EDU 6315 

Urban Environments and Multicultural Education

Urbanization in Latin America

[Note: this article appeared in 2002: “Urbanization in Latin America;” pp. 88-100 in Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember (editors), Encyclopedia of Urban Cultures, Volume 1. Danbury, CT: Grolier Publishing Co.]

Robert V. Kemper

Southern Methodist University

Latin America covers an immense territory, from the dry deserts of Mexico in the northern hemisphere to the cold, windy landscapes of Tierra del Fuego in the far southern hemisphere. The natural diversity of Latin America is visible in the tropical islands of the Caribbean basin, in the vastness of the Amazon rain forest, and in the volcanic peaks and valleys stretching from central Mexico through Central America and then continuing along the western edge of South America. These distinctive physical environments provide a wide range of challenges for human settlement in Latin America. As we enter the twenty-first century, more than half a billion people in Latin America increasingly use urban strategies to cope with these challenges.

In the year 2000, 74% of Latin America’s 513,000,000 inhabitants were living in urban areas. The seven largest urban agglomerations have a total of 82 million residents. These mega-cities, each with more than five million inhabitants, range from fourth to forty-fifth among the world’s most populous cities: Mexico City (fourth with 19.8 million); São Paulo (fifth with 17.9 million); Buenos Aires (eleventh with 13.3 million); Rio de Janeiro (twentieth with 10.7 million); Lima (twenty-eighth with 7.5 million); Bogotá (thirtieth with 7.4 million); and Santiago (forty-fifth with 5.4 million).

Urban Development before the Arrival of Europeans

Urbanization is one of the great themes in the transformation of the native cultures of the Americas into the contemporary nation-states of Latin America. Although urban life was not widespread in the region before the arrival of the Europeans, the archaeological evidence uncovered so far suggests that some Amerindian peoples had established urban-based cultures as early as 1300 B.C.E. in Mesoamerica and as early as 500 B.C.E. in the coastal valleys along the Andes. These urban places came to so dominate their hinterlands that urbanization was linked to political and religious power from the earliest period of Latin American development (Hardoy 1973). Long before the emergence of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, urban centers played significant roles in centralizing authority. By the 1500s, when the Spaniards finally encountered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán and the Inca capital of Cuzco, urbanization was well established in the Americas.

The most magnificent example of pre-Columbian urbanization may have been the island city of Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325 and by the late 1400s the dominant force in Mesoamerica. Although it was virtually destroyed by the Spanish Conquest, recent excavations of the Great Temple give some idea of what the conquistadores saw when they entered the Valley of Mexico for the first time in 1519. As Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1956:218-19), a soldier in the company of Hernán Cortés, described the event:

We were amazed. . . . It was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. . . . I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about. Some . . . among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a market and so full of people and so well-regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before.

The Colonial Urban System

The fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 and Cuzco in 1536 ushered in a new era in Latin America urbanization (Kemper and Royce 1983; Greenfield 1994). Between 1521 and 1820 the Spaniards and the Portuguese created hundreds of cities and towns, both on and near established indigenous sites and in newly conquered lands beyond the limits of the former Aztec and Inca empires. This considerable urban expansion was not carried out just to assure military and political control of the vast reaches of Latin America, but to create a system for exploiting its human, mineral, and agricultural resources for the benefit of the home countries. The colonial urban system was designed to expedite the flow of goods between the hinterlands and the major ports of trade and then onward to the Iberian peninsula – as well as to improve the counterflow of goods and immigrants from Spain and Portugal to the New World.

The consequences of the Spanish and Portuguese urban policies may be summarized as follows: (1) the colonies were economically dependent on Europe and suffered from restrictive trade practices that hampered their economic development; (2) the cities and their hinterlands were dominated by a bureaucratic-political system tied to the needs of Spain and Portugal rather than to local conditions; (3) the establishment of cities and towns essentially ignored the boundaries recognized by the indigenous populations; and (4) the cities and towns were the focus of a fairly rigid caste system.

Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century

Just as the conquest had profoundly transformed the pre-Columbian urban systems, so the fierce fighting between loyalists and independentistas (those seeking independence from Europe) had significant consequences for the colonial urban system. Mining and agricultural productivity declined sharply, throwing the entire economy into disarray. Many people abandoned their villages and towns as unsafe; their cityward migrations temporarily swelled the populations of the larger urban centers. Although the period of violence and revolution lasted from about 1810 to the late 1820s, it did not result in a population decline comparable to that following the conquest. Ultimately, independence simply took earlier administrative and economic reforms one step further: the restrictive chain laid on the colonies by Spain and Portugal was broken, and the colonial urban system and the hierarchy of power it represented could be reorganized.

Nevertheless, Latin America's newly "independent" urban system changed relatively little in the first half of the nineteenth century. Few new cities were established; those of the colonial period continued their desultory growth. The continent was dominated by large rural landholders whose estates assumed a central place in the economic and political struggles between liberal and conservative forces. In mid-century, when Latin America as a whole had 30 million inhabitants, only four cities – Rio de Janeiro, Salvador (Bahia), Mexico City, and Havana – had more than a hundred thousand residents, and only six other cities – Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Recife, Caracas, and Montevideo – had more than fifty thousand. This relatively slow urban growth was in marked contrast to the rapid growth experienced by cities in Europe and in the United States during the same period. In effect, these emerging Latin American nations were saddled with highly regionalized, weakly articulated urban systems in which the cities were consumers rather than producers.

