Rchard M. Morse Latin American Cities Aspects of Function and Structure

8/14/2019 Rchard M. Morse Latin American Cities Aspects of Function and Structure

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LATIN AMERICAN CITIES:ASPECTS OF FUNCTION AND STRUCTURE*

This essay will advance two interrelated hypotheses about the Latin American

city. The first of them has to do with the role of the city in the settlement

of the New World. The second suggests certain characteristics of the modernLatin American metropolis.

The analysis of the colonial Latin American city is frequently prefaced bya review of its medieval Iberian origins. These origins are clearly reflectedin the internal workings and institutions of the New World city: in the munici-pal control of common lands; in the function and structure of craft and trade

guilds; in the procedures for election of town officers by property owners;in municipal supervision of prices and trade practices; and in the role of thechurch and of religious brotherhoods. Significantly, however, these quasi-medieval organizations and procedures were assembled - in the Spanish ifnot in the Portuguese lands - within a Renaissance city plan whose geo-metric lines of force radiated out to the vast and often loosely settled sur-

rounding space.'This leads us to perceive the New World city not solely as a projection

of municipal and cultural traditions from the Middle Ages but as a protagonistin a large scheme of imperial colonization. The Spanish and Portuguesemonarchs claimed a territory the size of thirty or forty Iberian peninsulas.

The conquerors and colonizers were largely urban types from two urban-minded countries. Yet, ironically, their task was to make contact with thesoil and subsoil from which all wealth would flow, given the labor of millionsof Africans and American Indians.

In Spanish America ultimate title to all land was vested in the crown,which delegated the right to grant lands to the conquistadors, and later to

viceroys and governors by agreement with town councils. In practice, thetown councils tended at first to allot lands directly, operating at the marginof the law. By the seventeenth century the crown, desperately needingincome, was asserting its right to sell vacant lands or to question the rights

* This paper was read in abbreviated form at the December, 1960, meeting of theAmerican Historical Association. Some of the research upon which it rests was doneon a grant from Columbia University in the summer of 1958.1 Erwin Walter Palm, Los origenes del urbanismo imperial en America , Contribu-ciones a la historia municipal de America (Mexico City, 1951), p. 258.

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RICHARDM. MORSE

of those who already claimed land titles. When royal inspectors came toexamine questionable itles, however, t was common for a town council to

requesta

compositionhat allowed t to

paya

lumpsum for the

propertiesin question, thus legitimizing he de facto distribution. Until well into theeighteenth century he juridical doctrines applying o crown lands were stillin formulation.2 One historian goes so far as to say that the municipality wasessentially the juridical agent authorized by the crown to effect concessionsand allotments of land, whether rural or urban, according o the needs andinterests of each particular ocality .3

The city, then, is the point of departure or the settlement of the soil.And we can say that, whereas the Western European city represented a

movement of economic energies away from extractive pursuits oward thoseof processing and distribution, he Latin American city was the source ofenergy and organization or the exploitation of natural resources.

This relation of city to land helps to explain several characteristics fcolonial Latin American cities.

First, the abandonment r transfer of cities was frequent because of errorsof judgment y the founders, who had ncomplete nowledge f local geographyand who could not accurately redict he patterns of future rade routes whichmight have been expected o guarantee

tabilityand commercial

rosperityo

the administrative, military and religious nuclei.4Second, crown officials were in many regions thwarted n their attempts

to nucleate he sprawling ettlement patterns nto towns or villages. Smallermunicipalities ived under threat of dissolution as their leading citizens weredrawn off to regions of greater economic promise or else devoted themselvesto rural pursuits o the detriment of municipal administration.

Third, many towns became encircled and their common ands absorbed bythe individual holdings preempted by firstcomers. Status was defined by

ownership of the land rather than, as in older societies, the relation to theland being a function of status. This caused the early growth of municipaloligarchies which controlled without putting into full production circum-adjacent town lands.5

2 Jose Maria Ots Capdequi, Manual de historia del derecho espafol en las Indias(Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 273-292.3 Francisco Dominguez y Compafiy, Funciones econ6micas del cabildo colonialhispanoamericano n Contribuciones..., op. cit., p. 166.4 Jose Maria Ots Capdequi, Nuevos aspectos del

sigloXVIII en America

(Bogota,1946), p. 283; R. MacLean y Esten6s, Sociologia de la ciudad en el Nuevo Mundo ,Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Sociology (30th August-3rd September1951), II, 277; Pierre Deffontaines, The Origin and Growth of the Brazilian Networkof Towns , The Geographical Review, XXVIII, 3 (July 1938), 399; Raimundo Lopes,Antropogeografia (Rio de Janeiro, 1956), pp. 162-163.5 Jose Maria Ots Capdequi, El regimen de la tierra en la America Espaiola duranteel periodo colonial (Ciudad Trujillo, 1946), p. 45; Juan Agustin Garcia, La ciudadindiana (Buenos Aires, 1937), passim.

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Fourth, the urban network was weakly developed. The lack of commercialreciprocity among the cities, which was accentuated by Iberian mercantilist

policies,insulated them and tied them

individuallyto Lisbon and Seville.5a

If we assume such characteristics, we may permit ourselves the analogybetween the Iberian colonization of America and the Roman colonization ofWestern Europe, fifteen hundred years earlier. In both cases the location ofthe colony-town is decided more by political, strategic and agricultural con-siderations than by industrial or commercial ones. (The Latin word for

colony , colonia, is in fact related to colere, meaning to cultivate .) Theadministrative unit is a civitas or municipality, centering on a nuclear gridplan that is surrounded by arable fields, to be allotted to the colonists or to

be held aside as an ager publicus or ejido. The Roman civitas was an oldtribal unit, comprising a tribe and its territory. Its chief town served as itsadministrative center, having a government organized on the standard Romanmodel. Gaul was ... too large, its tribes too backward and scattered, to bewelded into the Italian type of a network of municipalities. A tribal territorywas like a French department, or often larger. 6In Spanish America, similarly,municipal jurisdictions might extend scores or even hundreds of miles. Theearly Roman colonists were soldier-farmers, and their towns had a camp-likeappearance. In Spanish America certain land grants were called peonias andcaballerias, because they were allotted to foot soldiers or horse soldiers.

