Peasants’ Sons in City Schools: A Inquiry into the Politics of Urbanization in Panama and Costa Rica

Abstract

It is frequently assumed that the extremely rapid urbanization of Latin America will generate political extremism and instability, based on the bitter protests of the new urban mass, which aspires high but must live on the margin of survival. The flow of subsistence farmers and agrarian laborers to the cities has been intellectually accommodated by social scientists only in a very crude way. Although the folk-urban continuum has been challenged by a series of empirical studies, the newly urbanized are still uncritically expected by many observers to exhibit signs of social disorganization threatening a progressive susceptibility to demagogic political leaders.