Between the 1850s and the 1890s a new stage in Latin America urban development began. The national capitals and port cities grew rapidly as a result of domestic migration and immigration from European countries, especially to Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Cuba. The millions of immigrants included Jews, Russians, Poles, Italians, Swiss, Germans, and Spaniards. Because of their generally better education and greater business experience, many immigrants began to control the petty and medium-scale commerce of the expanding cities. Moreover, the immigrants played an important role in bringing European experience with labor unions and political movements to bear on the Latin American urban scene. Thus, the newcomers made a major contribution to urban and industrial growth at a time when their contribution was vitally needed to supplement the relatively unskilled indigenous work force.

Urban Growth in the Twentieth Century

By 1900, Buenos Aires had a population of 867,000 inhabitants; Rio de Janeiro had 691,000; Mexico City, 541,000; Montevideo, 309,000; Santiago, 287,000; São Paulo, 239,000; Havana, 236,000; Salvador (Bahia), 208,000; Lima, 130,000; and Recife, 113,000. With the exception of Mexico City, these ten most populous cities of Latin America were critical cogs in the city-port complex that linked their nations to European and United States markets.

The policies followed by governments from Mexico to Argentina promoted strong ties between local agricultural interests and foreign capitalists; the growing interchange of raw materials (exported from Latin America) and finished goods (imported into Latin America) was concentrated in one or two ports in each country. A vital component of this interchange network was the establishment and expansion of railroads. This development greatly affected existing cities. Those that were thereby connected with the capital and the major ports greatly benefited, those that were bypassed were fated to decline. In addition, the railroad networks tended to reinforce the primacy of one or two urban centers in each country.

As in the United States, the railroads opened vast territories for agricultural and mining development and created new urban frontiers. Thousands of new towns and cities were built. The majority were simple service centers and transportation hubs, but some – such as La Plata and Belo Horizonte – were shining examples of European-influenced urban design.

Not since the sixteenth century had so many new urban settlements been founded in Latin America. However, very few of the new cities achieved the population and importance of urban centers forming the old network inherited from the colonial period. Indeed, the pattern of dependent urban development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merely preserved the old colonial pattern of external domination in another guise.

Primate Cities and "Dependent" Urbanization

Latin American economic and demographic growth was increasingly characterized toward the end of the nineteenth century by growing primacy in the urban system – the situation in which the largest (the "primate") city is many times larger than the second biggest city. The major city acts as a nodal point in the nation's economic and political affairs and serves as the link to the foreign metropolis that dominates the international export-import relationship. As a place of government, the major city attracts elite groups and becomes the place of residence for the landowning and merchant class. Consequently the purchasing power of the nation becomes concentrated in the primate city, stimulating further commercial and service activity, construction, and local industrial production. This growth attracts migration from less prosperous agricultural regions and also draws the bulk of foreign immigrants. Once the primate city emerges, the process of urban agglomeration tends to become cumulative because other places are starved of the resources needed to compete. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of the centralization produced by the development of a railroad network based on the capital, Mexico City had become three times as large as the next biggest city in the country, whereas in mid-century it had been only twice as large.

The extreme degree of urban primacy in Latin America seems to be related to the region's dependent role in the world economy (Castells 1973). By 1920, most Latin American countries had primate urban systems, with the highest primacy rates found in Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. Brazil was a special case in which the two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, emerged as a bi-primate urban node. Foreign investments, dominated by Britain and the United States, were focused on these same countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the absence of pronounced urban primacy in Venezuela and Colombia may be due to their relatively weak incorporation into the world economy during this period.

By the period of the global economic crises of the 1930s, the pattern of urban primacy was firmly entrenched throughout most of Latin America (Greenfield 1994). The annual growth rates of the principal metropolitan areas were higher than the annual growth rates of national population. The urban population by 1930 included some twenty-eight cities with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, although these were not evenly distributed throughout the region. Seven of the hundred-thousand-plus cities were in Brazil, six in Argentina, four in Mexico, three in Colombia, two each in Chile and Ecuador, and only one each in Bolivia, Cuba, Peru, and Venezuela. There were none in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or the majority of Central American countries. In sum, urbanization during this period reinforced the politico-administrative structure formed during the nineteenth century and reflected the growing economic dependence of the relatively underdeveloped Latin American countries upon industrialized countries such as the United States, Britain, Germany, and France.

Import-Substitution and Urbanization

The dangers of relying on the export of primary products became increasingly obvious to many in government and in the private sector during the period after World War I. European demand declined sharply, and supplies of manufactured products from abroad were similarly reduced. Other world regions, with even lower labor and production costs, also began to compete with Latin American countries for the world markets of many primary commodities, including rubber, sugar, coffee, cacao, and copper. The Depression struck another serious blow to the relationship between urban centers in Latin American and foreign markets. Not only international exchange but also internal economic growth suffered.

Not surprisingly, nationalist sentiment advocated diminished local dependence on foreign economic forces. As a result, by the 1940s, most Latin American countries were producing basic consumer goods, construction materials, and tools needed to further economic development in the post-war era. Some, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, were even able to establish national industries in rubber, steel, cement, and petroleum refining as part of the broader effort to substitute domestic products for foreign imports.

