2.3 Marginalization and Dependence
A simple observational tour through the city of San Salvador, as brief as it may be, would suffice to demonstrate the most striking aspects of the country’s current social order. Undoubtedly, the most astounding fact is the chasm which seems to separate two sides of the population, one elevated to the heights of luxury and abundance, and the other plunged into the depths of poverty and near-total helplessness.The city's layout and housing conditions speak more than any statistical analysis ever could. On the one side, there are spaciously designed communities, containing clean and well-lit streets lined with trees and flowers; the houses are large and stylish, most of them surrounded by beautiful gardens, driveways for cars, and high walls which protect the privacy of the home (before, such walls were made out of vegetable plants, but now, they are reinforced by bricks and security systems). On the other side are the shacks of the poor, often atop the hillsides of ravines and covered with branches, strung along the metropolitan area or piled up on top of crumbling estates, left for the most part underdeveloped and without lighting or plumbing; there are also miserable, cramped, and dirty “sheds” of cardboard and tin, foul-smelling burrows subject to the extremes of hot and cold, water and wind. A third kind of dwelling there is the collective household or lodging house, which is perhaps less inhumane but occasionally not by much, consisting of old houses in which each family occupies a room and shares communal amenities with the others, as if they lived in human-sized honeycombs.
In the metropolitan area of San Salvador, the ratio of destitute households to wealthy or luxurious homes is approximately 5 to 1, and if the lodging houses are included, the proportion would probably surpass 10 to 1 (See Murillo, 1974; Harth et. al., 1976). In other words, for each family living in San Salvador and graced with commodities, there are 10 families cramming themselves into shelters unfit for human beings. Of course, between these two extremes, there is a relatively large constellation of families in the metropolitan zone with appropriate housing who tend toward one end of the two poles or the other; however, their existence does not diminish, let alone erase, the striking juxtaposition between the luxurious few and the impoverished many.
Looking over the data, one finds that in 1978, there was a shortage of rural housing in El Salvador estimated at 230,880 units, or 48% of all needed housing, and in 1980, the urban deficit was projected at 221,709 units, or 53.9% (See Salegio, 1978). If one takes into account the terrifying destruction wrought by the war in the wide-ranging rural areas of the country, or the devastation produced in the San Salvador area by the 10 October 1986 earthquake, there is little risk in saying that the country's housing situation is substantially worsening rather than improving. Altogether, one can claim that more than half of the Salvadoran population (no less than 60%) lacks housing, and this estimate is based on a relatively conservative criterion for what could qualify as shelter, in other words, paying attention only to those "dwellings" lacking even the most minimal standards of habitability and which could not be restored. Thus, in terms of shelter, there are two worlds in El Salvador: those who have, who are few in number and have luxurious mansions at their disposal, and those who have not, in particular, the masses who can barely huddle together under shadows of tin and cardboard.
This same inequality found in housing appears in every other aspect of the Salvadoran social reality. All socio-economic indicators demonstrate the same, extreme dichotomy between the few, who enjoy all the benefits of contemporary civilization imaginable, and the vast majority, who lack the most basic necessities of life. Thus, for example, the social division of labor shows a drastic divide between, on the one side, those few who own the means of production, take on managerial positions and capital benefits (See Instituto de Investigaciones, 1984), or who develop close ties with the productive system, and, on the other side, those who move into the margins of that system, who sell the strength of their arms to the highest bidder and receive wages barely amounting to one or two colones per capita (one colón is equal to 20 cents of a dollar as of 1988), and even less than that per day. Moreover, the rates of underemployment or even unemployment periodically rise above the 50% mark of the “economically active population” (which is an ironic descriptor for those it labels), and it is clear that this percentage comes from, above all, the majority, the marginalized urban and peasant populations. Similar data appear in the areas of academics, health, and every other socio-economic indicator (See Text Seven). The division of Salvadoran society thus spreads through all spheres of life and aspects of existence, from the physical (including race, as skin color) to the cultural and spiritual.
