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By Root 1707 0

governments and scholars for decades. Even as the major cities of Latin America, Africa, and Asia became clotted with slums and other spontaneous arrival-city developments in the decades after the Second World War, the world was viewed as being divided sharply into the rural and the urban. Yes, there were rural laborers in the city, but they were seen as a temporary, transitory population. It was widely assumed by scholars and officials that villagers, even if they did spells of work in the city, would remain peasants forever. So there were rural policies and urban policies, and no attention was paid to the interface between them.5

In the 1970s, the British geographer Ronald Skeldon, studying the lives of villagers in Cuzco, Peru, and their trips to and from Lima, recognized a pattern. Back-and-forth migration was indeed occurring, often for many generations. But, eventually, there was something of a tipping point, a moment when the entire family, and sometimes the entire village, shifted its allegiances and investments to the city and ceased to rely on agriculture. This he called the “migration transition.” Sometimes it took generations to occur, sometimes only years. The difference seemed to depend, above all else, on communication and education: people who had been to school, and had information coming from the city, tended to stop moving back and forth and make the transition sooner and more thoroughly.

And, at the core of this transition, Skeldon realized, was a certain kind of urban space: “The earliest migrants from any particular community tend to settle first in the center of Lima,” he wrote. “Some years later, after they have become established in the city, they move out to the peripheral barriadas, or pueblos jóvenes (young towns). Once the links have been established between the peripheral settlement and the community of origin, migration tends to be direct to that settlement.”6 Those words form a precise definition of an arrival city.

At almost the same time, the American sociologist Charles Tilly was examining the history of rural-to-urban migration in Europe and North America and realizing that human migrations were of more than one type. Previously, it had been believed that the decision to migrate had been a matter of either “push factors,” which thrust people out of the village through hardship and starvation, or “pull factors,” which drew people to urban lives with tempting income opportunities. Tilly noted that, while these factors often apply, the decision to move rarely had anything to do with them. He recognized three major types of migration between village and city. There were circular migrations, like the Limousin stonemasons who migrated from their farms to the crowded arrival cities of central Paris every year for centuries to spend the winter season building the city, each year leaving a few men behind to settle permanently. There were career migrants, those who moved more or less permanently to the city to work for skilled trades, governments, armies. They didn’t tend to be villagers and were proportionately few in number. And, his most significant discovery, there was the preponderance of chain migration, an activity that “moves sets of related individuals or households from one place to another via a set of social arrangements in which people at the destination provide aid, information and encouragement to new migrants.”

Here he found the central mechanism behind the world’s great population shift. The move was not a matter of pulling and pushing forces, or of passive victimization at the hands of economic structures (as another group of scholars had intimated); rather, it was the creation of a new culture between village and city. This is exactly the process by which seasonal migrants like Sanjay are pulled into the city and turned into urbanites. By turning from circular migrants into fixed agents who aid the future migration of others, they establish a more secure, village-owned urban base, and a set of informal institutions, which allows a larger, constant flow of villagers and makes