index of 2005 conference papers

Urban poverty reborn:
a gender and generational analysis

Jeanine Anderson
Catholic University of Peru

Introduction

Understanding urban poverty is a critical task for our times. Migration from rural to urban areas is a continuing process in most of the “Two Thirds” world (see Ferguson , 1999, however, for a vision of contrary movements, not altogether voluntary). Urban squatter and shantytowns are the habitat of millions of human beings. Living conditions here are often worse than those of depressed rural areas. There are high levels of pollution; water tends to be scarce, expensive, and poor quality; disease propagates rapidly. Even the occasionally well-administered and well-intentioned government programs cannot keep up with the demands for basic services, schools and health posts. Vast tracts become densely inhabited slums before they complete their evolution from squatter invasions to under serviced informal settlements.

One of the prevalent notions about urban poverty is that it is self-reproducing, at least as concerns a large percentage of the “hard core” or “chronic” poor. Under this view, urban poverty is somehow handed down from parents to children. Different analysts have suggested different mechanisms that might contribute to this pattern: cultural beliefs and practices (Lewis 1961); enclosure in socially homogeneous ghettos ( Wilson 1987); dense and interdependent social networks (Stack 1975); lack of bridges to other social sectors (Lomnitz 1975); prestige hierarchies that reward self-destructive behavior (Bourgois 1995). In Latin America , low educational aspirations and achievements are a favorite candidate as a mechanism of reproducing poverty (see for example, Larrañaga 1997). Recently, the concept of social capital has focused attention (CEPAL 2003). By this view, poor people are deficient in social capital insofar as they have few ties to strategic actors and may not use their ties effectively; often, they cannot represent themselves as trustworthy persons (Roberts 1973). Here, as in other attempts to explain the “reproduction” or “intergenerational transmission” of poverty, a basic question is whether the poor are to be regarded as agents or victims, in what proportion.

The problem of correctly attributing responsibility and agency is real and important, and it has serious implications for the anti-poverty strategies deployed by governments, international agencies, and the poor themselves. Clearly, neither poverty nor wealth strike at random in the second generation: rich parents tend to have rich children, poor parents tend to have poor children. But exactly how and why? At stake is a vision of poverty as static, inexorable, vegetative in its mode of replication, versus a vision of poverty as dynamic, actively created under circumstances that are never a simple copy of any that occurred before. As stated in the introduction to a recent collection of “new poverty studies” in cities of the United States (Goode and Maskovsky 2001:16):

By using new theoretical approaches that situate different groups’ experiences of poverty in dialectical relation to global, national, state, and local political-economic change and to the interconnected ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationhood, the new poverty studies treat poverty not as a static “moral” condition but as a dynamic historically and geographically contingent process.

This paper explores some of the specific mechanisms that help explain the persistence of poverty and inequality in Latin American, specifically Peruvian, cities. In Peru as in most other cities of the region, the “older” generation of the urban poor are predominantly migrants from the countryside. The younger generation is urban born, raised, and educated. Thus, a cultural dimension must be added to the list of contingencies that influence poverty.

Some of my central arguments have to do with the ways in which adolescents and young adults in the urban population are deprived of opportunities at critical moments of transition into adult life. I will argue further that this process is different for young women and young men, and that young women are at greater disadvantage in starting their adult lives. In many respects, the gender gap was narrower in their mothers’ generation as, in many respects, it continues to be so in rural settings.

My empirical base is a series of research rounds in what started as a shanty invasion in Pamplona Alta on the southern edge of Lima , Perú. I conducted interviews with members of a sample of families in 1977-78, 1992, and 2001. At various points over an almost 30-year cycle, I was involved in research on more specialized topics (for example, surveys of women’s skills and interests in forming microenterprises) as well as development projects (for example, promoting a family daycare system; women’s leadership training). I can thus draw on a body of research that, although somewhat disorderly, constitutes a rare example, in Latin America as in other parts of the global South, of a register of long-term processes using predominantly qualitative methods and making the perspectives of the actors themselves a primary concern (Moser 2003).

