Latin American Development

Geographical Perspectives

David A. Preston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780582236950
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317892090
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Provides an up-to-date analysis of many aspects of Latin America through a series of short essays, written by experienced geographers.

CHAPTER 1

Themes in contemporary Latin America

David Preston

Latin America in the world

Two major periods during the past five centuries altered the appearance of some parts of Latin America:

1. In the sixteenth century the continent was invaded and many areas were transformed by European people, predominantly from Spain and Portugal. They conquered the native inhabitants, many of whom were killed by their diseases. They used land and mineral resources to create wealth for themselves and for the European powers to whom they were either economically or politically subject. They enslaved millions of Africans to work for them and they and their descendants dominate the human population of parts of the continent and the Caribbean.
2. At the end of the nineteenth century some parts of the continent were again invaded by Europeans. This time they were settlers seeking a better life than in their homeland. They transformed the economies of the southern countries of South America: they peopled the growing cities: they also helped to establish financial and other service institutions which laid the foundation for the growth of modern economies.

Even so, parts of the continent remained in the hands of the non-European original inhabitants. In these areas the landscape and human population remained substantially unchanged, and economy and ethnic identity were distinct even though changes continued to modify details of individuals, households and communities. Such areas were mainly rural, far from towns and cities. Native people lived in much of the central Andes, parts of highland Mexico and Central America and in the Amazon basin and forested areas of north-west South America as well as in some arid and semi-arid lowlands from Argentina to Mexico.

European domination?

Those parts of the continent of Latin America whose economy and population is predominantly Hispanic or of mixed race have long been a part of the European economic and cultural world. The European origins of many Latin Americans and the European influence of many of the economic and cultural developments during the nineteenth century and up to the Second World War made this inevitable. Native people were relatively few in number in some parts of the continent, they had little political power and were often seen by the ruling classes as deeply conservative or opposed to change. This ensured that they continued to be subject to discrimination or even genocide, for they had few rights and limited access to power. After the success of the various independence movements of the early nineteenth century nationalism became an important political force in many countries. Areas that, to the ruling élite, were apparently empty and under-used were incorporated into national territories without regard for the native inhabitants. The haphazard boundaries of the new states of the 1820s and 1830s were modified by both war and treaty.

Any account of Latin America as a distinctive economic or cultural realm must recognize three levels of focus:

1. One domestic and local in which individuals and groups develop their strategies for reproduction and self-fulfilment and to defend themselves against external pressures.
2. One national in which local and regional economic and social changes create a national identity.
3. The other global in which events in Latin America must be seen as part of a global pattern.

Global influence

The French Revolution of 1789 is a necessary part of the backdrop of the independence movements of Latin America just as the world boom in vegetable oil demand fuelled the dramatic expansion of soyabean production in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. Neither national nor agricultural land use revolutions took place without influence from other countries nor the world trading system.

During the period in which Spain and Portugal dominated the Latin American externally focused economy, the basis of wealth for the Spanish and Portuguese was primary products from mines and agricultural areas. The flow of gold and silver to Spain was vital for the Crown which was chronically indebted. Much silver also entered European and East Asian economies by legal and illegal means through the Philippines, Brazil and to the British and the Dutch through the Caribbean. The precious metals provided earnings which were partly spent on fine European and Asian manufactured goods – textiles, for instance – and thus the Spanish part of the Americas was an integral part of the world trading system of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Once manufacturing on a large scale became important in Western Europe and later north-eastern Anglo-America, an increasing demand for food stimulated production in Central and South America. By the end of the nineteenth century technology allowed the rapid shipment to Europe and Anglo-America of perishable produce such as meat and bananas from places such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, Uruguay and Argentina. Thus some areas which had produced little surplus during the colonial period became incorporated into world trade.

Although our focus is geographical – Latin America – it is necessary to recognize that the growth and decline of specific regional economies in many parts of Latin America are closely linked to events outside the continent. The demand for and prices of a commodity produced in Brazil for sale in Germany or Illinois is a function of the nature of the economic system which affects those goods and not just the conditions in the area of production. It is logical to recognize the value of using a world-systems perspective in seeking to understand some of the historical and geographical patterns of change in Latin America (see Box 1.1).