If both situations yield the example of the geometrically planned townfunctioning as a metropolitan outpost and as a colonizing agent, so do theyexhibit functionally comparable agrarian institutions. The latifundium, con-trolled by a single proprietor, originally from an urban background, becomesthe agency by which rural workers are organized for production. In bothcases a large number of these workers is culturally alien to the colonizers,and, whatever the dictates of the metropolis may be, it is largely the latifun-

dium which determines the workers' relation to the soil and the nature of thejustice which they may expect to receive. Potentially, the latifundista hasmixed rural-urban allegiances. When the social or economic promise of thehinterland is great, or when life in the town is penurious and oppressive, hewill be drawn to reside in the country. This deprives the town of administra-tive leadership and of chances for economic growth to the extent that thelatifundium becomes self-sufficient in agriculture and manufactures.7

In Roman Europe by the third century A.D. the wealthiest landownerswere spending little time in the chief towns, which were being exploited by

5a These historical aspects are further developed in Richard M. Morse, Some Char-acteristics of Latin American Urban History , The American Historical Review, LXVII,2 (Jan. 1962), 317-338.6 Olwen Brogan, Roman Gaul (London, 1953), pp. 66-67.7 Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages(New York, 1931), pp. 115-130, and La Gaule (Paris, 1947), pp. 201-203, 406-407.

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the metropolis, diminishing n size, and becoming gloomy fortified outposts.Rural workers, reduced to servile dependency upon the landholders, ameto live in clusters of

huts,and to form a kind of

agricultural roletariat.A great villa not only had hand-mills, bakeries and such workshops as forgesand carpentry hops needed for farm maintenance but might also supportembroiderers, hasers, goldsmiths, sculptors and hairdressers. In short, thevilla replaced he town as the vehicle of Romanization. The towns , wroteCollingwood with respect to Roman Britain, represent omanization s thecentral government wished to have it; the villas represent t in the shape inwhich it commended tself to the individual British landowner. 8 Of GaulBrogan observes hat with the decay of imperial authority ver municipal ife

by the fifth century, he great estates n the country and the bishoprics n thetowns were the chief institutions which eased the transition o the MiddleAges .9

The Spanish American encomienda was not strictly a latifundium, or itwas not a grant of territory ut a stipulation f reciprocal uties and privilegesobtaining between Spaniards nd Indian aborers. Within he limits indicatedearlier, land grants (mercedes) were generally made by town governments,while encomiendas were awarded by governors, udiencias nd viceroys. As adefinition of social organization he encomienda howed a medieval mprint.It scarcely corresponded, owever, o the medieval manor, or encomenderosand their tributary ndians did not share he common raditions which underlya manorial regime of community and mutuality. The prominence f disposi-tions affecting he encomienda n Spanish aws revealed he crown's constantfear of the encomenderos' eparatism and their exploitative use of Indianlabor. In Brazil, moreover, he latifundiary azenda rather han the encomien-da was introduced rom the start, while in Spanish America the encomiendagave way in the eighteenth century to the hacienda, which appears o have

had its origin in municipal and grants.10Reverting to the Roman analogy, we will recall the insistence of Fustel

de Coulanges hat the structure f rural social organization n Western Europeas determined by the villa persisted as late as the ninth century. Villagecommunities ended to lead a somewhat marginal xistence and were usuallyscattered among and upon, and subordinated o, the villas. It was the villa,controlled by a single proprietor, nd not the village which originally dividedthe land and organized rural ife and agricultural roduction.T1 Neither the

8 The Cambridge Ancient History, 12 vols. (Cambridge, 1923-1939), XII, 288.9 Brogan, op. cit., pp. 210-211.10 Silvio Zavala, Estudios indianos (Mexico City, 1948), pp. 207-353; Louis C. Faron,The Acculturation of the Araucanian Picunche during the First Century of SpanishColonization in Chile: 1536-1635 (Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1954), pp.62-67, 157-172.11 Fustel de Coulanges, L'Alleu et le domaine rural pendant l'epoque merovingienne(Paris, 1889), pp. 38-42, 198, 229-231, 436-437.

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Latin language nor Burgundian and Salic law contained a term that un-equivocally denoted village .l2 In general, a village was a grouping ofcoloni and serfs on a villa, or else a small commercial or parochial centerwithout agricultural functions. From roughly the fourth till the ninth centurythis situation prevailed. In Carolingian Gaul the village, as a personality,did not yet exist, seeing that the 'parish' was scarcely beginning to be formedin the country districts .13 Only in the late Middle Ages did independentvillage communities come into being, growing in most cases out of the oldvillas.14

In the settling of Latin America the village community was of secondaryimportance alongside the town or municipality and the encomienda or later

hacienda. The colonization of central Chile has been described as a con-centration of land in the hands of a few, an extensive domination over largeterritories rather than small village economies .l5 In modern Venezuela themost frequent form of rural social organization is not the village but thedispersed and nomadic farm families. Eighty-five percent of the centers ofpopulation have 25 houses or less, and 92.4% of them have fewer than200 inhabitants. The resulting conditions of solitude and isolation arecontrary to the development of a spirit of communal cooperation .16

The colonial Brazilian village came often as an afterthought , a sponta-neous grouping to care for whatever needs of the settlers were not being servedby the fundamental rural unit, the farm or fazenda. The nucleus of today'srural community is the neighborhood, rather than the village center to whicha cluster of such neighborhoods may or may not be tributary.17 An eighteenth-century captain-general despaired of implanting the Portuguese village systemin Brazil because of the centrifugal tendencies of the settlers.18 His letters aresimilar to those of Spanish administrators in the viceroyalty of New Granadawho, during this same period, were unable either to maintain the agricultural

