The Sociodemographic Effects of the Crisis in Mexico

Chapter Three: The Economic and Social Effects of the Crisis on Mexican Urban Households, 1978-1990[1] Henry A. Selby

Introduction.

Although it is not quite yet the time for triumphalism in official circles in Mexico, the 1994 elections provided a pretext for crowing, rather than the eating of same, when the results came in to show the PRI triumphant, the PRD destroyed, and the political opposition to Salinista policies in disarray. The hotbeds of protest in the 1988 election, the Federal District, and adjoining zones of the State of Mexico had been either persuaded of the efficacy of the President's program, or had warmed to his administration by reason of the bestowal of lot and house titles, and the building of public works. The numinous effect of the restoration of the PRI in public life had unfortunate consequences. People, so it was said, were seen to have regained their senses, after going off the rails in 1988, and had recognized the hardy, manly qualities of the President and rejoined the colors. Normalcy, at last. The crisis was ending. Business as usual.

Business did seem to be usual in one sense. Despite all the hoopla about the Free Trade Agreement and the Mexican recovery, ordinary people in Mexico have not yet begun to recover the ground they lost during the 1980s. And when the crisis flared up again in December 1994, it seemed that they would not start to make it up for at least a year or two.

This chapter is about the transformation of domestic life in Mexico as a result of the crisis, and consists of mainly of a comparative statistical analysis of the form and composition of the Mexican household in 1977,before the crisis, and in 1990.

The Economic Decline of the 1980s.

Carlos Tello (1991:58-59) has summarized briefly the economic effects of the crisis, and we will cite him to set the stage for our analysis of domestic change in Mexico.

"During these (1982-89) years the country's poor grew in both absolute and relative terms. Per capita GDP fell 14 percent. and the decline in earnings was very unevenly distributed. While the country's population expanded from 71.4 million in 1981 to 81.2 million in 1987, the country's poor grew from 32.1 to 41.3 million. In this brief, six-year period, nine of out every ten Mexicans added to the national population were to be found in the ranks of the poor. Today forty-one million Mexicans are unable to satisfy their basic needs, and seventeen million live in extreme poverty."

As a result of the crisis there have been dramatic changes in the living conditions and economic life of the Mexican households, and it is to these broader changes that we now turn.

The Samples

The statistical comparisons that we draw in the first part of the paper are based on two big samples, first the INDECO sample which dates from 1978, and second the INEGI sample from 1990, both named after the institutions that were responsible for carrying them out. The 1978 INDECO sample was supervised by Ignacio Cabrera, Ignacio Ruiz and A.D. Murphy, [Murphy (1979), Murphy and Stepick (1991) and Murphy et al. in this volume], and consisted of 9,459 households from ten cities in Mexico, drawn by a two-shot technique designed to guarantee representativeness at the level of the city, the urban zone and the neighborhood type. (See Selby et al, 1990: Appendix One, for full explication of the sample). The 1990 INEGI sample is the quarterly sample of the work force, La Encuesta Nacional de Empleo Urbano, or ENEU, and consists of 11,637 households drawn from four cities of Mexico on the basis an area based sample stratified by neighborhood type. The cities are not the same in the two samples; there is overlap only in the Mexico City sample. But we rely on large numbers and treat both as samples of urban Mexico in two different time periods. The INDECO sample was from the cities of Mazatlán, Mérida, Mexicali, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Reynosa, San Luis Potosí, Tampico, and Villahermosa, while he ENEU (1990) sample was from Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Tijuana.

Comparing Household of Different Economic Conditions.

One of the most interesting comparisons is to examine the social and demographic characteristics of households in different economic circumstances. For convenience sake we have partitioned the households into three classes: those belonging to the bottom two quintiles of the household income distribution, those belonging to the middle two quintiles, and, lastly, those of top quintile.

The argument that we will be advancing is familiar to a number of students of the domestic group in Mexico in recent years. With some variations and regional differences, the arguments being advanced by González de la Rocha and her collaborators (1986, 1988, 1990, 1991) and our group (Selby, Murphy and Lorenzen 1990, Selby et al. 1994) are as follows:

The household and the family upon which it is based (in the vast majority of cases) has been compelled to change its forms of organization, composition, size and manner of insertion into the work force in order to confront the daunting challenges of the depression in Mexico. Three tendencies have worked together to produce a different household and family form in Mexico:

1. Declining fertility, especially urban fertility, has meant that the number of children in the household has decreased. Dependency ratios as a consequence have decreased as well, even though the number of older people, especially older people living alone has increased.

