, based on tariff protection for domestic industry; but it shared with them other characteristic results of these policies, particularly economic concentration in the largest city.[6] The 1950s and 1960s saw high rates of urbanisation in Guatemala characterized by the increasing concentration of the urban population in Guatemala City. In 1950, Guatemala City was over four times larger than the combined populations of the next four cities; by 1981 it was over seven times larger.[7] Velásquez provides a detailed analysis of economic trends in these years, showing that economic and employment growth in Guatemala was primarily located in the city.[8] Primary sector exports prospered but the benefits from these concentrated in large, often foreign owned, agricultural enterprises, in the city-based financial and marketing firms that serviced them, andwere diminished internally by unfavorable terms of trade. The share of the GNP provided by small-scale subsistence oriented farming declined sharply up to 1980; whereas the numbers of subsistence farmers increased as the rural population grew apace. Industrial growth, stimulated by the General Treaty for Central American Integration of 1960, concentrated in Guatemala City, as did investments in construction.
Economic concentration brought large-scale migration from rural areas and small-towns to Guatemala City as it did to the major cities of other Latin American countries. The implications of this migration and of ‘explosive’ urban growth became a major research focus for social scientists interested in development issues.[9] The question that preoccupied many researchers of the time, including myself, was whether rural people with low or no education, accustomed to the ways of life in very small places, could get by in large, heterogeneous cities.
These issues of ‘peasants in cities’ were approached from diverse theoretical perspectives.[10] For some theorists, rural-urban migration was viewed as potentially positive when accompanied by urban planning for low cost housing, not only in terms of providing the labour needed for industrialisation, but also as instilling the values and skills required for economic development through education and the experience of ‘modern’ work.[11] Other theorists pointed to the anomie that could result from migrants’ experience of the impersonality of the city and its possible negative political implications. This was a preoccupation even in the Argentina of the 1950s where urbanisation was well advanced, as in Gino Germani’s comments on the role of internal migrations in the creation of a society of masses in Buenos Aires.[12] Whatever the perspective, rural-urban migration was seen as essentially a centripetal process in which over time rural and small town inhabitants made permanent homes in the city.
My research in Guatemala City concentrated on two low-income neighbourhoods, a squatter settlement, San Lorenzo, and a low income legally established neighbourhood, Planificada.[13] In both neighbourhoods, the majority of heads of family were migrants, but some 27 percent in each neighbourhoodwere city-born, whose education and occupations were of a somewhat higher level than those of the migrants.[14] The focus of the research was, however, less on migrants than on showing how the poor, whether migrants or natives, were active agents in managing the challenges of living in Guatemala City. It was influenced by earlier anthropological research done in Central African towns, which showed how rural or small-town origin migrants could adapt to large towns and cities through social networks and urban identities based on the cultures of places of origin, kinship, religion, as well as urban work and residence.[15] The organizing capacity of migrants in the cities and their capacity to adapt economically in the city had also been shown in the Latin American cities of the 1960s in such case studies as Mangin in Lima, Leeds in Rio de Janeiro and Balan, Browning and Jelin in Monterrey, Mexico.[16]
In the 1960s, there was relatively little migration to Guatemala City from the indigenous rural areas to the west of the city, so indigenous identity was not a significant organising factor in urban life unlike the case of La Paz in the same time period and, to a lesser extent, Mexico City.[17] In the 1980s, Bastos and Camus found a more substantial indigenous migration to Guatemala City, partly as a result of the violence against indigenous areas during the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s.[18] But, except in one of their neighbourhoodcases, they report little evidence of indigenous families from the same place of origin settling in the same urban neighbourhoodsand find relatively low levels of ethnic segregation.
In Guatemala, the relative weakness of rural-urban property and commercial ties meant that place of origin did not determine urban residence and relationships as much in Guatemala City as it did in Lima and Huancayo in Peru .[19] Kinship, however, was an important part of coping with urban life in Guatemala City as elsewhere in Latin America.[20] Also, my research and that of Lauren Bossen showed that religion was an important source of material as well as emotional support for women in San Lorenzo who were often the main breadwinners of the family due to the desertion or lack of contribution of the male head.[21]
The Making of the City
The focus on adapting to urban life highlighted two key elements of the nature of poverty and inequality in the ISI period. Poverty was a general condition that in terms of low income and poor facilities constrained the lives of most of the urban population, but it did not prevent them actively seeking to improve their situation. Despite Lewis’(1968) culture of poverty thesis, I and others found no evidence that the urban poor were mired in fatalism.[22] Likewise, inequality, while clearly apparent in housing and life styles, was not perceived by my poor informants as a structure excluding them or their children from the possibility of obtaining education, employment and shelter. For rural migrants, the city offered opportunities for work, improved housing and education for their children. Among the first generation of migrants, poverty did not provoke violence or radical politics.[23]
A key to understanding why even the poor saw opportunities in their environment is the informality of many of the rapidly growing cities of Latin America. Poor migrants and city-born could see themselves as ‘making’ the city because that is what they did both in terms of work and housing. An important part of adapting to the city in this early period was the informal pattern of settlement.
