For the past thirty years or so, reporters, anthropologists, architects, and the occasional politician have been "discovering" the social and economic ingenuity and solid achievements of the people who have formed squatter settlements and those who have set up shop in the streets of Lima, Peru. The most recent discoverer is an upper-class Peruvian, Hernando de Soto, who in a recent book, The Other Path [featured in the Book World section of this issue], describes the activities and organization of Lima's ambulantes (street merchants).
De Soto suggests that the ambulantes are the only true capitalists in Peru and says that the government and "legitimate" businesses have much to learn from them. In passing, he says a little about squatter settlements (formerly called barriadas and, for the last twenty years, "young towns"). In many ways, these settlements constitute an even more dramatic example of popular enterprise and initiative and, as de Soto point out, they are part of the same informal sector of the national economy.
When the barriadas first became visible to the general Peruvian population in the late forties, powerful groups in Lima responded by calling for their "eradication." The call was often quite strident, and both squatters and ambulantes were condemned as everything bad in the Peruvian middle-class glossary. They were "communistic" and "anarchistic" at the same time; they were "disorderly" and yet constituted an organized thereat to civilized society. And worst of all, they were Indians--bumpkins (cholos, serranos) from the mountains--who, as "everyone well knew" could never do anything on their own. Therefore, they must be led by outside agitators.
Some critics were, of course, more sophisticated, but even they felt that Lima, the colonial, Creole city of beautiful women, music, fine food, and cheap labor, was rapidly becoming cholificada (Indianized). About that they were correct. The migration of rural people to Lima form the forties to the present is the most notable aspect of life in Peru. Millions of people have arrived seeking work and a better life, and the vast majority of them and their children have no intention of moving out.
The life they found often does not look very good to an outsider (and, in fact, often does not look very good to anybody), but for many of them it met their expectations or even exceeded them, particularly if they could see a better future for their children. Many of the migrants are Quechua-speaking Indians, and as a result, Lima is by far the largest Quechua-speaking city in the world. Most of them, and practically all of their children, have also learned Spanish, so Lima is probably the largest bilingual city in Latin America.
There have been small, spontaneous invasions of hillsides and riverbanks since Lima was founded, but the large-scale invasions that formed the hundreds of settlements now in existence began in the late forties. The government has begun to oppose families building houses around the city on empty land, so people were forced to organize into larger groups and invade in a sudden action. The groups were organized around kinship, region, union membership, neighborhoods dislocated by urban renewal, political party membership and, occasionally, under-the-table suggestion by governmental agencies or private developers seeking to vacate a site.
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