2. Poor economic conditions, bad wages, and rising food prices have compelled individuals to scramble to protect themselves and to survive, so that we have seen a proliferation of types of households far beyond the variety that existed prior to the crisis. Sometimes we call this the "complejificación de la familia" because it sounds better in Spanish, even though it shows scant regard for the language. At the same time these demanding economic conditions have enjoined a degree of collaboration among kin folk unheard of in recent years so that the maintenance of living standards to a level even close to those before the crisis has meant an intensification of what we have called the "Mexican solution to the problem of immiseration". The Mexican solution runs parallel to "complejificación" because it rewards households that are larger and more genealogically complex, particularly if they control their dependency rates by putting member into the work force as soon as they can. In this way they may manage to arrive intact and to reach that felicitous stage of the domestic cycle which González de la Rocha (1986) calls the "stage of consolidation", and which we, more pleonastically, call the stage "when the children are all over the age of fifteen, and are earning and contributing to the family budget".

A brief discussion of how the households in the two city samples changed over the twelve years period is in order.

Changes in the Household: 1978-1990.

[Table 1 goes in here]

As can be seen in Table 1, the comparison between households of 1978 and 1990 is straightforward.

Household Membership.

1. The number of members declines from 5.4 in 1978 to 4.9 in 1990.

2. The number of coresident children declines from 2.9 in 1978 to 2.6 in 1990.

3. The percentage of households having no children declines from 17.5% in 1978 to 6% in 1990.

Thus the result of a decline in urban fertility can be seen in the reduction of the numbers in the household. The decline in the percentage of childless households, despite the decline in the average number of children per household is due to the significant increase of the percentage of households in the later stages of the domestic cycle. The three stages where there are children present account for 82% of the households in 1978 compared to 90% in 1990. Urban households are retaining their children for longer periods than before: whereas in 1978 only 15% of the households held children over the age of 15, fully 44% did in 1990. In some cases the children cannot afford to buy lots or rent houses away from their parents, in other cases they have made a decision to stick with their parents so that they can all survive better.

Household Complexity.

Complex households are defined as those containing more relationships that those comprehended by the nuclear family of father-mother-children. Matrifocal households are those headed by a female, with no male present, while singletons are single person households.

1. The percentage of complex households has increased from 17% in 1978 to 21% in 1990 in line with our hypothesis of "complejificación" of the household.

2. The percentage of matrifocal households has almost than doubled by 1990, as has the number of singleton households.

3. The percentage of nuclear households has declined from 73% (1978) to 62% (1990), in favor of the other household forms.

The nuclear family form no longer dominates in 1990 as it did in 1978; it is clearly easier to form matrifocal households, and even singleton households are possible, in a way that they were not in the earlier period. We differentiate in our study between female headed households in which a female earns the biggest salary, from matrifocal households where a female is the head and she has no spouse present. Female headed households are greatly increased from 12% in 1978 to 18% in 1990.

Work Force Characteristics of the Households

What we might call the "employment efficiency" of the households has increased greatly in 1990, as compared to 1978.

1. There are more household members in the work force (1.8 average in 1990, compared to 1.4 in 1978).

2. Households in1990 have lower dependency ratios than they had in 1978 (2.7 members per worker in 1990, compared to 3.8 members per worker in 1978, a decline of 29%.)

3. More households have put more than one member into the work force in 1990 (44%) than in 1978 (30%).

4. But there is a greater percentage of households where the head is out of work (19%) in 1990, than there was in 1978 (12%), just as there are more households with no members in the work force in 1990 (10%) than there were in 1978 (5%).

5. The percentage of households that have spouses in the work force in 1990 has increased 206% over the figure for 1978.

6. The number of sons, and daughters in the work force has increased greatly: sons have increased 135%, daughters 175 %,

7. The percentage of households with their heads in the formal sector, here defined as receiving "prestaciones", at least health benefits, is lower in 1990 (44%) than it was in 1978 (55%), consistent with the many reports in this volume that people were chased out of the formal sector and obliged to find work of a more casual kind.