The formation of urban poor neighborhoods

Rural migrants to urban shantytowns place great hopes on achieving economic security and improved conditions of life for their children, if not for themselves. The language that surrounds the formation of urban squatter town emphasizes investment in children, improving their opportunities and future quality of life. The self-help efforts to build, organize and establish services in the community are phrased in terms of transmitting a more favorable base of action than the parents enjoyed. “Ella tiene que ser otra gente (she has to become a different kind of person)” says a resident of Pamplona Alta about her daughter. “No va a estar hincando aguja como yo (She’s not going to be plying a needle like me).”

This includes respect and inclusion. The neighborhood, beginning as a shantytown built of straw shacks distributed over a bald, sandy hillside, must be “greened” and, with trees and asphalted streets, made to look like a residential neighborhood in the traditional part of the city. The migrants adopt urban dress styles and model their houses on a middle class urban pattern. Those that speak only Quechua and Aymara (primarily women) replace them with Spanish except for intimate family conversations among peers and elders. Children born in the city recognize a few words in their parents’ native language, but they typically have very little use for learning it. They know full well how Quechua-accented Spanish is the brunt of jokes at school and on television.

To set this is the proper framework, it must be emphasized that Peru is a country with very limited social provision. Some urban families may have access to programs that distribute subsidized food, others may get help with health emergencies from government programs or NGO projects. Health posts charge fees, albeit small and on a sliding scale, and public schools, while theoretically free, require that families buy uniforms, notebooks, books and supplies. A very few families with under-4 children use home-based daycare services under the government’s “wawawasi” program. It has been calculated that no more than 5% of the total basket of goods and services required by urban poor families is provided by social programs.

Data on urban and rural poverty dynamics are only recently becoming available through household panel studies (Chacaltana 2005). The data show frequent movements in and out of poverty, especially in urban areas. In the 4 years between 1998 and 2001, 22% of Lima households spent 1 year below the poverty line; 15% spent 2 years in poverty; 10% were poor during 3 years; and 8% were poor throughout the entire period. A total of 55% were poor at least 1 year, whereas 45% were never poor. Chacaltana calculates Peru ’s per capita product at $5,000 per year, or $471 per month. Salaries fluctuate around $200 a month on average. The average for Pamplona is approximately half that amount.

In what must necessarily be a very brief discussion of the intergenerational transmission or inheritance of poverty thesis, I will emphasize three aspects. These three provide some of the strongest evidence from Peru and the Pamplona study against the thesis, but they are far from exhausting the many strands of argument that might be proposed. The first has to do with the socialization of values and aspirations, the second with children and work, and the third with parents’ transmission of advice and models.

Inheritance of poverty? 1. Growing up in the shantytown

The transmission of poverty from parents to children is said to involve the transmission of low aspirations, defeatist or conformist attitudes, and perceptions of limited opportunities. As I have already adumbrated, the founding couples in the Pamplona Alta households, by contrast, had high ambitions when they were first interviewed in the late 70’s. The move to the city was in itself a symbol of upward mobility, and nearly all considered the kin they had left in the countryside to be worse off than they were. Most of these men and women migrated in their teens. The initial period in the city was an intense learning experience for all. Those who came with plans for finishing high school and even enrolling in college or at least a teacher training program (far more men than women) learned to give priority to acquiring technical skills demanded by the urban labor market. The men, with better-paying jobs and connections to a broader range of institutions and networks, had clear advantages over the women. At the end of the 70’s, with Peru’s economy still growing and a relatively healthy industrial sector concentrated in Lima, the men were taking courses in typing, accounting, a range of specialties in construction, and even theatrical production and airplane maintenance. None of the women was embarked on any similar project. Instead, they were receiving short courses in child care and nutrition, family health, and similar “women’s” topics from NGO’s and government agencies that worked in the shantytowns.

