Moving to cities is framed as the price of becoming communicable citizens

Evidence

And such sensibilities more often than not are to be acquired by shedding the skein of darkness facilitated by socio-geographical movement. Cultural mobility – the movement away from cultural commitments identified as Indian or black – is considered most directly enabled by geographic mobility from areas marked as Indian or black and therefore seen to be lacking urbanity, sophistication, and prospect to areas identified not just demographically but culturally and expressively as white. De la Cadena opens her insightladen book, Indigenous Mestizos, by quoting noted Peruvian writer Maria Vargas Llosa observing that Indian peasants can only acquire the ability “to communicate” by “moving to the cities,” “integrating,” “becoming mestizos,” and thus explicitly shedding their Indianness. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1183

Categorization

• SEED: An angle on how modern urban-rural migration policy echoes colonial whitening logic - cities as ‘civilizing’ destinations, the country as racialized backwardness.