1. Published in the Economic Bulletin for Latin America, VIII, 1 (March 1963). The Economic Commission for Latin America at its tenth session in 1963 requested the Secretariat to “continue research on the geographical distribution of the population and on the causes, characteristics and effects of the various shifts and settlements of both urban and rural population …” Resolution 230(X), May 16, 1963.

2. See, in particular, Richard N. Adams, Cultural Surveys—Panama-Nicaragua-Guatemala-El Salvador-Honduras, (Pan American Sanitary Bureau Scientific Publications No. 33, Washington, D.C., December 1957); Orlando Fals-Borda, Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes: A Sociological Study of Saucio, (University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1955); I. Silva Fuenzalida, “Rural Communities in Central Chile,” Report on the Ninth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study, (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 1960); T. Lynn Smith, Brazil, People and Institutions, (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1946); Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Mexico, (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948); Nathan L. Whetten, Guatemala, the land and the People, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1961); G. Hill, J. Silva and R. O. de Hill, La Vida Rural en Venezuela, (Caracas, 1958); Venezuela, Consejo de Bienestar Rural, Problemas Economicos y Sociales de los Andes Venezolanos, Parte II, (Caracas, no date); and Peru, Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Peru, Los Recursos Humanos del Departamento de Puno, (Informes Vol. V, PS/B/9, Lima, 1959). The last of these sources, together with a number of other reports in the same series, contains the most extensive information on settlement patterns, derived from field studies, to be found for any region within a Latin American country.

3. Studies made for the Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Peru set limits of 5,000–10,000 inhabitants for a pueblo chico and 1,000–5,000 for an aldea; in practice, however, the same studies treat settlements well below these population limits but meeting other criteria as pueblos and aldeas. Whetten, op. cit., in discussing Mexico classifies nuclei of 101–1,000 as “villages” and nuclei of 1,001–2,500 as “large villages,” but adds that “many communities reporting a population of about 10,000 inhabitants are little more than a collection of farm villages.”

4. For present purposes, it is not necessary to enter into the complicated question of whether these strata really constitute “classes” in the strict sense.

5. Some studies touching upon rural settlement in Latin America distinguish between “pueblo” and “ldea” simply on the basis of size and administrative status; using the term “aldea” for the small administrative centres of predominantly rural municipios, and “pueblo” for the larger and more urban centres of the next tier of administration. The different distinction suggested here, however, has the advantage of drawing attention to the fact that “village settlement” of the types widespread in Europe and Asia and associated with the conception of compact, complexly organized rural communities is not widely characteristic of Latin America.

6. The studies of southern Peru cited above set population limits of 200–1,000 for villorrios. Silva, op. cit., sets a bottom limit of 100 families for villorrios in Chile. Presumably most of the settlements classified by Whetten in Mexico as “villages” (101–1,000) are closer to the villorio type than to the aldea.

7. The “line settlements” found in many parts of Latin America along roads or rivers in general conform more closely to the sprawling unorganized villorrio (or the smaller caserio) than to the “line villages” known in Europe.

8. The southern Peru studies limit the term caserio to nuclei of 10 to 50 families; Silva of 5 to 60 families; Whetten distinguishes “hamlets” of 11 to 100 people.

9. In the cereal-mixed farming areas of Argentina, “local neighbourhoods can be identified only by the sporadic visiting within geographic vicinities and seldom or never as a mutual-aid group. Communities, even trade-center communities, do not exist in any sociological sense.” Carl C. Taylor, Rural Life in Argentina, (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1948).

10. According to the studies of southern Peru previously cited, hacienda settlements in that area range from 50 to 500 in population; in some of them the population is grouped around the administrative-commercial center in self-sufficient communities; in others the population is scattered in small nuclei with social life oriented toward outside villages or hamlets.

11. The Mexican population census of 1950, in a table distributing the population by settlement types, listed 5,582 ejidos with 1,615,334 inhabitants. The ejidal census of the same year distinguished 17,579 ejidos with 1,552,926 ejidatarios (heads of families, indicating a probable total population of about 7.5 million).

12. A “comunidad” recently studied in southern Peru had 3,500 persons and 150 km² of land. Of its people, 1,500 form a minority in the population of a town outside the limits of the comunidad holdings; 1,200 live in a village on the other side of the holdings; the other 800 live dispersed within their boundaries. The three groups have no present feelings of community solidarity, but joined because their claim for legal recognition was based on a 17th century document defining the communal holdings of their ancestors. Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Peru, Funciones y Medios de Gobierno Local (Informe Vol. XXII, PS/F/52, Lima 1959).