As young parents, the men and women had similar dreams for their children of both sexes. They would by all means finish high school. If they showed talent and determination, they would go into technical professions or to the university. The parents identified as “professions” a wide range of occupations that might presuppose either technical, teachers’, or college training. They reflected the usual stereotypes in Peruvian society: sons would become doctors, lawyers and engineers; daughters would become nurses, accountants, and teachers.

In point of fact, most young people in Pamplona did manage to finish high school, though repeating a grade or two is a common experience. The quality of the education students receive, however, in both public and private schools within reach of the poor, is steadily declining. Peru occupies the bottom rungs for Latin America on international comparisons of educational quality. A high school diploma, under these conditions, while seen as an achievement by parents who may have little or no formal education themselves, is no more than a small step on the path to becoming established and independent. With respect to their human capital and opportunities available in the labor market, both the parents and the children are quite realistic about what they can offer and what they can expect. The parents made adjustments downward through most of their working careers. The children started with low expectations. For both generations, the determining factors were the objective conditions of the Peruvian economy in succeeding moments. What was “inherited,” then, if anything, was extreme adaptability and the lack of illusions.

Inheritance of poverty? 2. Children and work

Child labor is one of the principal suspects in the “intergenerational transmission of poverty” debates. The argument is that families condemn their children to a truncated future when, by forcing them to work, they deprive them of the chance to go to school and interfere with play, exploration, and the construction of their personal identity. Work limits their horizons and their exposure to alternative models of success.

Against this stands the high levels of participation of Andean children in their families’ economic strategies. From an early age, children are expected to be hardworking and to identify with the serious business of getting the family’s income and paying the bills. According to economic demands and the abilities that particular children display, boys and girls, almost interchangeably, are assigned various household and work-related tasks. They help their mother or father to sell produce from a market stall, to run a carpentry workshop, to take care of customers in a home-based bodega, to sew the buttons and do the hems of clothes made on consignment. Whether sons or daughters, older children will be given responsibility for overseeing younger siblings and cousins.

During the 1992 summer school vacation, in the second round of interviewing in Pamplona , about half the adolescent sons and daughters were working for pay. Adolescents of both genders had long and complex job histories behind them. A slightly higher percentages of boys were working than girls: 40 out of 59 boys (68%) and 27 out of 45 girls (60%). The adolescents were working to pay for their school supplies and uniforms, to help with the family budget, to meet their own needs for clothes, bus fares and even food, occasionally to permit themselves indulgences like brand-name jeans or running shoes, music tapes or a guitar, a radio, beer, cigarettes and evenings out with friends. “Work” here excludes, of course, the “other” work that many of the adolescents –especially girls—were doing: helping with housework, preparing meals, taking care of siblings.

One robust finding from the longitudinal study in Pamplona has to do with informal education and the importance of acquiring an understanding of complex systems. The families that came through the various economic crisis of the late 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s in Peru with a certain stability have in common experiences of participating in, or observing closely, complex institutions operating in conflictive social and political environments. One example are the men who worked for large industries in the early 70’s. They participated in unions with their internal hierarchical structures and political cross-currents, shared in a complicated division of labor and functions in the factory, observed the myriad relations of the firm with suppliers and customers, and analysed the position of the firm and the industry in a complex urban and national economy. Persons who had such experiences in their portfolios seemed to transfer a “logic” of complexity, differentiation, conflict and opposed interests to other arenas of their lives, long after the factory jobs and the unions disappeared. This kind of understanding is patently useful for poor people whose access to information is limited by many vested interests and by prejudices that portray the “lower classes” as simple people on whom complex ideas would be wasted.

If this factor is as important to the urban poor in other cities and countries as it surely is in Lima , we would have to look again at the experiences –work, school, social, cultural, mass media—that children and adolescents are exposed to. In Lima , parents understand that having jobs teaches their children useful skills and habits (punctuality, saving money, obedience). It may also be one means of compensating for the deficiencies of the educational system, which is relentlessly reduccionist and simplifying. More work needs to be done on these questions.

