Latin American perspectives II; Episode 32 of 38

Latin America perspectives a series of information and comment about Latin America with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. These programs are recorded by station w s i u FM. Here now is Dr. Gardner Right in the urban world of the present big today bigger tomorrow the hue and cry most commonly heard is that of renewal and with technological change coming as rapidly as it does today's problems and unsatisfactory solutions complicate and delay the planning for tomorrow. Very seldom does the urban problem take the peculiar twist that finds planners starting from scratch and yet called upon to think big. In the interior of Venezuela in that stretch of the Orinoco River Basin now associated with unlimited iron resources change is coming so rapidly that major cities are

developing on the sites of previously in consequential towns. This in turn presents maximum opportunities to urban planners and the same situation constitutes a challenge to economist sociologist anthropologist and others. One effort to interpret an emerging city in a developing country has been made by anthropologists. Lisa Redfield Petit the last name spelled p e a t t I e whose book The view from the body all published by the University of Michigan press is a study of certain aspects of life in SEO dot young. About Rio I hasten to add is a neighborhood the author has preferred to use the Spanish term barrio la la is a part of the city of LA Yana in the interior of Venezuela at that point where the Karni River joins the

Orinoco. The city was formally founded in 1061 as a planned industrial city. Its official inauguration celebrated by a well publicized ceremony in which many prominent persons took part. Its future development under the charge of an autonomous agency of the Venezuelan government. The city had as its nucleus a new steel mill and a dam and electric power plant. Both government owned and already managed by the government agency as well as two private mining companies which are subsidiaries of U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel. This city sealed out quite Yana was to be planned and developed by the Venezuelan state agency in accordance with the national economic targets set for Venezuela as a whole and was to contribute

to those national goals and the state agency was given very wide powers in the control of land so as to be able to shape the form of the city. Indeed the city was to be a corporate artifact consciously created. The Venezuelan government planners were soon joined by a group of American consultants from the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. The city's future was planned in more detail. The economists of the team began to project possible industrial bases of the new city based of course on the available resources and high grade iron ore. And other minerals the cheap hydroelectric power the nearby supplies of oil and gas and of course the ocean transport down the wide deep Orinoco River they began to work out what this sort of base might mean in terms of population projecting 250000 by one thousand seventy and more

than 600000 by nineteen eighty. It was into this setting then in 1962 that anthropologist petty accompanying her architect husband went to live for a period that soon stretched out for more than two and a half years. The neighborhood into which he moved. Known as the body of law. Embraced fewer than 500 people. This was a lower class neighborhood and it found this family from the United States all the more completely immersed in the Latin world because that island of Americans that special suburban setting was far removed from this. And so they were not in the United States transported abroad. They really had come to immerse themselves in a Venezuelan neighborhood. Indeed the Petits with their four children lived in a house of earth

walls and sheet aluminum roofing as simple housing as that of any of their immediate neighbors. It is then in this setting that we find the author struck by the realisation that in all Venezuelan institutions there appears to be a gap between the top levels and the bottom. A weakness in structure at the intermediate levels and so one of the themes that she develops in the book that results from her Venezuelan experience is that of trying to follow the roots the connections between those at the bottom and this lower Klaus class barrio in which she lived. The law was the bottom and those at the top in looking at life in LA in seeing how new immigrants to the industrial city make their lives in it. Still another set of considerations emerges. She asked

moving into a modern industrial economy affects the people in that neighborhood. How well how fast they are learning to live in the New World. I might add parent that equally these people who are coming into this new this plan this industrial city were coming in part out of the ranch land they were in part coming from agricultural areas some from the mountains and indeed some from all zones but almost invariably rural settings in the country of Venezuela the people were learning to be industrial workers faster than one might expect. But the people seem to be learning ways of living and being which were at the same time dysfunctional. In reference to building a modern industrialized economy. She noted in her experience in law that while things were getting better very fast in some ways they were also through the very same processes getting

worse much worse. And so we have in these pages that constitute the book a methodological exercise an attempt to see what the view from the little barrio of law can suggest about the major historical transformation in which not only this one community but indeed all of rapidly changing Venezuela is caught up. It is significant then to note that the view that one gets in this study is not a view of the neighborhood but is a view from the neighborhood. This author is not one who is outside looking at it objectively and without any sense of involvement. Rather she is one who inside it is very much involved. And I might add that on that score that her conclusions in the volume however broadly and generally they are stated on occasion are also wrapped up in a lot of

very specific cases. There is the situation which finds a new sewer system. The major concern of all the people in the neighborhood and because of her prestige. Indeed because she was a woman with a degree. A woman who had travelled widely. A woman of a higher social class than the neighborhood in which she lived. She became one of the spokesmen of the community and you find then a very intimate glimpse of this American in Venezuela trying to fight the cause fighting the case of the downtrodden Venezuelans of this low class neighborhood. There was also by way of relief for the generality the case study of an individual who was introduced as saying you are to get race. And so you have the personal. You have the private the individual the singular as well as the plural the total community which I repeat only adds up to about 500 persons and all of them seem to know well

it was the author's time her gasoline her bus and ferry fares which were involved as she fought some of these cases some of these problems. It was partly because she was a so-called rich woman but she was useful to the law. She had a jeep. She had time she had money. Other people in the barrio had very limited stocks of any of these commodities. There was good reason why the members of the delegations that went along with her generally turned out to be people of secondary importance. Usually it is only the unemployed who can afford to spend the day going to a distant state capital are sitting in some administrators office hoping to be interviewed. And so it was that the class system in Venezuela formed in a pre-industrial economy is reflected in the structure of politics and administration. To put it more simply the administrators are superior not only in power and position but also in social class to those whom they

administer. And their feeling about the social class difference is such as to suggest notions of caste. The chief engineer of the SOR project found it possible to go to a law and hold a meeting to explain his position on the sewer but he found it intensely difficult to sit down at the same table with a group of delegates from the law. And this despite the fact that this was a man who had called them political ambitions. There are stages in the mobility whereby these migrants come to the city whereby they take on the attributes that are really beyond them wearing the fountain pen even though illiterate. There was a time when they dream of better futures saying their child would like to be a doctor. There comes a time when in this mobility process the individual sees himself not only as satisfying the new wants through new skills but acquiring the new skills through a sort of

reshaping of one's self. And yet there is a gap between the poor and the rich nations the developed and the underdeveloped. That's reflected in such economic indicators as production and per capita income figures. But these indicators merely point and rather imperfectly to the crucial differences which are really those of structure the haves among nations are not just richer they are richer because they have developed the institutions which make them rich and which are perpetually tending to make them richer still the gap is not easily closed. Even by providing the backward nations with compensating encroachments of capital and technical advice. There has to be in the final analysis among the institutions the social the political and the economic a realisation that the problem of economic development must be seen in general as a problem of broad social transformation. And in each particular instance be it in the heart of

Venezuela or some other area of the underdeveloped world. This has to be analyzed in terms of a particular structure of institutions. We have then a case study that is both general and specific. Viewing the rise of a city that promises to be a trouble that's in the near future in the volume by Lisa Redfield petty. The view from the barrio published at the University of Michigan press. This was another program in the series Latin America perspectives with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. Join us for our next program when Dr. Gardner will comment on another interesting aspect of Latin American affairs. These programs are recorded by station WFIU FM and are made available to this station by the national educational radio network.