Indians in nucleated settlements or to gather the white settlers into systemsof villages, or parishes of Spaniards . Even the larger towns were partly

12 Ibid., pp. 200 ff. Fustel's theory needs the qualifications that are set forth in RobertLatouche, The Birth of the Western Economy: Economic Aspects of the Dark Ages(New York, 1961), pp. 59-72.13 Lot, Ancient World..., op. cit., p. 369.14 Roger Grand and R. Delatouche, Les Communautes paysannes dans la France duMoyen-Age , in Francois Perroux (ed.), Agriculture et communaute (Paris, 1943),pp. 40-62.15 Jean Borde and Mario G6ngora, Evolucion de la propiedad rural en el Valle delPuangue, 2 vols. (Santiago de Chile, 1956), I, 57.16 J. A. Silva Michelena, Factores que dificultan y han impedido la reforma agrariaen Venezuela , n Resistencias a mudanca, ed. by Centro Latino-Americano de Pesquisasem Ciencias Sociais (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), pp. 138-139.17 T. Lynn Smith, Brazil: People and Institutions, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1954), pp.495-502.18 Carlos Borges Schmidt, Rural Life in Brazil , in T. Lynn Smith and AlexanderMarchant (eds.), Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent (New York, 1951), pp. 169-171.

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RICHARD M. MORSE

abandoned because of an exodus of inhabitants o rural haciendas.19 Todaythe nuclear rural group in this area - that is, highland Colombia is stillthe

neighborhoodor extended

family(vecindario,

vereda)rather than the

village, although here are signs that functional differentiation f the groups sfinally causing complementariness mong them and therefore the gradualintegration f larger communities.20

In describing the autonomous and self-sufficient hacienda of northernMexico n the seventeenth entury, ormed outside he pale of the encomienda

already drained by the Crown , Chevalier explicitly advances the analogywith post-Roman Europe. Settlements f free workers were absorbed nto thehacienda, and the Indian communities became hired labor upon it. Military

power and judicial authority n effect devolved upon the hacendados, whoattracted arge retinues of relatives and hangers-on. Mexico City alone brokethe monotony of this disintegrated ociety, as the point d'appui of a Statewhose authority hreatened o dissolve n the vast country .21

The regions of the most advanced Indian civilizations, where systems ofpermanent nucleated settlement had grown up before the Spanish conquest,did not necessarily offer exceptions to the generalizations eing developed.Such Indians were often regrouped nto small areas for use as a labor force.In the case of Guatemala his led to cultural ntegration on a 'township'basis , with the municipios becoming the fundamental cultural units .Divisions tended o reflect preexisting thnic groupings, though t is probablethat many of these lines were entirely arbitrary .22 n short, the uprootingand regrouping f highland ndian populations under Spanish administrativearrangements, nd the disruption f pre-Columbian conomies, might produceunknit or disarticulated interlands, as did the settling of empty lands.

To complete the analogy between post-Columbian America and post-Roman Europe, of course, one would have to imagine a gradual cessation of

all contact between the Old World and the New once the colonization waseffected. Under such circumstances ne might further magine he universaldecadence of town life and the decentralization f New World society aroundthe landed estate, as Chevalier has described he process or northern Mexico.Finally, allowing he Americas many centuries of isolated history, one mightenvision he growth of village communities n or near these estates, as well asa network of exchange among them.

In some regions, especially he more outlying ones, parts of such a processdid certainly occur. In counterpoint o it, however, he more important ities

19 Orlando Fals Borda, El hombre y la tierra en Boyacd (Bogota, 1957), pp. 47-50.20 Ibid., pp. 188-198.21 Fran9ois Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Terre et societe'aux XVle-XVIle siecles (Paris, 1952), pp. 390, 404-406.22 Felix Webster McBryde, Cultural and Historical Geography of Southwest Guatemala(Washington, 1945), pp. 88-89, 100-101.

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of Latin America continued o serve as bureaucratic, ommercial nd culturaloutposts of metropolitan urope and, after Latin America ndependence, s thecenters of national

politicalife.

Furthermore,he

economyof Latin America

as a whole, far from becoming autarkic, ame to hinge more and more uponthe export of a few raw materials and tropical or semitropical ood crops inreturn for manufactures and other necessaries. This commercial relationwith the increasingly ndustrialized emperate ountries brought about erratic,externally nduced shifts in the centers of production. It tended to createexploitative patterns of agriculture nd an easily uprooted rural proletariat.And it militated against the emergence of a stable network of towns andvillages, producing a variety of economic surpluses and linked in commercial

exchange.The history of the settlement of what is today the department of Norte

de Santander n Colombia exhibits many features characteristic f the urbanhistory of Latin America as a whole.23 Six settlement phases have beenidentified for this north Andean region. (1) The conquest. Towns werefounded along strategic routes between the coast and inland administrativecenters, or between such centers. Some towns, like Salazar and Ocafia, hadmultiple foundings before certain military or commercial criteria were em-pirically satisfied. (2) Rural dispersion. During the seventeenth entury nonew towns were ounded, but some existing ndian enters were Spaniardizedand brought nto encomiendas as the rural taproots of economic life werestruck. Also the earthquakes f 1610 and 1644 produced some changes oftown sites. (3) Cacao phase. The intensification f agriculture, nd in par-ticular the new commercial possibilities of cacao, attracted population romthe highlands o the hot, humid river valleys. Cucuta and other owland ownswere founded, some at the cost of depopulating revious nuclei. The carefulregulations or founding cities contained n the Spanish Laws of the Indies

were now no longer followed.(4) Rehabilitation f Indian centers. Overlapping he cacao boom came

a period when old encomiendas r Indian ettlements ook on more mportanceowing to the wealth of the whites who resided n them. Some towns wereformed by the grouping ogether of scattered ndian nuclei. (5) Improved om-munication. ntensified agriculture nd a denser population aused an increasein transportation mong population centers and the appearance f new way-station settlements long the routes. Before the nineteenth entury, however,it can be said that the three main towns of the region - Pamplona, Salazarand Ocafia - were still tributary o their surrounding ncomiendas andhaciendas, and that among them there was no settlement net by which theymight be unified .