Inheritance of poverty? 3. Parents as models

If poverty were “inherited,” parents, other close relatives, neighbors and friends of parents would have to be models for children. In Pamplona , on the contrary, fathers and mothers did everything they could to make their children different from them. Nonetheless, they clearly did wish to be appreciated, respected, and admired by their families, and they did often deliver themselves of advice and judgment that sought to influence their children’s decisions and behavior. Much of this had to do with moral issues: excessive drinking, skipping school, a lack of seriousness, dressing provocatively, questionable friends.

Some of the most surprising results of the 1992 round of interviews dealt with personal and emotional relations within the families. By this time most of the parents were in their mid-30’s, and the strains of Peru ’s economic roller-coaster had taken their toll. Some of the couples had separated, some were living situations of violence and abuse. Some of the men had taken up with other women and had “outside” children that competed for their earnings. The majority of mothers, found at home with their young children in the first round of interviewing, were now out working, often very long hours. Though necessary from an economic point of view, this caused tensions as other family members (especially daughters) were required to replace the mothers in the households’ care economy. Some tasks (for example, caring for severely incapacitated or chronically ill family members) became the source of extreme conflict, and others went sliding (for example, buying cooking fuel, boiling drinking water). In some households, midday meal preparation was transferred to the “community kitchens (comedores populares)” that sprung up all over the country and became one of the government’s favored channels for poverty relief.

In this context, many of the adolescents spoke with great bitterness and disappointment about their parents as well as their relations with brothers and sisters. Fathers, in particular, were portrayed as distant, authoritarian, even threatening figures. The mother-daughter relation was the one most likely to be experienced as friendly and warm, especially when daughters felt recognized for the support they gave to their mothers.

Sexuality, entertainment, and life style were arenas of great conflict. The adolescents complained that their parents did not trust them and tried to keep them from enjoying teen culture. The parents pushed to have both sons and daughters established in jobs or education before they became involved with partners or there was a pregnancy. Many of the older men and women explained their own frustrations in life by blaming their spouse or saying they had fallen in love at the wrong time, too early. Despite warnings and vigilance, many of the young girls did become pregnant in their late teens.

There are enormous difficulties of comprehension between the generations in a situation such as that of Pamplona . Most of the older men and women remember growing up on a small farm in the Andes, and they often got their start in the city through a patron or sponsor in situations that their children would find unthinkable (men in domestic service, for example). An 18-year-old denies his father’s ability ever to understand him: “A veces mi papá piensa que una cosa es así y como yo ya he vivido, yo ya conozco, como mi papá es pues de provincia no sabe cómo es, pues”. Beyond the rural-urban gap, the adolescents were almost violent in rejecting their parents as models for the kind of person they wanted to be and – even more emphatically – the kind of life they wanted to have. A young man answers the question “¿Qué cosas has aprendido de tu papá?” by saying baldly “Not to be like him”: “No ser como él. No ser como él pues. Porque no enseña pues a sus hijos lo que debe ser. Consejos pues”.

We might suspect that the children were going through the “storms” of adolescence, yet I think the situation is far more complicated. Idealistic adolescent children were seeing their parents have to do things the parents never wished or planned for. During this period, fathers who had worked for years in factories, offices and municipal governments were losing their jobs to the restructuring and liberalizing of the Peruvian economy. As families lost access to social security and social services (privatised, forced to charge fees), mothers intensified their involvement in degraded forms of work such as cleaning and washing. The young men and women who rejected the models their parents represented were in reality rejecting the possibility that they should ever be forced into retrenchments similar to theirs. Unquestionably, some of the parents reacted violently, became depressed, or attempted to resolve the situation by exploiting their children’s labor beyond the bounds of reciprocity and reasonable obligation. All this was indeed, for most of the families, a passing phase in the sense that the children, in the 2001 interviews when they were in their mid to late 20’s, took a new tone. They spoke with objectivity, understanding, and even compassion about the heroic efforts their parents had made and the obstacles they faced. They accepted as well their own obligations to assist their parents in their old age, and they recognized intense ties of interdependence and cooperation, including shared responsibility for a family businesses.

