The Sociodemographic Effects of the Crisis in Mexico

Preface Henry A. Selby & Harley Browning

This book is about the social effects of the crisis in Mexico. The contributors are social scientists, with sociologists and social anthropologists predominating. The book is based on a set of papers prepared for a conference called "The Sociodemographic Effects of the Crisis in Mexico" which was held at the University of Texas in April, 1992, was organized by Harley Browning (Sociology-Population Research Center) and Henry Selby (Anthropology-The Mexican Center) and funded by the Ford Foundation (Mexico), the President's Office of the University of Texas (Austin) and the Institute of Latin American Studies of that same university through its fine Mexican Center. Thanks are especially due to Gabriel Lopez, then associate of the Ford Foundation in Mexico City, Bill Cunningham, President of the University of Texas (now Chancellor), and Peter Cleaves (Director, ILAS).

This book, and the conference, is different from many that deal with the crisis because comprehensive data was available on the 1980s for the first time. Enough time has passed to allow us to make a preliminary assessment of what transpired during the crisis years in Mexico. Some people, academics and lay, feel that crisis is too dramatic a word for the adjustment processes that carried Mexico through the transition from a fortress mentality and a captive market (and captive economy) into the world economy. After all similar drastic transformations of the capitalist system in other areas had provoked, or been provoked by catastrophes much greater than an eight or ten year economic recession, as the twentieth century bears eloquent testimony. There were even some areas of Mexican life not much affected by the crisis of the 80s. It could be argued that families were not torn up nearly as much by the prolonged recession as they had been in the 1950s and before, when so many of the young people had gone to Mexico City looking for work and escape from the village or small town. Some regions, and some cities were not that greatly affected by the crisis. The border area had suffered its recession in the 70s, and in the 80s it was enjoying a relative boom, as Rodolfo Cruz and Rene Zenteno point out in this book. It seems that cities like Guadalajara, perhaps Aguascalientes were not that greatly affected, at least not affected as early as not as hard as, say Monterrey and Mexico City. Guadalajara has a homegrown economic base which does not require the quantities of imported inputs for survival, and therefore was spared the consequences of Mexico's isolation brought on by the financial and foreign exchange crisis. Aguascalientes kept on growing until the middle 80s, and succeeded in building a successful industrial zone and in attracting both public sector activities (e.g. INEGI) and foreign investors (e.g. Nissan) during the period.

But other regions (the Center) and some cities (Monterrey) were greatly affected, as were most areas of Mexican life, and we are now in a position to assess what these were. Unemployment, and underemployment and the fear of losing one's living became paramount features of many Mexican families' lives. Older people, once laid off, could not hope to the foothold in the formal sector of the economy. A specialist carpenter who did fine work for builders and contractors could find himself out of work and reduced to building pencil boxes to be sold by his children in the school or from door to door, and this was a terrible blow to his dignity. Children could not afford to set up their own households because of financial stringencies, and although staying on to live with the parents could not be accounted a hardship, it betrayed the implicit promise of eventual independence that Mexican young people had counted on for years. Diets were changed: meat eaten less regularly, recipes from the rancho revived, and in some cases vegetarianism obliged, even if hunger did not return. Social pathologies increased, including crime and alcoholism. In the middle class, luxuries were foregone, children were taken out of private school, and families were obliged for the first time to go to the doctors in government service in Seguro Social, rather than to their private physician. Vacations eliminated, respectability imperiled, children's futures truncated, and a kind of lace-curtain penuriousness installed which, in the end, is defeating to the spirit. Families turning en masse to petty commerce, or to the provision of respectable services (catering, photography) which they had eschewed before. These are not tales of catastrophe, but years of worry take their toll, and breed a kind of pessimism and apathy that betokens the loss of control of one's life and one's destiny.

Not only were data available but we were in contact with many people on both sides of the border who were working on data sets of the crisis period, and many had developed ones that permitted comparisons before and after the crisis. Every member of the conference had data to interpret, with the result that the conference and the book is very far from a postmodern reflection. The appellation "a tables-and-prose-book" could well be applied to it, and we would consider that a compliment. Many of the contributors from The University of at Austin used wholly or in part, the data from the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo Urbano (ENEU), the quarterly survey of the National Institute of Geography and Information, INEGI, in 16 Mexican cities. Two contributors to the conference, Joe Potter, and Harley Browning held semester long seminars analyzing this data and introducing the local research community to the opportunities it presented.

