The mass influx of poor and dispossessed people into Latin American cities in recent decades has resulted in a process of settlement common to a variety of countries, and Arequipa is a textbook case.  Someone will assume a role of leadership in the endeavor to claim a plot of land on the fringe of the city.  This person’s job is to find enough families (at least 70-100 adults) to occupy an area and enlist them.  The group of squatters will descend upon their target en masse on a designated night and set up residence with what scavenged resources they can find—scrap material, sheets of plastic, and the like.  Each family’s plot is marked off with a perimeter of stones.  If the squatters can evade the police and hold the land for a certain amount of time, it becomes theirs. 

Eventually, the government may buy the land from its owner and, with the cooperation of the squatters’ committee, lay out orderly streets.  But it may take years for the barrio to get legitimate electricity, running water, pavement for its muddy streets, a sewage system, or regular bus service.  Once the squatters have some assurance that they will not be evicted, concrete block gradually begins to replace the corrugated iron siding, window frames are added.  Across the years the block gets plastered and the plaster gets painted.  Reinforcing rods may stick out of the roof pointing to the sky—signs of hope that perhaps a second floor may yet be added (Mike Berg and Paul Peritz, “Five Waves of Protestant Evangelization,” in New Face of the Church in Latin America, ed. Guillermo Cook [Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994], 66).  

In Arequipa, reused blocks of the white volcanic rock unique to the city’s nearby quarry make the first structures: one room dwellings, roughly 10’x10’, in which lives an entire family of four or five. Neighborhoods created in this way are referred to as pueblos jovenes (young towns). 

{gallery}Arequipa/Evolution{/gallery}