Bryan Roberts

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Sociology

Migration shapes Sao Paulo’s history. The labour demands of the sugar economy and, increasingly, the coffee economy soon exhausted the supply of local labour, replacing it with European immigrants, mainly Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, but including government-sponsored immigrants from Japan. Domestic immigrants from the Center of Brazil and from...

In comparing the urban poverty and marginality of the 1960s with their equivalents today, my assessment is necessarily influenced both by where I began my studies and by where I am doing research today. The contrast is both geographical, as well as in terms of levels of economic development. I began working in Guatemala City in the 1960s, one of th...

Mexican migration to the United States long exhibited a strong circular pattern, as Mexican migrants returned annually to Mexico after working in US agriculture or other industries. With increased enforcement, undocumented migration from Mexico increasingly took on a permanent character. In addition, Central American migrants could not return to th...

This chapter uses census material and interviews with three generations of Mexican migrants to the US to explore the changing meaning of migration for family strategies of survival and how it affects transnational identities in both the US and Mexico. Using the concepts of family time and industrial time (labor markets and urbanization), and adding...

This volume pioneers in the study of immigrant transnational organizations by including eighteen different immigrant nationalities with organizations in the US and Europe. The case studies follow a common format and are based on interviews, questionnaires and observation in both sending and receiving countries. Data are provided on the characterist...

This volume focuses on recent experiences of return migration to Mexico and Central America from the United States. For most of the twentieth century, return migration to the US was a normal part of the migration process from Mexico and Central America, typically resulting in the eventual permanent settlement of migrants in the US. In recent years,...

This chapter examines changes in the characteristics of contemporary return migration to Mexico in a period dominated by tighter border controls and rising levels of involuntary, and therefore unplanned, return migration. We use the complete set of individual and household records of the 2005 Population Count of Mexico to establish a reliable bench...

The paper examines the relation between illicit drugs, violence, and the state, focusing on why certain drugs are prohibited and others not. The moral concerns underlying prohibition and the stereotyping of drug users on racial and class lines are reviewed historically and in the present. One conclusion is that modern states use drug prohibition as...

Return migration has been a constant feature of Mexico–US migration patterns, but its characteristics have changed sharply with time. We use the Mexican censuses and counts of 1995, 2000, 2010, and the complete set of individual and household records of the 2005 Population Count to explore the demographic characteristics of returnees in the context...

Historically, international migration was a movement of people from overcrowded, resource-poor areas to ones that were underpopulated, had resources, and could put migrants to work. Return or temporary international migration then was basically a survival strategy for rural families that did not have the skills to easily hold year-round jobs in the...

The paper examines possible sources of urban disorder and their impact on social disorganization in two times periods in Latin America. The first period is that of the region's rapid urbanization (c. 1950–1980) and the second is the current period of low rates of urbanization and slow urban growth, particularly true of the largest cities. Unlike in...

This overview focuses on urbanization and the development of urban systems in less developed countries from the 1950s to the present. In 1950, some 18 percent of the population of less developed regions was urban, rising to 40 percent by 2000 (UNDP, 2002: Table A.2). These percentages conceal considerable variation between countries and regions. Fo...

This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between contemporary urban organisation and that of the 1960s in Guatemala City and other Latin American cities, mainly using data taken from a re-study of low-income neighbourhoods in Guatemala City. It looks at the impact of sharper patterns of residential segregation, changes in migration pa...

The concept of the informal economy serves to identify important trends in the current restructuring of the global economy. The key issue is that of economic regulation, whether formally by the state or informally through social relationships. Family strategies, whether consensual or not, gain significance as a means of coping with urban life as a...

In this volume, we present studies of the emerging pattern of socioeconomic segregation in seven major cities of Latin America and, for interregional contrast, one in the United States. Our aim is twofold: One is to contribute to the understanding of contemporary urbanization in Latin America by highlighting contemporary processes of socioeconomic...

As the twentieth century closed, the growth of the metropolitan areas in Latin America slowed and the irregular settlements on the periphery consolidated, even though globalization continued to subject labor markets to great stress. Research on cities, at least on Latin American cities, has not placed a priority on questions about urban spatial dif...

Major social and economic changes in Latin America brought about by adoption of the neoliberal model of development have been documented in the recent research literature. We ask to what extent such changes have affected the character of popular collective mobilizations in major cities of the region. We present data from six recent field studies in...

The chapter identifies key components of the new patterns of farming and rural livelihoods emerging in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By the beginning of the millennium, most rural areas of Latin America had become integrated into global agricultural commodity networks that curtail the opportunities for small-scale, family-based farming...