Expansion of industry provided a great impetus for urban growth and began to transform the economic linkage between countryside and city. As a result, the metropolitan areas where local industrial development was centered witnessed dramatic population growth by the 1940s, which continued unabated through the 1970s. Thus, the path of economic development taken by Latin American governments in recent decades has had a direct impact on population distribution, migration rates, and levels of urbanization. In a few cases governmental policies dictated the creation of new towns, especially in previously marginal regions. Ciudad Sahagun and Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Brasilia in Brazil, Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela, Belmopan in Belize, and Chimbote in Peru are well-known instances of urban centers created since the 1950s to expand the urban-industrial network (or to serve as administrative capitals) and stimulate regional economic development.

In sum, Latin American reactions to dependence on external capital have speeded urbanization even where economic development has remained uneven. As the flow of foreign immigrants has declined, the stream of rural-urban migrants has assumed enormous proportions, so that overall rates of urban population growth remained high in most countries through the 1970s. The fundamental economic and political dominance of the major cities has not been challenged by the growth of numerous secondary and tertiary urban centers. This historical-structural background is essential for understanding the urbanization of Latin America during the contemporary period.

Population Growth and Urbanization: 1950-2000

The remarkable growth of the Latin American population since World War II has no parallel in the history of the world. In 1950 the region's total population was about 156 million; in 1960, 206 million; in 1970, 274 million; in 1980, 365 million, in 1990, 448 million, and over 517 million in 2000. In other words, since 1950, Latin America has increased in population by more than the equivalent of the entire population of the present-day United States. Moreover, some demographers project that Latin America’s population will exceed 702 million in the year 2025 and may reach 822 million in 2050.

Table 1 (at end of document) provides basic data on the percent of urban population for 1950 and 1990, and gives projections for 2000 and 2010. In 1950, 42 percent of the total population in Latin America lived in places defined as "urban," with a range from 12 percent (Haiti) to 78 percent (Uruguay). The overall proportion jumped to 72 percent by 1990, with a low of 28 percent (Haiti) and a high of 91 percent (Venezuela). For the year 2000, the overall Latin American urban population is at 74 percent, with a range from 34 percent (Haiti) to 92 percent (Uruguay). By 2010, the Latin American urban population may reach 80 percent, with a low of 42 percent (Haiti) and a high of 95 percent (Venezuela).

As the data in Table 2 (at end of document) show, in the forty years between 1950-1990, Latin America as a whole had an annual percentage rate of urban growth of 3.9 percent, with a range from 1.0 percent (Uruguay) to 5.7 percent (Honduras). For the 1990-2000 decade, the United Nations projected that the overall Latin American urban growth rate will decline to 2.5 percent, with a low of 0.8 percent (Uruguay) and a high of 4.7 percent (Honduras). Their projection for the period 2000-2010 is 2.0 percent for all of Latin America, and a range from 0.8 percent (Uruguay) to 4.2 percent (Haiti).

This urban population expansion is staggering, yet its implications for economic and social development take on special significance in the context of the urbanization process. The very high rates of overall population growth (due especially to declines in infant mortality and increased longevity) have been combined with substantial flows of rural-urban migration from the 1940s through the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, (with projections for the first decade of the 21st century following the same trend), urban growth has resulted more from natural growth (i.e., the excess of births over deaths) than from cityward migration.

Cityward Migration and the Urbanization Process

The integration of people and places tied to the urban system has increased from the largest metropolitan areas to the smallest hamlets (Butterworth and Chance 1981, Gilbert 1994). The flow of population to and from the cities is not just a demographic phenomenon; it is a significant feature of the social, cultural, and economic matrix of Latin America's development crisis. Urbanization is not restricted to cities; the extension of urban institutions and the imposition of urban standards in the countryside confirms the truism that the highways carrying migrants to cities are not one-way streets (Roberts 1978). Thus cities, towns, and villages become part of a national (even international) network in which urban processes affect people today.

Millions continue to migrate from the countryside to the major cities and secondary towns of Latin America. Their movements may be temporary or permanent, entail short or long distances, involve individuals or groups, and be characterized by certain sociodemographic features related to the migrants' age, sex, education, employment, social class, ethnicity, and even personality. Given the volume and diversity of the migration stream, it is not surprising that social scientists have had difficulty generalizing about the qualities of individual migrants (Bilsborrow 1998). Furthermore, it has proven a considerable challenge to link individual aspects of migration to the broader historical-structural factors beyond individual control, though such factors influence or even force people into decisions about why, where, when, and how to migrate. Finally, as socio-economic circumstances change in both rural and urban areas, the causes and effects of migration change too, and migrant characteristics are transformed.

At the risk of overgeneralization, the following statements regarding cityward migration seem valid:

1. Migrants are overwhelmingly young adults.

2. Females tend to migrate more often than men do.

3. Ethnicity can facilitate the migration process since ethnic enclaves may assist new arrivals to adjust to their cities.

4. The presence of relatives or friends in specific cities often influences the migrant's choice of destination.

5. Migrants to large cities tend to come from smaller urban centers and from higher-status families in towns and villages.

6. Migrants tend to have higher levels of education and more appropriate job skills than do those who remain behind.

7. Migrants from rural areas may travel directly to large cities or they may travel by stages (i.e., from village to town to city).

8. Some cityward migration is an intergenerational process in which parents leave the village, but their children eventually settle in the large cities.