In sum, the composition of the household contribution to the work force has changed greatly as a result of the crisis. The number of wives in the work force has increased greatly, as has the numbers of sons, daughters. The increase in female participation in the work force does not stems equally from the entry of wives, and the entry of daughters into the work force. González de la Rocha mentions (this volume) that many middle class wives in Guadalajara entered the work force in fact, but not in name. They became caterers, chocolate polishers, specialty foodstuff and child care workers, and semi-clandestine sellers of second hand clothing. Whether they would turn up in surveys as members of the work force is open to doubt, and it may be that the number of wives in the work force is underestimated. But the number of children is not. And when one sees that the average age of the children over 12 in the household has increased from 12.7 to 13.4 years[2], seemingly a small increment but not if you realize that with the reduction in household fertility that is well documented for the period, the average overall age of the children has increased a good deal more, one realizes that households are retaining their children, and, of course, their children's earning power longer in 1990, than they did in 1978.

Incomes

1. The median income of the head of the household has dropped 36% from 1978 to 1990, while household incomes have dropped "only" 15%.

Household Characteristics by Income Group and by Year.

I have reviewed the changing characteristics of Mexican urban households, grosso modo, by looking at the average changes that took place in the years 1978-1990. It is much more interesting to break down the two samples by income groups to see whether the strategy for getting ahead has changed from 1978 to 1990. We do this in two ways: 1) we compare the characteristics of households in the higher income groups to those in the lower in both years, and, 2) we run wage generation equations for both years to see if the standardized regression coefficients attribute different degrees of importance to the most relevant variables in 1990, as compared to 1978.

Comparing Income Groups: 1978 and 1990

Table 2 has the familiar household variables, broken down into three income groups: the first being the first two quintiles of the household income distribution, the second being quintiles three and four, and the third being the top quintile.

[Table 2 goes in here]

Discussion of the Different Income Groups

Looking across the quintiles of income distribution we see the same effects in both 1978 and 1990. The better off quintiles are performing exactly the same on the household variables in 1990, as they did in 1978. For example:

1. The better off the household:


* the more members it has,


* the more children living at home


* the less likelihood of having no children in the household.

2. The better off the household:


* the higher the percentage of complex households


* the lower the percentage of matrifocal, nuclear and singleton households

3. The better off the household:


* the older the head


* the older the spouse


* the older the children


* the more likely it is to be in the phase of consolidation when the children are still present in the household

4. The better off the household:


* the more members in the work force


* the more work force participants than dependents


* the more spouses in the work force


* the more household heads with formal sector employment


* the fewer heads either unemployed or out of the work force

Conclusion about the Comparison of Income Groups.

The Mexican solution that we identified in 1978 whereby the better off households were the bigger, more complex, and more incorporating still held true in 1990. In addition to their greater numbers, better off households were less likely to be matrifocal or singleton and more likely to be at least nuclear, and more frequently extended.

2. The Mexican solution involved getting ahead economically by putting more workers into the work force, and that was even more true in 1990 than it was in 1978.

3. The Mexican household became more "feminized" in 1990 than it had been in 1978. There are many more female headed households in 1990 than there were in 1978, particularly in the bottom 40% of the household income distribution, where 22% of the 1990 households are female headed compared to 14% in 1978. Rates of matrifocality are higher in 1990. In the bottom income group 20% were matrifocal in 1990, compared to 9% in 1978.

The tendency towards matrifocality is confirmed by Sylvia Chant's (1991:137) study who notes in her 1986 household survey 19.6% of the households in Puerto Vallarta, 10.4% in León, and 13.5% in Querétaro were female headed. Matrifocality was not a Mexican pattern in the years before the crisis. According to our data and that of both Sylvia Chant (1985a, 1985b, 1987) and Mercedes González de la Rocha (1986), matrifocal households were formed in three ways: through the death of the husband/father; abandonment by the husband; and through the initiative of the mother/wife. Roughly half of the cases were formed at the initiative of the mother/wife according to Chant's direct observations of a small sample she studied in Querétaro, and what was particularly noticeable was the increase of female headed extended families which had increased from 10% of her small, intensively interviewed sample in 1982-3, to 30% in 1986.

