10 - Migration to major metropoles in colonial Mexico

Summary

The urbanization of Latin America since the Second World War, much of it characterized by the migration of impoverished rural people to primate cities, has attracted a great deal of scholarly analysis, so much that influential hypotheses, such as the “culture of poverty” and “marginality, ” are periodically posited and tested against prevailing studies and that syntheses of the considerable literature are composed. Although studies of recent migration may attempt some sort of historical overview in their introductory chapters, their treatment is handicapped by several factors. The first is that there is relatively little literature on migration to major cities in Latin American history. While some excellent studies of aspects of migration do exist, they usually cover rural areas and towns and villages and emphasize the origins of marriage partners or movement back and forth between Indian villages or small towns and the surrounding hinterland. These subjects are certainly worthy of serious study, but neither in their findings nor in the implications do they suggest what we might expect to find in patterns of migration to the major cities. The second failing is an assumption that in the past as in the present the most important component of urban migration was that conducted by the rural poor. In fact, it constituted merely one aspect of a broader and long-maintained movement by elements from a variety of socioeconomic and occupational groups towards the large cities. Finally, these studies do not appreciate the extent to which modern-day migration represents the continuation of traditions and patterns determining who within the family migrates, when, to what destination, and what relationship the migrants maintain with those who do not move.