9. Migration is highly selective of those individuals who are risk takers, adventuresome, dynamic, and responsive to perceived opportunities beyond their place of origin.

The substantial volume of emigration from the rural areas of Latin America influences conditions in villages of origin as well as in cities of destination. The tendency for young women and men to leave their villages sometimes depletes the local community of its potential future parents. Although most rural areas have been able at least to maintain their size in recent decades (through high birthrates and lower death rates), some of them are suffering a net loss of population because of the high rates of emigration. For example, Douglas Butterworth and John Chance (1981:82-83) describe the situation for the Mexican community of Tilantongo: "Marital infidelity, temporary sexual liaisons, and marriage dissolution are becoming more frequent largely as a result of the breakup of the immediate and extended family through out-migration and the exodus of potential marriage partners."

Another consequence of substantial emigration is the loss of the local community's young and middle-class inhabitants -- those most likely to become innovators and leaders. This "rural brain drain" mirrors the international movement of well-educated and talented people from underdeveloped regions to Europe and the United States. When and if the village offers its emigrants the chance to practice their newly acquired skills (e.g., as doctors, dentists, pharmacists, veterinarians) some may move back to the community.

Villagers who return to their communities of origin, either permanently or temporarily, bring back new ideas, new aspirations, and new consumer goods (Kemper 1977). They know that their village is not isolated from the outside world, and others witness this. Some migrants visit relatives and friends for the holidays or for vacations. Others return to attend to local responsibilities, whether familial, economic, or religious. Still others abandon the city because they have lost their jobs or homes, as occurred in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

Even those migrants who seldom or never return to their home communities may have profound effects on the lives of those who remained there. They often send money to their relatives to help with the economic problems that caused (at least in part) the emigrants to leave in the first place. Migrants also provide their fellow villagers with assistance in looking for jobs and housing in the city. As a result, complex social networks bridge the geographic and cultural gap between village and metropolis, transforming what were once individual migration itineraries into a continuing and expanding social process. Finally, migrants provide valuable information about city life and about the economic and political events that are shaping village affairs. For example, the migrants often serve as intermediaries when villagers need assistance in dealing with businesses, government agencies, or with admissions to higher educational institutions in the city.

In many rural or semirural communities, village-oriented migrant associations play an important role in local religious and educational activities (Hirabayashi 1993). Migrants join with those who stayed behind to improve circumstances in the community (e.g., by building a new wing for the school) or by affirming the historical solidarity of the community (e.g., by sponsoring dances and fireworks displays at the annual patron-saint festival). Such migrant associations may also provoke social conflict in the community of origin by highlighting the success of some families (to the chagrin of other families) or by attempting to gain control of the local political system for private gain.

Urbanization of the Countryside

Aside from the obvious impact on rural areas of returning migrants and remittances from migrants, other aspects of the urbanization process are played out in the countryside, including the diffusion of government programs, business activity, and individual decisions. Along the same lines, in many rural zones of Latin America, federal and state governments are building systems of transportation and mass communication to integrate the population with urban priorities. Building schools is also a high priority in the national development schemes of most countries. Health care can be improved through the establishment of rural clinics, the dissemination of health-related information, campaigns for immunization, and programs for population control and family planning. In many countries government and private-sector corporations are trying to attract tourists to economically depressed rural areas that offer some combination of archaeological, environmental, and cultural or ethnic attractions. These tourist development projects often have mixed results for the village economy and culture, precisely because they are more focused on meeting the "needs" of urban-based tourists than they are on ensuring that the local residents maintain control of their lives and their lands. Similar problems arise with other development projects, such as hydroelectric schemes whose purpose is to bring electric power or water to the growing cities- often at the expense of rural areas.

These examples of urban bias could be multiplied endlessly, but the central point remains: the rural sector contains most of the poverty, whereas the urban sector contains most of the power. In general, it appears that national development policies have slighted the countryside in their attempt to deal with the enormous problems visible in the cities. This is not just a matter of where one lives, but also a function of one's involvement in agriculture or industry and of one's position in the class hierarchy. For example, government policies promoting large-scale irrigation-based agriculture may do little to improve the situation of small farmers who have little or no access to irrigation or mechanization. Indeed, there is some evidence to show that the Green Revolution and other efforts to raise agricultural productivity through the use of improved seeds and fertilizers may have accentuated landlessness and has probably stimulated, rather than reduced, the flow of cityward migrants. Even the vaunted schemes of the Brazilian government in recent decades to develop the Amazon Basin have created problems for indigenous populations, for the rain forest environment, and for the thousands of poor people expected to join in this population movement. As Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler (1982:184) have argued: "Spectacular the Amazon program may well be, but it demonstrates most of the faults of uncontrolled capitalist development; it generates economic growth, without improving the extreme maldistribution of wealth and income. [I]t clearly demonstrates the paramount importance of the style of national development on the formulation of subsidiary policies." And, it might be added, the style of Brazilian "national" development is formulated by elite members of the urban-industrial society dominated by Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia.

Spatial Patterns of Urban Development

In most Latin American countries, urban growth has been chaotic and uncontrolled. Despite governmental efforts to restrict the location of urban development, individual and collective enterprises have continued to be significant in constructing the urban landscape. All too often, uncontrolled urban expansion has resulted in the use of land unsuited to urban purposes, whether industrial or residential. Valuable agricultural lands have been invaded as city residents seek space for housing and corporations seek locations for industrial parks. As cities expand, the need for improved transportation systems has grown beyond the abilities of municipalities and the private sector to build infrastructure and supply buses, ride-share shuttles, taxis, and private cars and trucks.

