While natural population growth is important, this unit focuses specifically on rural-to-urban migration. The causes of migration, such as the widespread displacement of peasant farmers by commercial agriculture or by government policies that favor commercial production, are closely tied to economic globalization. Furthermore, migration plays a large and often neglected role in explaining urban expansion.

    Migration is defined as the long-term relocation of an individual, household, or group to a new location outside the community of origin. "Long-term," in this context, accounts for the reality that many migrants after having moved, may move again to a new place, whereas others may be unable to adjust or establish themselves in their newly chosen place and return to their place of origin. Migration is most often explained in terms of either push factors -- conditions in a given place that migrants perceive as detrimental to their well-being or economic security that induce people to leave their homes, and pull factors -- the perceived circumstances in new locales that attract people to move there. General examples of push factors include environmental degradation, the loss of a job, or political persecution. Examples of pull factors include job opportunities, friends and family, or a pleasant climate. In many ways, however, these factors work together. For example, a farmer in rural Brazil whose land is suffering from drought and is increasingly unproductive, would not be "pushed" off his land and decide to move to Sao Paulo unless he was also aware of the presence of opportunities to improve his economic situation there. In the context of urban growth, people often emphasize pull factors in that the city is seen as a magnet or a place where people believe there are better opportunities, higher incomes, and better lifestyles.

    These perceptions of a better life in the city hold true in a general sense. In 1986, the UN calculated that 36% of urban and 60% of rural Latin Americans live in poverty (Gilbert 1994, 41). This comparison was based on measures such as infant mortality rates, the incidence of malnutrition, and the availability of education and social services. Indeed, the city does offer relatively better opportunities than the countryside: wages are usually slightly higher, work is available for longer periods (as opposed to seasonal agricultural work in the countryside), there are better services and large urban markets in which to sell goods, and there is the potential to tap into, if illegally, electricity and water services. In comparison to rural living conditions, these urban advantages attract poor people from rural areas.

    Push and pull factors encompass a combination of individual decision-making processes and macro structural forces. Although individual migrants at some point make a decision to move, larger forces often influence that decision. Despite the importance of these larger forces, much of the research on migration has focused almost exclusively on the individual. Models that attempt to explain the reasons for migration based on differences in rural and urban incomes fail to grasp the complexity of the decision to move. At their simplest, these explanations reduce migration to a straightforward, rational, individual choice between a traditional, backward, rural way of life and a modern, industrialized lifestyle in the city (Drakakis-Smith 1987).

    This treatment does two things. First, it oversimplifies the distinction between rural and urban areas. Because of improved transportation and other developments, urban values and goods have long penetrated the remotest rural areas. In addition, rural values have moved into the city with migrants and are retained when people of similar backgrounds cluster together (Drakakis-Smith 1987, 33). In other words, the distinction between the "rural" and the "urban" is frequently not as sharp as much of the literature might lead us to think. Second, a model based on a clear-cut distinction between urban and rural settlements often implies that the rural is inherently "backwards," lacking in "modern" qualities. This image obscures the forces that produced the apparent stagnation and decline in the countryside, ignoring historical forces, government intervention, and global processes that have interfered with what was, until recently, a productive lifestyle in the countryside for thousands of peasants.

    It is important to note that migrants themselves, when asked why they moved to the city, will frequently cite economic reasons, highlighting the job opportunities they anticipated there (Drakakis-Smith 1987). Migrants explain their move in terms of their immediate situation, neglecting the broader structural changes that have shaped rural and urban economics. We focus here on the ways in which structural processes like rural restructuring encourage migration.

    When macro-forces have been considered in the migration question, they have often been framed in terms of the "progress" and "development" that supposedly occur with urbanization. In one common explanatory model, GNP per capita is linked to the urban proportion of total population, suggesting that the more urbanized a given area, the more economically developed it will be. Thus, economic development and urbanization are often interpreted as being causally linked. As Drakakis-Smith (1987, 8) points out, however, "GNP per capita is an indicator of economic growth rather than development (growth with equity), and urban population levels do not reflect the complexity of the urban process." Furthermore, this approach fails to consider that most migrants will never attain an average urban income (an average that is inflated by the small number of very wealthy people) or have access to many urban amenities. Instead, most migrants survive literally and figuratively on the fringes of the urban settlement, living in shanty towns and working in an informal economy.

