Violence, the consolidation of the city and low-income settlements in Guatemala City

The paper takes a three generational view of the disorganizing and reorganizing role of globalization and violence for the population of Guatemala City.  The starting points are the low-income neighborhoods created by their settlers in the late 1950s and 1960s and the ending points are these neighborhoods today.  The 1990s witnessed a rapid, but dependent, incorporation of Guatemala into the legal and illegal global economy through the development of the modern service sector and the criminalization of the informal economy.   In this period, the city consolidates in terms of the provision of services and upgrading of existing informal settlements, but its spatial segregation becomes more complex as its boundaries expand to include what were previously rural municipalities. The market liberalizations accompanying globalization stimulate investment in business and residential enclaves throughout the city.  The poor disperse from the center to the periphery of the metropolitan area to poor areas of the city. The paper uses life histories of three generations of families of original settlers to document their own occupational and residential trajectories, their perspectives on the changes that have happened in the city and their strategies of survival, including in face of the increasing levels of drug-related violence.  Two different types of trajectory will be identified. One in which as the original family expands generationally, so too they seek to remain close together residentially. The other is a process of dispersion as younger generations leave the parental neighborhood to move elsewhere in the city or internationally.