Even where governments have encouraged industrial companies to move to the urban hinterlands, workforce relocation, residential subdivision construction, and development of commercial zones are only the beginning of what must be done. In addition, schools, clinics, hospitals, water/sewer systems, roads and highways, and a wide array of social agencies must be installed. The costs can be staggering. As a result, many governments have opted for a "sites and services" approach to urban development. This leaves the bulk of investment to the private sector, with the municipalities involved only with basic infrastructure.

Another major problem of the expansion of cities into metropolitan systems is the failure of municipal governments to grow in the same fashion. The city governments developed in the colonial era are unable to cope with regional urban issues. The creation of regional planning authorities may alleviate some problems, but these agencies are often hampered by lack of sufficient budgets to carry out their mandates. Radical solutions rarely alter the underlying national trends, as the case of Brasilia demonstrates. Developed as a new national capital in the 1960s, Brasilia (with a population of about 2 million) has hardly slowed the growth of Rio de Janeiro (more than 10 million in its metropolitan area) and São Paulo (around 18 million in its metropolitan area).

Urban Problems

The problems of cityward migration and the urbanization of the countryside are only two sides of the multi-faceted urban problem facing urban planners and government agencies as they enter the twentieth-first century (Peattie 1970, 1987). The cities themselves, especially those with a hundred thousand or more inhabitants, face a wide range of serious difficulties related to the fundamentally unequal distribution of income, resources, and goods and services among the urban population. Housing shortages, transportation problems, environmental pollution, unemployment and underemployment, and the unavailability or inadequacy of government services such as health care delivery are evident throughout Latin America. The issue of equitable income distribution however, is most apparent in the cities, where enormous wealth and abject poverty confront each other every day.

Housing

Perhaps the most obvious and serious set of urban problems is related to housing and land use (Gilbert 1993). Because conventional housing and land are increasingly beyond the means of most city residents, and because the only affordable housing involves renting apartments, rooms, or shacks in the overcrowded, deteriorating central-city slums, millions of urban residents (including migrants and the city-born) have established urban peripheral settlements. They may join "invasions" to occupy unoccupied land, or they may purchase lots in unplanned, unauthorized subdivisions. In most metropolitan areas about half of the people now live in such irregular or uncontrolled settlements.

Squatter settlements have been the object of numerous studies by social scientists and government planners. The earliest studies suggested that such aggregations were "festering sores" or "cancers" on the urban system; most of the recent investigations conclude that the residents of squatter settlements have taken the only realistic approach to the housing and land use problems of most Latin American cities. One of the prevailing myths about the squatter settlements claims that they are "marginal" to the larger city. On the basis of her extensive fieldwork among squatters in Rio de Janeiro, Janice Perlman (1976) concluded:

Socially, they are well organized and cohesive and make wide use of the urban milieu and its institutions. Culturally, they are highly optimistic and aspire to better education for their children and to improving the condition of their houses . Economically, they work hard, they consume their share of the products of others (often paying more since they have to buy where they can get credit), and they build--not only their own houses but also much of the overall community and urban infrastructure. They also place a high value on hard work, and take great pride in a job well done. Politically, they are neither apathetic nor radical . [They] are generally system-supportive and see the government not as evil but as doing its best to understand and help people like themselves.

In short, they have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots.

Unfortunately, few people in the squatter settlements have a chance to realize their dreams. They get the worst jobs with the lowest pay; their children seldom enjoy the benefit of public schooling or adequate health services; they are often politically manipulated by government agencies or by strong-armed police officials; and they usually suffer from the worst environmental problems of urban dwellers, including inadequate water and sewage systems, high levels of air pollution, and dangerous exposure to pests and vermin. Despite arduous conditions, the resiliency of their social support systems, involving families, friends, and compadres (fictive kin), makes possible the "survival of the unfittest" -- as Larissa Lomnitz (1975) has referred to the residents of a squatter settlement in Mexico City.

Governmental responses to the phenomenon have ranged from brutal evictions to benign acceptance of a social reality. In Lima the proliferation of squatter settlements has been followed by government programs to help residents install basic urban services and to help them legalize land titles. Government attempts to repress squatter settlements by relocating their residents to housing projects have failed to meet their objectives. As a result, government housing programs are now usually designed for the middle classes rather than for the poor. One problem underlying the proliferation of squatter settlements and the failure of urban and national governments to offer viable alternatives to them is rampant land speculation by individuals and companies of the middle and upper classes. Cuba stands out as a significant exception to the general miasma in which the housing problems of the urban poor generate huge profits for the urban elite. In general, the following comment by the well-known urban historian and planner Jorge Hardoy (1992:xiv) seems appropriate: "Governments must address several interlinked aspects: housing conditions and basic services must be improved; real incomes for lower-income groups must be increased; and the infrastructure and services that support economic expansion must be made more efficient."