    These criticisms of the ways in which the migration question has traditionally been approached provide the framework for Units 2 and 3. In the remainder of this unit, we will link the micro- and macro-scale analyses by considering the structural "push" factors that impel people out of the countryside. In the final unit, we will narrow the broad and deterministic focus of a macro-scale approach by highlighting the realities of city living for relatively recent urban migrants.

    The rest of Unit 2 is organized into two sections. We suggest that you read just one section at a time. Part I discusses the structural factors that have changed living conditions in the countryside. Part II investigates the individual decision to move and examines the experiences of various groups including peasant farmers, women, and natives.

 

Part I: The Forces Behind Migration

 
 

The End of Rural Society: The "Push" Out of the Countryside

 
    Since the sixteenth century, migration to Latin America has contributed to the development of the region and to its varied ethnic composition. During the Colonial Period and the period of post-independence, the emerging republics actively sought ways of attracting overseas populations to settle the vast expanses of arable land and to develop the fledgling urban industries. Many of these new immigrants, like those from Europe, came voluntarily to look for work; others, like those from West Africa, were brought to the region as part of the slave trade during the 1800s. The flow of immigrants to Latin American countries had stagnated by the early twentieth century, and by the late twentieth century, the region had become one of emigration rather than immigration. Widespread movements, between various scales and places, now characterize the region.

    One of the most significant movements is that from rural areas to cities. This movement is directly linked to changes occurring on the global scale as national governments, with the aid of international institutions, work to restructure the ways in which their economies function. Rural production patterns have been restructured and altered, creating numerous social, economic, and political effects on those who live in the countryside and contributing directly to the rural flight that significantly augments urban populations in Latin American countries.

 

The Interplay of Structural Forces Operating in Latin America

 
    Structural forces are broad processes, out of the individual’s direct control, that present people with opportunities and constraints on their actions. These processes emerge out of the economic, political, and cultural systems in which people live. Structural forces emerge from a combination of many different things: historic events (e.g., the experiences with colonialism), the policies and actions of national governments (e.g., competing agendas of urban-industrial and agrarian development), and contemporary international influences (e.g., the move to free trade or economic globalization in general). The combination of different experiences -- whether they be historical or contemporary -- provides the structural framework in which changes will occur. Because all places have different histories and different political, economic, and cultural orientations, structural forces will necessarily affect individuals and places in different ways; structural forces do not operate in the same manner across all places.

    Our focus is primarily on the structural impacts of contemporary forces. In the last decade, daily life in LDCs has been fundamentally changed by the increasing penetration of capitalist relations and shifts in the international division of labor. These changes have greatly compromised small-farmer production in the countryside and the provision of social services in the cities. These events can be traced to the emergence of the debt crisis and the resulting process of structural adjustment, a process that includes the transformation of a nation’s economic orientation, an increase in its trade linkages, and alterations in government spending. Accordingly, we focus on the debt crisis as one manifestation of political-economic globalization.

  

"The Lost Decade": Debt and Structural Adjustment

 
    The debt crisis has its roots in the globalization of production and financial systems that took off in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 when OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) raised the price of oil, the effects reverberated throughout the global system (Canak 1989; Walton and Seddon 1992). Most importantly for Latin America, the upsurge in "petrodollars" (the surplus revenue earned by OPEC with the price hike and then deposited in international banks) led international banks to aggressively seek new sites to invest this surplus revenue through loans that would "recycle" the petrodollars and earn interest revenue for the bank. At the same time, Latin American countries like Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela were considered a "good risk" because their oil wealth would ensure that the debts would be repaid. It was not "reckless abandon" that led countries to accept loans during these "boom" years. The growth of world trade was expected to continue, and it was logical for these countries -- most with large populations and to some extent, underdeveloped resources -- to import capital in order to finance development. Furthermore, the abundance of money on the world market produced very low interest rates (roughly 4-5%), and it was enticing for developing nations to take advantage of them. These factors were the primary reasons for the accumulation of foreign debt in LDC’s.