The University of Texas was fortunate in enjoying the presence of three Mexican researchers of great distinction: Agustín Escobar Latapí, Mercedes González de la Rocha both of CIESAS-Occidente, who were visiting Fulbright Research professors and Orlandina de Oliveira of the Colegio de México, who was visiting Tinker Professor of Sociology.

Our idea in organizing the conference was to get beyond the economic and political discussions which had dominated the analysis of the crisis. We recognize how important they are, and will continue to be, but we felt that whole areas of Mexican social and cultural life were being ignored, and required analysis and understanding. As the conclusion to this chapter states, perhaps in too histrionic terms, we feel that we should not permit the sufferings of the ordinary Mexicans of the middle classes and the clases populares to be forgotten. Their struggles did not take place in the arenas defined by the abstractions of economics nor on the well-lit political stage, but in everyday worlds as they struggled to "defend themselves", to "bear up", to "keep on" as we translated their words. Their arena was not covered often in the newspapers, for it was the barrio, the colonia, or the hogar, or the everyday, changing relations between the sexes or among close family members. We felt also that we could bring some clarification to the understanding of the crisis by stating what we felt were the topics that had to be understood if we were ever to have a comprehensive knowledge of what we call the crisis, and this task we undertake in this chapter, the next, and the last.

Conclusion

We agree with Nora Lustig (1992) who has suggested in her book Mexico: The Remaking of an Economy that the question is not "why did the crisis occur", so much as "why did it last so long?" It lasted as long as the European depression of the 1930s and its effects on the middle and working classes were at least as drastic, even though Mexico was able to avoid the horrors of hyperinflation that had left such indelible memories on the Germans of that period. One commentator invited North American readers to contemplate what would have happened in Europe or the United States if individual wages were to be cut in half, for a period of six years, or if workers lost all union protection, or if there were no jobs, and worse, if employers were "improving their work forces" by firing workers who had long been loyal to their enterprises and hiring cheaper substitutes, and, in addition there was no end in sight to the suffering of ordinary people. Would it tolerate electoral chicanery that kept the same old group in power? Would it not erupt in demonstrations, protests, civil strife or class struggle, as living standards plummeted? Would anyone have predicted the willingness of ordinary Mexicans to change their lives, their customs, their definitions of themselves at the most fundamental levels in order to preserve a system that served them so badly? But that's what they did. Perhaps they felt that one Revolution which killed perhaps 10 percent of the national population was enough for one century, or perhaps they felt that there was no alternative but to hunker down and weather the situation together, as Mexicans, and not as members of different and opposed class fractions. Or maybe, as one person we interviewed stated it, "in the end the gringos will save us".

There is a sentimental reason for this book, as well as an academic one. With all the hoopla surrounding North American integration, the recovery of official party's fortunes in Mexico in the elections of 1991 and 1992, and with the emergence of the received opinion in North American that Mexico is on the road to recovery, it could be easy to forget what the Mexican people went through in the past ten years. But the onset of the devaluation crisis in December of 1994 reminds us that Mexico is not out of the woods yet, and that the same people are paying for the continuing crisis as before: the popular clases, what we call "ordinary Mexicans". There is no Mexican literature of the common man, but common Mexicans have had to summon up all their powers of endurance in the last decade, more than at any time since the Revolution, and their suffering should not be forgotten. The effects of this crisis may well be with them for a long time to come in the truncated lives of its survivors. Let us not forget the demeaning encounters of fathers when they confessed to their children that they could no longer find jobs of any dignity and had to rely on their children's wages, or what mothers had to say to their families when they concocted recipes "learned in the rancho" for newly vegetarian diets, and how young women felt when they were compelled to do the meanest of tasks for the meanest of wages, obliging their hire by accepting miserable wages in the work place in that ugly transformation of Say's Law which tells people that there will always be a demand for the doing of awful work for awful wages, if awful wages are all there are to be had. No need to be sentimental for the "common man of Mexico" is a realistic person, And sentimentality would belie their experience. But no need to forget either and divagate into some mindless cheer for capitalism, when so much that is bad has been done in its name and for its saving, and so much that is bad remains to be made up.