The Urban Economy: Formal and Informal

Unequal distribution of resources such as land and housing among urban residents is a continuing problem for Latin American countries. The region's wide range of wealth and poverty is responsible. For instance, more than 70 percent of Port-au-Prince (Haiti) households have incomes of less than forty dollars per month. In many nations, extremely high rates of inflation, coupled with ongoing economic crises often accompanied by currency devaluations, have made poverty more desperate in the 1990s than it was a decade ago. Migrants from the countryside may see cities as places of opportunity, but far fewer jobs are created there than necessary to accommodate the economically active population. In this sense Latin America is been seen as overurbanized and underindustrialized. And many of the new jobs belong to the tertiary (or services) sector rather than to the secondary (or manufacturing) sector.

Most new entrants into the urban job market find an opportunity in the so-called informal economy rather than in the standard categories defined by government economists and protected by government social security programs. The informal sector of the economy includes a wide range of low-paying, labor-intensive activities that often involve families (including women and children) in small-scale enterprises (Thomas 1995). A young boy selling chewing gum to motorists at a stop sign, a women with a few pears for sale on the street corner, a family gathering trash and garbage for resale -- all are participating in the untaxed, uncensused, unmeasurable informal economy. The informal economy involves a great deal of entrepreneurship and individual initiative, especially in central-city slums and peripheral squatter settlements. The informal sector meets the subsistence needs of perhaps one-third of Latin America’s urban population. Even successful middle- and upper-class businessmen are often engaged in informal activities (including bribery and contract "incentives") that they hope will escape taxation or official notice.

Many analysts suggest that the inability of government or private enterprise to create enough jobs in the formal sector of the economy will mean continued expansion of its informal sector. Moreover, because informal-sector activities tend to be small-scale, family-oriented, labor-intensive, and highly competitive, they are an appropriate indigenous response to the dependency that marks formal-sector activities dominated by multinational corporations or elite national firms. Thus, for diverse reasons, the informal sector of the urban economy is likely to prosper--both in terms of the number of households that participate in it and in terms of economic activities outside of large-scale, high-technology, capital-intensive enterprises. Such a pattern of urban economic development promises to fragment the already highly diversified labor market still further. As a result, the economic strategies of urban residents begin to resemble the traditional practices of villagers in the countryside at the same time that villagers increasingly emulate urban consumption patterns. Thus the urban system continues to be transformed.

Social Science Research on Latin American Urbanization

Although a few contributions (e.g., Redfield’s [1941] elaboration of the "folk-urban" continuum in Yucatán, Mexico) were made to Latin American urban theory before World War II, it took the rapid growth of urban populations in the second half of the twentieth century to capture the attention of a much wider range of investigators. Since the 1950s, anthropologists, demographers, economists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists have published thousands of articles, monographs, and edited volumes in their efforts to understand urban trends in Latin America. Demographic-geographical approaches have focused on population growth and population redistribution in regional, national, and trans-national contexts. Economic approaches have emphasized the rationality of decision-making by individuals, corporations, and governments vis-à-vis the temporal-spatial allocation of resources. Historical approaches have not only emphasized archival resources but also oral histories to discuss macro- and micro-levels of urban transformations. Political approaches have focused on the problems of urban administration and planning , especially in metropolitan areas rather than in smaller provincial towns. And anthropologists/sociologists have concentrated on the behaviors and values of rural-urban migrants in major cities and the diffusion of these behaviors and values into the countryside.

The variety of disciplinary approaches to urban research is also manifest in the different contexts in which field research is conducted. Two distinctive categories of city-based research may be discerned: some studies (e.g., Burdick 1993; Royce 1975) are situated in cities but concentrate on specific phenomena (such as the arts, education, medicine, religion) which may be studied independently of urban development processes per se; second, studies of cities ask questions about the character of the urban setting and focus on the ways in which the city influences behavior and beliefs (Murphy and Stepick 1991). Another major category of urban research focuses on the countryside, either in terms of the diffusion of city influences to small communities or the impact of rural-urban (and return) migration on peasant and indigenous populations (Hirabayashi 1993; Massey et al. 1987). A third main category of research concerns urban systems, whether defined in national or trans-national contexts (Leeds 1994).

The major units of analysis in urbanization research reflect important theoretical and methodological assumptions about Latin American urban development. First, there is a strong ethnographic tradition of research on individual life histories (Lewis 1959, 1961; Higgins and Coen 2000) and the life careers of families/households (Selby et al. 1990). Second, many studies (Mangin 1967; Lloyd 1980) emphasize residential units, ranging from central-city slums to peripheral squatter settlements, with particular concern for the qualities of community development. Third, some scholars (Lomnitz 1975) deal with socio-economic groups, especially so-called "marginal" populations, whether through life-history approaches or through large-scale surveys. Fourth, some analysts (Altamirano and Hirabayashi 1997; Arizpe 1975, 1978) emphasize specific populations, especially ethnic groups, rather than individuals, residential areas, or socio-economic groups. Fifth, political-administrative units, including whole cities (or their sub-units), municipalities, and regions, and even entire nations have been analyzed through the use of census and survey data ( Cornelius and Kemper 1978; Hope 1986). In recent decades, a new element – gender – has been overlaid on all of the more traditional approaches (Barrera Bassols and Oehmichen Bazán 2000; Gutmann 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Iglesias Prieto 1997).