The increase was especially to be noted among matrifocal households which were well organized and economically above average. These were the very household types that we had discovered to be doing well in the 1978 sample, organized around a senior woman, but with more older children in the work force contributing to the household budget; so much so that although the incomes of the female extended families were smaller than average, their per capita incomes were higher. The children in these better off matrifocal households had significantly higher educational levels and held better jobs than children in other kinds of households.

The process of feminization of the urban Mexican family can be seen in other ways as well -- in the increasing ability of women to defend themselves largely because of their ability to set up on their own living arrangements, in extremis, an alternative denied to most in earlier years. In an interview in 1989 in Oaxaca, a woman who was divorced and living with her three children, her unmarried sister, and her father and grandmother said it quite clearly , "Ahora sí, sabemos replicar a los hombres, pero antes ya no!" ("Now we know how to talk back to men, but we didn't before!"). Her attitude and her testimony was miles distant from that of a woman interviewed by González de la Rocha (1986) who persisted in putting up with her drunken, wastrel husband who was a burden on her and their children. She repeatedly took him back in because she believed there was no other alternative available to her and her family. Over and over again women in the 1993 Guadalajara interviews insisted that there were employment alternatives for women now, and that women were not stuck with "macho fanfarrón" husbands the way they had been in the past.

The process of feminization is linked to the entry of women into the work force. In 1978, according to Kim (1987), 25.4% of the urban sample's women in the age range 15 to 64 were in the work force[3]. By 1990, according to the ENEU data 30.5% were. Table 3 shows the percentage of women in each age cohort in the work force. In all but the youngest age cohort, the percentage of women in the work force has increased, as a percentage of women in the age group.

[Table 3 goes in here]

Obviously, just because a woman is in the work force does not mean that she has more authority in the household, or is better able to defend herself. But there does seem to be some relationship. In the Murphy-Morris-Winter Oaxaca survey of 1987 (see Murphy et al., this volume and Winter 1990 and 1991), for example, questions were asked about women's attitudes towards men and their employment status, and at least on the attitudinal level we can say that women in the work force had more positive attitudes about themselves, their rights, and their gender construct than women who did not. For example, all women were asked whether they felt that the man had the right to be the boss in the house and make all the important decisions, and around 50% said yes. Women who were in the work force tended to deny the proposition 3: 1[4], while women in the formal sector of the work force denied it 10:1. The formal education of the wife was the decisive variable; people who endorsed the item showed around 3 years of education while those who dissented had 8. The reaction to another item, "A man has a greater right to cheat on his wife than she has to cheat on him" received a higher overall negative response, but once again, the women who were in the work force dissented more frequently.[5] Women's educational attainment has improved over the 1978-1990 period, although we are not sure exactly how much more[6] . The reason why women's formal education is so important in the household has little to do with reading and writing, and a lot to do with school experience of girls in Mexico. If they stay in school they have a maturing support group of other girls who are learning together to deal with a hegemonic ideology that subordinates women. Having a support group during the period that girls are becoming sexually active and being exposed to an ideology that emphasizes the right of exploitative behavior by men, enables them to penetrate this ideology better, to use Paul Willis's (1979) term which he used to describe the way in which the working class in Great Britain deciphered the bourgeois ideology of the school.

In 1978 we could truly say that the elementary social unit in Mexico was the nuclear family since 90% of the households and 97% of the people lived in

households based on the nuclear family.[7] Mexico is still overwhelmingly a country that lives in families in 1990, but there are big differences in the kinds of families they live in. Nuclearity in the top quintile of the household income distribution is down to 59% in 1990, compared to 71% in 1978, while overall, matrifocality and singletons are double their rates in 1990 as compared to the earlier period. [8] By 1990 the poor have been obligated to try all manner of living arrangements to meet the crisis.