    In 1979 when the second oil price hike hit the global economy, the price of oil rose from $13 to $34 a barrel, and another wave of inflation hit the world economy and led to a world recession. Oil-importing countries, like the United States, were especially hard hit. In response, these countries introduced protectionist policies including a drastic decrease in imports from other countries (including many Latin American countries who depended on trade with the US), a tightening of foreign investment, and domestic layoffs. These policies dramatically affected interest rates on the loans Latin American countries had taken; interest rates soared to 18% and even higher. All of a sudden, most countries in Latin America were struggling just to pay the service (the interest) on their debt let alone the principal (the actual amount of money borrowed initially). By 1983, a rise of 1% in the US interest rate increased the Latin American debt service obligation by $12 billion a year. By 1986, the high cost of debt servicing was evident, as countries were forced to channel an increasing percentage of their GNP and export revenues into paying the service on their debts (see Table 4).

    Although the 1979 oil crisis and subsequent interest rate hikes were the precursors of the accumulation of debt, Mexico actually inaugurated the crisis in 1982 by stopping payments on its $80 billion foreign debt to international banks because of the enormous pressures that debt service exerted under these recessionary conditions. Mexico’s announcement alarmed the international banking community and was seen by some as potentially heralding a destabilization of the international banking system. In reaction, private bankers drew back from supplying new loans to Latin America, and in their place, international lending institutions, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, stepped in to resolve the growing crisis. The IMF extended loans to the indebted countries, but these loans came with conditions: the national governments had to agree to impose "structural changes" on their economies to get the economy "back on track" in order to repay their debts and ensure that this kind of crisis would not occur again. These policy packages are referred to as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs entailed a broadly similar set of policies across countries that included:

• wage cutbacks,
• the devaluation of national currencies (to make their exports more attractive abroad),
• a dramatic increase of export-oriented development and in foreign direct investment,
• increased free trade (meaning that tariffs were lowered),
• the contraction of the public (government) sector, and
• a severe reduction in subsidies for rural producers.

    Many authorities on the Latin American debt crisis (Bailey and Cohen, 1987; George 1988) argue that the burden of the debt crisis fell on the middle and lower classes; that is to say economic indicators were able to reflect some "progress" because expenses had been cut in several key social sectors. As a result of these cuts, Latin America became a "landscape of poverty" as SAPs imposed a "regime of sacrifice" on ordinary people (Centeno 1994, 34).

    Mexico illustrates this trend clearly. Just as President Miguel de la Madrid’s administration (1982-88) privatized formerly state-owned enterprises, aggressively encouraged foreign investment, and reduced barriers to free trade, it also cut vital social services. During the 1980s salaries for the average working Mexican were frozen and approximately 400,000 jobs disappeared even as the labor force expanded by eight million people (Centeno 1994, 202). Yet the national budget for education, housing, and health fell, dropping by 22% in 1983 alone (Centeno 1994, 207). The impact of an economic crisis can often be measured in the food intake and health of the population (Riding 1989, 227). In Mexico’s case, by 1989, per capita meat consumption had decreased by 50% from 1980 levels and was even below those for 1975; milk consumption had dropped to one-half of that recommended by the World Health Organization. Likewise, the consumption of corn, beans, and rice declined by 48% between 1982 and 1988 (Goldrich and Carruthers 1992, 101). To compound this problem, while the population became more susceptible to poor health and disease because of malnutrition, the government reduced its health care budget from 2.5% of GDP in 1982 to 1.5% by 1989 (Goldrich and Carruthers 1992, 104). In all, the impacts of the cuts in both the economic and social sectors can be seen in the fact that those classified as "moderately poor" in Mexico increased from 25 million in 1982 to 40 million by 1990.

    The IMF approached the debt crisis in a manner that reflected a shift in the world’s ideological climate, as the solutions to a wide range of socioeconomic problems in many countries were viewed more and more in financial terms. For example, politicians in the United States, led by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, complained that government had gotten too big and interfered too much with the free market. These "free marketeers" argued that environmental regulations, trade tariffs, price supports for agricultural products, and social subsidies like those for cheap food distort the market and cause "inefficiencies" in the production of goods and services. They assumed that the market, left to its own devices, would promote efficient production and the resulting economic growth would "trickle down" and benefit everyone. Because social problems would be addressed through this "trickling down" of resources, government social spending was seen as relatively unnecessary and a drain on the market. Such an approach to economic planning is generally referred to as free market economics, or, increasingly, as neoliberalism. Ronald Reagan initiated his neoliberal plan of "Reaganomics" in the United States in 1980. Bolstered by the fall of the USSR and the Communist Eastern Bloc countries, and joined by his contemporaries in a number of other countries (most significantly, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Brian Mulroney in Canada), Reagan made neoliberalism a common approach to national economic planning in numerous countries. Thus, the policies that characterized structural adjustment in Latin American countries were also implemented in developed countries as they tried to stay competitive and "efficient" in an increasingly interconnected world.

