Cityscapes

From Country to City: Internal Migration

Throughout Latin America, cities are transforming their urban spaces through migration from the countryside.  Historically, peasants, villagers, and ambitious dwellers in smaller cities have migrated to larger urban communities in search of educational and economic opportunities. Now, the urbanization of rural communities is escalating migration to the cities and transforming the countryside itself.

This trend is reflected by observing the migration patterns in Peru. Peruvians are now migrating to mid-sized cities, not just to Lima, and they are also increasingly migrating abroad. More women than ever are flocking to the cities in order to improve their lives. Migrants who moved to escape political violence are remaining in their new homes. Local organizations building bridges to the communities of origin and supporting these new city citizens, "the internal immigrants," have flourished. This new type of internal migration has created a new urban culture in Lima.

Even after the political violence in Peru ended in 1992, displaced persons and their families, trapped in involuntary migration, left their stamp on the city. Two out of every five displaced migrants (desplazados)—some 800,000 people—came to the metropolitan Lima area from the poorest parts of the country such as Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurímac. Many remained. They are the poorest citizens of the poorest rural communities farthest from Peru's larger cities. Their presence in the cities caused and is still causing resentment, indifference, and even fear among long-time residents. These attitudes make us think that the cities are not prepared to receive these new social and cultural actors who generally reside in the most marginal and poorest zones of the city. The desplazados are invisible migrants, often confused with those who travel to the city in search of a better economic life.

Many of these migrants did go home after 1992, when relative peace came to the country, but many had established families in Lima and their world now spans both contexts.

Different Types of Growth
 
The 1993 census shows a relative decline of migration to metropolitan Lima in favor of medium-sized cities. Greater Lima is growing at a rate of 1.7 percent after experiencing a 3.5 percent growth rate during the 1970s and 1980s. One reason for this lower growth rate is the tendency toward smaller families; another is the extensive international migration, estimated to have quadrupled from 500,000 Peruvians abroad in 1980 to 1,940,000 in1999.

In the last 20 years, medium-sized cities have exploded in population. Cuzco, Huancayo, Juliaca, Huancayo, Juliaca, Ayacucho and Abancay all grew between four and seven percent annually, although Lima continues to receive more migrants in absolute terms.  The rapid growth of medium-sized cities is causing housing shortages and adversely affecting the environment. The advantage for the migrants who moved to these smaller cities is that they can keep in touch with their communities of origin and are able to return frequently.

Another change in migration is the increase in the number of female migrants. When internal migration began, women hardly ever left the countryside. Culturally, migration was the domain of men. The father or oldest son took to the road because the migratory routine was part of the public life that the family considered a masculine privilege. The trip to the city was usually made in order to find work, and women, with their lack of education, were limited in their occupational choices. Census data from 1940, 1961 and 1972 all show more women than men living in the countryside. The seasonal or temporary absence of men helped redefine the role of women, taking them out of the domestic, private realm and thrusting them into more public roles. Women began to take on political and religious roles, as well as economic tasks, in the absence of their menfolk. Then the women themselves began to migrate.

As women increasingly entered the labor market, they sought better opportunities, just like the men. Women also found good opportunities in the city both in commerce and as domestic workers. In the countryside, women found increasing educational opportunities and changing gender roles prepared them to enter the labor market. Thus, migration allowed women to discover better horizons and even better marriage prospects. In the city, women became leaders in the defense of civil rights. Many of them went on to lead their families and become educated, sometimes even making it to the university.

The last census in Peru demonstrates that half of all migrants are women; indeed, in international migration, the number of women slightly outnumbers the men. Women head one out of every four households in Greater Lima. Divorce, separation, and single motherhood are increasing the number of female-led households. Unemployment and underemployment more often affect men than women; there are already quite a few homes in which the woman works and the man stays at home to cook and take care of the children. Valuing their traditions and regional roots, women are assuming critical roles in the migrants' local organizations as well. Women have a great capacity to combine the modern and the traditional, while it is thought that men tend to favor the modern as a substitute for the old ways.