The assembly and maintenance of a complex household is not easy, and we should not be surprised to find that they break up very easily, especially among the poor. One household that we interviewed three times in Oaxaca over the period 1987-1990 started off as a complex three family household in 1987, with the jefa in Sonora, her daughter working as a rezagadora (culler) in the tomato harvest, and one of her sons in jail on a rape charge, but with the daughter-in-law and the grandchildren sharing her solar in Oaxaca and a third family living there composed of another son and a daughter-in-law both of whom sold used clothing in the city living there. The jefa returned, and tried to sustain her one remaining dependent daughter of fourteen by making and selling a delicious atole, while she minded her daughter's virtue and arranged a suitable marriage for her. The jefa had been a ferocious opponent of the state and federal governments, and was very active in the PRD. As a result of her activities, in ways forever mysterious, she and another group of ten activist families invaded a new section of the city and seized control of some land and started construction on their houses. Next year when we returned she had left the old solar and was living independently a few kilometers away, and the two sons were building a wall dividing the solar on the good-fences-good-neighbor principle. What had been a complex three generation female-headed extended family was now three households: a mother-child household in the area they had invaded, and a mother-child household, with the husband temporarily incarcerated and a nuclear family composed of a couple with no children. It is very hard to keep complex households together if you are poor, because your economic condition inhibits the offering of incentives to independence-minded children, who, all things equal would like to be away from parental supervision and live their own lives.[9]

My only personal experience of complex family living was in Cd. Netzahualcoyotl, in the Metropolitan zone of Mexico City where we were 13 at one point in a couple of rooms and a kitchen. But there the head of the household was not poor (he was a skilled carpenter before the onset of the crisis, and unemployed after that) and he was one of the most skilled diplomats I have known. His children said it was not just that they loved him, but it was the way he counted on them so that they always kept their self-respect, and they never felt any economic pressure from him to contribute to the household. It was here that I learned about running big households; they run on love, respect and self control. The maintenance of an extended or complex household requires all those skills for which the Mexican popular classes have been famous since the Conquest: patience, endurance, and self-control.

But perhaps most of all it requires that the excesses of machismo be controlled, and here we conjoin the two themes of "feminization/democratization" of the household and "complejificación". Nothing, but nothing, so disrupts relationships between children and their parents as does domestic violence, usually directed from the husband towards the wife, and often stimulated by drunkenness. The children are torn by this violence; they hate it and fear it, because they feel it is an extension of the father's moral disapproval of them as well. Both sons and daughters will run to the assistance of the mother, and children will brood about the time to come when they can expel the brute from their midst. So drunken bullies have their comeuppance: by their behavior they deny themselves the only route out of poverty, namely the joint labors of their wives and children. The wives suffer abominably when they are young, isolated and the babies are small. This phase of the domestic cycle is truly difficult for the poor Mexican family. But if a woman endures she will be able to build a coalition against the husband in the household, and eventually move away from him, either by forming a complex household with her children, as in the case of the woman who culled tomatoes, or by abandoning her husband and moving to a matrifocal household.[10]

Studying Household Income Sources.

The final step in the quantitative comparison between households studied in 1978 and 1989 is to see how the determinants of household income have changed in significance and importance as a result of the crisis. We have a chapter-long discussion of the determinants of household income in our book The Mexican Urban Household and it was on the basis of this discussion that we constructed an household income equation.

The dependent variable in the equation is monthly household income (all sources). Based on the 1978 study we believe that this was the best overall measure of welfare, particularly if one took the point of view of the "popular classes" in Mexico, who, in 1978, did not spend much money on their children. In fact, the essential household expenses did not increase in the households below the median on household income, from three to seven children. In that sense, children four through seven were essentially "free", for the poorer half of the households. Neither did the "popular classes" regard children as causing expenses of a significant kind, although the parental discourse of sacrifice and mortification was no less developed among them as it was among the middle and upper sectors. When we calculated the marginal cost of family members in terms of the expenses that they occasioned in the household budget, the "nose dive" of the marginal cost curve was indeed impressive. Income for 1978 was adjusted for the cost of living in each region of the country, since there was a great deal of variation in that period, as the minimum wage provided for over one hundred regions at the time. In 1990 there were three levels of minimum wage, and two in the cities of our sample, and the monthly wages were adjusted accordingly. We used logarithms to help linearize the curvilinearity induced by the expected extreme values of income for the richest households of the samples.

