Living Conditions of the Poor in Latin America

The four books examined here ask the same fundamental question: How do Latin America’s urban poor suffer and interpret the structural, symbolic, and physical violence that, we are told, has greatly increased as a result of two decades or so of neoliberal economic policies? Two of the books are especially interesting in this regard, in that they involve return visits to sites where their authors had done fieldwork in the late 1960s. The opportunity to track down and reinterview members of an original sample of participants, to evaluate their lives and experiences over the long run, is somewhat rare in the study of the urban poor in Latin America. All too often, we go in, gather information, and leave, never to be seen again, except perhaps as talking heads on the television or in editorial columns of newspapers.

In the case of Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar, there was a twenty-two-year gap between her first (1968–1974) and subsequent (1996–2000) visits to Colonia Hermosa, a squatter settlement on a hillside on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. When she first arrived as a graduate student in 1968, she encountered— and was clearly enchanted by—a community of recent migrants who had left the countryside in search of a better life. Housed in wattle and daub huts, with minimal and irregular access to electricity, sewerage, and water, the residents of Colonia Hermosa worked hard, and together, to resolve the many problems associated with their shared position of marginality. Recounting her earlier experiences, Mahar states that “symbolic capital (status, honor, and prestige) was of upmost importance in creating and maintaining the social capital that is bound to one’s social relationships,” and that “living a life worthy of respect was what counted most” (101).

On her return, however, Mahar found a very different community, indistinguishable from any number of others fully integrated into the hustle and bustle of a rapidly expanding city. Houses that were once small and precarious in both their physical structure and their legality had come to be larger and consolidated, replete with CD players, stereos, gas stoves, refrigerators, and televisions. Worse, the sense of collective identity, which was so strong before, had largely disappeared, replaced by a culture of individualism: rather than being a reflection of larger structural conditions, success—or failure for that matter—was viewed in terms of individual characteristics, qualities, and flaws. And instead of relying on neighbors and the larger community for assistance, the residents of Colonia Hermosa had turned increasingly inward, toward an ever-expanding network of relatives who, more than likely, resided in the same family compound.

So what did Mahar make of these changes, of the loss of a sense of community? On the one hand, she was delighted that her informants had made the transition from rural migrants to citizens integrated into the urban economy, and proud of all they had achieved over the course of twenty years. On the other hand, she could not help but feel that their lives had been compromised, that they were “fully colonized by the logic of the economy” (28) in such a way that their efforts to survive and accumulate consumer goods “sap[ped] them of the strength to fight the larger struggle in the nature of the social logic itself” (54). This is a state of affairs that Mahar characterizes, with a nod to...