Class Formation in Latin America: One Family's Enduring Journey between Country and City

Abstract

In contrast to the US, scholars of Latin America have not been shy about viewing agrarian life through a class lens. To the contrary, Latin Americanists have often seen class formation as a primarily rural process. This paper examines the uneven nature of and relationship between class formation, “industrialization,” and “urbanization” by tracing the history of a single family: the Alvaros. It is a narrative that provides an interesting window into the central processes, forces, struggles, and events that have defined Ecuadorian as well as much of Latin American history during the twentieth century. It is, at the same time, a history that highlights the problematic nature of any analysis of class formation that (a) focuses solely on urban or rural life, (b) posits a smooth transition from one to the other (i.e. rural to urban), or (c) privileges the solitary male worker so familiar to labor studies. It is not simply the fact that members of the Alvaro family moved back and forth between city and country, a trait they share with many of their counterparts in the non-Western world. The reproduction of the family has, and continues to be, dependent on the relationships between family members living in small rural towns, regional centers, and Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest and most industrialized city-port. The family as a whole has always been—and needed to be in order to survive—simultaneously rural and urban. Like the Alvaro family, those of us interested in understanding class formation need to inhabit these multiple worlds simultaneously.