The dependent variable was then: the log of adjusted monthly household income.

The equation which we adapted from our earlier discussions was as follows:

HOUSEINC = HEADWORK + SPOUWORK + NSONSWORK + NDASWORK + EXTRAWK + HEADEDUC + AVAGEHH + HEADFORM + EXTENDED

where,

HOUSEINC is the log of adjusted household income (all sources),

HEADWORK is a dummy variable with value "0" if the head is not in the work force and "1" is the head is in the work force

SPOUWORK is a dummy variable with value "0" if the spouse is not in the work force and "1" if the spouse is in the work force

NSONSWORK is the total number of coresident male children in the work force

NDASWORK is the total number of coresident female children in the work force

EXTRAWK is the total number of distant kin and nonkin in the work force

HEADEDUC is the educational attainment of the head of the household

CYCLE4 is the percentage of the households in stage 4 of the domestic cycle when the children are all over the age of 15

HEADFORM is dummy variable with value "0" when the head is employed in the formal sector, and "1" otherwise

EXTENDED is a dummy variable with value o when the household is not extended (i.e. complex) and "1" if the household is based on an extended or complex family.. Approximately 70% of the complex households are lineal extended, split half and half between patrilineal and matrilineal extended forms.

The equation was run separately for 1978 data and 1990 , yielding two sets of coefficients. Since a direct comparison of the regression coefficients is tricky, however tempting, the following table presents the beta coefficients for the variables, with an asterisk indicating that they are insignificant, i.e. fail to reach the 0.05 significance level for the t-score associated with the variable . These standardized coefficients rank order the importance of each variable in the equation in which they appear, but cannot be compared across equations.

[Table 4 goes in here]

1. Nonsignificant variables

The only variable in both equations that is insignificant is the number of distant kin and nonkin in the work force. Indeed there is very little variance to work with this variable, since the average number of such people in the work force ranges between 0.03 and 0.05.

2. Different ranks

The downgrading of the head of the household by 1990, as compared with his importance in 1978 is the most striking difference to be found in the sets of standardized regression coefficients. The employment of the head is insignificant in 1978, since almost all of the heads are in the work force, as can be seen in Table 3, where the percentage ranges from 87% in the first two quintiles of the household income distribution to 85% in the top quintile. Compare these figures to the 69% of the heads recorded as in the work force in the first two quintiles in 1990. Whether the households are poor because their heads are not in the work force, or whether they are not in the work force because they are poor, can be partially solved by looking at the contribution of the education of the head of the household: in 1978 it is the most important variable in the household income generating equation, while by 1990 it is seventh (out of nine) in importance. This suggests that whereas credentialism was critical in determining income in 1978, it is not in 1990, and in that latter year unemployment was no respector of educational attainment, the middle class, particularly the lower regions of the middle class are being driven into the lower quintiles of the income distribution (assuming that education is a middle class marker) just as González de la Rocha reports for Guadalajara (this volume).

Rank order of importance.

The rest of the variables are of comparable importance in 19878 and 1990.

Having household members in the work force is of great importance: first having sons, then having daughters and then having one's spouse in the work force.

Of intermediate importance are having the head in a formal sector job, being in the fourth stage of the domestic cycle, when all the children are over the age of 15, and finally, having an extended family, which usually means having a larger family (since the average number of members in a household based on a extended family is 6.5 members, as compared to 4.4 members for the other kinds of households in the 1990 data).

Of little or no importance are having a distant kinsperson, or nonkin in the household and in the work force, as mentioned above.

11. Conclusion

The Mexican urban household has undergone dramatic changes during the period the crisis. Drastic changes in the job market induced economic pressures on the family, and the psychological costs of accommodating to these changes have been marked as well. We will not know what the effects of this terrible period of Mexican history will be for some years to come. The brunt of the crisis fell squarely on the middle and lower income sectors of the population. The poor did what they had always done, organized themselves into survival collectives, and when they were successful they enjoyed relative economic success, even though in absolute terms their standards of living fell. Household incomes did not fall nearly as much as individual incomes; probably about half as much, and this indicates that the accommodations were in their way successful.

