ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on household survival strategies in the frontier community of Santa Terezinha, Mato Grosso. Survival strategies is a term distilled from expressions employed by others, including Larissa Lomnitz's "survival mechanisms used by marginals," Bryan Roberts "informal economy," and Anibal Quijano's "survival structures." The term survival is specifically used to connote a struggle against almost overwhelming odds. To understand the dynamics of rural-rural migration in Amazonia, the reader may find it instructive to consider Stanley H. Brandes's distinction between "institutional" and "transformational" migration. The migration histories support Feder's characterization of the rural migrants as primarily farmers. The migration histories support Feder's characterization of the rural migrants as primarily farmers. The stated preference of most of the migrants interviewed was to stay settled in one place where they could farm, earn sufficient cash, and become integrated into a community. Almost all farm families, for example, contain members who work periodically at cattle ranches.