Entering adulthood

By their early and mid 20’s, as reflected in the third round of interviews in Pamplona, the young men had inserted themselves into occupations such as taxi-driver (own or rented car), construction worker, gardener, fumigator, solderer, municipal garbage collector, mechanic, office maintenance, ticket taker on buses, house painter, carpenter, and employees in businesses such as Internet outlets, wholesale market stalls, poultry shops, supermarkets, and hardware stores. Some had their own workshops and small businesses, fixing locks, repairing and selling used leather jackets, making fiberglass items and promotional materials such as stamped pens and notepads, electronics repairs. A very few had graduated from college and were working as teachers and engineers; one had embarked on a career as member of a musical group that had toured Bolivia . Many of these young men were employed sporadically, and they fell back on odd jobs to tide them over: street vending, washing cars, helping older male relatives on construction jobs.

The young women had gained entry to the Lima labor force in a similarly varied range of occupations, most of them even more poorly paid than the men’s. They worked in market stalls which might be rented, on loan, or ceded by a relative. Many worked in different kinds of household service or home caretaking. Several had moveable carts and stands where they sold juice, hotdogs, fruit and the like. They were employed as sales personnel in drugstores, shoe stores, used goods outlets, as supermarket cashiers, servers in casinos and at food stalls in markets. Some worked free lance as hairdressers and seamstresses; others did sewing for sweatshops, export factories, and factories supplying Lima ’s upscale department stores. Like the men, a few young women had completed a technical course or college and were working as teachers, hospital nutritionist, administrator, bank sales representative pushing small loans to micro enterprises, municipal tax offices. Most of their jobs were also insecure, but, during slack times, their labor was in demand at home, where housekeeping and caretaking roles were seldom filled to satisfaction.

At the same time as they were struggling to find their place in the labor market, most of the young men and women were starting their own families. Over half of those in the sample were in unions and had children. Their initiation into marriage and parenthood differed from that of their parents in many ways. The Andean ideal is for young couples to become economically self-sufficient as early as possible, having been endowed with a certain resource base (land, animals, tools) by parents and godparents in a process which starts at baptism. After marriage the couple may live with parents (usually, the husband’s) for a time, but, especially as children arrive, they will be assisted to build a separate house and establish themselves independently. They may carry on with labor exchanges and other forms of mutual aid with parents, siblings, other relatives and neighbors, but each nuclear household is on its own.

The expense and scarcity of housing, and the difficulties of organizing a self-sufficient domestic economy, cause dramatic distortions to this pattern in the city. Young couples begin married life in Pamplona under extremely stressful conditions. Many occupy a room in his or her parents’ house, but in some cases they shared even that small space with siblings. There are high levels of conflict in very complex households involving several spouses and children, all under the strain of unemployment and low wages. Money is never enough to cover daily needs (water, electricity, food, transportation, school and health services). In closely-knit and expansive family networks, emergencies are frequent. How much each contributed to resolve a health emergency, to provide food or help pay off a debt, implies keeping several running tabs that are each a source of contention. Under these conditions, some of the young people behaved with astonishing altruism. One young woman, an expert seamstress working for a sweatshop that produces clothes for the Pierre Cardin label, was supporting her father-in-law, two or three of her husband’s brothers and a variable number of their dependents (spouses, children). She got little recognition in return and in practice was contracting with her sister-in-law to get the cooking and housekeeping done – understood to be “her” tasks, too.