But what changes they were! Nothing so well indicates the degree of transformation as the proliferation of "alternative" family forms, singletons (unMexican!), older people living alone, and a doubling, or perhaps even tripling of matrifocal and/or female headed households.

These changes carried with them psychological costs. Living in complex family environments, particularly under conditions of poverty is not easy. The author did it at second hand, but the reader may never have done it at all. It isn't edifying and it does require the skills of diplomat, the patience of Job and a disposition for love and tolerance not normally found in abundant distribution among our fellows. And for that reason, complex and extended formations are not that frequent nor as durable as one might hope.

The final question that begs to be asked is "was it worth it?" And the answer is best posed and answered in the conference at which this paper was first given by Salomón Nahmad, who suggests that the sweeping transformation of Mexico taking place under the Salinista programs under the rubrics of modernization, privatization, social liberalism and so on are no more than the radical means for the preservation of the old model of accumulation in Mexico. John Womack's famous phrase about the peasants of Morelos, who, in order to preserve their ancient privileges and way of life were compelled to start a Revolution, can, in the 1990s be said to apply to the Mexican elites, who, in order to preserve their ancient privileges and their way of life were compelled to start a neoliberal Revolution which had the effects of inducing sweeping transformations throughout Mexican society. The is the tiger that the political class must ride. We shall shortly see whether a recuperating Mexico will go back to some version of "normalcy", or whether the changes already effected will loose a flurry of demands so insistent that the old model of accumulation will be swept away.

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Selby, H. A., A. D. Murphy and S. A. Lorenzen (1994) La familia en México urbano. México: CONACULTA.

Tello, Carlos (1991) "Combatting Poverty in Mexico" in González de la Rocha and and Agustín Escobar Latapí Social Responses to Mexico's Economic Crisis of the 1980s. US-Mexico Contemporary Perspectives Series, No. 1, Center for US-Mexican Studies. La Jolla. Ca.

Willis, Paul (1979) Learning to Labor. New York. Columbia University Press.

Winter, Mary (1990)"Planning and Implementation in the Informal Sector: Evidence from Oaxaca, Mexico". City and Society Vol. 4(2): 131-143.

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Table 1: Household Composition Variables

Variables	1978	1990
Mean Number in Household	5.4	4.9
Mean Number of Children	2.9	2.6
Percent Households No Children	17.5%	6%
Household Complexity
Percent Households Complex	17%	21%
Percent Households Nuclear	73%	62%
Percent Matrifocal Households	7%	13%
Percent Singleton Households	2.4%	5%
Household Head
Percent Female	12%	18%
Median Age of Head	41	42
Median Age of Spouse	35	37
Average Age Children	12.7 years	13.4 years
Education Head (Years)	8 years	8.7 years
Work Force Characteristics
Mean number in Work Force	1.4	1.7
Mean members per worker	3.8	2.7
Percent with Head in force	87%	81%
Percent Households No worker	5%	10%
Percent with Spouse in force	5%	19%
Av. num. distant kin in force	.04	.04
Av. num. sons in force	.14	.33
Av. num. daughters in force	.08	.22
Percent houses in stage 4	15	44
Income Data
Median Inc Head (1990 pesos)	811.2	516.
Median Inc HH (1990 pesos)	1014.	860.

Table 2: Household Variables by Income Group

Variables	1978			1990
Quintile of Household Income	Quint 1-2	Quint 3-4	Quint 5	Quint 1-2	Quint 3-4	Quint 5
Mean Number in Household	4.9	5.5	6.0	4.2	5.2	5.8
Mean Number of Children	2.6	3.0	3.2	2.1	2.8	3.4
Percent Households No Kids	22	15	13	10	2.4	1.5
Household Complexity
Percent Households Complex	14	18	23	15	18	24
Percent Households Nuclear	73	75	71	77	70	59
Percent Matrifocal Households	8.6	6.9	5.5	20	12	9.1
Percent Singleton Households	4.5	1	1	8	2	1
Household Head
Percent Female	14	11	9	22	15	13
Median Age of Head	41	41	43	42	41	45
Median Age of Spouse	35	35	35	36	37	40
Average Age Children	11.5	13.	15	13	13	15
Education Head (Years)	7	8	10	8	9	10
Work Force Characteristics
Percent Heads in work force	87%	88%	85%	69%	88%	89%
Mean number in Work Force	1.2	1.4	1.9	1.1	2.0	2.9
Mean members per worker	4.1	3.9	3.2	3.5	2.4	2.0
Percent Households No worker	6.8	4.1	4.1	19	2.3	1.5
Percent Spouse in Work Force	3	6	13	10	23	29
Av. num. distant kin in force	.04	.08	.80	.03	.04	.04
Av. num. sons in work force	.04	.15	.28	.16	.42	.65
Av. num. daughters in force	.02	.08	.22	.10	.25	.48
Percent in stage 4 of life cycle	12	15	21	34	50	61
Income Data
Median Inc Head (1990 pesos)	608	1014	1825	344	720	1290
Median Inc HH (1990 pesos)	608	1217	3042	420	1247	2960