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Box 1.1 Wallerstein’s world-systems

The development and refinement of the notion of world-systems as a necessary tool for the analysis of social behaviour has been associated with historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He is particularly involved in the description and analysis of one particular world-system: the capitalist world-economy. He identifies three characteristics of a world-systems perspective: one is the use of the world-system as the unit of analysis for the study of social behaviour; another is the recognition of the importance of the long duration of certain periods of note in human history; and the third is the view of the capitalist world-economy.

This approach offers a distinctive framework for historical analysis, it stresses the importance of using the knowledge gained from the work of scholars in different disciplines, it stresses the dynamic nature of economic and social structures which makes the indentification of beginnings and ends of notable periods difficult. World-systems analysis also stresses the importance of recognizing the changing nature of spatial units in response to different perceptions and geographical levels of resolution.

Source: Wallerstein (1990)

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Latin America is one of the more industrialized and affluent continents among those that are peripheral – that is, relatively powerless – in the world economy which is dominated by the USA, Japan and the European Union (EU). In the world trade negotiations at the beginning of the 1990s it finds itself split between the possibilities of two geographical alliances. One is with the USA, which is particularly attractive for Mexico which shares a long common border with the USA and the other, for certain countries, is with the so-called Cairns group of countries heavily dependent on the export of agricultural commodities a surplus of which is produced by both the USA and the EU.

A question of scale

One aim of this book is to help the reader grasp the meaning of trends and events to people and places in Latin America. The emphasis of the previous paragraphs has been on the continent as part of a global system from which it cannot completely escape. Even so, as Bob Gwynne explains in Chapter 9, economic change has taken place sometimes independent of stimulus from the world-economy. It is necessary to understand that the functioning of the capitalist world-economy affects Latin America at every imaginable scale from continent to village and down to household.

A. G. Frank suggested that there was

a whole chain of metropolises and satellites, which runs from the world metropolis down to the hacienda or rural merchants who are satellites of the local commercial metropolitan centre but who in their turn have peasants as their satellites (Frank 1967: 146–7).

Thus one can readily imagine that many aspects of Mexico are powerfully influenced (dominated) by the USA, both economically and culturally. At a national level it is easy to understand how actions by the US government to release silver on the world market, or to check the movement of migrants across its borders with Mexico can hardly be resisted by a Mexican government of any political complexion. The consequences of such actions affect not only the national economy but thousands of Mexicans of different social classes and in many parts of the country.

The members of the Sánchez household in Mexico City are poor and find a range of ways to make a living. Manuel is attracted by the opportunities of working in the USA and travels there illegally. The relative ease of access, the rates of pay and type and duration of work there are all influenced by the state of the US economy and of the economy of California where he seeks work. His father, Jesus, has a steady job in Mexico City working in a restaurant owned by a Spaniard. His daughter Consuelo has a range of jobs, mostly short-term, depending on the dynamism of the city’s economic growth and her own physical strength (see Box 1.2). One household is thus influenced to varying degrees by events in different parts of two countries as well as by the state of the city’s economy (consult Oscar Lewis’s (1963) Children of Sánchez to come to your own conclusions and see Box 1.3).

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Box 1.2 Consuelo, talking about her family

if someone gave Manuel [her brother] a common stone, he would hold it in his hand and look at it eagerly. In a few seconds, it would begin to shine and he would see that it was made of silver, then of gold, then of the most precious things imaginable, until the glitter died.

Roberto would hold the same stone and would murmur, ‘Mmmm. What is this good for?’ But he wouldn’t know the answer.

Marta would hold it in her hand for just a moment, and without a thought, would throw it carelessly away.

I, Consuelo, would look at it wonderingly, ‘What might this be? Is it, could it be, what I have been looking for?’

