Latin American shantytowns and their inhabitants have, for the past two decades or so, been scrutinized for several reasons. At first, social scientists such as William Mangin, Wayne Cornelius, and Joan Nelson investigated theories about the supposed radicalizing influence of the city upon poor migrants. When no empirical evidence to support such theories emerged, follow-up studies went in several directions, examining public policies toward the poor (David Collier in Peru), mass-state relationships (Talton Ray in Venezuela, Susan Eckstein in Mexico), political participation (Cornelius in Mexico), elites and urban development (John Walton in Mexico and Colombia), and the internal dynamics and structures of poor urban neighborhoods (Lisa Peattie in Venezuela, Janice Perlman and David Epstein in Brazil).
Larissa Lomnitz’ Networks and Marginality (a revised translation of Cómo sobreviven los marginados) fits perhaps best into the last category. Her basic concern, simply put, is survival of the poor in a single Mexico City shantytown. She assumes, rather than hypothesizes, the presence of structural marginality among its populace, since they are excluded from industrial production and its associated benefits, and thus live at the margin of the dominant system. She is keenly aware of how macro-level outside forces impinge upon her subjects; however, she concentrates upon how the poor survive under extremely severe socioeconomic constraints.
Supported with extraordinarily rich ethnographic and sociological data, Lomnitz shows how the urban poor create a variety of informal associational networks, including family and kinship structures, compadrazgo, reciprocal exchanges, cuatismo (close friendships), and confianza. All, she argues, allow survival under conditions of chronic economic insecurity. These conclusions by themselves are not startlingly new. What makes Lomnitz’ treatment so valuable is the vividness of her examples, cases, and details. She shows, for example, how the members of one complex network operate simultaneously not only within the neighborhood, but also between Mexico City and the small town of Villela, in San Luis Potosí, the home of some twenty five migrant families in the community. With such evidence, Lomnitz demonstrates more convincingly than any other account that the network, although ignored and unknown to middle-class Mexico, performs extraordinarily vital functions for the poor—in spite, and because, of the exclusionary nature of the larger system. I strongly recommend this study.