Growth of Local Organizations
 
With the loss of influence by political parties and unions in Peru's most populated urban barrios, many local organizations have sprung up. During the 1980s, urban political violence and increased governmental military control politically demobilized city residents. Popular organizations active in the 1970s came to a halt and still remain inactive even though political violence is currently under control. 

Local groups such as block organizations, church groups, and housing committees gradually filled this vacuum. Inside these relatively safe spaces, citizens organized themselves into neighborhood associations, sports clubs, anti-delinquency groups, and prayer groups, that is, specific small and local groups with a tangible purpose. Each of these organizations, with unwritten rules about rights and obligations, practiced democracy: a democracy that was carried out independently of the influences of the central government and separately from the still existing political parties and unions. This is the new democracy of migrants and the children of migrants. In this democracy, the customs, traditions, and experiences that led up to the migration, coupled with the anxieties, hopes, desires, and frustration of the migration experience itself, make up the present urban culture condensed into these small organizations. These social protagonists feel that the organizations are their own and represent their interests. Someone from the outside did not come to organize them, as had been the case with political parties, unions and the government. The rules of operation of each organization emerged from its members. Its decisions, statutes, and internal and external rules are collective creations, even though men and those with the most education generally become the leaders. These are voluntary associations, not obligatory ones, and its members are groups of families, neighbors and friends.

Clubs of migrants from the same region are some of the oldest types of these local organizations and are growing rapidly. Compared to the other types of urban organizations, these "provincial clubs" attract the greatest numbers of members.  Practically every little mountain village has one or more associations representing it. The relatively apolitical nature of these associations has permitted them to bring together migrants from all walks of life who reach consensus to engage in a variety of activities.
   
These organizations represent not only the migrants, but their urbanized children. These experiences—which can also be found in other parts of Latin America, as well as Asia and Africa—are very locally based phenomena, not only because they are developed in an urban context, but because they are rooted in the communities of origin.


New Interactions between Country and City
 
When you think about the country and the city, you might be tempted to think in terms of structural dualism. The rural is separated from the urban, the traditional from the modern, and the particular (rural) from the universal (urban). These separations, propagated by theories of development and modernization, have been rendered obsolete. Socio-demographic and cultural evidence in the last decades has shown us that the city and countryside are experiencing an intense interaction and mutual correspondence. No one can analyze cities independently of the countryside and vice-versa. There are many cultural elements found in both country and city; the question is to isolate these cultural factors to determine how much of each is found in both environments.

The traditional migration from countryside to city to find better work opportunities is giving rise to steady movements of populations in which the migrants come and go from the cities and countryside with more frequency and freedom. The temporary, seasonal, or definitive abandonment of the country by the peasant is no longer a novelty.

The small towns and capital cities of the provinces receive people from outside their communities daily. Better highways, as well as administrative links between country and city, are contributing to greater mobility of the population. Likewise, visits to family members who have relocated to towns, trips for agricultural supplies, and exploration of new markets for rural zones require movement between the countryside and the cities. Many migrants to the cities return periodically to their hometowns because they maintain small businesses or farms there.

Many returning internal migrants (as well as the transnational ones) invest their savings in "combis"—a van-like form of transportation that is replacing buses. Every town, even the most remote, is now linked to small and medium-sized cities.

Growing Rural Urbanization
 
If more and more people are moving to the countryside, perhaps it is because the countryside itself is becoming more urban. The city is no longer so strange. Roads and electricity reach into the smallest hamlets. Radio and television are becoming more commonplace, and small industries such as shoemaking and bakeries can now operate in remote areas.

The radio is the most efficient means of urbanization. According to the 1993 census, 95 percent of Peruvians depend on this media. The growing rural audience has conditioned the urban radio program producers to direct their messages towards the countryside because that's where the new consumers are. In addition, the growing presence of consumer goods in the countryside is motivating urban manufacturers to include the countryside in their target market.  Every time a highway is built, manufactured products follow. 