We examine the evolution of Latin American cities in the last two decades of the twentieth century and in the first years of the twenty-first on the basis of comparable data from six countries comprising over 80 percent of the region’s population. These years correspond to the shift in hegemonic models of development in the region, from import-subs...

This article focuses on the economically disorganizing and politically reorganizing role of globalization for the urban populations of Latin America. The 1990s witnessed a rapid., but dependent, incorporation of Latin American countries into the global economy and in ways that had considerable impact on their urban economies. Though the modern serv...

In this paper, we concentrate on certain trends in Mexican economy and society that are shaping the geography of emigration, are creating new zones of expulsion and are beginning to alter the characteristics of emigrants. Among these trends are the radical restructuring of Mexican agriculture, the reshaping of the urban system through the decline o...

This paper derives from a LARK-sponsored forum at the LASH 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American citie...

Se reúne evidencia sobre la forma en que han evolucionado diferentes aspectos de la vida urbana en América Latina durante las últimas décadas. El periodo coincide con un cambio dramático del modelo de sustitución de importaciones por uno nuevo de libre mercado, inspirado en la economía ortodoxa. Este cambio político y económico no podía dejar de te...

Peasants and proletarians are key actors in the social changes that produced the modern world. The concepts identify different forms of demographic behavior, social organization and political action. The peasant is locally oriented and defensive politically, yet has contributed to revolutionary change. The proletarian looks to association beyond lo...

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Mexico and U.S. Worldwide Immigration Policy Chapter 3 Mexican Social and Economic Policy and Emigration Chapter 4 Do Mexican Agricultural Policies Stimulate Emigration? Chapter 5 Mexican Immigration and the U.S. Population Chapter 6 Fiscal Impacts of Mexican Migration to the United States Chapter 7 Labor Market Imp...

In this article we explore the variability of US-Mexico migration, positioning the emerging discourse on transnational migration within a migration systems approach. Looking at factors in the social and economic structures of Mexico and the US, we evaluate the prevalence of transnational migration patterns among Mexican migrants in conjunction with...

This article is focused on the intermeshing of the informal sector with the development of social citizenship in Latin America. Since the construction of social citizenship has been strongly influenced by employment, the implications of the latter for the system of stratification and social integration since the end of World War II are discussed, w...

This paper looks at the effect of the new international division of labor on urbanization in developing countries. Previous histories, particularly of insertion into the world economy, affect responses to the new order. Also, previous phases in the organization of the world economy, particularly those associated with import-substitution industriali...

LomnitzLarissa Adler and Perez-LizuarMarisol, A Mexican Elite Family, 1820–1980 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. xv + 294. - Volume 21 Issue 1-2 - Bryan Roberts

In 1969 Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto published a short interpretative account of Latin American history (Cardoso and Faletto, 1969). It should be noted that it is by no means clear whether the authors intend to develop a general theoretical model of Latin American development, or whether they are merely applying a particular kind of m...

Military intervention in the political life of Latin American nations has a long history, and almost certainly a long future. However, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw an apparently qualitative change in the type of regime that followed a successful coup. Moreover, the coups took place in the most developed Latin American countries, societies mar...

Like any major historical phenomenon, the Mexican Revolution can be viewed from a variety of angles. From one, arguably the most important, it was a rural phenomenon, rightly categorized by Eric Wolf (1969) as a “peasant war”, hence comparable to the Russian or Chinese Revolutions. From another it can be seen as a generalized social and political (...

The fundamental distinction between the twentieth century and preceding ones in the history of Latin America has been the growth of the popular masses in size, in importance, and as a potential threat to the status quo. National populations have expanded spectacularly, communications networks from roads to radio waves have begun to crisscross natio...

The operations of TNCs should not be treated in isolation but seen as part of a wider process of internationalization of capital, of which they themselves are primary protagonists. The homogenization of production and consumption patterns is a characteristic of the internationalization of capital everywhere, but in the socioeconomic context of Lati...

[It has been widely argued that the advancing of credit and the resulting indebtedness of rural labourers hashistorically been a key means of tying labour to the land. Bauer argues that this may sometimes have been the case, but that in general recent studies (Bazant, 1973; 1974; 1975; Brading, 1975; Deas, 1977; Katz, 1974; Martinez-Alier, 1977; Tu...

This essay describes in outline the colonial economic system and its spatial organization, taking as examples the two great silver-producing complexes, the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

As a country with abundant land and a relatively scarce population, Brazil confronted special problems in the creation of a labour force. Until the 1850s, slaves made up the bulk of the workforce needed by large-scale export agriculture. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, as slavery came under increasing attack, at least some São Paulo coffee...

