Nomad Century by Gaia Vince

Author:Gaia Vince
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

8

Migrant Homes

Every year, the Peruvian capital Lima grows larger as one-room shacks expand over the surrounding desert. Instead of facilitating the rural poor to move to planned settlements with infrastructure and social assistance, the government largely ignores the ‘problem’ of migrants. In Lima’s slums, as in shanty towns across the world, people pay to live on what becomes tightly controlled, gang-run land. Internal people-traffickers locate land on the outskirts of the city, ascertain that the owner is overseas, and then collect people to invade it – for a fee.

Back in 2012, I spoke to one of the slum’s residents, Abel Cruz, a farmer from Echarate near Cusco, who had kept pigs and grown cocoa and vegetables. He told me that continued terrible drought had made life on the farm increasingly desperate.

‘One day, a man came into the village and asked if we wanted a better life in Lima with good jobs and school for our two boys,’ Cruz said. ‘We didn’t want to leave our families and our home, but the drought got worse.’ Like millions of people across the tropics, Cruz decided the hardship and uncertainty of migration would be better than a future of hopeless poverty and hunger in his village.

‘We were told to meet the man at 5 a.m. with the money and some sheets of bamboo ply. When we met him, there were lots of other families just like us there. We were taken to a sand dune and told to fence off an area and start constructing our houses from the material we brought with us.’ Their home, like their neighbours’, had a bare earth floor and few possessions. Rolled-up bed mats stood against one ply wall; a nest of bowls and a couple of pans were neatly stored in the corner.

‘Our toilet is a hole we dig in the floor of the room and cover with plywood. Every couple of years it gets full, so we make another hole. It’ll take twenty years for the whole of the floor-space to be full of shit, so I don’t know what we’ll do then. The place stinks and people get sick. We have no water and spend half our wages on water delivery from a truck.’

Initially, urban migrants in the global south usually move between the city and their village, returning to help with harvesting and at other labour-intensive periods, or when work dries up in the city. Seasonal migrants often sleep in makeshift dorms or camp on the floor of their workplace, saving every penny they earn for food or to send back home. Keeping one foot in each place enables them to build up networks of security and useful skills in the city while not losing out on any potential land ownership in their village. Eventually, the move to the city will become permanent, and then migrants build a life that may involve further migration to another city or country, learning new skills and exploiting new opportunities. The remittances, however, continue to flow back

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