From the systems perspective, this division has been interpreted as a phenomenon of marginalization against the established social order. In other words, the population which lives in the ravines or “slums” of the great Latin-American cities, rampant with unemployment or underemployment, amassing armies of thieves and prostitutes, and promising an abundant and cheap labor for any enterprise, seems to constitute a human group which is not integrated or incorporated into the ruling social system. One could thus speak of a “marginal” or “marginalized” population, implying the existence of another area of social reality, the center (here, a social system), from which it is excluded, remaining “at the margin” or periphery. In El Salvador, as in all the Central- and South-American countries, it might be said that there is a substantial percentage of the population at the margins of their respective social systems, a population not integrated into the processes and benefits of the prevailing social system.
According to this view, the marginal population constitutes a separate world, since it does not receive benefits from the prevailing social system (i.e., it does not participate passively) or shoulder obligations and duties imposed by this same system (i.e., it does not participate actively). In simpler terms, the marginalized are considered a peripheral system at the margin of the established system at the center. Hence the recommendation of some to distinguish the concept of marginalization from the concept of poverty, since they do not mean the same thing despite often being related (both imply a lack of passive participation, that is, a failure to receive benefits from the system). Poverty would be a situation involving a lack or scarcity of resources necessary for survival, but within a system; marginalization instead describes the lack of a role or articulated economic position in the prevailing social system in a given society. In principle, not all who are poor are marginalized, even though
all who are marginalized are in fact poor (See Text Eight).
According to Gino Germani (1973), the concept of marginalization carries five connotations with which one tries to express the chief traits of a sector of the population: (1) ecological segregation in the city, or lack of basic urban services; (2) poor working conditions coupled with a low standard of living; (3) lack of formal and informal participation in the system, and thus an objective incapacity to make decisions on some community or institutional level; (4) cultural differences between the sector and the rest of the population, and even a lack of national identity; finally, (5) separation from the central areas of the society to which the sector is related asymmetrically as a peripheral area.
Marginality, especially when distinguished from poverty, is a phenomenon whose essential traits must be specified, since marginalization does not entail a lack in general, but only a particular kind thereof. For this reason, Germani (1973, p. 21) asserts that “the common assumption in any definition of marginality is not simply a lack of participation or performance of roles in an indeterminate form or in all given spheres of human activity, but a lack of participation in particular spheres which one thinks should be included within an individual or group's the scope of action and/or access. In other words, the meaning of marginality is grasped by comparing how a situation is and how it ought to be.”
Germani also lists five elements often taken as essential for defining marginality: (1) structural characteristics of a given socio-economic order through which the order becomes incapable of absorbing the entire population; (2) a political order through which certain groups assume an ascent to power, impeding any significant participation from other social sectors; (3) the dominance of a particular cultural group through which other groups which do not accept its ways of life, values, and norms are excluded; (4) certain psycho-social characteristics of personality which prevent life in a “modern” society; and (5) a demographic explosion which prevents social systems from absorbing large population growth.
That the social order in El Salvador “marginalizes” a substantial number of people is an irrefutable fact. Nevertheless, it is important to try to establish what the chief determining characteristics of this system are, like those shown by Germani and others, in order to better understand the life and plights of “the integrated” and “the marginalized” later on. Consequently, this involves discussing the descriptive data more deeply and investigating the essence of such a social system. There are two chief models which claim to explain the dynamics of a marginalizing social system: the model of psycho-social disintegration and the historical-structural model of dependence.
2.3.1 The Model of Psycho-Social Disintegration
The Center for the Economic and Social Development of Latin America, DESAL, is a Catholic Chilean institution which attained great influence during the 1970s. It has developed a model which interprets marginality as the consequence of a profound rift in social life which grows as the social system modernizes.
For DESAL, marginality is “a split which indicates existing discontinuity between the many social strata integrated into the hegemonic class's professional, social, commercial, political, and cultural structures and the groups deprived of a concrete and organic share in goods, resources, decision-making procedures, and exercise of social power” (Silva, 1972, p. 15). The essential point is discontinuity, division between the population’s strata, above all, in terms of “organic” participation within the social system. Thus, the starting point is a stratified social organism, an organic social system which ends up leaving behind the lower strata in the same way a snake loses the last rings of its tail.