But my father would take the stone and set it on the ground. He would look for another and put it on top of the first one, then another and another, until no matter how long it took, he had finally turned it into a house.

Source: Lewis (1963: 274)

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Box 1.3 Oscar Lewis and Latin American people

The work of Oscar Lewis, a US anthropologist, is a valuable source of knowledge about the lives of the poor in Latin America. He spent most of his career, from 1943 to 1970, studying the lives of the poor in Mexico, New York City and Havana. He was admired by both Time magazine and Fidel Castro. Many middle-class Latin Americans were outraged that so much publicity should be gained by a North American professor portraying the lives of some of the less privileged members of their society.

He worked by tape-recording the life histories of individuals, and his books were largely the edited and translated autobiographies of his subjects. As such, they offer an outstanding opportunity for people interested in Latin America to read about the lives of some of its people.

Scholars have made little use of his work although generations of students have enjoyed reading some of his books.

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The example of the Sánchez household shows that it is necessary to recognize both dependence and independence as important elements that can help us understand two fundamental aspects of contemporary Latin America:

1. The crucial links between past and present events.
2. The relationships between people and between geographical locations.

Elaborating on A. G. Frank’s view of the levels at which dependence can exist in relation to Mexico, the different geographical and domestic scales can easily be shown. Mexico is dominated by the USA in many ways. In 1995 Mexico was forced to contract payments of her oil revenues to the USA in return for help in tackling the economic crisis of 1995. Needed foreign investment would not have returned without giving in to powerful US and world financial pressures.

Elaborating on A. G. Frank’s view of the levels at which dependence can exist, a commentary is given below in respect of four different levels at which there is a dependent relationship between geographical locations: the country, the capital city, the regional capital and the village.

• Within Mexico, Mexico City dominates economic and social development. A university in Oaxaca will be able to attract lower-quality professors than one in the capital. The city and state of Oaxaca will have less money to spend on education, health and roads because most of the population lives in the countryside and produces mostly for their own subsistence.
• The village of Tequi two hours from Oaxaca has difficulty recruiting and keeping teachers for its 170-pupil primary school, for the housing is poor compared with that in the city and the village is relatively isolated: only one bus a day. Many decisions about the running of the school and about the provision of facilities in the village are controlled by bureaucrats in Oaxaca.
• Within the village the Martinez household recently set up home in the settlement having moved from an isolated site over an hour’s walk away. The eldest son has been working in Mexico City for a year, and his sister who accompanied him on his last trip to the capital, has a job in a restaurant. The money that they could send home enabled their ageing parents to move to Tequi, start a small shop and also help their younger siblings find work to supplement their earnings from farming their land. One or two of the household usually live in the old home an hour away.
• The hamlet of Kenchi, an hour on foot from Tequi, has only one teacher in its single-room thatched school, water is taken from nearby streams and the one house that sells goods often runs out of basic items such as matches and cooking oil because the woman who runs the shop does not have the money to buy much when she goes to market. The people there are despised by those in Tequi for their relative poverty and for the facts that everyone speaks the local indian language most of the time and that they sell little in the local market.

Each household, institution or settlement in the series identified suffers from discrimination from that to which it is subordinate – its own growth and change is dependent on, and partly controlled by – decisions and actions taken by people and groups in the higher-order place. The range of geographical scales at which dependency operates needs to be clearly recognized.

Dependency is a useful concept but it has its limitations. It implies the superiority of North over South and of global economic might over local or regional powe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Themes in contemporary Latin America
• Chapter 2. The Latin American colonial experience
• Chapter 3. The rise of industry in a world periphery
• Chapter 4. Environmental issues and the impact of development
• Chapter 5. Rural development: policies, programmes and actors
• Chapter 6. Race, gender and generation: cultural geographies
• Chapter 7. People on the move: migrations past and present
• Chapter 8. Caring for people: health care and education provision
• Chapter 9. Industrialization and urbanization
• Chapter 10. Urban growth, employment and housing
• Chapter 11. Geopolitics in South America
• References
• Index