Impacts of Mexico's trade openness on Mexican rural women.

Many authors claim that the Mexican policy of prioritizing industrialization and providing economic incentives to entrepreneurs has only negative impacts on small-scale farmers or campesinos. Such policies have been referred to as the "trickle-down" effect, sectoral disarticulation (deJanvry),

As the global economic system penetrates even the most isolated corners of each country, small producers are wrested from their subsistence economy and thrust into a different world, one of wage earners and job seekers. But this new world is incapable of supplying sufficient opportunities to fulfill the hopes and implied promises of its far-reaching claims: employment opportunities are limited and welfare programs are virtually nonexistent (Barkin, p. 14).

Superimposed on this debate is the more recent one focused on Mexico's new trade openness and entrance into the GATT in 1986 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. The sexenio of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari went far in making the necessary changes to open up the Mexican economy to trade and foreign investment; some say it amounted to a revolution in Mexico's economy. Gone are requirements that 51% of Mexican businesses be owned by Mexicans; even ejido land, which since the Revolution could not be sold but had to be kept in the family as individual parcels or owned collectively, can now be sold. This means a big change from the protectionism that has characterized Mexico from the time of the Revolution, and abandonment of the state's long-standing role as engine of growth in favor of a vastly expanded private sector.

Critics claim the new trade openness will result in the further marginalization (maquilization) of Mexican industry (Wilson). Some note that the only sector showing a positive trade balance last year in manufacturing was the maquila (assembly-platform) industries, which use predominantly low-wage female labor (Audirac). The effects of trade liberalization and increasing U.S.-Mexico economic integration were felt immediately, they say, in the loss of more than 5,000 small- and medium-sized firms. For NAFTA to work as a trade block and for Mexico to compete effectively with the Asian newly industrialized countries (NICs), Mexico's labor legislation would have to be weakened to give Mexican labor an edge over Asian competitors.

Women-in-development (WID) researchers in particular argue that one cannot evaluate the maquila industries simply on the basis of the quantity of foreign exchange they generate; a more complete assessment should consider their costs and benefits in human terms and their impacts on the women whose labor has enabled them to flourish (Tiano, p. 220). This rationale has given rise to much of the recent literature on the role of women's labor in the new "international division of labor" and the rise of the "global factory" (Deere et al.). While studies show that Latin American women between 1950 and 1980 have increased their labor force participation rates from 18% to 26% and still higher in some countries (Safa), most of this increased employment has occurred in unskilled, unstable, low-paying jobs in the informal economy or maquila industries (apparel, electronics industries) encouraged by structural adjustment policies. Most observers thus conclude that women workers suffer unduly under deteriorating working conditions and too-low salaries, and are employed only because they are cheap, passive, compliant workers, are less likely to unionize, and have greater patience for the tedious, monotonous work of assembly operations (Deere et al., p. 62).

Lim, however, takes feminist scholars to task for perpetuating overly negative images of women assemblers' experiences, and claims these pessimistic stereotypes date from the 1970s when export manufacturing programs were in their initial stages. She calls for up-to-date studies of export-manufacturing programs at a more advanced stage of development, and cautions researchers against judging Third World women's experiences by standards for women workers in developed countries, since such an implicit comparison might lead to conclusions that are irrelevant to Third World women's lives. What is needed, according to Lim, are research designs based on appropriate comparison groups.

Tiano's research partially fills this gap by comparing the employment satisfaction of a sample of women in the apparel and electronics maquilas in northern Mexico to that of women in the service sector in the same region. She debunks the notion that conditions for women in the apparel maquilas are more "squalor-, deprivation-, and exhaustion-laden" (Fernandez-Kelley). Instead, she shows that workers in apparel occupations are more likely to profess universal employment satisfaction and are less likely to quit their jobs, because they develop job coping mechanisms that allow them not only to increase productivity, but also to generate a sense of personal achievement from their work tasks. Although these satisfactions do little to transform the objective realities of the workplace, they do enable workers to meet the challenges of their work. Tiano concludes that job satisfaction has less to do with job tasks and workplace conditions and more to do with who the women are and the abilities they have acquired to cope with the demands of their work roles.