13. For an interesting description of the consolidation of the hacienda and the community in the 17th century see Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (The University of Chicago Press, 1959). This source, concerned with Mexico and Guatemala, stresses several factors in the survival of the Indian communities that are relevant to their present potentialities as instruments for rural development: first, the communities were, in the main, not spontaneous survivals of pre-Columbian forms of social organization but products of colonial policies for control of Indian labour; second, the maintenance of community solidarity came to depend on the rejection of innovations and individual initiative; mechanisms such as the obligation of periodic ceremonial expenditure served to prevent the individual from accumulating permanent wealth that would enable him to dominate the community; third, the limited size of community landholdings meant that they could survive only by continually exporting their surplus population, presumably including the elements least adaptable to the static community life. Rural out-migration thus has a long history, and from the beginning this usually led to the loss of distinctively Indian traits among the migrants.

14. Venezuela, Consejo de Bienestar Rural, op. tit.

15. Nathan L. Whetten, Guatemala … op cit., pp. 37–38.

16. See Orlando Fals-Borda, op. cit., and a series of surveys of individual municipios carried out by Section de Investigation Social, Facultad de Sociología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, for the land tenure studies sponsored by the Comité Interamericano de Desarrollo Agrícola.

17. An unpublished study of Brazilian agriculture points out that the various kinds of “residual” or subsistence cultivation act as shock absorbers for commercial agriculture, expanding when markets for the latter are poor, and shrinking again when the commercial farms need more land and labour; this study asserts that there is no consistent trend toward the absorption of squatters, share-croppers, etc. into wage labour, but a fluctuation (Andrew Gunder Frank, “Brazilian Agriculture: Capitalism and the Myth of Feudalism”).

18. This study asserts that real distinctions among the rural people who cultivate marginal plots of uncertain ownership and seek seasonal wage work “are entirely and exclusively determined by the degree of friendship maintained with the local patron-latifundista.” (G. W. Hill, Estudio Preliminar a una Reforma Agraria en Honduras, Union Panamericana, Washington, D.C., 1962).

19. A study of a locality in Central Chile, for example, describes the settlers occupying the poorer mountain lands of the haciendas as a type of pioneer, living partly by woodcutting and small mining, partly by shifting cultivation, sometimes on a sharecropping basis, sometimes receiving full right to the crop in exchange for clearing the land. (J. Borde and M. Gongora, Evolution de la Propiedad Rural en el Valle del Puangue, Instituto de Sociología, Universidad de Chile, Santiago 1956).

20. See, for example, Celso Furtado, Eormacão Economica do Brasil (Editora Fondo de Cultura, Sao Paulo, 1959, pp. 141–142).

21. Olen E. Leonard, Bolivia: Land, People and Institutions (The Scarecrow Press, Washington, D.C., 1952).

22. E. Service and H. Service, Tobatí: Paraguayan Town (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954).

23. Richard N. Adams, op. cit., p. 60.

24. See Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, “Estrutura social e vida económica em una area de pequenha propiedade y de monocultura,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, 12 de octubre de 1961; and Jean Tricart, “El desarrollo de los Andes Venezolanos,” Cuadernos de la Sociedad Venezolana de Planificación, I, 6 de enero de 1963.

25. The first report of the Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria (INCORA) attributes to this factor a concentration of large holdings in zones opened to settlement in the present century. The large owners have profited from “the huge investments of the community in lines of communication and public services and the heroic sacrifice of the anonymous peasant,” (Informe de Actividades en 1962, Bogota, abril de 1963, p. 43).

26. For a discussion of this last problem and the conflicts to which it gives rise, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Tensoes sociais no campo e reforma agraria,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, 12 de octubre de 1961.

27. Rafael Baraona, Ximena Aranda, Roberto Santana, Valle de Putaendo, Estudio de Estructura Agraria (Instituto de Geografía, Universidad de Chile, 1961, p. 236).

28. Carl C. Taylor, op. cit.

29. Jose Luis de Imaz, “Estratificación social del sector primario en Ucacha,” Desarrollo Economico, (Buenos Aires, 1, 4, enero-marzo de 1962).

30. Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, op. cit.

31. Victor Goldkind, “Sociocultural Contrasts in Rural and Urban Settlement Types in Costa Rica,” Rural Sociology, 26, 4, December 1961.