However, to what do we owe this collapse of a population sector? What is the cause of the system casting away, separating, or in any case, not integrating a part of the population which, in principle, is part of the society? According to DESAL, the cause must be sought in the Latin-American countries’ particular history, and more specifically, in the inability of the new culture brought by the conquistadors to harmoniously integrate the culture of conquered peoples. “The fundamental root of marginality, like an overlap as opposed to a cultural fusion, is located within the structures and values of two worlds which collided in the Conquista and congealed in the Colony” (Silva, 1972, p. 15). The collision of these two cultures brought a group of the population toward increasing disintegration, preventing it from taking an active (or even passive) role in the social system, a division which crystallized in the colonial period and now persists in the form of an overlap between the integrated population and the marginal population (See Vekemans and Silva, 1969).
Latin-American marginalization is thus a phenomenon of cultural and normative disintegration. The crucial fact is precisely the lack of identity which characterizes each country’s own marginalized groups, an identity not only tied to the established society, but also to the groups themselves. In other words, DESAL’s analysis of marginalization finds the root cause of marginality in the process of conquest which established an initial cultural overlap. In this view, the problem is rooted in the marginal population itself, not in the social system, since it is the marginalized who become incapable of actively integrating themselves into the society; their cultural deficiencies, lack of values and norms adequate for contemporary life, and attitudes are what impede them from harmoniously integrating themselves into a modern social system.
According to DESAL’s assessment, the solution to the problem of marginalization must be psycho-social: marginalized groups must be educated and made fit for integration into the existing social system in order to begin sharing in its benefits (passive participation), and also to be included in its decisions and demands (active participation). Of course, this requires special attention from those in power, whose duty it would be to help change the cultural patterns and attitudinal deficiencies of the marginalized. The solution would be cultural evolution, the development of some values which all could share and take as a guide for existence. “The model’s goal should be a cultural shift at the center of a structural transformation, overcoming the dichotomy through an integration of the entire society by its own values rather than acculturated ones” (Silva, 1972, p. 98).
As Ignacio Sotelo (1975, p. 129) emphasizes, DESAL’s approach conceptually revives the old, 19th-century idea that “the problem of Latin America consists of casting off the residue of colonization, completely integrating what remains into the modern, meaning Anglo-Saxon and capitalist, world.” However, what would this integration entail? In DESAL’s framework, integration would mean the marginalized sectors' passive and active participation in the social system, achieved by a change in their values and attitudes. However, both the concept of passive participation and that of active participation, central to this view of marginalization, are quite problematic. At what point or under what conditions does the lack of granted social benefits in a system go from being labeled poverty to being called marginalization? Moreover, what does "active participation" even mean? After all, “in every case, it can be asked at what point socially incorporated individuals actually participate in the decision-making process which determines the face of their country, even in the most modest cases which affect the business in which one works or the city in which one lives” (Sotelo, 1975, p. 130).
DESAL’s framework fundamentally assumes that a society is based on a uniform culture, and that it is the failure to assimilate the values and norms of this culture which brings people to remain at the margin of the established system. Consequently, it presupposes that the integrated, not the marginalized, share the same values and attitudes. It is thus a matter of the marginalized changing their mentality (See Durán, 1978) in order to incorporate themselves into the system and receive its benefits. However, this systemic and psychologizing assumption has already rejected any tie to basic facts.
2.3.2 The Model of Dependence
While, for DESAL, the gaps in living conditions and social benefits between “the integrated” and “the marginalized” of the system constitute a rift, other analysts believe that there is no actual social split. On the contrary, there is a profound, structural link between both sectors of the society, even though it is a bond of conflict. The separation between some and others is not due to the fact that the marginalized lack the psycho-social characteristics necessary for participation, whether passive or active, in the system, but rather that it is an effect of the social order itself. In other words, it is the system itself which, as part of its structuration, marginalizes a sector of the population. The marginalized form part of the social system, but in a peculiar way: marginally. Thus, the apparent paradox arises: these sectors are integrated as marginalized members.
The central idea is that “marginalization” exists because the social system is organized in a way which excludes a substantial part of the population from operating within the system and from receiving its benefits. It could not be the Conquista alone which established the duality between the integrated and the marginalized, since an identical marginality is likewise produced under a capitalist process of development. Foremost, this latter kind of marginality entails a problem of political economy—not culture. In this case, there does not exist a marginal population (for example, indigenous people) before the constitution of the social system; the system produces the marginalization of a social sector so long as it goes on to be organized in accordance with the demands of capitalist principles of production. Industrial capitalism sets off a modernization of the productive system, transferring most of the rural population to the city without generating sufficient jobs at the same time. The remaining mass of people is not only left unabsorbed by the system, but becomes more and more unabsorbable, since industrial technification exacerbates the disproportion between the workforce and available jobs.
