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commercial, industrial and service enterprises; and of these a generousnumber of workers (including also apprentices, craftsmen, and owner/managers) came from the Mantaro region (only five hours by road) whereeducational levels were well above the average for highland locations.Moreover, a significant proportion of these small-scale enterprises, mostlyoperating in the fields of transport and commerce, were directly articulatedwith this highland region and its neighboring mining, agricultural andlivestock zones. This context laid the groundwork for the emergenceof several types of multiple family-enterprises that combined differentbranches of economic activity with networks of social relations that crossedthe rural–urban divide.Such phenomena pointed to the need to move away from simple bipolarmodels of migration that focused on the movement from “place of origin”to “place of destination,” or which represented the flows of people to newlocations in terms of the “adaptation” or “adjustment” of new migrantsto their so-called “host” societies. Instead one needed to treat migratoryprocesses as essentially multi-sited and inseparable from the more generalissues of translocal livelihoods and mobility.40Hence exploration of the increasing integration of the Mantaro regioninto the metropolitan area of Lima required a detailed understanding ofthe organizing practices and networks that accompanied this process. Asmany Andean specialists have repeatedly demonstrated, life in the Andeshas always been characterized by a high degree of spatial movementbetween ecological zones producing a variety of products and throughwell-trodden pathways of trade and administration. Thus the notion ofmigrating for work to obtain access to additional resources and to improveone’s standard of living was a familiar option for many local householdersand there was an abundance of examples on hand of those who had, to adegree, already “made it.” Nevertheless, for relatively poor rural dwellers,the hazards and possible benefits of moving to a shantytown or poorinner-city neighborhood of the metropolis were daunting, and requiredstrong back-up from family, friends, compadres (ritual “co-parents”), andpaisanos (“fellow countrymen”). This conglomeration of factors providedthe breeding ground for the emergence and proliferation of migrantassociations.2.2 Migrant Associations and the Web of Rural-Urban TiesAs compared to the rest of Latin America, Peruvian urban life is strikingfor its large number of migrant associations and other kinds of civicorganizations. Many of these can be traced back to earlier periods when