    How then did these macro-economic and ideological shifts affect the way that national governments in Latin America responded to this crisis? What sectors did they specifically target and why? So far, we have answered these questions in only broad terms. How have people and certain regions of countries weathered this crisis? In particular, how have individuals and communities been affected by these changes? Because our focus is on urbanization in Latin America and the contribution of migration to that process, we now look at how changes in the rural economy have produced an overwhelming "push factor," radically altering social relationships and cultural world views in the countryside.
 
 

Intensification of Commercial Agriculture and Resource Use

 
    In the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on January 1, 1994, an army of masked indigenous Mayans seized several towns and declared war on the Mexican government. The boldness of the event shocked Mexicans and galvanized attention from around the world, as the group, calling themselves the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (The Zapatista National Liberation Army, or the EZLN) initiated a well-organized publicity campaign to expose wrong-doings of the presidential administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. One of their key complaints was the way in which the Salinas administration had dismantled Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. In existence for over 70 years, Article 27 had guaranteed the right of all Mexican peasants to own a piece of communally held land to farm, called the ejido, and to pass their ejido plots down to their children. But because the ejidos had initially been carved out of poor-quality land, over the years, they required constant government support to maintain productivity and to allow peasant farmers to continue making a living off the land. Such support included, for example, subsidies for farming inputs like seeds and fertilizer and price supports to keep the prices of farm products high, even if they were over-supplied. With the turn toward free-market economics, however, the neoliberal approach viewed government support as "intervention" or "distortion" and argued that farm production should be left to market devices.

    Influenced by the turn in the global ideological climate, Salinas had aggressively pursued free-market, or neoliberal, restructuring in Mexico, in all sectors of the economy, including the rural. The elimination of Article 27 was a direct result of this approach, allowing the ejido plots, for the first time ever, to be sold to private interests so that they, and not the government, would be responsible for increasing efficiency and productivity. The ability to transfer land titles to private companies holds serious implications for peasant farmers, like those in Chiapas and throughout Mexico. Already impoverished and facing declining farm productivity with no help from the government, many farmers feel they have no choice but to sell their land and move to cities like Mexico City, Guadalajara, or to northern border towns. As an example of this process, an average of 270,000 rural out-migrants have been arriving in Mexico City annually over the last ten years (Goldrich and Carruthers 1992, 104).

    The issues behind the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico are similar to those that most small agriculturalists faced throughout Latin America as governments turned to higher income-producing activities in order to pay off foreign debt and to be more competitive in an economically interdependent world. For many national governments this has been accomplished by increasing the export of natural resources and agricultural products. Because many LDCs lack a well-developed and diversified economic base, closer integration in the international market is achieved by rapidly depleting some of the only resources they have (Goodman and Redclift 1991, xvi). Agricultural products like sugar, fruit, vegetables, flowers, and primary-sector goods like timber, rubber, fish, and minerals become natural resource "capital" that can be traded to bolster the national economy.

    Governments have also encouraged the production of non-traditional agricultural exports (NTAE) such as fresh flowers, processed fruits, and vegetables for MDC markets. The NTAE strategy has become a key part of trade liberalization and structural adjustment policies and is promoted by governments and international aid agencies to help countries overcome economic stagnation and to reduce their dependence on low-priced traditional agricultural products like bananas, coffee, and sugarcane (Thrupp 1994). For example, in response to the economic policies outlined in the World Bank’s structural adjustment program, the Costa Rican government has encouraged farmers to switch from traditional crops like beans, rice, and corn produced for domestic consumption to NTAEs such as ornamental plants, flowers, melons, strawberries and red peppers destined for international markets. The World Bank and US Agency for International Development (USAID) have supported this effort by providing about $5 million over the last eight years to promote the production of NTAEs in Costa Rica (Korten 1993, 20).

    In order to produce agricultural goods quickly, efficiently, and for a decent price, national governments often look to "weed out" small producers and turn agricultural production and resource extraction over to larger enterprises who can take advantage of economies of scale (the larger the production facility, the lower per-unit cost of production). This commodification of agriculture has been a key effect of neoliberal restructuring in the countryside in recent years. Free-market economics pursues "economic efficiency" in order to deliver crops and livestock to processors and industrial buyers at the lowest possible price (Ritchie 1992, 221). The proponents of this approach maintain that any government intervention in the day-to-day activities of business diminishes this efficiency. They seek to scale back or eliminate farm programs such as price supports, land reform, supply management, as well as land-use provisions designed for environmental protection.