The Latin American city in the mid-twentieth century showed a chaotic pattern of urban development. Neither markets nor government planning ordered the city’s ecology into clearly defined zones of commerce, industry or of working, middle or upper class residential areas. Land invasions, ambiguous or contested land titles, and the ease of sub-dividing land into building plots without providing infrastructure generated a heterogeneous pattern of residential and business settlement. Lucio Kowarick labeled the process, ‘the logic of disorder’, referring to the speculative, ad hoc ways in which areas of the city were urbanised through the combined efforts of politicians, developers and people seeking cheap accommodation.[24] The low incomes of the majority of the Latin American urban populations meant that there was little incentive for the private sector to build extensive middle class suburbs on the US model, nor to provide housing for the working classes.
Government-constructed housing for the working class was relatively uncommon until recently, and the housing that was built tended to go to the middle classes. Consequently, self-construction was the rule rather than the exception. Squatter settlements and other types of informal settlement occupied both peripheral and central locations. Low-income housing appeared even in zones mainly occupied by the wealthy. At times, this was facilitated by topography, as in the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City or the ravines of Guatemala City, but even in relatively flat cities, squatter settlements or semi-legal low-income housing found their way into the interstices of high-income neighbourhoods, such as the squatter settlement, Villa La Cava, in the middle of the wealthy neighbourhoodof San Isidro in Buenos Aires.
There was no one path of settlement in the city. The influential argument of John Turner posited a model of first seeking cheap rental accommodation in the central city, which made it easier to seek work, and then eventual movement to an irregular settlement on the urban periphery to self-construct housing to meet the needs of a growing family.[25] However, migrants also settled directly in more peripheral locations, as argued by PerlmanforRio de Janeiro and in Ward’s analysis of patterns in Mexico City in the 1970s.[26] Renting remained an important means of access to the city and to locating close to jobs.[27]
Most studies reported, however, that after some initial residential mobility, migrants became long-term residents of neighbourhoods, whether in legal or illegal settlements. Thus, even in neighbourhoodswhere tenure was precarious, most residents had lived there over the long-term. In a 1993 survey of 61 precarious settlements of Guatemala City, Moran found that most households had lived in their settlement for ten years or more, and, with longer residence, their housing was more likely to be built with solid materials.[28] Obtaining housing, upgrading it with time and working with neighbours to improve neighbourhoodamenities became in the 1970s and 1980s a major way in which even the poor could experience some improvement in their situation.
There was a clear synergy between informal settlement and finding jobs in the informal or non-state regulated economy of self-employment and small businesses.[29] In many cities, informal settlements were close to city centers or to the residences of the wealthy, facilitating service employment and street-vending. Self-construction was itself a source of informal employment, as owners hired labourers and craftsmen to build their houses. Also, the flexibility of construction in informal settlements meant that housing could accommodate workshops, shops and other domestic industries.[30] Even in formally-settled neighbourhoodszoning regulations restricting industry from locating inside residential locations were rarely enforced even when they existed. Lax government regulation stimulated many types of informal activity. The most successful entrepreneur in San Lorenzo in 1968 made his money through smuggling goods from Mexico to sell in the city, taking advantage of the tariffs that put a high price on legally imported goods.
In the Latin American City of ISI poverty and inequality were facts of life, but not inflexible barriers to social mobility. Most researchers of the period did not view poverty as a social condition that required a government welfare policy. From the marginality perspective, the problem of the poor was their lack of integration into society and was to be remedied by education and community action aimed at promoting local organization.[31] In cities, such as Buenos Aires, where industrialisation had proceeded apace and formal work dominated, it was labour conditions not poverty that dominated the agenda. Gino Germani’s classic, Estructura Social de Argentina, reviewed a host of social and political issues, such as social mobility, but had no section on poverty.[32]