Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [39]
‡ Of the 500,000 people who migrate to Dhaka every year, a sizable proportion are seasonal agricultural workers or work-seeking refugees from floods and other climate or food disasters; they pack into temporary shelters and pavement spaces. Almost all are temporary. Those who attain tenure on slum dwellings are more organized and less desperate, as they have been able to save to make the move.
§ Workers in Shenzhen are granted the lesser residence card, which does not carry housing or education benefits. In 2009, Shenzhen introduced a system allowing residence-card holders to apply for a hukou after five years in the city, but there is little sign that low-wage workers have been able to take advantage of this.
‖ This somewhat excessive “eco-wall,” so called because it was also built to protect forests outside, became the subject of protests and media stories in 2009, after an activist group repeated a rumor that it was built to prevent people from migrating to Rio and setting up favelas. This never made much sense: The area beyond the wall has never been desirable for housing, and mass rural migration in Brazil is largely finished.
3
ARRIVING AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID
THE GREAT AMERICAN ARRIVAL CITY
Los Angeles, California
The Salvadoran village of El Palón is little more than a narrow strip of farm shacks scattered along a dirt road, surrounded by small plots of dry grazing land and patches of forest. Much of it still does not have electricity or running water; its few score residents live off the vegetables and livestock they’re able to farm, plus a diet of tortillas, rice, and beans. Children start working at age six, joining the family for long treks to take part in the seasonal coffee harvest, and life is a search for sparse sources of non-farm income and a calculated avoidance of the region’s periodic bursts of violence. “We spent our time there in survival mode,” says Mario Martinez, who grew up there in the conflict-ridden 1980s.
The area around the intersection of South Redondo and West Adams boulevards in Los Angeles could not be mistaken for a village, although it is tightly and intricately linked to El Palón. It is a grid of narrow bungalows with miniature front lawns, interrupted by blocks of industrial and commercial buildings on the main boulevards, all in the shadow of the elevated Santa Monica Freeway. Known to the city government as West Adams and to many Angelenos as a northern corner of South Central,* it is a gray, baking-hot, car-packed neighborhood, unleavened by any sort of park or green space, one of the most densely populated districts in the city. It is also one of the poorest.1 Historically, it was an African American ghetto that had a reputation as a crime-ridden no-go zone among white Angelenos. It had no economy, its boulevard’s only signs advertising heavily guarded liquor stores and check-cashing shops. In 1992, it exploded in violence, the Rodney King riots leading dozens of its buildings to be set aflame and scores more to be looted. Men stood on its tiny front lawns and outside its barren shopfronts with shotguns, desperately defending their rented spaces and swearing to move away as soon as they could.
Yet this corner, almost two decades after the riots, has become something else altogether. Its tiny bungalows nowadays tend to be freshly painted and well maintained, with neat gardens and flowerbeds surrounded by new wrought-iron fences in the front and thriving vegetable patches in the back. Its boulevards are now more active and colorful, with many more shops, small industries, and lively markets and eateries, decorated with exuberant, colorful signs and displays. This will never be a beautiful neighborhood and is not a completely safe one, but it has become a much neater, happier, more optimistic one. It is now populated mainly with villagers: Six out of 10 people living here today were born in a Latin American village, often the same one as their neighbors.2