Neoliberal shocks drove urban refugees into mobile rural-urban livelihoods rather than resettlement

Evidence

After the war ended in 1992, two kinds of projects were launched to address the problems in Huancayo. First, international humanitarian organizations set up well-funded aid programs in the city, offering neighborhood soup kitchens, medical services, and other basic relief, and then job-creation schemes based on street-vending, artisanal labor, and other household-based income generation. Second, the government, anxious to draw the refugees back into the countryside, offered an alternative assistance program to support the regeneration of agriculture. … The refugees took advantage of these rural incentives, but typically without moving back to the countryside. As the economic shock caused by Fujimori’s neoliberal reforms made waged employment in the city increasingly difficult to find, a majority of migrants began looking to the countryside as a source of urban incomes. Households developed distinctive “mobile livelihoods,” traveling to the villages to sow and harvest and for other occasional tasks, sometimes leaving behind one or two members of the household to mind the fields and animals, but the rest returning to the city (Stepputat and Sørensen 2001, 783–786). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1973

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core theme of how neoliberal reforms (here Fujimori’s shock therapy in Peru) reshape ordinary people’s economic survival strategies — ties to other chapters on the liberalization moment in the Global South. — connects to: Neoliberal capitalism has turned permanent migration into impermanent transnational subcontracting — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 25
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Fujimori’s reforms specifically structure the rural incentives, and did the mobile-livelihoods pattern persist after the war ended?
• ADDENDUM: A concrete case of infrastructure/economics reshaping household spatial organization — not a direct match to the trees or sacrifice articles, but illustrates adaptive household strategies against policy shocks.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal capitalism has turned permanent migration into impermanent transnational subcontracting #expands (0.80) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 25