Sources of the new poverty

It should be clear how I think poverty of the second generation in the shantytowns of Lima has little to do with a process of “reproduction” of almost any of the habits, attitudes, models or practices of parents and the older generation. By contrast, it has everything to do with the meagre opportunities provided for young people launching out on adult life; with the fact that their parents have been unable to endow them with critical resources as would have been the “traditional” pattern; with the high demands for mutual aid placed on all family members; and with the obstacles put in the way of independence and self-sufficiency for the younger generation.

Meager opportunities

Neoliberal projects promoting liberalization, flexible labor and the opening of markets have taken a direct toll on the possibilities for Peruvians old and young, urban and rural, to leave poverty. I have in preparation a book that follows the economic and employment histories of the Pamplona families. Suffice it to say that none has truly “overcome” poverty in the 30-plus years I can reconstruct. A crucial factor for the men and women of the younger generation is extremely low wages, below his or her costs of reproduction. The work histories speak of insecurity, long hours (10 to 12 hours of work is becoming the standard) with frequent overtime, discrimination in hiring on the basis of gender, ethnic background, educational limitations, and address. None belongs to a labor union, and extremely few have benefits such as health insurance or pension plans. Work in the “new economy” in the conditions of Lima means devoting further long hours to riding crowded buses to and from the shantytown where, even now, piped water is not necessarily available every day of the week. Although women’s pay is notably lower than men’s, some women are the economic mainstay in their young families while at the same time they try to fulfil cultural ideals as devoted and protective mothers.

Young people find it almost impossible to accumulate assets; on the contrary, many are indebted. They may owe a few dollars on the purchase of clothing or they may owe several hundreds as a result of failed business ventures, health emergencies, or attempts to buy into new shanty invasions. By contrast, at the same age, their parents had a plot of land and at least a straw shack from which to start building their house. Without consumer credit available, with no microenterprise loans being offered by NGOs or banks, they might become modestly indebted to family members and local shops that extended credit for food.

Another of the robust findings of the Pamplona study concerns the importance of the economic subsectors in which poor people operate. There is, in fact, a strong tendency for sons and daughters to remain within the subsector that their fathers and mothers are engaged in, whether this be construction, urban transportation, small-scale retailing, services, low-level government employment (municipal garbage collector, kitchen help or nurse’s aide in a hospital), or wage work in a factory or shop. Both generations end up trapped in sectors which are low wage, low productivity, resistant to new technologies, politically exposed, in the line of fire under the neoliberal project. Superficially, their situation is similar yet the process, meaning, and future significance of their entrapment is different.

It should be mentioned that those who emerged in the best position after three decades were members of the older generation who were able to establish businesses of their own (bakery, dental prosthetics, automobile body shop, furniture manufacture for door-to-door sales, baby strollers and playpens, trucking of produce). Some of the family businesses also failed. In the successful cases, sons and daughters grew up working with their parents, and many continued to do so into adulthood. There are limits, however, on how far these businesses can grow, whether for lack of capital or technology or because they serve a narrow niche of the market. For the men and women of the younger generation, then, they were important as a platform for branching out on their own in a related line of activity.

Insufficient and inappropriate endowments

Formal education should have been the ticket out of poverty for the young people of Pamplona Alta. As we have seen, basic education even through secondary level is poor preparation for the challenges they face, and complements must be found in circuits of technical, non formal and informal education. Like their fathers, many of the young men and –unlike their mothers—many young women are taking specialized post-secondary courses, even starting them while still in school. Unlike their parents, however, they face the competition of thousands of other high school graduates vying for the same jobs in the “new” economy of informatics, services and sophisticated technologies. Peruvian cities are reputed to have one of the highest ratios of internet cafés to population in all of Latin America , another reflection of the unceasing search for saleable knowledge and skills.

