Urbanization as an Agent in Latin American Political Instability: The Case of Mexico

A large descriptive and conjectural literature has evolved during the past decade suggesting that rapid urbanization—conceived primarily as a massive demographic shift from country to city—constitutes an important agent of political instability in much of Latin America, favoring the growth of alienation and radicalism. This effect is frequently attributed to the frustration of migrant expectations for economic improvement and social mobility in the large cities, or to the processes of personal and social disorganization allegedly inherent in the migration experience. Although field researchers have long suspected the inadequacy of such theory, derived largely from the urbanization experiences of advanced Western nations, for explaining political instability in Latin America, there have been few systematic attempts at testing the various propositions and unconfirmed generalizations advanced by the “urban instability-crisis-and-chaos” theorists. This paper attempts to explore, if not to test, some of the empirical implications of the general theoretical conceptions of the urbanizing process and its socio-political consequences as developed in recent social science literature on Latin America. Mexico is selected for analysis both by virtue of its extremely rapid rate of rural-urban migration in recent years and because of the opportunities afforded by the availability for Mexico of detailed survey data from a number of independent sources to examine systematically a wide range of theoretically relevant variables and relationships posited in the urbanization literature. While in certain areas (as indicated below) the particular nature of the Mexican political system and developmental pattern may render these findings imperfect as predictors for other parts of Latin America, the analysis presented here should serve to identify the major inadequacies of existing theory and illustrate the need for new conceptual models which can encompass both stabilizing and destabilizing concomitants of rapid urban concentration in a developing nation.