Research Design

These results point out a problem with previous studies of women assemblers in that they focus only on factory working conditions and job satisfaction and take women's lives out of cultural context, a context which for most Mexican women means home, family, and community. This research, by contrast, starts with the culture of a village in southern Mexico - San Antonio Cacalotepec, located off the old federal highway between Puebla and Atlixco - and takes a detailed longitudinal look at fifty of its families to assess the impact of the women's work on the overall quality of their lives. The assumption is that the ethnographic detail provided by six months of anthropological fieldwork in one village and elicitation/observation of life histories of several members in the same families helps us better interpret aggregate data and understand why women live their lives the way they do. The data obtained should allow comparison of the work experiences of different subsets of Mexican rural women, some of whom were employed in Puebla factories, others in the service sector, and still others in family businesses or as housewives in San Antonio. The goal was to compare the quality of life of women employed in factories with those employed elsewhere, as well as to assess the impact of factory-generated incomes of other family members on mothers' quality of life. To accomplish this goal, we tracked fifty rural families. Gladwin elicited life histories from fifty men whom she had interviewed twenty years ago and from fifty of their wives or daughters, who had not been formally interviewed twenty years ago. In addition, Thompson interviewed forty of their children, now in their twenties and thirties.

Twenty years ago when San Antonio was chosen as a field site for a study of the Plan Puebla - one of the first farming systems projects (Gladwin) - women were not considered working women. In those days, San Antonio was accessible to the colonial city of Puebla only by trudging for twenty minutes up a dusty unpaved road, alternately muddy and rocky in the rainy season, waiting another twenty minutes for a bus on the highway, and then riding for another twenty minutes into the city. It is now an easy twenty-five-minute commute to Puebla on microbuses that run every two minutes up the still dusty, unpaved road. In the interim, Puebla has become an industrial center of the Mexican textile and auto-part industries. It has had a Volkswagen plant for more than twenty years, as well as other manufacturing plants (e.g., Crolls Mexicana, which manufactures washing machines), and numerous food-processing factories producing chiclets, salchichas, etc. Its industries thus have the maturity that Lim suggests might lead to smoother employer-worker relations on the one hand, or worker adjustment to their jobs on the other.

The impact of this modernization when coupled with the increased job opportunities for women in Puebla is dramatic. Whereas twenty years ago women did not work outside the walls of their family compound, today they work in their own businesses in San Antonio or commute to Puebla to work as maids, market vendors, retailers, and employees in restaurants and factories. The kind of work women do has also changed. This is partly the result of technological change in household appliances: women use well pumps instead of manually hauling buckets of water, and they use gas stoves instead of carrying firewood. The majority go to the tortilleria, not the molino, to buy ready-made tortillas. The village as a whole is also noticeably more modern: two-story homes of brick or cement have replaced the old shacks with adobe walls; cars, trucks, and microbuses now edge burros and pedestrians off the road.

Why Quality of Life?

This approach considers women's quality of life and changes in overall satisfaction as the important variable to be explained rather than total family income or job satisfaction. Why? First, studies of intrahousehold distribution of income show that Third World women and children do not have access to all of men's income (Haddad and Hoddinott, Kennedy), so women's subjective satisfaction with life would not necessarily be affected by objective changes in total family income. Second, other studies of Latin women have pointed out that women working outside the home is not a conscious step toward female emancipation (Safa). Women do not pursue careers as good in and of themselves or even expect job satisfaction; they work to fulfill their families' economic needs. Even having their own family business does not necessarily increase women's quality of life: they often spend more hours in the family business than the men, but the business is still called Hermanos Coyotl. Third, given the incredible macro-level changes in Mexico during the past twenty years in which the peso was devalued from 12 pesos per dollar to 3,000 "old" pesos per dollar, it was easier to measure changes in quality of life than changes in real family income. Dependent variables thus became the answers to two questions: (a) "Has the quality of your life improved, worsened, or stayed the same over the last 20 years?" and (b) Elmendorf's (p. 89) question taken from Erich Fromm, "Are you now satisfied with life?" The latter elicited replies of very satisfied, a little satisfied, not very satisfied, and life is painful. In addition, a question similar to (a) asked whether earnings of women had increased, decreased, or stayed the same over the last twenty years.