For almost a century and a half during the colonial period — 1680–1810 — the Colombian Chocó became an important source of gold in the Spanish empire. But guarded by towering mountains and dense tropical rain forests, the Chocó is an area of heat, humidity, jungle, rivers, and rainfall. Because of geography and climate the Spanish themselves rarely...

To understand the specificity of the populist rupture, from which Peronism emerged, it is necessary to understand the nature of the previous dominant ideological system in Argentina, and its characteristic articulating principles.

The most striking difference in the political evolution of the Spanish and the Portuguese colonial possessions is the well-known phenomenon of the Balkanization on the Spanish part, in contrast with the unified nation that emerged from the Portuguese domain. To put it in quantitative terms, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Spanish col...

Beginning in 1974 Brazil’s largest industrial cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, were swept by a series of riots directed at the suburban railways. The riots were not only a sign of the growing discontent of the urban poor with their living conditions, but also a consequence of their loss since the military coup of 1964 of any adequate means of...

The declining significance of locality for job recruitment means an increase in job mobility and a greater discontinuity in the occupational careers of these workers. This occurs partly because age and literacy are not qualifications that commit an individual to any particular type of job. Consequently, a worker can seek out better job opportunitie...

Before considering in detail the way that estates and peasant communities change under the impact of capitalist economic relations, we need to consider the factors which give rise to these relations. Among the most important are changes in demand for food, in part prompted by urbanization in the peripheral country and also, in some cases, by the ne...

The “classical” account of Latin American populism sees it as a phenomenon combining a particular form of ideology with certain organizational and social structural features. For “classical” theorists, populism in Latin America is a loosely organized multiclass movement united by a charismatic leader behind an ideology and programme of social justi...

The presence of the urban informal sector makes possible a condition of high surplus labor extraction by compensating for concessions made to the organized segment of the working class with the continuing exploitation of unorganized informal workers. Stated formally: The amount of surplus value, V, is the difference between total wages paid, W, and...

No cultural phenomenon of the 1960s did more than the apparent explosion of creativity in the Spanish American novel to bring Latin America to international attention. It is no exaggeration to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its imp...

In Latin American cities low-income women work, not only in their homes and in the factories, but also in their neighbourhood communities. Along with men and children they are involved in residential level mobilization and struggle over issues of collective consumption. The inadequate provision by the state of housing and local services over past d...

Greater São Paulo is the dynamic centre of Brazil. Here, industrial production, the financial system, per capita income, in fact all indicators of vigorous economic growth, denote an area of great economic potential, especially in comparison with other areas of the country.

Through historical material combined with field studies of villages and of the major town of the region, Huancayo, the book examines the economic and cultural processes underlying the 'progressive' reputation of the region in Peru and in the literature on development. Since the major enterprise of the region, the Cerro de Pesco Mining Corporation,...

This volume traces the development of the central highlands, one of Peru's major mining regions. It draws on extensive fieldwork carried out in Peru between 1970 and 1982, spanning a reforming military government, reaction and a return to civilian politics under Belaunde. Through historical material combined with field studies of villages and of th...

WilsFritz: Industralization, Industrialists, and the Nation-State in Peru (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California. Research Series, No. 41. 1979, $5.95). Pp. xii + 273. - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Bryan Roberts

This book is about the expansion of capitalism in the Third World. It is one of the few accounts linking contemporary differences in the political and economic structure of underdeveloped countries to the historically specific way in which these have become part of the world economy. Focusing on the most securely capitalist of all underdeveloped re...

Traducción de: Cities of Peasants

Traducción de: Cities of Pea Sants

TRADUCCION DE: CITIES OF PEASANTS INCLUYE BIBLIOGRAFIA E INDICE

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. Supervisors: Bryan Roberts and Daniel Powers. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Requires PDF file reader.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. Supervisors: Bryan R Roberts and Arthur Sakamoto. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Requires PDF file reader.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. Supervisors: Joseph E. Potter and Bryan R. Roberts. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Requires PDF file reader.

Traducción de : Cities of peasants: the political economy of urbanization in the third world Incluye bibliografía e índice

Incl. bibl., index.

This paper analyzes the social significance of Protestant sectarian groups in two urban neighborhoods of Guatemala City. These groups recruit individuals with aspirations for social and economic improvement who are without a network of secular relationships to aid them in time of emergency and help them obtain better social and economic positions....