Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0079/00795.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 24KB | 378 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00795}
$Pretitle{277}
$Title{Chile
Chapter 2D.   Migration and Urbanization}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Andrea T. Merill}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{housing
santiago
percent
ch
church
government
migrants
bishops
catholic
chilean}
$Date{1983}
$Log{}
Country:     Chile
Book:        Chile, A Country Study
Author:      Andrea T. Merill
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1983

Chapter 2D.   Migration and Urbanization

     To speak of migration and urbanization in Chile is first and foremost to
speak of Greater Santiago. More than three of every four migrants have the
capital as their destination. Conversely, nearly one-third of the city's
population are migrants. In 1982 over 80 percent of all Chileans lived in
cities, and nearly 75 percent of all urban-dwellers lived in Santiago.
Significant unemployment and severely limited urban housing in the 1970s did
not significantly alter these trends. During the 1970s Chile's urban
population grew at a rate only slightly less (less than a percentage point)
than during the 1960s. Urbanization remained concentrated in Greater
Santiago-where by 1982 about 44 percent of all Chileans lived (see Population,
this ch.).

     That about one-third of all Chileans lived in or near the capital is an
index of how concentrated goods and services are. Santiago is the overwhelming
choice of migrants because however meager the opportunities that the city
offers the rural migrant, they are greater than those of the countryside.
Despite the efforts of several governments to decentralize industry and
services, investment in such amenities as housing, electricity, gas and water,
education, health, and transport all remain heavily concentrated in Santiago.
In 1970 the city accounted for nearly half the goods and services produced in
Chile-a percentage in excess of Santiago's portion of the population.

     The capital's preeminence is hardly new. Santiago's primacy was well
established in the colonial era (see Conquest and Colonization, 1535-1800,
ch. 1). Every landowner who could maintained a home in Santiago-not to do so
was viewed not merely as an eccentric commitment to the bucolic pleasures of
rural life but as a failure, financial or otherwide, to support a properly
elite life-style (see The Elite, this ch.). But Santiago in the early
nineteenth century offered little in the way of comforts. The scarcity of
lumber and the fear of earthquakes meant most houses were modest one-story
dwellings; modest was too generous a description for one traveler who
described the western approach to the city as "wretched hovels inhabited by a
slovenly and unwashed population ..." Only the churches offered a more
imposing aspect, and they dominated the landscape.

     The elite took care to see that new wealth in merchanting and mining
served their-and hence the city's-best interests. Even transportation
benefited Santiago's administrative-bureaucratic hegemony. Roads and bridges
linked it with the hinterland. All major railroad lines were routed through
Santiago-even though Concepcion-Talcahuano had the best natural port. Santiago
was linked to the central valley before a feeder line to Valparaiso was
built-an approach to railroad construction that meant that all materiel had to
be hauled overland by ox cart. Nitrate revenues too, when they came, benefited
Santiago. They provided the wherewithal for expansion of the state bureaucracy
and a plethora of public works within the city.

     By the twentieth century the character of Santiago migration had begun
to change. Sons and daughters of impoverished landless laborers and small
farmers in search of almost any employment supplanted the elite and
middle-class offspring, entering the professions and the growing state
bureaucracy. Young women, drawn by the promise of employment in the burgeoning
service sector, were disproportionately represented among the Santiago
migrants, just as young men went to the nitrate fields in search of work. By
1930 Santiago was 54 percent female, while in some rural provinces there
were twice as many males as females between the ages of twenty and
twenty-nine.

     By the late 1960s a fairly clear portrait of the Santiago migrant had
emerged. The typical migrant was a woman (156 female for every 100 male
migrants) who came to Santiago from a city or town in central Chile (over half
came from urban centers of over 10,000 inhabitants, over 89 percent from
central Chile). The average migrant was better educated than most Chileans (92
percent of all migrants had some formal education versus 80 percent for the
total populace). Both male and female migrants typically arrived in Santiago
when they were young; both experienced unemployment rates-at least until the
late 1960s-lower than most Chileans. Most migrants are long-term residents
(surveys typically report more than half of all migrants have lived in
Santiago at least ten years). In general a greater percentage of migrants hold
jobs than native Santiaguenos (inhabitants of Santiago), and this was
dramatically true for women (particularly between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-four, when over half of all migrants and only 30 percent of natives
held jobs). Although a substantial portion (half) of the migrants come to the
city alone, nearly all (84 percent) have friends or relatives already living
in Santiago to help them.

     The century-long transformation of a country more than 80 percent rural
to one where over 80 percent of the population is urban was hardly
accomplished without a few shocks to society. The Greater Santiago region has
been profoundly altered. The elite moved from the city's center early in the
twentieth century to the northwest suburbs (barrios) in search of a better
climate and a more controlled contact with rural immigrants who were flooding
the city.

     For the migrants themselves, however improved their employment
opportunities, housing proved a persistent problem. This was true also for the
authorities, who were faced with a mushrooming population, scant provision for
low-income housing, and limited services. As with most Latin American cities
in the post-World War II era the first efforts to confront these problems came
from the migrants themselves. They began moving out of slum tenements and
seizing unoccupied land. Makeshift communities sprang up so quickly in or near
Santiago that local inhabitants dubbed them callampas (mushrooms). The regime
of Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez was by turns indifferent or repressive to the
shantytowns. Throughout the 1950s (a decade when the urban population
increased by nearly 6 percent per annum) and the early 1960s settlers received
little assistance from government in meeting critical housing needs.

     The Frei government developed a variety of housing programs. In theory
these were to serve the needs of low-income city dwellers. There were a
plethora of mortage programs; state corporations were formed to buy land and
build houses. Nonetheless only 3 percent of total housing investment went to
low-income housing; new households in poverty consistently outstripped new
housing. Government efforts foundered in large part because of the sheer
magnitude of the problem. They failed, as well, because of a marked disparity
between middle-class bureaucrats' notion of "decent housing" and "good
investments" and the poor' overwhelming preoccupation with simply a house of
any sort and a piece of land. ("It would be very difficult for us to pay such
an amount," wrote one community organization asking for "low cost" government
housing, "regardless of how decent the house is.")

     Land seizures increased under Allende, but the organization of government
involvement in low-income housing remained fundamentally the same. Allende
emphasized alternative housing construction strategies, i.e., workers'
brigades, initially increased the poor's income, made credit more accessible,
and appeared to have increased services to poblaciones (housing settlements).
His effor