Although their overall state of health is probably better than their parents’ at the same age, several of the young women and men of Pamplona suffer from mental health problems, notably depression and what the Peruvian health system broadly diagnoses as schizophrenia. It is easy to imagine the many factors that contribute to states of stress and anxiety in persons who are struggling daily to maintain a sense of competence, integrity, and hope despite all odds. The mothers and fathers have constructed personal myths that emphasize their heroic efforts and ultimate triumph; at least they have not been forced to go back to the village and give up on the dream of mobility in Peru ’s exciting capital city. By contrast, the children measure their success and failures against urban standards, and they are aware of belonging to a devalued category of “cholos” and migrants. And some do eventually give up; thus, at least one-fifth of families in Pamplona has one child or more working outside Peru .

What could it have meant for the young women and men to have received the endowments they needed: appropriate in quantity, quality and timing? Self-esteem is issue I haven’t been able to go into but that certainly should be considered. Shanty residents and new migrants are made to feel inferior to old-time limeños in innumerable ways. Endowments necessary to exercise citizens’ rights are also at stake here. The parents of Pamplona were politically involved because of a strong urban popular movement that existed through the 70’s and into the 80’s. They came up through the ranks of organizations such as health promoter groups, parent-teacher associations, and pro electricity committees. The children are more savvy about the political system and in theory better equipped to use it (literate, familiar with the mechanisms of government), but they are extremely cynical. To become actively engaged, they would somehow have to be endowed with faith that the democratic system can actually provide them a better life.

High demands for mutual aid

Members of the younger generation find it impossible to leave poverty as long as they remain involved with a large family network many of whose members are also poor and none of whom has adequate protection through any form of social insurance. The parents participated in block-level or community-wide mutual aid mechanisms such as collections that were taken up when a neighbor was affected by a serious illness or suffered an accident. These practices disappeared long ago, but no one can entirely avoid requests for contributions –money, time, care, intercession—when family members are concerned. The most important concern health emergencies. Here, the health reform of recent years, forcing public health facilities to generate a major part of their own budgets out of user fees, has direct consequences. The Peruvian government, under advice from the World Bank, is now implementing a “universal health insurance” program for the poor: a classic case not only of too little, too late, but of trying to fix a problem that was created by those who now seek to repair it.

Here too there are differences in the situation of young women and young men. Earning more, the men’s contributions in family emergencies cost them less in relative terms. The major difference, however, concerns labor power, time, and the care economy. Daughters, especially if they are still living in their parents’ home, whether married or not, remain involved in housework, childcare and the care of other family members. Even many of daughters-in-law that are living in the house assume as their own the needs of their mothers- and sisters- in-law. In a pattern familiar world-wide and across social classes, the young women organize their work lives around the demands of the household and its members. They lose opportunities for jobs, training, social contacts that might improve their earning capacity, and –not least—they lose time for rest.

Obstacles to independence

Members of the younger generation face enormous difficulties in their search for independence. Moving out while still single is out of the question, and independent housing even for married couples with several young children is a major challenge. Many young men and women end up repeating one of their parents’ actions although it is what they least desired: they look to land invasions farther up the hills of Pamplona or farther out towards the edge of the city as the only way of setting up on their own. In these cases, a similar strategy has different meaning for the two generations. The children participated as children in the self-construction efforts of their parents: weekend work parties, block-level organizing, marches to the water utility and municipal government offices. For their parents this involved claiming citizenship in the city; for the young adults of today it is proof of the limits of their citizenship. They see more privileged citizens housed in neighborhoods that already have streets, basic services, and even parks and schools. They see the costs they will have to pay to get them.

Again, young women are at special disadvantage in the struggle for independence and autonomy. Fertility is prized in Andean rural communities, couples marry young, and certain practices of sexual experimentation and “trial marriage (servinakuy)” are enshrined in custom. In the urban-born generation, there is a radical change in the meaning and consequences of many of these practices. Young women who become pregnant have little ability to command the assistance of their childrens’ fathers or of their own natal families. It is easy for young fathers to disappear, and mothers must sue for child support, with the result that the cost of demanding assistance may be higher than the amount awarded by the judge, if that in fact occurs.