    Thus, the trend in Latin America has been to turn land into something to be bought and sold, something viewed only in terms of its productive capabilities. In the last decade, "the end of rural society" has been marked by the entrenchment of an agricultural sector more closely linked with industry (agribusiness) than with the rural environment. In the search to increase efficiency and revenues, land has become another commodity. As a result, between one-fourth to one-third of most countries’ populations are affected and they often have nowhere to turn but the cities.

    While most of these changes have occurred in recent years as the result of global economic integration, they can also be seen as an exacerbation of changes that have been occurring for more than four decades (Goodman and Redclift 1991, xv). Since 1950, peasant agriculture and self-sufficiency have been chronically weakened by cheap food policies. Cheap food policies were part of the strategy of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) undertaken by several Latin American countries between the 1940s and the 1970s. This strategy encouraged a "self-reliant" national attitude such that goods that were once imported from other countries came to be produced within a country’s borders, with minimal reliance on outside products or manufacturing. Part of the ISI strategy was to keep urban food prices below market levels to reduce the cost of urban labor and urban life. These policies made city life more attractive to workers and "pulled" them in from numerous areas around the country, including rural areas. In turn, this has resulted in a shift in urban consumption patterns and inadequate compensation of rural producers for the costs they incur to produce food products. Structural forces -- like the promotion of cheap food policies -- have consistently aggravated rural poverty. The agrarian structures of Latin America have been more deeply affected by external political and economic forces than have those of most other underdeveloped areas (Roberts 1995, 87).

    As a result of these types of forces, the last several decades have seen a widespread abandonment of rural areas in Latin America. In 1950, 80-90% of the total populations of countries like Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru lived in rural areas and small towns. By 1980, the rural populations in these same countries had declined by an average of 20%. These maps remind us that the recent intensified pressures on the agricultural systems concurrent with the onset of the debt crisis and the shift to neoliberalism had its roots in the changes that were already occurring throughout Latin America prior to the 1980s.

    As the Zapatista rebels made clear to the world, the pressures to reduce state intervention under the debt crisis and the move toward free trade have undermined peasant production; these changes have produced vastly more harmful results than anything that had occurred before. With drastically reduced government protection, small farmers who have historically been dependent on the state through cheap credit policies and farm subsidies are left to shoulder the burden of farming with all of its risks. The changes have therefore reinforced existing unequal class relations. Foreign investors, transnational food corporations, and some domestic-owned enterprises have reaped big profits while the land’s direct producers have borne the brunt of the costs.

    Not only has this growing inability to survive in the countryside affected economic well being, it has also had grave implications for social relations and cultural world views. Above all else, it has produced a rural exodus into regional cities and into more developed countries like the United States. The pursuit of efficiency has exacerbated already low productivity and has consistently made in-roads on the landholdings of small farmers forcing peasants to adapt or move away from the countryside. We examine some of these "coping mechanisms" in the next section and the way that they have disrupted social and cultural relationships.
 
 

Part II: Local Experiences -- A Closer Look

 

The Decision to Move

 
    In her 1992 article entitled "Why Migration?" Saskia Sassen gives us another way to think about rural restructuring and its relationship to migration. Sassen explores the reasons why immigrants choose to move to the United States. She argues that "US policy makers and the general public believe the causes for immigration are evident: poverty, unemployment, economic stagnation, and overpopulation drive people to leave their countries" (1992, 14). She goes on to point out, however, that "these assumptions. . . have led policy-makers to treat immigration as autonomous from other major international processes and as a domestic rather than an international issue." Based on this assumption, they often prescribe the one thing that Sassen argues can initiate a series of detrimental changes: increased foreign investment to alleviate domestic problems. Sassen writes, "US efforts to open its own and other countries’ economies to the flow of capital, goods, services, and information created conditions that mobilized people for migration and formed linkages between the US and other countries which subsequently serve as bridges for immigration" (1992, 14).