32. Frank, op. cit.

33. See the studies previously cited of the Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Peru. This kind of ruralization can also affect the physical characteristics of the small towns. In the past, the typical small town was composed of substantial adobe houses, however lacking these might be in modern conveniences. For many of them, the growth of the marginal population means also the growth of improvised shantytowns. The problem of callampas and villas miseria is not limited to the big cities.

34. Rafael Baraona and others, op. cit., p. 301. Other descriptions of landless labourers, however, as already indicated, suggest a general lack of initiative, a reluctance to try anything except the work they know.

35. Jean Tricart, “Un example du déséquilibre villes-campagnes dans une economie en voie de developpement: El Salvador,” Developpement et Civilisations, IRFED, Paris, 11, July-September 1962.

36. Richard N. Adams, op. cit.

37. See Jacques Chonchol, “Análisis Crítico de la Reforma Agraria Cubana,” El trimestre económico, 117, enero-marzo de 1963; and M. Gutelman, “L'agriculture cubaine: le reforme agrarie et les problèmes nouveaux,” Etudes Rurales, 8, January-March 1963.

38. The departamento is usually the unit immediately below the national level and may be divided into provincias, but in Argentina and Chile this usage is reversed. In three federally organized countries (Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela) the larger unit is an Estado. Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Venezuela have no intermediate administrative level and in Mexico the intermediate unit has only vestigial functions. The meaning of the term municipio is closer to the “county” or “township” of the United States than to “municipality.”

39. Colombia, Ministerio del Trabajo, División Técnica de la Seguridad Social Campesina, Estudio Socio-Económico de Nariño (Bogotá, 1959).

40. Gilberto Loyo, quoted by Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Mexico, op. cit.

41. Nathan L. Whetten, Guatemala … op cit.

42. Marvin Harris, Town and Country in Brazil (Columbia University Press, New York, 1956, p. 179). On the average, however, the advantages secured by the smaller municipio centres are pathetically limited and marginal to their real needs. Among the 2,468 municipios existing in Brazil in 1957 only 600 had in the centre (cidade) a water system “deserving the name”; in 1954 only 460 cidades had a sewerage system; 206 of them had no electric power. More than 600 municipios did not have a single physician, let alone one in public service. Diogo Lordello de Mello, “A decentralizacao administrativa e a realidade municipal brasileira,” Revista Brazileira de Etudos Politicos, 11 Junho de 1961. In southern Peru in 1959, among 461 “urban” cabeceras only 6 had an adequate supply of drinking water and 2 had adequate sewerage; 66 and 26, respectively, had water and sewerage systems “needing improvement,” while 390 had no water system and 433 no sewers (Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú, El Desarrollo Urbano, Informes Vol. XVIII, PS/E/42, Lima 1959). In Peru as a whole, according to a recent estimate, 725 out of 1,500 cabeceras lack an access road linking them with the national highway system (Fernando Belaunde Terry, “El Mestizaje de la Economía,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, October 1963).

43. See Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Revisited, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1951, p. 49.

44. Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú, La Organización Social en el Departamento de Puno, (Informes Vol. XXII, PS/F/49, Lima 1959).

45. Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú, La Cultura; Sistemas de Valores (Informe Vol. XXII, PS/F/50, Lima 1959).

46. A process of this kind also seems to have occurred since the 1920's under the combined stimulus of favourable access to produce markets, relatively vigorous and adaptable traditional community organizations, and the penetration of new national movements in parts of the Mantaro Valley in Peru. The cabeceras in this area, however, seem to have been from the beginning closer to the aldea of cultivators than to the pueblo, as they are distinguished in the present paper: See Jose R. Sabogal Wiesse, “La Comunidad Indigena de Pucara,” America Indígena, XXI, 1, January 1961.

47. See Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú, La Organización Social en el Departamento de Puno (Informes Vol. XXII, PS/F/49, Lima 1959, pp. 23–24).

48. For a thorough analysis of the consequences of paternalistic administration in colonization programmes, see Venezuela, Ministerio de Agricultura y Cría, Direction de Planificación Agropecuaria, División de Política Agrícola, La Colonización Agraria en Venezuela 1830–1957. Estudio Efectuado por el MAC con la Colaboración del IAN (Caraca s 1959).

