Some Characteristics of Rural Village and Urban Slum Populations on the Coast of Peru

Abstract

URBANIZATION and the cultural characteristics of urban as opposed to rural populations have been subjects of considerable interest, particularly in Latin American studies. Some observers have commented generally on the theoretical importance of investigations of urbanization (e.g., Beals 1951), some on the cultural similarities and differences between city and country and their relative positions in an acculturational scheme (e.g., Foster 1953; Redfield 1941, 1947). Others have presented comparisons of population composition and rates of reproduction (e.g., Casis and Davis 1953). In many studies, the city is treated as an undifferentiated whole. That procedure is certainly legitimate for some purposes, but an occasional necessity for finer distinctions is suggested by the nature of Latin American urbanization. Anthropologists have long been aware that specific urban-rural similarities in Latin America and, indeed, interpersonal ties, are often closest between the village peasant and the resident of the urban slum, who may, himself, have been a rural peasant in origin. It is not unusual for a peasant to lose his land or employment in the country; his usual recourse is to move to the city in search of a livelihood. Almost invariably, his poverty and lack of special skills make it necessary for him to reside and seek employment in the slums. Exceptions, of course, occur; the educated and ambitious sons of successful peasants, abandoning rural ways, sometimes acquire particular skills and enter the middle classes of an urban center. Women will sometimes leave the rural area to take domestic positions in the wealthier sections of a city and thus are not found in the slums. Nevertheless, the most frequent pattern is probably that of the landless peasant seeking refuge in the slum. The slum, therefore, is often the first way station in the urbanization of the rural peasant. Since anthropological interest in urbanization centers around the effects of living in large and complex as opposed to smaller and more homogeneous communities, the best analytical results might be expected from an approximate matching of populations, by