Table 3

Percentage of Women's Age Cohort in Work Force, 1978-1990

Age	1978	1990
15-24	31	31
25-34	22	36
34-44	16	33
45-54	12	24
55-64	11	16

Table 4

Beta Coefficients (and t values) for 1978 and 1989: Total Sample.

Dependent Variable: Log of Household Income

Independent Variables	1978	1990
Adjusted R squared	0.189	0.272
Head Employed	.014 (.1430)	.362 (.0000)
Spouse Employed	.100 (.0000)	.132 (.0000)
Number of Sons Employed	.173 (.0000)	.193 (.0000)
Number of Daughters Employed	.158 (.0000)	.156 (.0000)
Number of distant kin employed	-.009 (.3706)	.008 (.3110)
Education of Head of Household	.323 (.0000)	.073 (.0000)
Household in fourth stage of domestic cycle	.067 (.0000)	.064 (.0000)
Head employed in formal sector	.088 (.0000)	.120 (.0000)
Extended family present	.065 (.0000)	.058 (.0000)

[1] I want to thank all the collaborators on this paper, even though they are exculpated from its errors and omissions. First the entire staff of the Mexican Center for giving me the time to do the analysis and write it. Second Harley Browning who initiated the planning for this conference, and held a summer seminar which we all called "Harley's Summer Camp" where the INEGI data was analyzed. He, Joe Potter and Bryan Roberts negotiated the INEGI data, and established the relationship that we currently, gratefully, have with them. Arthur Murphy, of this conference who has persevered with me in what we call "El Proyecto Sin Fin", the name of which reminds us that you should never try to makes puns in a language that is not your own, has generously made available the data from the Oaxaca Household Study, in which he is joined by Earl Morris and Mary Winter. Special thanks to Fernando Pozos who ignored my rantings about the superiority of SPSS and assured me that it took everyone a month to learn SAS. And all the people who put up the data set, and who did all the recodings that make it such a pleasure to work with ... you know who you are.

[2] The statistic "average age of children over 12 years of age in the household" is obliged by the way in which INEGI codes the members of the household, giving ages only for those in the economically active age range or "población económicamente activa" (PEA) which runs from 12 to 65.

[3] In Kim's study the PEA was defined from 15-65.

[4] Chi square > 38 with associated probability , 0.0001.

[5] Chi square >19 with associated probability 0.013.

[6] Because of the way that we coded household membership in 1978, it turned out to be difficult to take out large numbers of young people whose educational attainment scores were mixed in with the wives.

[7] For those not used to anthropological discourse, complex units are all based on the nuclear family; so that only matrifocal households and singleton households are not so based.

[8] Since a lot of our attention in this project is focused on the border, it is interesting to note that the border does not differ much from the rest of the cities. Matrifocality is slightly lower, at 4% of the households, while singleton households are somewhat more frequent at 7%, but the other figures are right in line with Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey.

[9] Browning reports that in his studies of undocumented Mexican workers in Austin, Texas that as soon as their economic circumstances improved, they broke up the complex formations and went back to the nuclear form. This is true of the Mexican household as well, and therefore the increase in complexity can be regarded as obliged on them by the force of economic circumstances.

[10] See Chant 1991 (Table 6.4) where she notes that the per capita earnings of female-headed extended families were $5776. per month, compared to $5,022. for the nuclear families in Querétaro, according to her Household Survey.