Home

This issue offers readers distinct analytical views of two interrelated themes that crosscut the hemisphere—migration and urbanism and the impacts of globalization. The contributions span the range of scholarly research, from an international theoretical view to a local case study of globalization’s impact on a remote rural community. The material presented enriches our knowledge of life in Latin American cities and women’s role in the economy. The seven contributions include a photo essay that brings the stark world of urban migrants in Lima and Quito to life, supporting the articles on urban migration with strong visual statements. Taken together, they visit the problematic restructuring of the world economy with new theoretical insights and empirical data informing the perspective that historical and contemporary experience stands as an indictment of the conventional North American view of Latin America.

Since the early 1990s we have witnessed a battle pitting big business and government against grassroots and organized class-based movements over the Washington Consensus—the blueprint for global integration of national economies on the principles of free trade and privatization. A nuanced view of resistance to global domination appears in Gavin Fridell’s article on free trade and neoliberalism. He suggests that three critical perspectives have emerged from “fair-trade” movements: “shaped advantage,” “alternative globalization,” and “decommodification.” The first underlies such consumer marketing devices as fair trade, shade-grown organic coffee at Starbucks being the unintended consequence of a grassroots critique that ends in accommodation. Alternative globalization attempts to make the most of global integration but promises to skew advantages to benefit the poor. The funding of certain types of NGO projects fits this paradigm of global integration on people’s terms. The most radical critique questions commodification as a means of development in which exchanges between classes of producers are unequal. In other words, the first two, despite their attention to poverty and rural conditions, accept the market and the global process as given, while the third suggests a decoupling from the global system by limiting the commodity-based economy. This last is an untried alternative, not often discussed, that lies outside reformist efforts to mitigate the worst impacts of the global trade model.

Women’s experience with poverty and insecurity in the urban sphere is central to critical studies of capitalism. The lack of formal rights or the indifference of the legal system in guaranteeing these where they do exist makes their situations precarious. Four contributions in this issue discuss women’s lives, with two of them centering on urban migration (Cristina Alcalde’s on violence against women in Lima’s young towns) and union organization (Rachel Brickner’s on women workers in Mexico City). In Alcalde’s article we learn that violence against women is generalized in Peruvian society and is exacerbated by migration and the search for land to live on in the new urban settlements. The obstacles for women in Mexico City are no less daunting, but Brickner’s study of unionization shows wage-earning women organizing to obtain rights as workers that reflect their growing sense of citizenship in a complex society. The assertion of rights is a consequence of both radicalization and participation in a pluralistic system. The other two articles on women’s roles in local development are those of Edward Jackiewicz and Sarah Gammage, the former focusing on the case of a small remote village in Costa Rica and the latter on the remittance economy of El Salvador. Gammage’s study exposes the peculiar history of El Salvador’s new economy since the demotion of agriculture and the introduction of offshore maquiladoras. She shows that the remittance economy is supported by the United States and the World Bank and functions as a “solution” to the conservative program for development at home. Coupled with John Ripton’s article on rural change in El Salvador, this article presents a succinct and up-to-date analysis of the Salvadoran economy. Ripton describes the historical changes in the predominantly agrarian system in place up to the civil war of the 1980s and argues that the power of the coffee barons has shaped El Salvador’s distorted development, resulting in a massive displacement of rural producers over time. Those who see population density as playing a determining role in the country’s economic failure and fomenting international emigration do not acknowledge this history.

Paul Dosh and James Lerager provide text and images illustrating the conditions faced by women in Alcalde’s article. They contrast the experiences of land invasion in Lima and Quito, reporting that Lima organizations are more likely to encounter quick success and subsequent decline while those in Quito move more slowly but tend to survive. They point to differences in public policy, local democratization, and geography and climate as responsible for these effects and argue that national or metropolitan analysis is needed to complement the neighborhood-level analysis more often used by urban scholars in Latin American informal-sector studies. Fridell’s theoretical contribution can be usefully applied to Jackiewicz’s article, in which it is shown that remoteness can be helpful to a poor rural community by attenuating the impact of globalization. Distance and difficult communication have given the local community an opportunity to organize its linkage to the forces of the global economy on its own terms, similar to Fridell’s concept of alternative globalization. Will the “hybrid community” of Quebrada Grande succeed in keeping the global juggernaut at bay? Will its success be transferable to other rural communities? Jackiewicz suggests that it may be to the extent that neoliberal economics and its creature, globalization, can be directed to local advantage. Otherwise, Fridell’s third alternative may also be a possibility for Quebrada Grande and many poor communities in Latin America.

Deep changes in Latin America since the 1980s have altered the character of the urban economy, transformed the demographic structure of the domestic economy, and coupled remote resources in rural areas with the global system of production and trade. These articles show how women in the region’s cities and communities as small as urban squatter towns and remote villages are attempting to find a way to adapt to or resist the accelerated transformation of their lives.

Print copies of individual issues are available for purchase by contacting the SAGE Journals Customer Service department journals@sagepub.com, 1-800-818-7243. Individual copies are $11 each. You can also subscribe by going to our subscribe page.

To see the articles of this issue, click here
To buy this issue, click here