THE PROCESS OF SPATIAL DISLOCATION AND SOCIAL IDENTITY BUILDING: BRAZIL

Elisa Maria Pereira Reis and Simon Schwartzman

Paper presented to the session on "Comparative History and Comparative Politics" of the XIth World Congress of the International Political Science Association , Edinburgh, l6th-2lst August, 1976. Published in the International Social Sciences Journal, 30, 1, 98-115, 1977.

Summary

1. Center and periphery in Brazil

2. Geographical Mobility and Population Concentration

3. The introduction of market mechanisms in the countryside

4. Mechanisms and Consequences in the Areas of Destination

5. Conclusion: whither national identity?

Notes


The aim of this paper is to bring together data and concepts which could lead us to a better understanding of the process of national integration and identity building in Brazil. The basic proposition is that, contrary to the expectations of the prevailing theories of social mobilization and integration of earlier periods(1), Brazil is not moving towards an homogeneous and well integrated society, with a well defined profile of social and national identity Quite on the contrary, the present situation seems to be one of strong dualism between a modern and affluent section of the country, which adopts the technological and consumption patterns of the developed countries, and a large majority; living in very poor conditions according to these same standards.

There is nothing specially new in this proposition, since the so-called duality of underdeveloped societies is a well established and well known fact. What is probably less understood is how this dual society behaves itself in a context of rapid social, economic and political change, and what kind of society is being forged and will face ourselves in the years to come. The first part of this paper is therefore concerned with an overall characterization of the dual society in Brazil, and will be essentially conceptual in nature. The second deals with the pattern of intensive social and geographical mobility the country is undertaking, with strong references to migration statistics, The third refers to the social consequences of mobility both at its origin and at the destination. Final ly, the last section deals with some general propositions about the type of society and the patterns of social identity, or the lack of it, which is building up in the country, We believe that, although limited to a single country, this type of analysis and propositions can have much broader implications and applicability.

1. Center and periphery in Brazil

How an under-developed country was organized and put in contact with the Western, colonial powers of Europe is a basic and long-lasting determinant of its social, economic and political structure African countries have their boundaries inherited from the colonial period, and whether the colonizer was English, French, Belgian or Portuguese is usually more revealing of their social organization and development than the specific national or tribal distribution and composition of the population. South American countries also obey the same rule: the differences between the few British colonies in the continent (Jamaica, Guiana) and the former Iberian dependencies are so remarkable that the former are usually excluded from the concept of "Latin America", which obviously does not encompass everything to the south of Rio Grande.

Within Latin America, there are two still further distinctions that matter. One has to do with the presence or absence of a strong and well organized Pre-Colombian society in the country; the other with the diferences between the Portuguese and the Spanish patterns of colonization .

The first differentiation puts apart, roughly speaking, the South Atlantic from the Central American and Andean Pacific countries. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay are countries which were completely populated by the colonial powers, their original native population having been almost completely assimilated or wiped out in the process. This means that these countries did not, and do not suffer the problems of confrontation between a non-western, so-called "traditional" civilization and the Western culture, as it happened in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala, to quote some of the most striking examples. What they do witness, however, is the contrast between a society organized through patterns of eighteenth to nineteenth century Iberic colonization and the influence of a modern, capitalist economy.

We can have a better grasp of this pattern and its variations if we take a comparative glance on Brazil and Argentina. In Argentina, independence in early nineteenth century was followed by a long-lasting conflict for political hegemony between Buenos Aires and the provincial seats. The final outcome was centralization in Buenos Aires, but at the end of the century this was not the old colonial seat of the pre-independence days. On the contrary, it was a booming city growing with the impulse of the expansion of the international market and the international migrations which accompanied it(2) . The consequence was the development of a modern society which was able to mold one of the most homogeneous, rich, and well educated populations in the continent. The political and economic problems Argentina is facing today are not related to the lack of integration of large, marginal sectors of society, nor to political conflicts between ""modern"" and "traditional'" elites. They are, most likely, the result of the country"s difficulty in sustaining more than fifty years of fairly high patterns of consumption, political participation and high educational demands, with an economic system geared to the export of a few agricultural products.

This is quite different from Brazil, where the original seat of the colonial administration never ceased to be the political center of the country. A well organized state structure was able to keep together more than eight million square kilometers of land throughout the nineteenth century after independence, a political feat which demanded the organization and continuous increase of a powerful civilian and military central bureaucracy(3). The bureaucracy was able to raise income from the import and export business, to pull together civilian manpower into the armed forces, and eventually to lead an active process of economic development and modernization of its own organizational structure. In this process, it had to relate and deal with the more capitalist-like sections of the country. São Paulo, very much like Buenos Aires, was able to grow as a strong industrial, agricultural and populational center thanks to the boom in international trade and the international migrations from earlier twenty century, But, contrary to Buenos Aires, it never reached political supremacy, and had to enter in a rather complex pattern of relationship with the more traditional and well established political center(4).

The pattern of center-periphery relationship is thus much more complex than that of a simple contrast between a modern and traditional sector. If we think just on the urban areas (which concentrate most of the country"s population by now) we can, in a very schematic way, suggest the following pattern of social stratification:

  Public, Political Section Private, Economic Section
Center civilian and military bureaucracy, "political classes" national and multinational capital ism
Middle-Level middle-level bureaucracy educated middle classes white-collars, specialized blue collars
Periphery urban, non qualified workers and sub-employed or unemployed shanty-town dwellers

If we had to summarize the essential points about the relationship between these different social groups, the following could be stated: This context of potentially conflictive relationships between the private and the public elites is dramatically exposed when there seems to be a never-ending flux of people from rural to the urban sections of the country. That is what will be shown in the next section, before taking a closer look at the sociological meaning of this flux.

2. Geographical Mobility and Population Concentration

Brazilian population has experienced since the forties, and particularly from the fifties on, massive geographical dislocations, whose general result has been an increasing concentration process. The average annual urban growth rate was around 3.9% during the forties and more than five percent during the last two census period (1950-1960, 1960-1970). The general level of urbanization rose by 79 percent during the last thirty years(6). While the rural population is still growing in absolute terms, its share in the total population has been declining steadily. It was 68.76 percent in 1940, 63.84 in 1950, 59.92 in 1960, and 43.91 percent in 1970. Annual growth rates in rural areas averaged 1.6 percent from 1940 no 1960 and then dropped to 0.6 percent in the last inter-census period. The significance of this sharp drop in the annual rate of rural growth in the recent past gains even more significance when we consider that the annual rate of natural rural growth was estimated to be 3.4. percent during the sixties(7). Among the ten regions characterized by the Census Bureau, three had even experienced negative growth rates in the rural sector, as the table below illustrates. TABLE 1 - Urban and Rural Population growth rates by region, 1960-1970


Even discounting for the high birth rates characterizing Brazilian population (natural urban growth rates per annum averaged three percent during the period 1950-1970), the role of internal migration in this urbanization process has been crucial. According to the census data there were in 1970 29.2 million people living in a place other than their birthplace. In other words, more than one third of the total Brazilian population had experienced at least one migratory movement in his lifetime. It is true that official data show rural-urban moves to be smaller than urban-to-urban and rural-to-rural migration. While migration from one urban center to another constitutes 49.3 percent of total migration and rural-to-rural ones 26.2 percent, rural evasion constitutes only 18.6 percent of the total, Nevertheless, it has to be stressed that the contribution of rural-urban migration is under represented here due to three kinds of factors. First, the calculus only takes into consideration the last change of residence. Thus, we run the risk of calling "urban" all the rural migrants who went by stages from one urban center to another, and there is evidence indicating step migration to be quite a usual phenomenon in Brazil. Second, we are not taking into consideration the contribution of migrants to natural city growth. Finally, part of the so-called urban-to-urban moves are in fact rural-urban since, as we commented earlier, the "city" of origin is frequently a rural village.

One rough estimate of this under-representation is provided by Milton da Mata(8). Taking the census population of 1950 and the national growth rates for the period 1950-1970, they estimated the urban population in 1970 to be 34,174 and the rural one 60,334. However, the census population of 1970 was 52,604 in the urban centers and 41,604 in the rural areas. Thus, while the reported rural migrants in cities were less than 8 million people, estimates suggest their number to be 18.73 million. There are also other indications of a impressive concentration process. Thus, for example, more than 80 percent of the interregional migration reported in 1970 (according to the last change of residence and also according to the place of origin) is directed to four geographic areas (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paraná and Goiás-Mato Grosso).

Moreover, concentration tends to occur in the major urban centers. While cities with 2,000 and less inhabitants comprised almost 15 percent of the total urban population in 1950, their share of the urban total of 1970 was no more than 6.8 percent. In general, cities are growing much faster than towns as we can observe from the data below: TABLE 2: Average Growth Rates of Brazilian Cities and Towns.


If we consider now the evolution of the cities of 20,000 and over (the United Nations criteria for urbanization) we observe that their share in the total urban population increased from 55.9 percent in 1950 to 70.6 percent in 1970.

A more precise evaluation of the urban concentration process is provided by Costa as we show in table 3. TABLE 3: Urban population of Brazil distributed by size and urban concentration according to the last four censuses (%)


3. The introduction of market mechanisms in the countryside

The Brazilian countryside never had a stringently organized rural gentry, which could provide a conservative and pre-capitalist pendant to the modern, urban and capitalist sections of the country, a frame of reference which is not appropriate to the Brazilian historical realities. In fact, the Brazilian rural landowner had historically been either a producer of export goods, and as such strongly related to the international capitalist market, or the heir of former, decadent export economies or producers of secondary food stuffs and cattle for the internal market. Old and decadent sugar-cane or coffee plantations turn to cattle raising or producers of rice, beans or other products for the internal market when, for various reasons, the productivity of the major crop dwindles. Sometimes the decadence of some booming products is very rapid, leaving substantial segments of population stuck in the countryside and with less and less contacts with the major urban centers. This seems to have happened with the gold mines in Minas Gerais, with sugar in the Brazilian northeast, with coffee in a later period in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and in a lesser scale, with rubber in the Amazon area(9).

This kind of decadent and impoverished rural economy is the basis of a type of social organization that is left outside the main stream of market exchanges, which is concentrated in the urban centers and the leading export areas. As time passes on the number and diversity of decadent areas increases in size and becomes, as it were, the "traditional" side of the country, encompassing the majority of its population. It is upon this "traditional" society that the contemporary expansion of the capitalist market would impose its presence, contributing to the process of urban concentration in the country.

It is very illustrative, in this context, to refer to some preliminary results of a recent pilot study on the meaning of formal education for the rural population in Brazil. Although very limited in scope, this study can provide some insights on how the process of migration from country to town is so clearly linked to the introduction of market mechanisms and how this process is perceived as a mixture of hope for improvement and threats of instability and insecurity for the country dweller(10)

It is possible to distinguish at least three levels of introduction of market mechanisms in the so-called "subsistence" or "traditional"" rural economy. The first refers to the mercantilization of the product; the second, to the mercantilization of labor force, which makes people available to dislocations according to the wage levels; the third, to the possibility of buying and selling land according to market prices.

The first level seems to occur throughout the country. In several places there is a clear differentiation between production for self-maintenance and a surplus which goes into the market. Sometimes not only the surplus, but the bulk of the production is sold, in an apparent pure market situation. But the small producer is bound to by his consumption commodities from the landowner, to whom he is tied by a system of recurrent indebtedness. What is important to notice is that these monetary interchange .are not deep enough to go into the roots of the social system, The very fact that these are decadent, economically marginal areas, makes the system of land property in great measure protected from market exchanges, while submitted to transfers according to principles of inheritance and marriage. In this context, labor relations tend to be based on personal ties of protection and subordination(11)

There is thus a kind of simulacra of a traditional, feudal-like system. But the differences are very important. First, the occupants of the upper level of this system are usually strongly urban oriented. What they lack in economic power they tend to compensate in terms of political influence and personal ties with the political regional and national centers. They send their sons to the law schools, carry the votes from the peasants for the men in government, and, in general, provide political and electoral support for the political center in its efforts to keep ahead from the pressures coming from the more capitalist areas of the country(12)

Second, this kind of system is usually impoverished, working with very primitive technology. Poverty combines with the urban orientation of its elite to create only precarious stability. Instability can be brought about by natural phenomena, such as the cyclical droughts in the Northeast, which leaves the rural dweller without means of subsistence and forced to migrate to the South, leaving, however the property and technological structures in the countryside unchanged, Or it can be produced by the perception the peasant might have of possible high monetary wages in the urban centers or in more dynamic agricultural activities, Given the extremely low standards of life of the rural population, the tension between personal loyalties and market attractions tend to break up to the latter's benefit. Finally, new demands of the international market-such as soy beans- can increase very rapidly the value of the land, and therefore bouleverse the whole traditional system of social organization in the countryside.

The passage from a system of relatively stable, somehow protected, but impoverished social and economic relations to a more productive, but also more unstable market economy seems to be unavoidable, when the economy is geared towards maximum profitability. For the rural dweller, the process is pregnant of new possibilities and threats.

For him, there are always two values which are important but often conflictive: higher income and stability. Depending on the vagaries of the weather for his survival, losing the personal ties which could make his employer somehow responsible for his lot, having his small self-maintenance crop being destroyed by the introduction of cattle or highly mechanized production of cereals, losing his job as some sections of the rural economy become more capital intensive, he sees in the migration to the city a possibility for attaining both some better monetary gains and some assurance of work stability. The interviews show how migration to town - which is supposedly a much more competitive and market-like place than the countryside - is perceived as a means to achieve a stable job, a predictable income at the end of the month, some social benefits, and so on.

It is in this context that formal education plays an important role in the perceptions of the rural dweller. First, he thinks that it provides him with a few basic instruments to understand and move around a little bit in the world of market exchanges. Education can help him to calculate if his boss is not cheating him with his salary or share-crop; it helps him to read the name of a bus, if he has to travel around; it protects him from the shame of not being able to sign a piece of paper for a bureaucratic or economic procedure.

But more important than to move around within the market is the help formal education can give to step outside it. Education is perceived as a formal requisite for passing a test, for getting a job, for entering into the local bureaucracy - in short, to move up the social ladder from insecurity to security. There is no perception that the education should provide better working skills, increase the productivity of the agricultural economy, and son on. There is, it seems, only one possible way to improve one's lot in an economy which was economically decadent and exposed to the impact of rapid and uncontrolled capitalization - the way out.

This perception of formal education as a channel for social mobility does not mean, of course, that this channel is wide and open. In fact, the general increase of the economy and the job market, together with the increase in the country's educational system have meant that many people could experience effective social and economic mobility in the last twenty years. But it seems that the opportunities for education have been higher, the higher was the person's previous education, as shown in table 4.

TABLE 4: Educational level of the Brazilian Population, 1950-1970

What this table tells is that, while the relative increase of primary education was a little above fifty percent in a twenty years period, the corresponding increase at the upper level of secondary education was fourfold. Only at the university level the trend of better opportunities at the top was not fully carried on; but this was well compensated by the expansion of the Brazilian university system in the last years (the number of students enrolled at university level establishments increased about tenfold between 1964 and 1974).

This effective, but limited experience of social mobility seems to have created a high demand for formal education - and for jobs in the educational system - throughout the country. In this process it helps to increase the masses of marginal people which are lured by the urban society without ever being able to enter neither into the modern industrial or tertiary economy nor into the payroll of any ever growing public bureaucracy.

Let us then take a closer look at the performance of the rural immigrant when he comes to town.

4. Mechanisms and Consequences in the Areas of Destination

If its true that push mechanisms are an extremely important factor behind migration from Brazilian rural areas, it is also true that pull mechanisms acting from the urban centers play an important role in the process. Expectations of higher wages, better provision on public facilities, greater leisure opportunities, etc. are certainly decisive in the concentration process we discussed earlier. Of course, pull and push mechanisms are not independent from each other. Expulsion factors in the place of origin and attraction factors in the prospective centers of destination are both parameters conditioning individual's decision to stay or to leave his homeland. That is to say, behind the mechanisms of attraction (or for that matter of expulsion), there are expectations concerning the place of destination as the rationale for migrating. it does not matter now if this expectation proves to be true or not. What is certainly true is that the Brazilian model of growth strongly supports the persistence of attractive forces leading to urban concentration.. Regional development programs, infrastructure works, agricultural policies, and so on, do have some impact in containing concentration, but their efficacy is limited due to the unintended catalyst process created by public policy in the major urban centers. The comparison between Brazilian average rural wages (excluding São Paulo, the richest Brazilian estate) and the minimum urban wage in Rio de Janeiro provides some indication on the magnitude of the pull forces in what respects economic motivations for migrating.

As we see in Table 5, rural wages outside São Paulo are much lower than the legal minimum wage levels established for Rio de Janeiro. Between 1966 and 1972 the rural-urban ratio remained somewhere between .53 and .64. During 1973 there was a significant increase in average rural wages, though we don't have any means to evaluate if this constitutes a new trend or just a short term phenomenon.

TABLE 5: Brazil: Rural Wages* and Minimum Urban Wage (1966-1973)


How about the real performance of migrants in Brazilian cities? According to standard economic theory, migration constitutes a spontaneous adjustment of the labor force to market stimuli (13). Economic analysis of the global Brazilian situation seems to confirm that optimistic view: migration trends follow rational lines from stagnated to progressive areas, thus increasing general welfare levels as well as improving the lot of migrants. Moreover, it is concluded, adaptation poses no major problem since migrants tend to do better - or at least as well - as natives in the job market(14) Even postponing the consideration of other than economic problems involved in migrating, there seems to be a need for qualification of the positive macro-evaluations of migrants adaptation, when we consider individually the three major Brazilian urban centers, (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte), as we will do next.

Belo Horizonte, the third Brazilian metropolitan area, had in 1970, 1,606,306 inhabitants(15). More than 50% of this total had migrant origin, and if we take into consideration only the economic active population the share of migrants goes up to 70%. According to Brito and Merrick's study, migrants tend to participate less than natives in the "modern" sector of employment. Even though the "traditional" sector is not an exclusive source of employment for migrants, it does play an important role in their absorption into the job market(16). The distribution of the male economic active population among sectors goes as follows:

TABLE 6: Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area - Male Economic Active Population According to Sector and Migratory Status (%)


As we can see, more migrants than of natives work in construction and in the "tradicional" services. The opposite is true for employment In the modern industrial sector and primary activities. Concerning the remaining sectors there are no big differences among migrants and natives. In spite of small differences in sectorial definition, table 7 gives us some useful indications concerning medium wages per sector. As we can see, the sectors were migrants tend to have greater participation have lower wages, except in the "primary" sector which is quite small as a source of employment for the two groups. TABLE 7: Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area - Monthly Wages Perceived by the Male Economic Active Population by to Sector of Activity (in cruzeiros)

Further evidence provided by the authors suggests that the traditional sector plays an initial absorption role equally Important for both natives and migrants, but the chances for transfer to the modern sector, were wages tend to be greater, seem to come earlier for natives (see table 8)

TABLE 8: Labor Absorption by the Traditional Sector pf the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area


While the proportion of persons in the two groups whose first job was in the modern sector is quite the same, the proportion of persons whose present job is still in the traditional sector is greater among migrants. Only those with longer residence in the city have the same levels of participation as the natives, It is true that the age factor affects the data, to the extent that recent migrants tend to be younger and to enter the labor force earlier than natives, Nevertheless, data for 1970 reveal the number of natives in the group 15-19 years to be almost twice as the number of migrants. In the 20-34 years old group the absolute numbers of both groups are not significantly different, Moreover, if natives do enter the labor force at older ages than migrants, this suggests that they participate longer in the educational system, thus increasing their chances for future gains in the job market.

Since evidence suggests that people with long residence in the city tend to conform to native patterns, let us consider now as "migrants" only those with ten or less years of residence in Belo Horizonte. Table 9 shows that average income among economic active migrants is only 70% the mean income of active non-migrants. The proportion of migrants receiving less than the minimum legal wage decreases with length of residence.

TABLE 9: Metropolitan Area of Belo Horizonte - Mean Income of the Economic Active Population According to Migratory Status and Length of Residence - Proportions Receiving less than the Minimum Legal Wage (1970)



Data for Sao Paulo, the greatest Brazilian metropolitan area (population: 8,140 thousands in 1970) show a situation similar to that of Great Belo Horizonte, with a migrant-non-migrant income ratio of.67(17). Here too the increase in years of residence is accompanied by increase in average income but migrants 6 to 10 years in São Paulo are still in a worse off than non-migrants.

TABLE 10: Metropolitan Area of Sao Paulo - Mean Income of the Economic Active Population According to Migratory Status and Length of Residence - Proportions Receiving less than the Minimum Legal Wage (1970)


There are also evidences suggesting that the proportion of less qualified migrants to São Paulo is increasing in recent years, as indicated by the greater numbers of migrants whose last job before moving to the city was rural. According to the same source, the number of direct moves to São Paulo has been decreasing at the same time that the number of migrants born in rural areas has been increasing (see table 11). Though we lack further information to interpret those results, they suggest we should be more cautious in interpreting migration by stages. The usual assumption about the role played by step-migration in preparing people to enter the big city may be not so universal. Stages may also be the story of a hopeless search for adaptation in different places.

TABLE 11: Social Characteristics of Migrants to São Paulo According to Length of Residence


Finally, let us consider the situation of migrants in Rio de Janeiro. Evidences provided for the metropolitan area and for the city alone tell us different stories. If we consider the metropolitan area, whose population in 1970 was 6,9 million, migrants are in a disadvantageous position. Their mean income is 0.75 the average income of non-migrants. While the proportion of the economic active population receiving less than the minimum legal wage is 0.33 for non-migrants, it is 0.48 among migrants. (See table 12). Manoel Costa's analysis of the Rio de Janeiro city (population as of 1970: 4.247 million) shows that migrants are not in a worse economic position than natives, in what respects mean income, economic activities and employment levels(18).

TABLE 12: Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro - Mean Income of the Economic Active Population According to Migratory Status and Length of Residence. Proportions Receiving less than the Minimum Legal Wage (1970)


Those different conclusions about the performance of migrants should not surprise us once we take consideration the fact that while population growth rates declined in Rio city during the last decade, the metropolitan area maintained its participation in the total urban population. The inclusion of suburban areas would naturally push migrants' mean income down and the same is probably true in what concerns activities and employment levels, due to heavier concentration of lower class people in those areas.

In any case, the comparative table below indicates that the migrant is relatively better off in Rio than in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, although time seems to make a difference in the last two places, but not in the first one. There are two possible explanations for that. One is that Rio, more than other areas, is a center which attracts segments of the rural elite, which could make a diference on the average figures. The other is that São Paulo and Belo Horizonte seem to have been, indeed, places where the migrant could move ahead somehow as time went by, while in Rio the situation tended to be frozen from the start.

TABLE 13: Brazil, three metropolitan areas - Wage differentials between non-migrants and migrants (1970).


Another aspect in the evaluation of migrants' performance refers comparison of their present economic situation with the one previous to migration. Here, the usual assertion that migrants are better off in the place of destiny than in the place of origin is generally true. Nevertheless migrants are not pure labor force. In his above mentioned Rio study, Manoel Costa arrived at the conclusion that, while migrants are not in a disadvantageous economic situation, they "are in a worse social position than natives, if the higher mortality of their children, their higher fertility, and their lower educational attainments may be held to reflect such differences. Finally, there are smaller proportions of in-migrants than natives in the educational and retirement systems"(19). Though a powerful instrument of analysis, the abstraction of the "homo economicus" leaves unquestioned crucial problems involved in migration, such as social integration, political participation, and the implication of those aspects for national politics. How do migrants do as citizens? How do they do as members of social groups? The very decision to migrate involves more than income expectations. As Polanyi pointed out, "Purely economic matters as such that affect want-satisfaction are incomparably less relevant to class behavior than questions of social recognition. Want satisfaction may be, of course, the result of such recognition, especially as its outward sign or prize. But the interests of a class most directly refer to standing and ranking, to status and security, that is, they are primarily not economic but social".(20)

Apparently, no social organization is immediately available for incoming people in the big cities. The family seems to be the only institution providing continuity in social life. It is responsible for material and emotional support, which is certainly a tremendous burden given that the institution itself is suffering profound pressures for change in the urban context. Other informal resources coming from friendship and neighborhood do emerge, but in what concerns institutional support one Is lead to the conclusion that the new urbanite is at least initially driven to a pure market situation. It is obvious that the incorporation of migrants to the market does not have the same sense it had in England, for example, by the time of the industrial revolution. Brazilian migrants were already in contact with the market before migrating. Nevertheless, this contact was permeated by traditional social relations presented in the countryside. In this traditional context, the action of mediators in the economic as well as the political market was crucial. Though in a subordinate position, people knew to whom make demands and ask for favors. Again remembering Polanyi, economic action was embedded in social life.

Now migrants are driven to the market without compensating institutions to counteract the negative effects of the market utopia. In what concerns labor regulation, for example, the number of workers receiving less than the legal minimum wage gives some indication of the extension of the problem. According to the 1970 census data, 20% of the men and 54% of the women in the urban economic active population had wages inferior to the legally established minimum. True enough, poverty is a larger problem. which affects natives as well as migrants, and whose rural face is probably even more dramatic than the urban reality. What makes the fate of new urbanites harder is the process of social dislocation involved in migration. A suggestive indication of a searching for social identity is the growing number of adherents to new religions in the big national centers of migrant's destination. Looking at the growth rates of those religions in the last 20 years one wonders how could an essentially Catholic country be so rapidly permeated by other religions. What these " new" religions do have in common and what differentiates them from. the Catholic tradition in Brazil is their community-like structure. According to the 1970 Census, 85% of Brazilian Spiritualists and 64% of evangelical Protestants lived in urban areas. Moreover, the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro/Guanabara were responsible for 49.3% of the adherents to those religions. If we exclude the Southern Region, were Protestantism has different roots due to the presence of German colonization, the share of the above states goes to more than two thirds of the total (67.1%).

E. Willems's suggestion of the integrative role played by evangelical Protestantism can be extended to spiritualism in its several variants as well. In the words of the author, "regardless of the economic situation in which a person may find himself, his personal community provides a social identity and a sense of security of which the migrant to the city or the new frontier fells deprived... The migrants react to the new situation by seeking mostly by trial and error, a group of people with whom he may identify and in whose midst he may find emotional affinity. Among the alternatives open to him, one of the most readily accessible is the Protestant sect."(21)

5. Conclusion: whither national identity?

Although very general, the overview we presented above of the process of urban concentration in Brazil provides us with the framework to ask about which kind of national identity is being built in this process. The distinction we suggested earlier between a political and an economic sector of Brazilian society can prove now its usefulness.

It is fairly clear that the chances for bringing the whole Brazilian population to the productive, technological and consumption patterns of its richer centers is out of the question in the foreseeable future. Leaving aside the global constrains on energy and basic resources consumption, which are bound to affect the whole globe in the next decades, a look at the growth of the Brazilian modern labor market shows its obvious limits.

Chances of integration into the modern society being created through the labor market seem not very likely for the dislocated people, at least under the present pattern of growth. If open unemployment rates have been kept low, the same does not seem to be true for underemployment (or disguised unemployment). The low wages of the "traditional" sector we commented earlier can be taken as indicative of an excessive labor supply. To the extent that it is possible to those "traditional" activities to evade labor legislation, wage levels tend to be more responsive to demand-supply equations.

It has been argued in the recent literature that urban masses cannot be considered "unintegrated",.to the extent that they play a positive role in the general accumulation process. So far as the existence of a labor reservoir is functional to the operation of the global economy, they argue, marginality (non-integration) is in fact a particular form of integration. It is our contention that such conceptual refinements may displace the real problem, namely the exclusion of large masses of the population from the benefits generated by Brazilian growth. That a growing inequality has characterized Brazilian development process seems to be irrefutable as the data below on income distribution shows.

TABLE 14: Brazilian Income Distribution: 1960-1970


Source: F. H. Cardoso, Autoritarismo e Democratização, Rio: Paz e Terra, 1975, p. 75.

Whatever the reasons given for that - temporary necessity, education differentials, etc - there is no doubt the masses of the population have been left aside and to that extent they are not participants on the benefits apported by modernization. Despite impressive economic growth, evidence suggests, for example, that infant mortality increased significantly during the sixties. In Rio, the second largest Brazilian city, living conditions worsened among large segments of the lower class due to squatter-settlements remotion. Forced to move to suburban areas, previous favelas dwellers have to expend a much greater portion of their already small budget in transportation to and from the workplace(22). Moreover, some basic services (sewage facilities, security, etc.) in the new living places are lacking. Finally, wage policy has been a powerful instrument preventing the urban masses to harvest the ripe fruits of development. Through what E. Bacha has called "perverse income policy", wage levels have been kept below the growing cost of living, as the data below illustrate.(23) From 1964 to 1971, the minimum wage was fixed at consistent lower rates than the increments in the cost of living. Only recently has this situation being altered. Thus, wage regulation, one of the few existent institutions to counteract the vicious effects of the market, has in fact exerted a "perverse" effect in what concerns the labor force. Other possible protective measures such as union contracts and party lobbying remain excluded.

TABLE 15: Brazil: Minimum Wages and Cost of Living in Rio de Janeiro, 1964/1974


How much is this income concentration a necessity of the Brazilian type of growth, and how far can it be reversed? This has been an open question for economists, and we could not provide an answer here. Some have argued that it is the only way to grow rapidly, and more equality will happen when the pie is big enough.(24). The symmetric view is that this is indeed a necessary feature of the Brazilian type of growth, but that the time for redistribution will never come. Albert Fishlow, in a different perspective, has argued that income concentration was not a necessary feature of the process of economic growth, since the bulk of the investment has been provided by the public sector. The relative reduction of the real income of the working class was a consequence of political, rather than economic mechanisms, and could therefore be reversed without affecting the pattern of economic growth.(25) Nevertheless, it seems difficult to deny that though made possible by political process, income concentration has played an important role in the maintenance of a particular demand structure. A redistributive policy would imply significant changes in the patterns of consumption, which in turn would require profound changes on the supply side. A related aspect refers to the interrelationships between wage policy and accumulation rates. Thus, it seems inappropriate to isolate the political and economic aspects of the Brazilian growth model. It does not matter if post-factum judgements conclude for the superfluous character of 'perverse income policy' and labor repression in the impressive economic growth of the recent past. It did play an economic role in attracting foreign investments and in shaping a supply structure oriented to higher income consumers. That growth would be possible through different mechanisms is another question, and here lies to our concern the importance of Fishlow's arguments. What they do suggest is the possibility of reconciling equity and growth, a possibility often forgotten by the fatalism of the present.

The notion that there is no direct causal relation between economic growth and income concentration seems to have been officially adopted in Brazil in 1976, when some measures for increasing the real wages of the working class are being proposed in a year of economic stagnation. How much of the official redistributive rhetoric will be effectivated remains to be seen. It is no coincidence that this concern with income distribution appears in a "political year", that is, a year when a twelve years old closed political system make an attempt to build a basis of popular support and institutionalized mechanisms of legitimation. It is also certainly more than accidental that redistribution became a policy issue after the 1974 election when electoral support to the opposition party gave the masses a chance of symbolic protest. In any case, if a successful effort to reconcile equity and economic growth takes place, then the chances for maximizing political integration will probably also increase.

However, the question of political integration and national identity is not a simple matter of better or worse income distribution. The problems suffered by the North American war on poverty are a good warning for the difficulties that might arise when resources are given to social groups that have no chance of being effectively incorporated in the labor market. Instead of more identity and integration, increased equality seems to accentuate the differences and sharpen conflicts and contradictions between those that enjoy a good standing for their performance in the productive system and those that have obtained what they do through governmental favors or political pressures.

Transferred to a country such as Brazil, where the problems of poverty are much bigger and the resources are much smaller, this experience suggest that at least three logical alternatives seem to exist.

Large segments of the population can be integrated through symbolic mechanisms, and kept largely aside the benefits of economic welfare. The mechanisms can be political, as in times of political mobilization; or they can be strictly symbolic, as the systems of social participation known from Rome's Coliseum to the modern Brazilian soap operas on TV exemplify. The problem with this type of social and political integration is that it is not real, that is, it coexists with striking social differences in consumption patterns and effective participation in the management of society. Mobilization systems have proved historically to be dangerous and tend to be avoided. Strictly symbolic systems of participation tend to demand high levels of repression, and can last for indeterminate periods of time. In any case, rather than solving the national integration problem, symbolic integration systems leave the question in a "limbo" situation.

Dual societies, "modern" sectors that cannot incorporate and provide "traditional" groups with benefits of its high technology, are not a Brazilian peculiarity. It happens, of course with different degrees of brutality, in South Africa, in German and Switzerland with their "gestarbaiter", and in England with her migration problems. Fortunately, a system of internal passports, such as in South Africa, seems to be ruled out of the Brazilian scene. Also, strict migration regulations at the borders, such as in Canada or Norway, will not be suitable to the context in case.This impossibility of establishing clear-cut discrimination lines, precluding an effective apartheid system, may constitute, on the long run, a good prospect to be explored for attaining real social and political integration. This leads us to the third alternative.

The fact that the "traditional" side of Brazil has not been "traditional" at all, as we have shown at the beginning, can give to the country a better political chance than that of those societies where the lines of cleavage between rich, modern, high technology consumers and poor, traditional and low technology consumers are perfectly correlated with control of political mechanisms and ethnic lines. It can allow for a system of participation of the country's "traditional" sector which is more than symbolic, and which could redefine the pattern of economic growth through high technology and integration to the international capitalist market. One cannot take for granted that this will happen, and it is impossible to foresee the political, economic and technic difficulties that conversion to a more equitable society in an international context characterized by crisis in energy and basic materials supply can mean, But it is, at least, a chance to be worked out.

Rio, March, 1976

Notes

1. For an overview of these theories and their failed expectations, see S. Schwartzman, "Back to Weber: Corporatism and Patrimonialism in the Seventies", in James M. Malloy, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).

2. For the issue of centralization and decentralization in Argentina, see Tulio Halperin Donghi, Revolución y Guerra - Formación de una Elite Dirigente en la Argentina, Siglo XXI Argentina Editores, 1972. For the predominance of Buenos Aires at the turn of the century, see Roberto Cortes Conde and Ezequiel Gallo, La Formación de la Argentina Moderna, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1967. See also Oscar Cornblit, "Imigrantes y Empresarios en la Política Argentina", Desarrollo Economico (Buenos Aires), 6, 1967.

3. For the role of the Brazilian educated elite in the creation in the formation of the nation-state, see José Murilo de Carvalho, Elite and State Building in Imperial Brazil, Ph. D. dissertation, Stanford, 1974.

4. See S. Schwartzman, São Paulo e o Estado Nacional (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1975), for a broader discussion and historical evidence on this matter.

5. See Alexandre de Souza Costa Barros, The Changing Role of the State in Brazil: The Technocratic Military Alliance (paper presented to the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Atlanta, March 1976) for an up to date discussion of the relations between the private and the public areas in Brazil.

6. It should be observed however that the Brazilian official criteria for defining urban population is very broad, encompassing agglomerations which in fact are no more than rural villages. The Census Bureau defines as "urban" all seats of "municípios" The município is the smallest administrative unit in the country.

7. Manoel A. Costa, Urbanization and Migration in Brazil, with Particular Reference to Trends Since 1940, London School of Economics and Political Science, June 1975, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.

8. Milton da Mata et. al., Migrações Internas no Brasil, Rio: IPEA/INPES, Coleção Relatórios de Pesquisa, n.19, 1973, p.73

9. Historians tend to look to the upward side of economic cycles, but seldom to what happens when the economic boom moves elsewhere. An exception in the Brazilian economic historiography is Antônio de Barros Castro, "A herança regional do Desenvolvimento Brasileiro", in Sete Ensaios sobre a Economia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Forense, 1971, vol.2).

10. What follows is based on the pilot study on Education and Productivity in the Brazilian rural area, carried on in cooperation with ECIEL (Estudios Conjuntos para la Integración Economica de Latinoamérica) and the Brazilian School of Public Administration (Fundação Getúlio Vargas). The reference is Marcia Bandeira de Mello Nunes and Simon Schwartzman, "Educação e Produtividade na Area Rural, Documento de Trabalho n. 3", ECIEL-EBAP, March, 1976 (mimeo).

11. The influence of Karl Polanyi is this discussion is a matter of course. See K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) and George Dalton, ed., Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston, Beacon Press, 1968).

12. For a full discussion of this interchange between political influence and economic power, cf. S. Schwartzman, "Empresarios y Politica en el Proceso de Industrialización: Argentina, Brasil, Australia", Desarrollo Económico 13, 1973, or the chapter four of São Paulo e o Estado Nacional.

13. See, for example, Theodore T. Schultz, "Investment in Human Capital", American Economic Review 51, 1, 1961, pp.1-17

14. Milton da Mata, et al, Migrações Internas no Brasil, and Manoel Costa, Urbanization and Migration in Brazil

15. The metropolitan area includes 13 municípios. To the city of Belo Horizonte corresponds 77% of the total population.

16. Fausto A. de Brito and Thomas Merrick, "Migração, Absorção de Mão de Obra e Distribuição de Renda", Paper presented to the first Annual meeting of the Associação Nacional de Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia, São Paulo: November: 1973. There is no clear concept of what is "modern" or "traditional" in this study. The "traditional" sector includes activities such as construction workers primary activities, commerce, and industrial production and processing of cloth, leather, tobacco, food and beverage. The "modern" sector comprehends basic services (education, health, defense, communications), modern services (entertainment, restaurants) and manufactures such as steel production, chemistry, mechanics, transport industry, and so on. In general, the "traditional" sector seems to include activities which are more labor intensive and are not protected by labor laws and wage contracts (that is, activities which are more exposed to pure market conditions). See A. C. Harberger, "On measuring the Social Opportunity Cost of Labor", International Labor Review, 103, 1971, pp. 559-579.

17. Migrants constitute 69% of the economic active population of São Paulo metropolitan area.

18. Manoel Costa, op cit, pp. 252 and ff.

19. Manoel Costa p. 262.

20. Karl Polanyí, The Great Transformation, 1957, p. 153

21. Emílio Willems, Followers of the New Faith, Vanderbilt University Press, 1967, p.84

22. On the transplant of favelas in Rio, see Lícia Valadares, "Favela, Política e Conjunto Residencial", Dados, 12 (Rio de Janeiro), 1976.

23. E. L. Bacha, "Recent Brazilian Economic Growth and Some of its Main Problems", 1975, mimeo.

24. For the debate on income distribution in Brazil, see the issue of Dados 11, 1973. The official point of view which prevailed while Delfin Netto was Brazil's Secretary of Economy is expressed by Carlos Geraldo Langoni, Distríbuição de Renda e Desenvolvimento Económico do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Expressão e Cultura, 1973), and reinstated in "Distribuição de Renda - Resumo da Evidência", Dados 11, pp. 81-121.

25. Albert Fishlow, "Dístribuição da Renda no Brasil - um novo exame", Dados 11, pp. 10-80. <