23 Miguel Marciales (ed.), Geografia historica y economica del Norte de Santander(Bogota, 1948), I, 230-239.

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pivotal role as the cockpits of national politics, as centers for trade nowfree of mercantilist estraint, and often as refuges from the disruption and

banditryof rural ife. For Gilberto

Freyrethe

keytrend of the social and

institutional history of nineteenth-century razil is the shift of power fromthe rural big house , or casa grande, of the planter class to the town house,or sobrado, of the urban bourgeoisie.27 he ascendancy f economic iberalismin the new nations helped to commercialize nd build up capital n the urbaneconomy, and to make available he multiplying roducts of the industrializedsocieties. Even before banks were established, he Brazilian city of the earlynineteenth century began to extend its dominion over the country in theform of loans .28 n 1844 a Venezuelan observed hat, in his country, newlypassed Benthamite egislation authorized high, even usurious interest ratesthat were giving the urban moneylender stranglehold n the nation's agri-cultural development.29

Statistics or the province of Buenos Aires show that the rural populationcontinued o grow at a faster rate than that of the city until the 1830's, whenthe failure of the government's olonization policy and the city's greatereconomic attractions wung he balance the other way.30 From then until theFirst World War Buenos Aires, like other cities of Uruguay and southernBrazil, depended or its growth argely upon foreign mmigration. This, how-ever, was unusual n Latin America; and even in Argentina he total numberof permanent mmigrants was only one half of the 6.5 million arrivals, owingto the country's relatively imited agricultural nd industrial possibilities.83

By and large, Latin American city growth since independence as been fedby internal migrations. The nature and extent of these migrations re relatedto the patterns of settlement already described, and particularly o the lackof a seigneurial or village-community asis for rural social organization.Certain ocial and technological hanges of the nineteenth entury cast adrift

large numbers of rural workers. These changes included the abolition ofNegro slavery; he disruption f Indian communities r resguardos y osten-sibly liberal egislation; the commercializing nd industrializing f agri-culture; and the intensifying of single-crop production that offered onlyseasonal employment.

Reinforcing he push from the country was the pull of the city, especiallythe capital cities, now modernized with gas lights, trolley ines, broad prome-

27 Gilberto Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos, 2nd. ed., 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1951).28 Smith and Marchant, op. cit., p. 201.29 Fermin Toro, Reflexiones sobre la Ley de 10 de abril de 1.834 y otras obras(Caracas, 1941), pp. 162-163.30 Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism 1820-1852 (Cam-bridge, 1946), p. 27.31 Richard Robbins, Myth and Realities of International Migration into LatinAmerica , The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 316(March 1958), 106.

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nades, theaters, opera houses and monumental public buildings. By urbanimprovements the national strong man catered to the increasingly absenteeand city-based landholders of an

oligarchical,almost clan-like

society.The

same improvements, however, attracted rural masses to the cities, whereeventually they were to exert their own pressures in national politics.

Since the rural-urban migration was common to the whole Western worldafter the Industrial Revolution, one must bear in mind special characteristicsof the process as it occurred in Latin America.

First, the Latin American migration to cities, taken globally, representsa pressing against a social and technological system rather than against thesoil itself. Latin America contains 16% of the world's habitable area but

only 6.8% of its population.32Second, the migration has been out of proportion to the opportunities for

employment in manufacture. The ratio between employment in manufacturingand employment in services in Latin America is 1.4 to 1, as against a 1 to1 ratio in Western Europe. In the United States the services ratio is high(1.5), but growth in this sector was preceded by tremendous expansion ofindustrial productivity. The increase in the services category in LatinAmerica partly precedes industrial development, and it reflects activity inwhat are often called the least productive services, such as

pettycommerce

and certain personal services. Moreover, half of the Latin Americans saidto be employed in manufacturing are really in handicrafts.33

Third, migration has favored the large so-called primate city, usually onein each country, thus creating a topheavy pyramid or hierarchy of cities, andleaving the networks of secondary towns underdeveloped. Transportationnets radiate out from the primate cities, and give frequently poor directconnections among hinterland towns.

Finally, migration tends to assume an unselective, diluvial character, and

rural migrants often bypass the intermediate forms of non-agricultural, semi-rural employment.34 In Mexico and Ecuador there are even localities wherethe Indian becomes a factory worker or becomes urbanized without passingthrough the rural mestizo cultural stage.35

32 Kingsley Davis, Recent Population Trends in the New World: An Over-all View ,The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 316 (March1958), 7.33 Harley L. Browning, Recent Trends in Latin America Urbanization , The Annalsof the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 316 (March 1958), 117;Davis, loc. cit., p. 9.34 Browning, loc. cit., p. 118. The more gradual process by which rural migrants wereabsorbed into the European urban proletariat is described in Georges Friedmann (ed.),Villes et campagnes, civilisation urbaine et civilisation rurale en France (Paris, 1953),pp. 159-161.35 Ralph L. Beals, Urbanism, Urbanization and Acculturation , n Olen E. Leonardand Charles P. Loomis (eds.), Readings in Latin American Social Organization &Institutions (East Lansing, Mich., 1953), p. 172.

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A sociological study of Lima, Peru, published at the turn of this centurygives a trenchant f somewhat impressionistic ccount of the life and in-stitutions of that

city.36 Manyof its observations

mightbe

generalizedor

the other urban societies of modem Latin America. Lima, we are told, lackedthe superorganic nity of European cities. The regime of association wasexceedinglyweak. Neither professional roups nor workers' nions had passedbeyond a rudimentary tage. Political parties were organized not aroundprinciples but around personalistic eaders and their cliques who were seekingwealth and power. Class demarcations nd identifications were loose, whichimpelled people to simulate higher class positions than they in fact enjoyedand to substitute appearance or reality.