    Foreign investment into export-oriented agriculture and manufacturing in LDCs has displaced small-scale agriculture and manufacturing enterprises. Emigration -- either out of rural areas or the country of origin -- has increased in LDCs at times when the countries were experiencing accelerated economic growth according to conventional measures like annual GNP growth rates (Sassen 1992). Likewise, countries sending out the most emigrants are those in which the US has channeled the most direct investment, like South Korea, the Philippines, and Mexico (Sassen 1992). Contrary to what the free-market approach assumes, economic benefits from macroeconomic growth and foreign investment are not "trickling down" to the majority of the population.

    Sassen’s argument is important because it helps us to see that migration is a complex issue with decisions made at a number of different scales. We have seen that rural restructuring has resulted from decisions made at the national scale, by governments wanting to pay off debts or become more involved in the globalized economy. But we can also see that this kind of restructuring could not have taken place without the help of foreign investment and the decisions of foreign policy makers in other countries, often influenced by ideology of free-market economics operating at the global scale. Globalization of the world economy has facilitated foreign direct investment enabling capital, products, and information to flow freely across national borders. In sum, migration in many ways has become part of the structural framework of globalization today, and to think of it in these terms helps us get away from a perception that migration often involves a rational decision made only at the individual level.

    Is there any validity to viewing migration in terms of individual decision making? Absolutely. The decision to move -- indeed any decision -- is often made within a larger, structural framework. Individuals and households must make decisions based on the constraints and opportunities presented to them. As Sassen (1992, 18) suggests, "the option to migrate is itself the product of larger social, economic, and political processes." Let’s look at some ways that rural restructuring under neoliberalism has affected who moves and how it has affected village life, household relations, and cultural beliefs.

 

Out-Migration: Disrupting the Social and Cultural Landscapes

 
 

Peasantization of the Countryside

 
    Roberts (1995, 99) describes the "peasantization" of the countryside in many Latin American countries. This is where peasants, as a result of rural restructuring, have (1) diversified their productive capabilities, producing more than one product or producing products for "niche" markets like organic produce or nontraditional exports like flowers destined for Northern markets; (2) colonized new lands; and (3) used family labor in innovative ways to work the land they have managed to hold onto. These strategies have allowed them to remain in rural areas even while farming for the small producer is becoming increasingly difficult.

    But increasing capitalist relations in a number of areas have had detrimental effects on migration patterns. As it becomes harder to farm small, relatively unproductive parcels of land (unproductive both because of the poor land quality and the fact that small producers cannot afford the inputs without government help), peasant farmers realize the benefit of selling off their land to capitalist agro-industrial enterprises who want to consolidate land under the prevailing mentality that "bigger is better." This is a personal decision that peasants make, yet one that is obviously influenced by the events happening around them that are out of their control. Having received a small amount of monetary compensation, they often strike out for the cities with the thought that, with recent investment into urban industrial manufacturing sites, there are bound to be more opportunities for them.

 

Sending Women to Work

 
    Another example of complex decisions made in the global economy are those that occur at the household level. The decline in farm size over the years has meant that the peasantry in most countries are increasingly dependent on non-farm sources of income but are often unable to abandon subsistence farming because of the lack of full-time wage employment opportunities locally (Roberts 1995, 92). A household must then decide who should stay with the family land and who should set out to look for work in nearby towns and cities. In this case, gender becomes an important factor in the new globalized economy and in the decision to migrate. Only recently, in most LDCs, has it become more common to send a woman family member out to look for work because women are finding it increasingly easier than men to find waged work. This is the result of the recruitment of large numbers of young women by export manufacturers, as we discussed in Unit 1, into jobs in new industrial zones in cities and in border towns like Matamoros or Tijuana, Mexico.

    Women also migrate more readily in certain places because of distinct gender relations within households, families, and/or patriarchal cultural systems. For example, recent rural restructuring in the Campero and Mizque provinces of Bolivia has radically affected migration patterns out of the countryside (Gisbert, Painter, and Quiton 1994). Local cultural norms require that both men and women bring land to their marriages. Yet under conditions of increasing poverty in the countryside and greater land scarcity, land is increasingly passed down only to sons, reflecting the broader patriarchal cultural system that places greater importance on male offspring. Thus young women, who experience strong pressures to have access to resources in order to be married, often generate a dowry through wage labor migration to the cities. It is particularly women between the ages of 16 and 20 who migrate, and the phenomenon is tied directly to the gendered position of women (within families and the larger culture) in this specific region of Bolivia.