In the case of Latin-American countries, the situation is even worse, since the process of modernization begins in a situation of structural dependence: the needs and demands of the hegemonic countries are what dictate the fundamental parameters of Latin-American development—not the needs of the population itself. Thus, such social systems are structured in a situation of double dependence: these countries’ international dependence on the hegemonic countries, and the intra-national dependence of the rest of the population on the group connected to those foreign centers, representing their interests from within. Certain factions from the majority will gain entry into the system’s operation, such as those labeled the middle sectors, professionals and administrators at the service of the national or transnational bourgeoisie, or the industrial labor sector, often relatively privileged despite its proletarianization. But there would still remain a growing mass of the population for which there would be neither employment in a system structured in this way, nor prospects for obtaining it. In summary, one can agree with Sotelo (1975, p. 137) that “marginality is born in the countryside as the offspring of the old traditional structure and the interests of exporters…‘Marginal’ does not mean disconnected from the dominant economic system. It implies a connection at the margin controlled by the dominant sector of the economy.” As the basic structures of Latin-American social systems become consolidated and thus dependent on the structures of hegemonic countries (fundamentally, the United States and Europe), the phenomenon of marginality cannot be overcome, and it will tend to get even worse with the development of productive technology.
There are those who argue that the marginalized population is functional to the ruling social system, that is to say, that it satisfies a need of the existing order. Its function is to provide what has been called the “reserve army of labor,” an abundant, disposable, and cheap workforce ready to assume labor functions within the system at a given moment. Simply its presence assures the continuity of the process of exploitation, providing a cheap source to replace labor, allowing capital to maintain salaries at the mere level of subsistence, in other words, at the lowest levels possible.
It is true that, in a country like El Salvador, the disposability of the great masses eager for employment has fostered spectacular, short-term profits at relatively modest investment, as well as the survival of shameful conditions of exploitation. In times of conflict, this large labor reserve has served as a buffer against the demands of organized labor sectors, facilitating the cheap replacement of union members and workers on strike. Yet, describing this sector of the population as a “reserve” assumes, at the very least, the possibility of its future employment: even so, it is clear that a substantial percentage of the marginalized Salvadoran population, if not its entirety, is not a reserve in this sense, since the established system neither requires it nor will require it, except, perhaps, in the present conditions of civil war, during which its members are insufficiently trained on how to fire a rifle, only to serve as “cannon fodder” on the battlefront.
Thus, marginality as a phenomenon within Latin-American social systems refers to their structural dependence on other societies or centers of power. This dependence does not refer to the existing, necessary relation in the contemporary world between different countries, but to the structural subjugation of some countries to the conditions and demands of foreign centers, a relation which rules out the possibility of a social order oriented toward the welfare and demands of the subjected populations themselves. As Sotelo indicates (1975, p. 139), “if it has a specific meaning which is not conflated with poverty and unemployment, the concept of marginality is a dependence on hegemonic centers outside of the system which results in a shrunken frame of opportunity.”
Only from this macrosocial perspective do the processes of each social order’s formation acquire historical meaning. The norms which emerge in daily interaction fundamentally depend on the demands and possibilities which a wider social context, the structures which shape the already established order, allows. The institutionalization of a given activity is subjected to mechanisms of power which operating in every context. A norm does not emerge from every new habitualized interaction's hypothetical ground zero. Rather, the shape of the interaction itself, including the habitualization and consequent interpersonal typification, are all products of the factors which mold both the situation and the actors themselves. Thus, for example, the role assigned to the doctor in the clinical examination has emerged from a context in which the practice of medicine has been progressively assumed by particular organizations (medical schools officially recognized by the established power, lucrative clinics which in fact form part of a monopoly), and the tasks assigned to the woman in the family, such as nurturing an abundant workforce and rearing citizens useful for the system, have arisen in a situation in which the family has had to respond to the demands of the system of production. It would not suffice, then, to investigate the norms which seem to regulate activity in order to understand the ideological character of these actions (the medical examination, the job of the wife or mother); one must look for the forces which shaped the form and content of these norms and the interests which their social impact serves. This same line of questioning also demands a sensitivity toward the process of any norm’s development through daily group and personal interaction.
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