Country Comes to Town

Country Comes to Town

Homes and businesses climb the hillsides in La Paz, Bolivia, as viewed from the rim of the city.

Seeking Out Opportunities in Latin America's Cities.

By Naomi Mapstone   | World Ark contributor
 
SOFIA MAURICIO, an effervescent, dark-eyed woman who runs a support service for rural women new to Lima, Peru, is on the front line of Latin America's massive population shift from rural areas to the cities that's been rattling the region for decades.

The women Mauricio greets in La Casa de Panchita, a cheerfully painted house crammed with old school desks, blackboards and computers, left behind the lives they knew as subsistence farmers or shepherds for the possibility of work and better opportunities for their children. They're still getting used to their new surroundings and still struggling to tap into the jobs, educational opportunities, easier access to food and other resources that coaxed them to the city in the first place.

"The great majority are from the interior and they come here with other customs. They speak a mix of Spanish and Quechua, and they are looked down upon here in Lima, both because they are from the country and because they work as domestics, at the bottom of society."

Mauricio aims to give these newcomers the skills they'll need to survive in unfamiliar territory. The center offers training to qualify the women for work as nannies or domestic workers, and each Sunday offers workshops in English, computer skills, traditional Peruvian dancing, guitar—anything that can boost opportunities and selfesteem. Services like these are much in demand not only in Lima, but also in other large Latin American cities oversaturated by migrants pouring in from rural areas.

Mauricio said it's important to offer education to these women not only so they can make a go of it in the city, but so their children can also have a shot at success.

"Many of these women cannot read or write because they were never able to go to school; they were working in the fields or in kitchens. If we can't support them now, their children will follow the same path," she said.

ON THE MOVE
"In the '50s Latin America was three-quarters rural and one-quarter urban, and by the '90s that had completely reversed," said Marie Price, associate professor of geography and international affairs at George Washington University and co-editor of Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities. "Latin America is one of the most urbanized parts of the developing world. It's as urbanized as most fully developed regions—Uruguay is now about 90 percent urban, and Argentina is in the high 80s."

According to the International Organization for Migration, country to city migration accounted for 36.6 percent of urban population growth in the region in the 1980s and 33.7 percent in the 1990s. In Mexico alone, 4.2 million people moved from the country to the city from 1990 to 2000. During that same period, 9.4 million people left Brazil's rural areas to try their luck in the city.

At the same time, a population boom was ratcheting up census figures in both rural and urban areas.

"The population tripled, although those high growth rates of the '60s and '70s have slowed down quite a bit," Price said. "So today in Latin America, while most people live in cities, it's not like the rural areas are empty."

The composition of rural populations has changed, however. Country towns today are largely populated by the very young and the very old, Price said—the 20- to 40-year-olds have left to find work in the cities.

Want more great stories like this one? Sign up now for your free subscription to World Ark magazine.

Country Comes to Town

ABSORBING THE WAVES

In Latin America's megacities, such as Mexico City, Sáo Paulo and Buenos Aires, governments struggle to cope with the influx.

"The cities just could not accommodate this rush of people in the '60s and '70s," Price said. "Lima was almost like a refugee camp, the way it emerged in the '80s, when people fled the Shining Path [a communist movement], settled wherever they could, expanding the north and south cones [suburbs on the northern and southern ends of Lima]. And then the economy collapsed, so these soup kitchens were set up to try and help."

But governments' efforts to serve the migrants by building houses and infrastructure simply couldn't keep pace with the influx. Urban slums including Rio's favelas, Lima's Pueblos Jovenes, and Caracas' ranchos developed with a "fend-for-yourself" policy.

Some of these communities that sprang up decades ago to accommodate the newly arrived still lack basic services, such as electricity, water, sewage and paved roads. Governments across the region have sought to boost nutrition, vaccination and education levels in these communities with conditional cash transfer schemes such as Brazil's Bolsa Familia, Chile's Solidário and Oportunidades in Mexico. These plans send cash to the poorest communities when they meet education and health goals. Brazil's Bolsa Familia, for example, rewards communities that show strong school attendance and vaccine rates for children.

The Mexican government is reaching out to migrant areas by offering "three-for-one" schemes that promise three government dollars for every remittance dollar sent back from Mexicans working abroad and sending money back home for community projects. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez has brought legions of Cuban doctors into Caracas' ranchos to improve the health of residents there.

The services are not always enough, and many children are put out to work by their families in the homes of lower middle-class families.

"This problem is across all of Latin America, in Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, everywhere there are poor families with many children," Mauricio said. "The father sells the children to work, even if only for the cost of food or clothes, because that is one less plate he has to provide in his own house."

ABSORBING THE WAVES

Experts agree that rural-to-urban migration remains a big factor in the region, but they also point to rising city-to-city migration flows, and to the tendency for rural migrants to use their own capital cities as staging posts to international migration or to skip them altogether to head directly to the United States, Canada or Europe.

"Internal migration does not follow the concentrated pattern of previous decades," said Juan Artola, the International Organization for Migration's chief of mission in Mexico. "Although the main cities in each country still attract population … the bigger cities have expelled population since the 1990s, creating the new tendency of interurban migration."

Meanwhile, the region's campesinos are increasingly looking to Los Angeles, New York or Madrid for work. The flow of remittances to the region supports this theory, with successive years of double-digit growth from 2000 to 2006, then slowing slightly in 2007, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. Although the global economic crisis has dented remittance flows, with as much as a 13 percent drop in volume in January 2009 alone, the bank's researchers say there is little evidence yet of migrants returning to their home countries, despite monetary incentives being offered by countries such as Spain. In 2008, Spain began paying unemployed immigrants to go back to their home countries.

"Latin America has become a region of immigration," said Price. "Most states are losing more people than they are gaining. Today when you go to some rural areas, it is just as likely that the people there will have a friend or a family member in the United States or Spain as in La Paz or Bogota. So they say, 'Why struggle in Lima when I can struggle in New York and make five times more?'"

While the downturn might slow the pace of immigration, in Mexico at least a combination of insufficient job creation, wage and income opportunity differentials between Mexico and the U.S. and demand for migrant labor force in the U.S. and Canada will ensure it continues.

Based in Lima, Peru, Naomi Mapstone is the Andean correspondent for the Financial Times of London. Formerly the Financial Times' deputy U.S. news editor, she now divides her time between Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Based in Lima, Peru, Naomi Mapstone is the Andean correspondent for the Financial Times of London. Formerly the Financial Times' deputy U.S. news editor, she now divides her time between Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador.