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By Root 1579 0

the arrival cities of Caracas was leaving no lasting effect. “The poor of Venezuela are living much better lately and have increased their purchasing power … [but] without being able to improve their housing, education level, and social mobility,” he told an interviewer. “Rather than help them become stakeholders in the economic system, what [the Chávez regime] has done is distribute as much oil wealth as possible in missions and social programs.”25 In the view of disgruntled regime supporters, Chávez had done exactly what previous governments had: poured oil money into the economy, thus causing inflation and destroying the possibility of slum-based entrepreneurship, and given vote-winning handouts to the people on the margins, ignoring their real needs. “Despite its revolutionary rhetoric and its curtailment of democratic institutions,” the economist Norman Gall concluded in an impressive study, “the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ seems merely to be continuing the history of colossal waste of oil revenues, disorganization and failed investments that have impoverished the Venezuelan people in recent decades.”26 By the end of its first decade, the first great South American revolution of the arrival cities had fizzled, failing to deliver the rural migrants anything it had promised. Chávez, his popularity fluctuating wildly, turned his attention toward dramatic seizures and nationalizations of foreign companies, all but forgetting the promises of housing, development, and more prosperous slums. In Petare, time froze.

This was, like its Iranian cousin, an explosion from the urban center that simply used the arrival city as fuel. There is another way arrival cities can explode: by developing their own potent political movements and sending them inward to seize the political center of the larger city, and possibly the nation. The arrival-city takeover of the city and the nation is a new phenomenon but is likely to become the defining political event of this century, as neglected ex-migrant communities, which, in many countries, will soon represent a majority of the population, demand their own representation.

Mulund, Mumbai

Sanjay Solkar, whose annual journey to his southern Maharashtra village we followed in chapter 2, returns to spend his nights in a tiny concrete room, perhaps two by three meters, in the back of a narrow tea shop on a crowded street outside the Mulund train station in northeast Mumbai, in a busy and thriving district where slums and lower-middle-class apartments are jammed together. At night, this slight, quietly determined 20-year-old shares its bare floor with four other young men. Sanjay’s possessions—a blanket, three changes of clothing, and some papers—are piled in a corner of the room. His earnings, amounting to barely a dollar a day, are all sent back to his village; he gets his meals and spends most of his spare time in the shop. He sees his immediate family once or twice a year, at rice-harvest time and during major festivals. It would seem to be a fragile, precarious, lonely existence.

Next door to the tea shop, however, is another narrow building that offers Sanjay a surrogate family, a welfare system, and a source of physical security. It is an odd-looking place, fronted with a wood panel painted to resemble a comic-book entrance to a stone temple, adorned with flags and banners bearing a tiger logo. It functions as a social club, a meeting point, and a de facto employment center and welfare office. It is the place that guarantees Sanjay’s job security; where he can get small loans for transportation to Mumbai and back and gain his place in the social network of the slums; where he can someday seek a better job or find someone to pay the bribes to obtain a license for a vending cart or a skills-training course; where he can go to seek better-quality slum housing when he and his family become permanent urbanites; where they will be able to seek sewage hookups and fight to keep their slum from being demolished for middle-class developments; and where they stand the best chance of someday gaining