Most of our knowledge about Latin American urbanization has been pieced together from case studies of a variety of analytical units examined in a wide range of urban (and non-urban) contexts. Comparative research has been much more limited. Rarely have systematic comparative data been gathered in different sites (but see Berryman [1996] on religious behavior in São Paulo and Caracas; Selby et al. [1990] on a study of households in ten Mexican cities; and Whiteford [1960] on social classes in Popayán, Colombia, and Querétaro, Mexico). Most comparative research comes about from secondary analysis of published ethnographic(Kemper 1982) and census sources (Fox 1975). To make matters worse, most case studies have been one-shot enterprises, with relatively little attention given to the longitudinal dimensions of urban processes. And where attention has been given to the historical aspects of urbanization, the focus often has been on the comparison of the Latin American urban experience to that of the United States and of Europe.

During the past half-century, urban research in Latin America has shifted from the modernization paradigm popular in the 1950s and 1960s to the dependency framework frequently used in the 1970s and 1980s to the global systems and trans-national approaches dominant since the 1990s. Despite, or perhaps because of, these theoretical and methodological transformations, Latin American urban research has seen a continuing creation of new training programs, new journals, new post-graduate centers, and new funding opportunities for scholarly collaboration across disciplinary and national boundaries.

In the beginning, a handful of isolated scholars carried the burden of research on a rapidly urbanizing continent. They learned how to define the diversity of the urbanization process, discovered the key features of cityward migration, discerned the dynamism of slums, subdivsions, and squatter settlements, and determined that urban poverty and "marginality" were not just individual/familial matters but also implicated the nation state and the capitalism system in which urban processes took place. Perhaps the single most significant work of that first phase of urban research in Latin America was carried out by Oscar Lewis, first in his detailed studies of "urbanization without breakdown" (Lewis 1952) and the "culture of poverty" (Lewis 1959) in Mexico City, subsequently in his comparative investigations of structural poverty in Puerto Rico and New York City (Lewis 1966), and ultimately through the legacy of his fieldwork in Cuba (Butterworth 1980).

By the 1980s, hundreds of investigators across a wide range of disciplines were contributing to empirical and theoretical work on urban environments, inequalities, and social movements (especially related to aspirations of the middle classes decimated in the off-again, on-again economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s). In this shift of focus away from the poorest sectors of urban society, social scientists encountered the middle classes to which most of them also belonged. Unfortunately, with few exceptions (Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur 1987) researchers were still unable to come to grips with the historical development and present role of the urban elite.

As we enter a new century, researchers are increasingly committed to seeing Latin American urbanization as part of larger global processes reflected in the new international division of labor (Goldin 1995; Kearney 1997). This awareness of the global economic system calls attention to the ways in which urban economic structures function and develop in Latin America. The global connections of Latin American power-holders also have implications for policy-makers in urban governments throughout the continent. Finally, scholars are interested in learning more about how poverty and inequality are manifested in urban social structures through gender relations, not only in terms of women’s roles (Barrera Bassols and Oehmichen Bazán 2000) but also in the light of better understandings of traditional male roles (Guttman 1996).

Toward the Future

Urbanization in Latin American shows that both past and present offer important lessons for the future. Ever since the European conquest, the unequal relationship between Latin America and the industrialized North (i.e., Europe and the United States) has been a hallmark of urbanization. An archetype of this relationship is visible in the public plazas found in every Latin American city, whether large or small (Low 2000). The exploitation and dependency inherent in this long-term relationship is further reflected in the ties between the city and countryside within Latin American nations. In this sense, the capital cities and port cities of Latin America historically have served as intermediate points in the international urban system, and will continue to do so into the twenty-first century, especially in the context of the proposed expansion of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) to include other nations.

The sheer magnitude of the problems facing Latin American cities offers little hope that the twenty-first century will see real solutions to the dilemma of population growth and urban expansion. Even if the population of Latin America grows at rates somewhat lower than those of recent decades, and even if the metropolitan areas continue to expand more from natural growth than from rural-urban migration, the challenge of the next few decades will still be significant. According to many experts, Latin America can expect: "More shantytowns and overcrowded and deteriorating tenement districts; increasing competition among low-income people to find cheap or vacant public and private lands to occupy; poorer services and a rise in the number and incidence of diseases related to a deteriorating environment; more people, especially children, sleeping on the streets; urban agglomerations spreading endlessly outward, which will increase costs for building and maintaining infrastructure and make commutes longer and more expensive; environmental problems of unprecedented nature in some metropolitan areas, resulting largely from industrial and car emission" (Hardoy 1992:xvi).

The new century will continue to offer challenges to social scientists concerned about the future of urbanization in Latin America. We have learned much in a half-century of research, but so much more remains to be understood. Whatever the focus of our research or the scale of our methods and theories, we continue to confront this question: Can nearly half a millennium of "dependent" urban development be transformed into greater economic equity and social well-being for more than a half a billion Latin Americans, whether they live in the largest city or the smallest hamlet, whether they are rich or poor, whether they are well educated or illiterate -- and whether they remain in their native land or send remittances home from their work abroad?

References Cited

Altamirano, Teófilo and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, editors (1997). Migrants, Regional Identities and Latin American Cities. Society for Latin American Anthropology, Publications Series, volume 13.

Arizpe, Lourdes (1975). Indígenas en la Ciudad: El Caso de las "Marías." México, D.F.: Ediciones SepSetentas.

Arizpe, Lourdes (1978). Migración, Etnicismo y Cambio Económico (Un Estudio sobre Migrantes Campesinos a la Ciudad de México). México, D.F.: El Colegio de México.

