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From the Marginality of the 1960s to the “New Poverty” of Today: a LARR Research Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Mercedes González de la Rocha
Affiliation:
CIESAS Occidente
Janice Perlman
Affiliation:
Trinity University
Helen Safa
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville
Elizabeth Jelin
Affiliation:
Conicet-IDES, Buenos Aires
Bryan R. Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Peter M. Ward
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract

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This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 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 cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares “marginality” as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called “new poverty” today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. See Editor's Foreword, LARR 38, no. 1: 5.

2. Itself a quarter-century throwback to Louis Wirth's “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24. See Oscar Lewis, “Urbanization without Breakdown,” Scientific Monthly 75 (1952): 31–41.

3. LARR is grateful to two external readers who offered comments on this Research Note.

4. Department of Sociology, Princeton University.