    With women leaving the countryside in greater numbers, village economies and household life -- which have traditionally depended on women’s often unpaid work in food preparation, cloth weaving, basket making, and various types of craft work -- have been radically altered (Sassen 1992, 17). This "feminization of the proletariat" has resulted in an increase of male unemployment. "Not only must men compete with the new supply of female workers, but the massive departure of young women from rural areas, where women are key partners in the struggle for survival, reduces the opportunity for men to make a living there" (Sassen 1992, 17).

 

Disrupting Native Lands

 
    A final disruption is the expansion of market capitalism onto native lands. This results in alterations of the landscape that either disrupt cultural practices or encourage abandonment of the land altogether. Across the globe, in both MDCs and LDCs, indigenous communities are confronting the ways in which market economics have infringed upon their autonomy, their control over the resources on their lands, and their ways of life. Natives have protested resource extraction by large multinational corporations (with the compliance of national governments), that alters the natural landscape from which so much of their cultural ways of life stem; they have also protested the ways in which large agro-industrial enterprises disenfranchise natives from their lands.

    Let’s look at a few cases to illustrate this point. In Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the Kayapo Indians have confronted government officials over the development of a giant hydroelectric dam that, in the drive for modernization, will flood the lands on which they have lived for centuries; they have also confronted loggers, miners, and cattle ranchers who deforest the land and pollute rivers with mercury (Whittemore 1992). In Ecuador, the Cofan Indians battle national and international oil interests that operate in the otherwise pristine rainforest in the eastern corner of the country. The establishment of large drilling platforms, a trans-Ecuadorian pipeline, roads, and villages full of non-natives has greatly comprised one of the most biologically diverse rainforests in the world. In addition, the ways of life of the Cofan are threatened as deforestation and oil spills have become commonplace (Tidwell 1994, 38). In Minnesota, members of the Sokaogon (pronounced so-COG-in) Chippewa tribe face a similar battle as they confront the Exxon corporation and its plans to build an immense copper and zinc mine near their reservation (Schneider 1994, 12).

    These infringements by capital reflect the need for (1) LDC governments to exploit any "resource capital" available in order to earn hard currency to alleviate debt servicing; (2) governments in MDCs to form tacit alliances with large corporations in order to discover, exploit, and sell resources in a world of competitive free trade and comparative advantage; and (3) both LDC and MDC governments to pursue modernization and development as defined by orthodox economics. Is it a coincidence that much of the resource exploitation occurs on native lands? Many authors think not (e.g., Seager 1993; Montejo 1993). It is interesting to consider why, when faced with evidence of the deleterious effects of resource extraction on native ways of life, corporations and national governments continue to venture into native lands.

    Much of this has to do with the ways that colonial institutions and Western scholarship have tended to privilege the knowledge and lifestyles of those of Caucasian descent as "modern," "civilized," and "progressive" while native people were seen as "backward," "uncivilized," and "primitive," and their knowledge and their choices less legitimate and inferior. To represent native cultures in this manner is to set up a rationalization for intervention into native lives, in order to "correct" the natural "lackings" and to extend the benefits of the modern scientific world. At another level, it has been common for national governments to view vast tracts of land as "empty" or "vacant" and therefore available for resource colonization.

    The prevailing attitudes toward native "inferiority" in the contemporary period have helped the neoliberal dismantling of land use provisions designed to protect environmental and social rights and native land claims. Such land use provisions are seen as barriers to efficiency and foreign investment. Dismantling laws that protect land use (such as the ejido land reform discussed earlier) is an extremely effective way for national governments to encourage increased foreign investment; they can promise corporations "free reign" over the use of land with no penalties for environmental or social infractions. Hence, the tacit alliance between national governments and multinational corporations has incited many indigenous protests in recent years (Trueheart and McAuliffe 1995).

 These kinds of confrontations have helped bring greater awareness of native land use rights and of the ways in which native wisdom and presence have been ignored. For example, Jose Delgado, a rainforest preservationist in the Ecuadorian Ministry of Agriculture, writes about the Cofan’s struggle with the oil corporations: "For the first time, thanks largely to the Cofan, oil companies in Ecuador are being forced to admit that the rainforest is not vacant land where they can do anything they want.  People live there with rights and aspirations just as valid as any company wanting a profit” (Tidwell 1994, 38).