Barrera Bassols, Dalia and Cristina Oehmichen Bazán , editors (2000). Migración y Relaciones de Género en México. México, D.F.: Grupo Interdisciplinario sobre Mujer, Trabajo y Pobreza, A.C. and Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Méxcio.

Berryman, Phillip (1996). Religion in the Megacity: Catholic and Protestant Portraits from Latin America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Bilsborrow, Richard E., editor (1998). Migration, Urbanization, and Development: New Directions and Issues. Norwell, MA: United Nations Population Fund and Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Burdick, John (1993). Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Butterworth, Douglas (1980). The People of Buena Ventura: Relocation of Slum Dwellers in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Butterworth, Douglas and John K. Chance (1981). Latin American Urbanization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, Manuel (1973). "La urbanización dependiente en América Latina," pp. 7-26 in Manuel Castells, editor, Imperialismo y Urbanización en América Latina. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili.

Cornelius, Wayne A. and Robert V. Kemper, editors (1978). Metropolitan Latin America: The Challenge and the Response. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (1956). The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy. (orig. 1568).

Fox, Robert W. (1975). Urban Population Growth Trends in Latin America. Washington, DC.: Inter-American Development Bank.

Gilbert, Alan (1993). In Search of a Home. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Gilbert, Alan (1994). The Latin American City. London: The Latin American Bureau, 1994.

Gilbert, Alan and Josef Gugler (1982). Cities, Poverty, and Development: Urbanization in the Third World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goldin, Liliana R., editor (1995). Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin. Albany, NY: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany, Studies on Culture and Society, No. 7 (distributed by University of Texas Press).

Greenfield, Gerald M., editor (1994). Latin American Urbanization: Historical Profiles of Major Cities. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Gutmann, Matthew C. (1996). The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hardoy, Jorge E. (1973). Pre-Columbian Cities. New York: Walker.

Hardoy, Jorge E. (1992) "Introduction," pp. xi-xvii in Richard M. Morse and Jorge E. Hardoy, editors, Rethinking the Latin American City, Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center (distributed by the Johns Hopkins Press).

Higgins, Michael James and Tanya L. Coen (2000). Streets, Bedrooms, and Patios: The Ordinariness of Diversity in Urban Oaxaca – Ethnographic Portraits of the Urban Poor, Transvestites, Discapacitados, and Other Popular Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo (1993). Cultural Capital: Mountain Zapotec Migrant Associations in Mexico City. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (1994). Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hope, Kempe Ronald (1986). Urbanization in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Iglesias Prieto, Norma (1997). Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Austin: University of Texas Press and Institute of Latin American Studies.

Kearney, Michael (1997). "Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empires," pp. 151-166 in Teófilo Altamirano and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, editors, Migrants, Regional Identities and Latin American Cities. Society for Latin American Anthropology, Publications Series, volume 13.

Kemper, Robert V. (1977). Migration and Adaptation: Tzintzuntzan Peasants in Mexico City. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Kemper, Robert V. (1982). "The compadrazgo in urban Mexico," Anthropological Quarterly 55(1): 17-30.

Kemper, Robert V. and Anya P. Royce (1983). "Urbanization in Mexico: Beyond the Heritage of Conquest," pp. 93-128 in Carl Kendall, John Hawkins, and Laurel Bossen, editors, Heritage of conquest: Thirty Years Later. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Leeds, Anthony (1994). Cities, Classes, and the Social Order (edited by Roger Sanjek). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lewis, Oscar (1952). "Urbanization without breakdown: a case study," The Scientific Monthly 75:31-41.

Lewis, Oscar (1959). Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Wiley.

Lewis, Oscar (1961). The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House.

Lewis, Oscar (1966). La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. – San Juan and New York. New York: Random House.

Lloyd, Peter (1980). The ‘Young Towns’ of Lima: Aspects of Urbanization in Peru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler de (1975). Cómo Sobreviven los Marginados. México, D.F.: Siglo XXI.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler de and Marisol Pérez-Lizaur (1987). A Mexican Elite Family: 1820-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Low, Setha (2000). On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mangin, William P. (1967. "Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution," Latin American Research Review 2(3):65-98.

Massey, Douglas, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González (1987). Return to Aztlan: The Social Press of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morse, Richard M. and Jorge E. Hardoy, editors., Rethinking the Latin American City, Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center (distributed by the Johns Hopkins Press), 1992.

Murphy, Arthur D. and Alex Stepick (1991). Social Inequality in Oaxaca: A History of Resistance and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Peattie, Lisa Redfield (1970). The View from the Barrio. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Peattie, Lisa Redfield (1990). Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Perlman, Janice E. (1976) The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Redfield, Robert (1941). The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Roberts, Bryan (1978). Cities of Peasants: The Political Economy of Urbanization in the Third World. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Royce, Anya Peterson. (1975). Prestigio y Afiliación en una Comunidad Urbana: Juchitán, Oaxaca. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional Indigenista.

Selby, Henry A. Arthur D. Murphy, and Stephen A. Lorenzen (1990). The Mexican Urban Household: Organizing for Self-Defense. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Thomas, J. J. (1995). Surviving in the City: The Urban Informal Sector in Latin America. London: Pluto Press.

Whiteford, Andrew H. (1960). Two Cities of Latin America: A Comparative Description of Social Classes. Beloit, WI: Logan Museum of Anthropology, Bulletin No. 9.