A recent review of the transition to adulthood in the Global South (Lloyd 2005) speaks of a gradual normalizing trend in the sequence through which personal and family life cycles proceed: childhood, school, specialized training for entry to the labor market, work, economic independence, marriage, parenthood. Poor Peruvians turn such sequences on their heads (Anderson et al. 2001) This puts them out of step with their contemporaries from other, more privileged social sectors; with social programs and their logic; and with desirable images of youth and consumption. The unhappiness of starting a family in a makeshift room on the roof of one’s parents’ house, distracted by work and worries over money, is intensified when young men and women contrast their situation with representations of age-mates in telenovelas, movies, and advertising: the liquor flowing, fast cars, attractive clothes, take-out food, weekends by a swimming pool

Conclusions

Comparing parents and children at a similar point of life transition –entering adulthood, establishing families, finding a stable footing in the urban economy, embarking on a life project “of one’s own” (Nussbaum 1993)—has made it clear, I hope, that the intergenerational transmission or reproduction of poverty are notions of extremely limited value. They mask the real differences that lie behind what may appear to be superficial similarities in the position and behavior of young and old. They exaggerate the autonomy of persons who are the front-line sources of social insurance for close family, in the absence of adequate social protection. They distract us from analyses of the structural and contingent forces that continuously create new forms of poverty. They draw us away from the task of seeking to understand in all their complexity the particular circumstances that lie behind poverty and inequality at different historical moments, under different political regimes, produced by the action of particular social and economic policies. If poverty is a “dynamic historically and geographically contingent process”, it must be studied and addressed as such. Since it is also clearly a gendered process, this is a program for gender analysts as well.

NOTES

It is significant that a concept of “complex knowledge” or “understanding of complexity” is completely absent from the debates on poverty in international organizations. It was present as an intuition in the work of Paolo Freire and others of the Latin American popular education movement, as part of the analysis of their environment that poor people were encouraged to make.

Goldstein (2004) analyzes analogous situations in urban Bolivia .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Jeanine. “Gender and generations in shanty community development. Lima , Peru ”. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Global Development Network, Tokyo , Japan , December 2000.

Anderson, Jeanine. La pobreza urbana en perspectiva longitudinal (tentative title). Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, forthcoming.

Anderson, Jeanine et al. Yauyos. Estudio sobre valores y metas de vida . Government of Peru , Ministry of Education, 2001.

Atria, Raúl and Marcelo Siles, editors. Capital social y reducción de la pobreza en América Latina y el Caribe: en busca de un nuevo paradigma. Santiago : CEPAL / Michigan State University , 2003.

Bourgois, Phillipe. In Search of Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio . Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Chacaltana, Juan. “¿Se puede prevenir la pobreza?” Research report presented to CIES (Consorcio de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales), 2005.

Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. University of California Press, 1999.

Goldstein, Daniel M. Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia . Duke University Press, 2004.

Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky, editors. The New Poverty Studies. The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States . New York University Press, 2001.

Larrañaga, Osvaldo. “Educación y superación de la pobreza en América Latina”. In: Zevallos, José Vicente, editor. Estrategias para reducir la pobreza en América Latina y el Caribe. Quito : PNUD (United Nations Programme), 1997.

Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sánchez. Vintage Books, 1961.

Lloyd, Cynthia B., editor. Panel on Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries. Growing Up Global. The Changing Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries. National Research Council / Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Washington , D.C. : The National Academies Press, 2005.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler. Cómo sobreviven los marginados. México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975.

Moser, Caroline. Urban Longitudinal Research Methodology: Objectives, Contents and Summary of Issues Raised at the Joint DPU-ODI-World Bank-DFID Workshop. DPU Working Paper No. 124. University College London , 2003.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach”. In: Nussbaum, Martha C. and Amartya Sen, editors. The Quality of Life. Clarendon Press, 1993.

Roberts, Bryan . Organizing Strangers. Poor Families in Guatemala City . University of Texas Press, 1973.

Stack, Carol B. All Our Kin. Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged. The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

index of 2005 conference papers