49. Oscar Lewis, op. cit., constitutes a particularly interesting examination of the situation within a large rural community in which many traditional forms survive, and in which an earlier study had emphasized the elements of solidarity: “Another aspect of the tendency to idealize the free village has been the assumption that collective forms of land tenure are accompanied by cooperativeness and a form of collectivism in the economic organization of agriculture. As a matter of fact, Tepoztecans, like most Mexican peasants, are a highly individualistic group of farmers, and there is a minimum of cooperativeness or collectivization in the system of agriculture. The existence of collective forms of land tenure, in the face of this individualism, has been responsible for much bickering between the villages.” (p. 127) Lewis also states that the nearly extinct system of collective public works labour in the same village is considered “a coercive rather than a voluntary institution” and gave the local authorities “ample opportunity for favoritism and vengeance against political opponents or personal enemies.” (p. 110) He cites other local studies that support his conclusion on the dominant individualism of the Mexican peasant. (p. 303).

50. The latter situation is described as typical of minifundio cultivators in the department of Nariño (Colombia, Ministerio de Trabajo, op. cit.) and of Indian cultivators of Puno (Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú, Los Recursos Humanos del Departamento de Puno, op. cit.).

51. I. Silva Fuenzalida, “Rural Communities in Central Chile,” op. cit.

52. It is interesting that several studies dealing with migrants coming from rural settlements as well as small towns to the cities found prominent among their memories and motives for migrating a fear of the hostility or “envy” of neighbours in their place of origin, particularly at any sign of prosperity or initiative. See, for example, Humberto Rotondo and others, Personalidad Básica, Dilemas y Vida de Familia de un Grupo de Mestizos (Lima, 1960); and Oscar Lewis, op. cit., p. 295. “There is a deeply ingrained fear in the Indians of Tilantongo; fear of extortion, political persecution, economic exploitation, banditry, and blood feuds. In addition to these ‘social’ fears, there is an ever-present fear of the natural elements, which in one fell swoop, can, and often do, wipe out a year's food supply…. In Mexico City, the migrants say that they have ‘lost the fear’ which they had in Tilantongo.” (Douglas S. Butterworth, “A Study of the Urbanization Process among Mixtec Migrants from Tilantongo in Mexico City,” América Indígena, XXII, 3, July 1962.). 53. For local descriptions of the relationships between shopkeepers and small cultivators, see Richard N. Adams, op. cit.; G. Hill and others, op. cit.; Andrew Pearse and Salomon Rivera, La Tenencia de la Tierra y sus Implicaciones Socio-Económicas en Tenza, Colombia (Sección de Investigaciones, Facultad de Sociología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, May 1963); and I. Silva Fuenzalida, “Aspectos de la Organización Económica de las Comunidades Rurales de la Provincia de Ñuble, Chile,” Economía, Santiago, 75–76, 1962). The last two of these sources point to the squeeze placed on the small cultivator by continuing inflation in recent years; the prices of the tools and other goods he needs to buy consistently rise faster than the prices of the produce he has to sell. 54. Gerardo and Alicia Reichel-Dolmatoff, The People of Aritama: the Cultural Personality of a Colombian Mestizo Village (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 239 and p. 459).

55. For an assessment of the national social structures in relation to developmental requirements, see “The Postwar Social Development of Latin America” (E/CN. 12/660).

56. United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, Decentralization for Local and National Development (United Nations Publication: Sale No. 62. II.H. 2), p. 21.

57. In the 19th and early 20th century, a good many colonies of European migrants in the countries in the southern half of South America were organized according to the patterns of large compact villages in the migrants' countries of origin, but these examples did not influence the rest of the rural population, and in many instances the emigrants eventually turned to more dispersed settlement. Whetten (Rural Mexico, op. cit., p. 49) emphasizes that most of the new rural settlements deriving from the Mexican agrarian programme since 1930 received “little or no planning in regard to the location of the homes in relation to the farms or to the spacing of houses and lots with reference to one another.”

58. The Venezuelan agrarian reform policy calls for the organization of beneficiaries in groups of about 100 families with a nucleus of services, but in most of the earlier local projects the families have lived dispersed on their plots, with the nucleus located so as to have access to a road; while clustered settlement is now preferred only a few have been organized. One of the newer projects envisages centros poblados of about 140 families, with the size of nuclei determined by the criterion that landholdings of 10 hectares each should not be more than 3–3.5 kilometres from the centre, considered the maximum convenient distance for transport of crops, etc. by animal power. (Venezuela, Oficina Central de Coordinación y Planificación, Proyecto de Desarrollo Integral de Bocono, Primer Curso de Planificación Integral de Asentamientos Campesinos, agosto-noviembre 1963. The present approach in Venezuela is influenced by the experience of Israel in agricultural colonization.

59. Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria, op. cit.

60. El Mercurio, Santiago, 21 January 1964.

61. One authority has recommended a hexagonal system of land division, with each hexagon divided into 24 triangular farms, with the 24 families grouped around the centre of the hexagon, each at the point of its triangle, and with a nucleus of services in the centre. (T. Lynn Smith, “Una sugestión para la planeación de las comunidades rurales en América Latina, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, XXII, 2, 1960).

62. “More than concentration in small towns, the peasant who works the land is interested in access to the main roads so as to be able to use the transport services that permit him to carry his products to more profitable markets. Furthermore, access to the main roads permits him to send his children to the better equipped schools. The Chilean peasant is accustomed to living by the roadside; in settlements it would be hard for him to guard his animals or care for them conveniently.

“This tendency to live on the land is combatted by the planners of rural housing programmes in Chile. To them the clustering of buildings is the only way of solving the problems presented by modern construction. The creation of ”villorrios agrícolas” does not in any way solve the problem of a peasant.

“On the contrary, once he is at a distance from the land he will seek other forms of work, will use political pressure to enter the public administration or to obtain a license to sell alcohol or open a shop.” (Oscar Dominguez, El Condicionamiento de la Rejorma Agraria: Estudio de los Factores Económicos. Demográficos y Sociales que Determinan la Promoción del Campesino Chileno, Université Catholique de Louvain, Collection de l'Ecole des Sciences Politiques et Sociales No. 173, 1963, p. 182.)

63. See, for example, Alfonso Villa Rojas, “Notas sobre la Distribución y Estado Actual de la Población Indigena de la Peninsula de Yucatan, Mexico,” America Indigena, XXII, 3, July 1962; and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The Economic Development of Venezuela (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1961). The latter report criticizes earlier colonization projects for, inter alia, “excessive expenditures on housing, community facilities, and land clearing with insufficient attention to the economic productivity of the farms created.”

64. United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, op. cit., p. 15–16. The Working Group distinguished technical services from centralized field services “such as postal services and telecommunications, which lend themselves to highly centralized forms of field administration”; and local services, “such as construction and maintenance of local roads and irrigation works, which can be performed effectively without technical support or supervision from higher levels.”

65. One of the very few systematic discussions of standards for such nuclei, however, applying itself to Uruguayan conditions, proposes a 3-teacher school for 60–70 children and a clinic in charge of a first aid attendant, visited weekly by a physician, to serve a group of 400–500 people. Educational levels in most of the other countries would preclude a 3-teacher school for such a small number of children. (Centro Latinoamericano de Economía Humana, Interpretation del Uruguay Rural, Librería América Latina, Montevideo, 1963).

66. For a summary of mapping progress up to 1963, see “Los Recursos Naturales en América Latina, Su Conocimiento Actual e Investigaciones Necesarias en Este Campo” (E/CN.12/670).

67. The functions of administration and co-ordination of the services would in general be handled at higher levels.

68. Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Mexico, op. tit., pp. 302–303.

69. The main stimulus for pilot projects and local research has been the Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (CINVA). See, for example, its publications on Experiencias sobre Vivienda Rural en el Brasil (Bogotá 1961) and La Vereda de Chambimbal: Estudio y Acción en Vivienda Rural (Bogota 1958).

70. See “Geographic Distribution of the Population of Latin America and Regional Development Priorities,” loc. cit. Some of the smaller Caribbean and Central American countries show much higher rates of rural net increase and a few countries, including Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, show no increase at all.

71. See the discussion of local government and field services in Brazil by Diogo Lordello de Mello, in United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, op. cit., pp. 133–148.

72. The studies made for the Plan Regional para el Desarrollo del Sur del Perú constitute almost the only attempt up to the present to make such an assessment for a major part of a country. One of these studies, El Desarrollo Urbano, (Informes Vol. XVIII, PS/E/43) offers a framework for assessment of urban facilities and needs in small centres. The Report of the Working Group on Decentralization for National and Local Development offers extensive advice on standards for local government areas and for their relationships with higher levels of authority.

73. United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, op. cit., p. 16.

74. Ibid., p. 10.