The citizen's sense of civic responsibility nd of loyalty to the larger com-munity, or municipality, was faint; and his opportunities or enterprise weresmothered by the triple evils of monopoly, usury and heavy taxes. A largeproportion of the population was therefore non-functional. Some 30,000persons, or 30% of the inhabitants, were idlers who drifted among the cafesor, if youths, formed platoons on street corners to block the way and insultpassing women. Only one child in three in Lima attended school.

The nuclear social unit of Lima's society, the author continues, was theextended family, which might range across all the class strata and afford apermanent means for its indolent members to prey upon the industrious.

Every amily has its links scattered rom the beggars' asylum o the wealthiestclass. The main cause of Lima's poverty and political corruption s that

the chief of this tribe, however much he may work, can never, by the honestpath, acquire ufficient esources o provide sustenance or so many people .37

At the time this study of Lima appeared, the modern growth of LatinAmerican cities was still gathering momentum. Only four countries had over10% of their population n cities of 20,000 or more. By 1950, however, 25%

of the total Latin American population was in cities of 20,000 or more, and17% was in cities of 100,000 or more.38 This last percentage was 9% abovethe average or Asia, 4% above the world average, and only 4% below theaverage for Europe. But while Latin America had nearly as many peoplein large cities, proportionately, s Europe, about two-thirds of its labor forcewas still in agriculture, s against slightly over one-third or Europe.39

Enough has been said of the causes and nature of growth of the LatinAmerican city to suggest hat its structure ails to conform o other city typesof the Western world. A contrast that has been drawn between the socio-geographic tructure f Sao Paulo, Brazil, and that of Paris makes the point

36 J. Capelo, Sociologia de Lima, 4 vols. (Lima, 1895-1902), III, passim.37 Ibid., III, 258-264.38 Browning, loc. cit., p. 111.39 Kingsley Davis and Hilda Hertz Golden, Urbanization and the Development ofPre-industrial areas , Economic Development and Cultural Change, III, 1 (Oct. 1954), 8.

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In Latin America, rationalistic, depersonalized orms of organization aremaking uneven headway against primary and personalistic orms. This isborne out when we examine the structure of labor

unions, political partiesor business enterprise;43 r when we are told that a resident of Sao Paulo,a city of some four million, can be expected to be in touch with anywherefrom 30 to 500 relatives;44 r when we observe that only 3% of the 47,000manufacturing lants in Colombia have more than twenty employees.45

Rural migrants o the big cities, however bewildered and disoriented heymay be, are not, strictly speaking, massified .46 hey carry with them or,as circumstances permit, re-create quasi-familial r neighborhood arrange-ments. It has been pointed out that whereas rural migrants to Europeancities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries soon found new homes andloyalties in the city, their modern counterparts n underdeveloped ountriescontinue belonging o their places of origin. The city remains strange othem and forces them to seek out as associates persons from their ownkinship group or region. Patterns of co-operation, uthority nd responsibilityare fashioned upon rural models rather han upon those of the Western ity.47

In a Latin American city rural migrants and, in general, the proletariatare not customarily rowded nto a blighted area at the urban core, as in theschema devised or the North American ity by the sociologistE. W. Burgess;but they are scattered, ften in makeshift dwellings, n peripheral r interstitialzones. The Latin American ity center with its spacious plaza was traditionallythe residence area for the wealthy and was the point of concentration orurban services and utilities. The quickening of commercial activity in thiscenter may displace well-to-do residents without necessarily creating con-taminated and overcrowded belts of social disorganization. The poor areoften not attracted nto transitional ones by cheap rents; they tend to moveout to unused land as the city expands, erecting their own shacks. The

downtown area becomes converted or commercial uses or for compact andmodern middle- and upper-income esidences.48In Guatemala City in the 1940's the four worst slums were all peripherally

43 For Sao Paulo see Richard M. Morse, From Community to Metropolis: A Bio-graphy of Sao Paulo, Brazil (Gainesville, 1958), pp. 209-212, 228-230.44 Emilio Willems, The Structure of the Brazilian Family , Social Forces, XXXI,4 (May 1953), 343.45 Ford Foundation Mission to Colombia, Political and Economic Profile of Co-lombia , June 1960 (offset).46 Yolanda Ortiz, Algunas dificultades de adaptaci6n de las poblaciones rurales alpasar al medio urbano en los paises latinoamericanos y especialmente en Colombia ,Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, XIX, 1 (Jan.-April 1957), 25-38.47 Bert F. Hoselitz, The City, the Factory, and Economic Growth , The AmericanEconomic Review, XLV, 2 (May 1955), 176.48 Floyd and Lillian Ota Dotson, Ecological Trends in the City of Guadalajara,Mexico , Social Forces, XXXII, 4 (May 1954), 367-374, and La estructura ecol6gicade las ciudades mexicanas , Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, XIX, 1 (Jan.-April 1957),39-66.

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located and all brand new. Within two kilometers of the city center therewas only one area of distinctly poor housing. The lower lass half-urbanized

groupsn

great miserybut without

beingovercrowded n the American

cale;the tendency to interior breakdown of the urban configuration which soconcerns contemporary North American planners s not a problem n Guate-mala . And while it is clear that the city's acculturation f the rural migrantis a disorganizing xperience which entails a period of cultural marginality,we are led to question the assumption hat individual and institutional dis-organization re progressive unctions of urbanism per se .49

Recent studies shed light upon the formation, tructure nd social processesof the urban areas settled by rural migrants. In the case of Rio de Janeiro

the first favelas50 appeared in the late nineteenth century. However, mostof the city's poor continued o live in collective dwellings, usually convertedfrom houses of the wealthy, until about 1930, when there came a surge ofrural migration. Construction of rustic dwellings n the city rose to anaverage of 1,000 per year in the 1930's and to 2,700 a year in the 1940's.By 1957 650,000 people, or a fifth of Rio's population, ived in favelas.51Of the population f Lima, Peru, about 10% live in barriadas, r communitiesof dwellingson unimproved and generally peripheral o the city. On a singlenight in December, 1954, it is reported hat 5,000 persons invaded Limato establish a colony on a tract along the Rimac valley.52

