In this small volume, Kathleen Logan has given us a case study of a large problem: the integration of recently established settlements, both socially and physically, with the enormous and rapidly growing conurbations characteristic of Latin America. She focuses on the suburb of Santa Cecilia, a fraccionamiento (“housing development”) laid out in 1968 on the northern fringe of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. The “haciendo pueblo” of the title refers to the process whereby the 35,000 residents of Santa Cecila have attempted, and in many ways succeeded, to make a community for themselves. The book begins with a short but interesting survey of some of the social science literature on urbanization in Latin America. This is followed by chapters on the physical structure of the suburb and its settlement history; its economy; the overlapping zones of social contact, from family to the larger community, and the role of women in Santa Cecilia; and the roles of the church and the municipal government in structuring this small slice of urban life. In some ways the heart of the book, its culmination, is the chapter analyzing the failure of a private community action organization to bring about any meaningful short-term change in the community, or to help it in solving the critical problems of day-to-day life there, such as water shortage, inadequate urban services, internal political organization, and so on. A brief conclusion points to the factors in the urban development of Guadalajara that may make the relative cohesiveness of Santa Cecilia, and its small, but notable, successes in dealing with community problems on its own, anomalous compared to other Mexican and Latin American cities. Logan concludes, rather more optimistically than most researchers making such studies, that people who are basically poor (though in this case not necessarily recent migrants to the city) can take their fate in their own hands by nontraditional means—strong action by women, spontaneous community organization, and the help of reformist Catholic clergy influenced by the theology-of-liberation movement.
Engaging as the book is, it has a major flaw: it has no perceptible hypothesis, but consists of a series of descriptions and vignettes designed to support the view that social activism is possible in the urban fringes of Latin America. Yet the description often takes on the tone of a travel guide book, as though the author thought that to engage the reader, without explaining, were sufficient. Furthermore, the redundancy and the considerable naïveté of the book are striking. For example, the author tells us that “The problem of housing and integration is especially serious for lower-income groups because they enjoy fewer economic resources” (p. 17). Entertaining as it is, the book often seems to opt for lyricism rather than grappling with important theoretical and policy issues. The question is, on what ground should one meet this quite enjoyable book? And the answer is, as an eloquent and rather engage tract on social activism, rather than as a serious work of professional anthropology.
