IT WAS a slim volume, just 108 pages, and its title was hardly one to quicken pulses. Nevertheless Desborde Popular y Crisis del Estado (“Popular Overspill and Crisis of the State”) quickly became a bestseller in Peru after its publication in 1984. That was because the author, José Matos Mar, an anthropologist who died this month aged 93, had put his finger on a far-reaching social revolution which continues to reshape his country and has echoes across Latin America.
Mr Matos’s argument was that migration from the Andes to Lima and the other cities of Peru’s Pacific coast was no mere movement of population. Rather it amounted to an unstoppable tide of social change that smashed down or simply bypassed Peru’s oligarchic political and economic structures. The migrants settled—there would be 8m of them between 1940 and 2010—in largely self-built shantytowns (though by now many have brick houses and paved streets). They forged a new culture, mestizo (mixed) but with Amerindian roots, and had their “own sense of law and morality”. They created jobs for themselves in a growing “informal” (ie, unregistered)...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1KxKI9X
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