    Indeed indigenous communities are civilized, sophisticated, and delicately balanced societies that depend on their natural environments for subsistence as well as cultural needs (Linden 1991).  For example, these communities have developed ways to farm deserts without irrigation, produce abundance from the rainforests without destroying the ecosystem, navigate the Pacific, and explore the medicinal properties of plants (Linden 1991, 46).  The encroachment of rural restructuring and resource extraction driven by the changes occurring in the global economic environment, along with increasing cross-cultural interactions, threatens this balance and knowledge.  Because many indigenous cultures are closely connected to their environments, whether it be the yearly salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States (Knickerbocker 1994, 10) or the caves, volcanoes, and mountains that are so integral to Mayan worldviews (Montejo 1993), to alter these environments is to undermine the very foundation of indigenous civilizations.

    Although many native communities have fought against the incorporation of their lands into the global economy, once this kind of disruption occurs, landscapes are often inevitably altered.  Surviving off the land becomes more difficult, and even if the community fights for land rights and protection, members often feel forced to move to nearby towns or far-away cities to earn a living.  To compound the problem, once exposed to “modernization” in all its forms (settlers, missionaries, government officials, migration), indigenous community members become more aware of the outside world and what it has to offer.  “Relatives who have left the villages for the city and return to show off their wealth and status influence the young.  Girls encounter educated women who work as clerks and are exempt from the backbreaking hauling done by their mothers’ generation.  How can these youngsters resist the allure of modern life?” asks Father Frank Mihalic, commenting on what he has seen happen as a Jesuit missionary working in New Guinea since 1948 (Linden 1991, 50).  Because of this kind of exposure to the outside world, “young people often embrace the prevailing view that traditional ways are illegitimate and irrelevant” (Linden 1991, 47).  By moving off their lands and subsequently devaluing their place-specific indigenous heritage, natives are becoming more and more dispossessed from the traditional ways of knowing that have been so integral to their cultures.

     Not only does movement off their lands and out of forests and the countryside radically affect indigenous cultures, their vast reserve of knowledge about plants, animals, and ecosystems is also potentially lost.  This process, called a “cultural holocaust” and a “global hemorrhage of indigenous knowledge” (Linden 1991) may have severe consequences for Western scientists, who are only recently beginning to recognize and value native wisdom and its centuries-old, trial-and-error tests of plants, living practices, and agricultural techniques.  Moreover, scientists and environmentalists are working to help keep natives on their land by recognizing the structural forces behind out-migration/ rural restructuring and the encroachment of “modernization” that compromises the ability to survive off the land.  Many of those concerned, for example, have sought ways to help keep natives on their lands by helping them market forest products like nuts and oils to companies like The Body Shop or Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.  “Foresting” in this sense is still sustainable and allows for a measure of income-generation.  But indigenous communities and environmentalists alike still face an uphill battle against the ever approaching loggers, miners, and cattle ranchers, whose own livelihoods demand using the natural landscapes in very different ways.

    In sum, we have seen the serious social and cultural “domino effects” of the debt crisis, and the concomitant rural restructuring and resource capital extraction that has taken place with the increasing shift toward neoliberal economics.  We have pointed out that while the effects of economic restructuring have been devastating for most Latin Americans in terms of wage decreases, cutbacks in social subsidies, and the rapid orientation toward exports -- all greatly affecting daily survival issues -- such restructuring has also had devastating social and cultural effects.  An examination of these factors provides some insight into how individuals and communities have managed to cope with the larger framework of a rapidly changing world.

Conclusion

 
    We have explored the structural changes of the past two decades that signal the end of rural life and play a large role in the rapid urbanization of Latin America.  We have looked at how economic restructuring is rooted in the events of the 1970s and the shifts in political ideology during the 1980s.  The decision to move is one made within a larger-scale, structural framework, but individual assessments of place-specific situations play a large role in this decision as well.  Latin America, as a result of the devastating impacts of the debt crisis and neoliberal economics, has become a region full of people on the move -- away from rural areas stripped of productive opportunities for small farmers and away from denuded and polluted landscapes in rainforest and mountain communities into towns and cities oriented more toward industrial export production and Westernized social and culture relations.  In the next unit, we explore the opportunities and constraints city life holds for recent in-migrants.  We will see that much like the countryside, the cities of Latin America have been similarly affected by the debt crisis and economic restructuring such that there is less government money and support for social programs and for providing jobs to accommodate the large number of people arriving each day.