At the outset of this book the authors point to a “theoretical vacuum” that now exists in the field of urbanization and urbanism (p. x). That plus their view that “cityness” is a relative notion have made it difficult for them to come “to grips theoretically with the varieties of the urban experience …” (p. x). Indeed, one wonders if the search for the paradigm of “the urban experience” is not an illusory objective given that “there are probably no cross-culturally valid measures for deciding what is urban and what is not” (p. x).
Thus, with no unifying theory or perspective, the authors plunge in to explain “processes of change in the cities of Latin America” (p. x). The result is a book that is general, set in the multidisciplinary tradition of “urban studies,” that nevertheless is concerned with urban anthropology. It is an introduction to its subject and yet seeks to make a substantive contribution in, for example, the area of social stratification. It aspires to be a synthesis and yet is fragmented into summaries of scores of studies that are juxtaposed rather than integrated.
The authors’ method is to construct a kind of running annotation of numerous works around “the major paradigms in the field.” Those become the building blocks for the central concern of the book: the migrant. Butterworth and Chance want to know who moves to the city and why. Once the migrant has moved, how does he adapt? What effects do his departure (and return) have on the community of origin? What strategies will migrants create to cope with housing, lack of services, and poverty? What is the urban class structure and the migrants’ place in it? What effects on cities do patterns of international migration have (with particular reference to northern Mexico)? A preliminary chapter introduces these questions by surveying Latin American urbanization from the preconquest era to the present age of explosive growth rates and huge metropolitan concentrations.
These are undoubtedly important matters. They reflect the authors’ concern with movement, change, adaptation—the process of urbanization. Unfortunately, the exposition of these questions is disappointing. Instead of being given summaries and evaluations of the new cycle of research on colonial cities, the reader is treated to a lengthy summary of Chance’s research on Oaxaca, which, however worthy, is widely known and readily available. In the anthropological sections we encounter once again Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty,” the push-pull scheme to organize the discussion of migration, and the folk-urban continuum. Other paradigms, such as William Mangin’s optimistic interpretation of squatments, are used skillfully to show the continuity of a debate. Frequently the discussion takes the form of “myths” versus “current notions,” which leads to some nicely schematic but oversimplified revisions. Thus the myths of political radicalization in squatter settlements and the myth of “marginality,” both fairly easy targets given the research published in the mid-1970s, are dispensed with in short order.
In the conclusion the authors point to dependency theory and systems analysis as the next fruitful organizing focus for research on cities: “… we must think not in terms of discrete units such as the nation or city, but of hierarchical relationships where each node in the chain can thrive … only by dominating those below it to some degree” (p. 201). One wonders why this approach was not explicitly tried in the main body of the text, at least in the obvious case of the function and structure of northern Mexico’s border cities within world and national “systems.”
Like all such broadly cast works, Urbanization in Latin America is bound to fall short of expectations here and there. The authors have familiarized themselves with a large literature about a complex subject and brought some order to it by listing it. By doing this they have shown us that we still need the synthesis that they are seeking. In the meantime, they have given us a serviceable introduction.