The majority of the urban proletariat ends to be of rural origin. Of thefamily heads in the Lima barriadas tudied, 89% were born in the provinces,only 11% in Lima. Of the former, more than three-fifths came from theIndian cultures of the mountain rea.53 sample of semi- and unskilled actoryworkers n Sao Paulo showed that no less than two-thirds f them had eitherworked in agriculture r lived in rural settings.54 Some of the migrants ocities - those from the Andean or Middle American Indian areas, for

example - may carry with them developed traditions of collective action.In Brazil, on the other hand, the rapid disappearance f the mutirao, a rural

49 Theodore Caplow, The Social Ecology of Guatemala City , Social Forces,XXVIII, 2 (Dec. 1949), 114-115, 124-125, 127, 133.50 A favela is defined as a grouping of at least fifty rustic huts or barracks, unlicensedand uninspected, built by squatters on lands that lack any urban improvements.51 Andrew Pearse, Some Characteristics of Urbanization in the City of Rio deJaneiro , United Nations document E/CN.12/URB/17 - UNESCO/SS/URB/LA/17(30 Sept. 1958), pp. 1-4. This study and those below by Matos Mar and Brandao Lopesare now published in Philip M. Hauser (ed.), Urbanization n Latin America (New York,1961).52 Jose Matos Mar, Migration and Urbanization, the 'Barriadas' of Lima: AnExample of Integration into Urban Life , United Nations document E/CN.12/URB/11- UNESCO/SS/URB/LA/11 (30 Sept. 1958), p. 12.53 Ibid., p. 14.54 Juarez Rubens Brandao Lopes, Aspects of the Adjustment of Rural Migrants toUrban-industrial Conditions in Sao Paulo, Brazil , United Nations document E/CN.12/URB.3 - UNESCO/SS/URB/LA/3 (30 Sept. 1958), pp. 5-6.

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institution or mutual aid, has left few such traditions beyond he orbit ofkinship and neighborhood elationship .55 ven, however, in the barriadasof Lima with their

migrantsrom Indian

highlands,he insecurities nd mixed

origins of the inhabitants work against cooperation, so that the familyremains he sole effective compensating nit . In rural areas the family, thecommunity and tradition are all cohesive forces, whereas n the city thereis nothing left but the family .56

The fact that large extended families do not move from country to cityintact and in a moment of time does not necessarily mean - as much urbani-zation theory would assume - that the migrant amily is stripped down tothe nuclear or conjugal unit. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to be sure,

Pearse found only 17 nuclear amilies with accretions n a total of 279families studied. He also found, however, hat migrants o the city came aslinks in a chain of kin groups bothpreceded and followed by kin in persistentmovement citywards . City dwellers give every assistance to in-migrantsbelonging o their kin group. New kin groups are created within the city bymarriages, and the appointment f godparents may either reinforce existinggroups or extend them by incorporation f non-kin. Visiting tends to occuramong kin-group amilies of the same or different avelas rather han amongneighbors. Little sentiment attaches to the geographic neighborhood, andattendance at general gatherings or the public is not well looked upon. Thekin group serves as the dominant and almost exclusive sanction group orthe behavior, protection and collective action of its members.57

Some version of the extended amily seems to be a basic socialunit commonto all the urban working-class ones. Moreover, he family size of the averagedwelling unit is not always so small as in the Rio favelas observed by Pearse,nor always limited to the conjugal family. A comparison between ruralVenezuelan communities and migrant communities n Caracas reveals that

the number of extended-family ouseholds drops by only 1% in the city,and that the average family size actually ncreases.58 Oscar Lewis followedhis study of the Mexican village of Tepoztlan with studies of districts, orvecindades, of Mexico City peopled by migrant Tepoztecans. Not only wasthe average household ize in the city larger han n the village (5.8 against 5),but the city households contained a slightly larger percentage of extendedfamilies. Lewis found very ittle evidence of family disorganization n thecity . There seemed o occur no weakening f parental authority ver childrenand no decline n church attendance nd religious practices. It even appearedthat the trials of urban ife gave continuity o a family solidarity which was

55 Ibid., p. 14.56 Matos Mar, op. cit., pp. 17-18.57 Pearse, op. cit., pp. 7, 10-12.58 Inter American Economic and Social Council, Pan American Union, Causas yefectos del exodo rural en Venezuela (Washington, n.d.), p. 188.

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evoked in the village only during crisis or emergency.59 Lewis reports onevecindad n Mexico City in which most of the families, originally migrants,have lived for fifteen to

twenty years.Over a third of the households have

blood relatives within the vecindad, and a fourth are related by marriage orkinship.60 n Lima, the associations f residents based on provinces of origin,the associations of residents of the barriadas and the trade unions are allsecondary o the family, which provides the greatest source of security orthe inhabitants f these areas .61

The point is not that rural or familial nstitutions re indefinitely reserved,or precisely duplicated, n the Latin American city. It is, rather, that theutilization and adaptation of such forms are a necessary alternative n the

near-absence f mechanisms or the rapid assimilation of migrants nto theurban milieu. Thus we find that lower-class esidents of the fast-growing ityof Cali, Colombia, maintain not only the traditional ompadrazgo extendedfamily or coparenthood elation) but also an improvised urban variety of it.The conventional ne, carried rom the country, acknowledged he compadreas the trusted person who may eventually eplace the father of the family ,while the city-born version s designed o obtain economic aid, even thoughsporadic, rom a person of higher ncome . Thus he traditional ompadrazgobinds neighbors among each other, while the economic one binds them tothe city. 62

