Professor Cornelius has contributed a first-rate study to the growing literature on the political significance of Third World urbanization. The book describes and analyzes the political socialization of rural migrants to Mexico City. It focuses on six differing colonias proletarias. The research dates from the first three years of the present decade.
Amidst the presentation of much information and some fascinating findings, the author emphasizes the multiplicity of political and socioeconomic contexts in the urban milieu and insists on their import for a sophisticated understanding of the political socialization process. “There is considerable variation in the socializing influences to which a migrant is exposed,” he posits. “These differences in neighborhood socialization patterns are an important source of variance in individual political attitudes and behavior” (p. 226). The single most telling experience is the way in which the several colonias were originally established. Irregular land invasions make a lasting imprint on political attitudes and generate ongoing participation in pursuit of security of property tenure.
A host of less thematic, but equally intriguing, propositions fill the volume. Professor Cornelius adds his weight to the growing denial of the myth of revolutionary attitudes among the urban poor. On the contrary, they are an optimistically satisfied lot caressing visions of vertical class mobility for themselves and their progeny. They find jobs relatively easily and improve their economic situation. Indeed, the longer the migrant lives in the city, the more supportive he becomes of the political system. The policy implication for those attached to the present regime, logically enough, “lies in promoting cityward migration, both as a conservatizing influence on the urban population and as a safety valve for rural discontent” (p. 229). Moreover, the so-called “second generation hypothesis” does not obtain among the sons of the migrants. The findings are inconclusive, but tend to indicate that they are less political than their fathers basically because the catalyzing experience of the original migration and neighborhood foundation passes from their memory. In one of the more interesting chapters devoted to “Community Leadership,” finally, the author reports that the institution of caciquismo is flourishing in the neighborhoods of Mexico City.
Beyond this, the book is replete with tables clearly done and carefully explained; conventional wisdom and previous hypotheses cleanly posited and logically tested; and cross national comparisons contextually explicated and cogently analyzed.
With all of that (or because of that?), there is a strain of tedium about the effort. No bedside reading here, but rather a tome to be studied and digested. The results, nonetheless, are worth the effort; the study is a “must” for students of Mexico, urban migration and political socialization.