In 1993, 65 % of Peruvians had a television. This figure is most likely higher now because of rural electrification. A 1991 study of Peruvian ranchhands in Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and California showed that the money they were sending back home to the Valle del Mantaro was being used for the purchase of televisions and vans, whereas previously it had been designated for religious fiestas and agricultural improvements.

The increased use of radio, television, and, to some degree, the printed media, is changing the traditions of oral communication. Shepherds bring their transistor radios to the fields, peasants rely on the radio to keep abreast of market information and local and international news. Combined with the increased geographic movement by peasants and the greater role of women, orality—or the exchange of information through face-to-face contact—is evolving.

The shift towards urbanization begins before migration. Educational programs relying on urban models to transform students into Spanish-speakers have also fostered urban values such as individualism, competitiveness, and rewards for academic excellence. Parents encourage children to buy into the values of the school, to become professionals and not mere "campesinos." The majority of rural areas now have schools that go through the primary years, but to continue education, the student must travel to a nearby city or to Lima. The student often remains in the city forever, only occasionally traveling back home.

Government development agents in the area of education and health also help to urbanize the countryside. Rural schools have brought Spanish to Aymara and Quechua-speaking peoples and made villagers literate. Generally, this literacy and fluency in Spanish has increased migration to the cities.  Local changes in food habits and dress, as well as the increased use of Spanish, are leading to the rapid and irreversible process of urbanization.

As a result, manufactured and sometimes imported products supplied by cities are replacing locally-made ones, tying the rural communities to the cities through trade with the increased participation of peasants in the regional economy. Money has replaced barter systems, in part because there is less agricultural surplus due to the migration of the economically active population.

Almost every peasant community has a weekly market: socio-economic and cultural events with great exchange among the local, regional and national economies. It is an uneven exchange because the rural agricultural products cannot compete in quality and quantity with the urban manufactured goods. The markets provide a stage for great transactions between the country and the city; however the city-dweller merchant goes to the countryside only to sell things and later returns to the city. The peasant merchant remains.

As a result of these transactions, there are more and more urban products in the peasant home. A visible example of this trend is the presence of plastics and cans in rural communities.  In a quick survey of a peasant market in the highlands of the Valle del Mantaro, we found that the Friday market had more manufactured goods than local ones. This trend will certainly  continue as the production of agriculture and handicrafts declines.

The growth of Protestantism has also contributed to a more effective process of urbanization because the religion stimulates material progress, innovations and the market economy. Catholic evangelism, which began simultaneously with the conquest, has been more flexible in permitting native rituals and practices. This evangelism was more of an agent of change in social practices rather than economic ones. In contrast, Protestantism came to the community with the message of prosperity for those who reject "backwards" traditions such as religious fiestas with their accompanying consumption of alcohol. Well-funded Protestant sects attracted new members in both the countryside and urban areas; since evangelists could be ordained within their home communities, they could spread the religion more aggressively than outsiders.

Urban housing practices introduced by migrants often find the younger generation living in homes built of corrugated iron or other sophisticated materials, while the older generation remains in straw huts. Streets are now part of the community. Even in the most rural areas, there are two-story houses.  The urban part of such communities is growing more rapidly than the rural part.

The countryside and the city are constantly interacting and changing each other, creating urban-tinged spaces within the countryside, while families socialize and attend to their animals in rural-style migrant areas of Lima. The two spheres can no longer be seen as worlds apart.

Teófilo Altamirano is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. This article was based on ideas developed in Liderazgo y Organizaciones de Provincianos en Lima Metropolitana: Culturas Migrantes e Imaginarios sobre el Desarrollo. Volumen II Por Teófilo Altamirano. Fondo Editorial PUCP y Prom-Perú año 2000, Lima, Perú.