A study of political behavior in Rio de Janeiro concludes that the cityworker, failing o find in the urban structure he powerful organizations fprofessional and social solidarity which constitute he bulwark of urban ifein the highly industrialized ountries, seeks to rebuild his political behaviorfollowing the guidelines of agrarian patriarchalism . The local ward boss isutilized by his higher-ups n the same way that the agrarian clan eaderonce utilized the compadre, the authority figure of the extended-family

relation.63Of the compadrazgo n Mexico City Lewis finds that it has made urbanadaptations without becoming weakened. In the city many types of godparentfall into disuse; by and arge t is only the godparents f baptism and marriagethat continue to be named, and these are generally blood relatives becausethe family has not the friends it knew in the village. Thus the urban com-

59 Oscar Lewis, Urbanization without Breakdown: A Case Study , The ScientificMonthly, LXXV, 1 (July 1952), 36-37. Lewis recognizes that Tepoztecans, comingfrom a traditional and stable community, are not typical migrants; he calls for similarstudies of poor and landless migrants from plantation areas. Ibid., p. 41.60 Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (NewYork, 1959), pp. 13-14, 63.61 Matos Mar, op. cit., p. 10.62 Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento, Siloe', el proceso de desarrollocomunal aplicado a un proyecto de rehabilitacion urbana (Bogota, 1958), p. 9.63 Jose Arthur Rios, El pueblo y el politico , Politica, 6 (Feb. 1960), 34-35.

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padrazgo is reinforced by blood ties and becomes more personal, less cere-monial. It comes in fact to resemble more nearly the version originallyintroduced in Mexico

City bythe

Spaniards.64Hand in hand with the quasi-rural forms of social organization found inthe city goes the conventionally agrarian attitude of dependency of the pooror weak upon the rich or strong. The urban or economic compadrazgoof Cali described above is a product of such an attitude. The migrant inRio de Janeiro is not content with a mere wage nexus, and he looks for thepatron, the bom patrao, who will advance him money or medicine, or helphim cope with the bureaucracy. He may even appeal for tutelage to a strongsaint through prayers or communication via a medium. Pearse uses the term

populism to describe the system of patronage or clientage which preservesfor the urban scene the spirit of rural face-to-face dependency relations. Thecommon man receives his benefits - jobs, welfare services, recreation facili-ties, and so forth - through the intervention of populist and well publicizedleaders who utilize informal patronage structures that usually lie outside theformal structures of administration. Populism does not favour the organiza-tion of common interest groups or cooperative groups, and power is usuallydelegated downwards rather than upwards. The common man fits easily intothis situation, for he does not know either how to obtain his

legal rightsor how to operate successfully even in the lower echelons of the power andinfluence structures .65

Of course, the obverse to dependency is independence . That the lattersentiment is no less intimately a part of the migrant's outlook is attested byhis stubborn preference for the one-family dwelling, however crude andmakeshift, even in the largest metropolises. Nearly every migrant to SaoPaulo looks for the chance to work on his own. Any job where I'd give theorders , said one; it could be anything, a liquor shop, a food store. Anything

that could be mine. Nobody would give me orders there, see? 66 A factoryworker employed some years may frequently be expected to lower hisproduction rate so that he will be dismissed and may then set up his businesswith the dismissal compensation. Each worker's performance tends to beguided by an internalized norm, deriving from rural traditions but reworkedunder city influences and in answer to his particular needs as he sees them.That is, his job behavior is guided more by personal, independent criteriathan by the requirements of the system.

Given the urban worker's lack of experience with secondary groups andlack of identification with the industrial structure, it is no surprise that hismost effective group participation is on an ad hoc, cooperative basis. It isthrough mutual-aid residents' associations that the inhabitants of the Lima

64 Lewis, Urbanization... , loc. cit., p. 38.65 Pearse, op. cit., pp. 13-15.66 Brandao Lopes, op. cit., p. 12.

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barriadas xert pressure on the bureaucracy, he church and other entitiesto acquire the essential services of urban life. Organized communities arethus constituted which have as their

specific objectivehome

ownership .67An example of such an association n Cali is the Central Pro-Vivienda deColombia, a virtually spontaneous organization f 3,850 lower-class amilyheads who each pay about twenty cents a week to a common und or acquiringresidential and and urban services. The Central is governed by its owngeneral assembly, board of directors and governing ommittee. Its objectivesinclude: egal acquisition of land for individual home ownership; assistancein home construction; tudies to determine he greatest needs of the poorclasses and the ability of each family to pay for its land; solidarity f homeless

persons without attention to political, religious or racial considerations;exertion of pressure o bring down land prices near the city; encouragementof cooperation and self-help among the poor, especially or the constructionof dwellings; moral and cultural mprovement of the poor and defense ofthe nuclear amily; resistance o the creation of new slums and the invasionof private ands.68

In all, some 4.5 million Latin American amilies live in urban slums andshanty owns. Often t is they themselves who take the initiative and organizeto improve heir iving conditions and administer heir own affairs, o becomeon occasion effective political groups.69 There exists an economic argumentagainst high governmental xpenditures o improve he material condition ofthese urban poor. It is that a fixed capital investment n Latin America of$100 generates $40 to $50 of production er year. The same money nvestedin residential building generates only $10 to $12.70 This is an importantconsideration or an underdeveloped ountry. As a cold dollars-and-centsargument, t becomes more palatable when taken in combination with asociological one - namely, that the hiatus between urban bureaucratic

structures nd the agrarian ackground f the migrant s so great that accom-modation of one to the other can be expected only after the migrants havegrouped themselves, if possible with understanding uidance, in ad hoc,transitional associations. In short, the alternative o the urban worker'spersonalistic dependency omplex s not necessarily mpersonal, bureau-cratic regimentation ut might be an appeal to his independence omplex .

Wherever we pick our way in the study of the modem Latin American itywe must be careful not to trip over concealed premises that derive from

67 Matos Mar, op. cit., pp. 11-12.68 'Central Pro-Vivienda de Colombia:' Sintesis sobe origen, organizaci6n y finali-dades , ms. by Eduardo Burbano R., secretary general of the Central, June 1960.69 Report of the Seminar on Urbanization Problems in Latin America , UnitedNations document E/CN.12/URB/26/Rev. 1 - UNESCO/SS/URB/LA/26/Rev. 1 (29Feb. 1960), pp. 57, 61-62.70 Ibid., p. 31.

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familiarity with West European or North American cities. At least three suchpremises have come to the surface n this paper:

(1)The

primate city.It is

customaryo

deplore overwhelmingoncen-

tration of persons and services in a single primate city which is said to beparasitic and to be a cause or the underdevelopment f the hinterland.One observer asks, however, whether urban concentration does not offeradvantages n countries which cannot afford o dissipate heir meager esources.If Montevideo, which contains 40% of the population of Uruguay, weredivided into two or three cities, would these still offer the existing servicesand amenities? Also, the beef-and-wool economy needs relatively ew ruralworkers to run it. The question is raised, is not Latin America perhaps

over-ruralized ather than over-urbanized ? s not the present afflux tothe cities healthy, as helping o provide both a solution or agricultural nder-employment and a better opportunity or rationalizing ural production?71

(2) The services ector. Another observer asks us to be wary of a faciledistinction between the high proportion of tertiary employment, or employ-ment in services , ound in rich countries (seen as an index of progress)and the high proportion ound in the poor countries (seen as an index ofpoverty). Services n Latin America are often loosely referred o as pettyones in which excessive numbers are employed, hough with no definitionof terms. The question occurs, do not people generally seek out the mostadvantageous mployment, and would not those who are in petty servicestend to be less productive n the other occupations open to them? May notLatin American city growth be reallocating he working force into moreeffective occupational patterns?72

(3) The city as Gesellschaft . The assumption s frequently made that theurbanization f modern Latin America mplies he depersonalization f socialties, the ascendancy of the secondary over the primary ocial group, and the

bureaucratization f the occupational tructure. While it is clear that suchprocesses are at work, it is less certain that they are as unequivocal or asovermastering s in the classic model of the Western metropolis. Certainlythere is nothing prescriptive about them, and the attempt to build an in-dependent heoretical model for the Latin American city would be of solidpractical value for the reconstruction f its society.

There is already much evidence that similar analyses need to be done forcities throughout he underdeveloped orld. William Kolb suggests hat thesecities cannot afford he diversity and anarchic conflict of Chicago in itsheyday. They will industrialize nd achieve fitting levels of welfare largelyunder governmental ontrol. Diffuse bonds of neighborliness nd kinship n

71 Browning, loc. cit., pp. 116-118.72 Simon Rottenberg, Note on the Economics of Urbanization in Latin America ,United Nations document E/CN.12/URB 6 - UNESCO/SS/URB/LA/6 (30 Sept.1958), pp. 8-11.

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cities can be further developed and may long endure. What Talcott Parsonscalls the universalistic-achievement alues of the Western city may neverreceive ull stress n other

settings. Primaryontrols of a

communityriented

variety can be much more prominent both in the control of individual actionand of corporate action. 73

Marriot speculates that in India extended primary group organizationmay even have grown stronger with the growth of cities.74 Banton gives us astudy of the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, which has a population hat isabout three-quarters ribal. Here the fusion points of African and Westernculture often produce new cultural orms which are outwardly European butretain a latent content of tribal significance.75 t should n fact be noted that

an attack has even been launched upon the assumption hat extended amilyrelationships re incompatible with the democratic ndustrial ociety of theWest. It is now asserted hat the isolated nuclear amily was the most func-tional type only during earlier stages of industrialization. A modified versionof the extended family, no longer characterized y geographic propinquity,occupational nepotism or strict authority elations, appears o be coming ntoa more important ole in the Western ndustrial ity.76 If this is the case, itwould almost seem that the Latin American city is, in certain respects ofsocial organization, more developed han that of the developed nations.

At this point we may restate the two interrelated ypotheses which havebeen set forth in this paper regarding he process of Latin American coloniza-tion and the structure f the modern Latin American ity. The early settlementpatterns had, by and large, a municipal point of origin. During the colonialperiod, however, rural institutions developed o an important xtent outsidethe radius of municipal control. Under such conditions, rural social organi-zation was thrown back upon extended-family, ompadrazgo r neighborhoodunits.77 These were reminiscent of the hermandad or adfratatio of early

medieval Europe, a social unit which at the time of the discovery of Americahad given way to a more complex type of community rganization.78

73 William L. Kolb, The Social Structure and Functions of Cities , Economic Devel-opment and Cultural Change, III, 1 (Oct. 1954), 43-46.74 McKimm Marriott, Comments on Kolb's article, loc. cit., pp. 50-52.75 Michael Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (London,1957).76 Eugene Litwak, Occupational Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion and Geo-graphic Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion , American Sociological Review,XXV, 1 and 2 (Feb. and April 1960), 9-21, 385-394.77 Fals Borda, op. cit., p. 188.78 Alfons Dopsch, The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization(London, 1937), p. 158; Eduardo Hinojosa, La comunidad domestica en Espafiadurante la Edad Media , La Lectura, V, 2 (1905), 233-241, and La fraternidad artificialen Espafia , Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, IX, 7 (July 1905), 1-18; SidneyW. Mintz and Eric R. Wolf, An Analysis of Ritual Co-parenthood (Compadrazgo) ,Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, VI, 4 (Winter 1950), 341-368.

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LATIN AMERICAN CITIES 493

As the Latin American city entered its centripetal phase in the nineteenthcentury, it began to reap as it had sown. It drew massively from the rural

areas, and the migrants depended heavily upon traditionalor

impromptuprimary group organizations for their accommodation to urban life. Thus thecity, which imparted an individualistic, exploitative spirit to the settling of theland, exhibits internally the traces of agrarian, familialistic social structure.Any attempted reconstruction of the Latin American city which relies uponsecondary associations to the neglect of primary groups would seem, there-fore, to have only tenuous chances of success.

RICHARD M. MORSE

Yale University

Rchard M. Morse Latin American Cities Aspects of Function and Structure

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