Results

In this sample of fifty older women and twenty younger women, significantly more women claim that their quality of life and earnings have improved rather than stayed the same or worsened [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Similar results, for brevity not presented here, were obtained from the men in their families. These results are surprising only because the conventional wisdom in Mexico is that campesinos are one of the groups most negatively impacted by the last ten years of Mexico's structural adjustment (neo-liberal) policies and new trade openness. This raises further questions: Why are not these campesinos negatively affected? Is San Antonio the exception that proves the rule?

Descriptive statistics provide some answers; only fifteen of seventy women (21%) depend on agriculture for more than half their family's income, so most people in San Antonio are now rural residents/urban workers rather than the part-time farmers they were twenty years ago. Fifty (71.4%) women now work outside the home for an average of 34.8 out of 62.1 hours per week, and have held 2.7 different kinds of jobs. The average woman is forty years old, has 4.7 years of education and a weekly income of 224 new pesos (N$) from both her salary and contributions of husband and working children out of an average family income of N$388. As a result of this improved income situation, fifty-two women have improved their living rooms, adding either tile floors or cement walls to replace the old adobe, or large glass windows. In addition, on a scale of 1 to 9 measuring whether families owned a TV, radio, stereo, bathroom, refrigerator, well, gas stove, phone, and better furniture, the average score was 7.

Quality of life clearly is better today than twenty years ago, but how can the impact of Puebla's new factories on quality of life be measured? This was not a simple task, even though thirty-five of the seventy women interviewed reported at least one family member recently working in a factory, and we were bombarded with statements like, "Before all the women stayed at home; now almost all go to Puebla to work in factories." The problem was how to determine which women in the sample benefitted from factory work. The latter category is different from that of who now holds a factory job, given the high turnover rate and the unstable nature of factory jobs. Job change was frequent, especially among the workers in their teens and twenties. Of the seventy jobs held by this group to date, the average length of job holding was 1.8 years. As a result, we interviewed only four women presently holding a factory job; another received a pension. Are these the only women now benefitting from factory work? We think not. First, it is not unreasonable to expect recent factory work to [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] have a lagged effect on present quality of life; by this definition, ten women in our sample benefitted from factory work. Second, due to Mexican rural custom, an unmarried child of the house must turn over part - often a substantial part - of his or her salary to help pay household expenses (gastos de la casa), and many older women in San Antonio received factory incomes indirectly via husbands' and children's remittances. In this sample, twenty-eight women reported recently receiving income from a factory job, either directly from their own work or indirectly from other family members with factory jobs.

The next question was whether their quality of life was positively or negatively affected by factory income in a significant way. The graph of quality of life of women with factory income versus others (without factory income but with income from their own family businesses or service sector jobs) is inconclusive [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. To determine this, we used an ordered probit analysis on the dependent variables (a) quality of life and (b) satisfaction with life now, as OLS regression provides biased estimates of coefficients with categorical dependent variables. Independent variables were developed to represent the woman's income (her salary plus weekly remittances from her husband and single working children living at home), total family income (her earnings plus husband's and working children's salaries), and her age. In addition, dummy variables included whether she was sick, a woman household head, and a member of a religious solidarity group. The last variable is called "evangelist" but includes groups within the Catholic Church that have now formed "evangelist groups" to compete with the evangelist religions which have made significant inroads in Mexico and Central America. Simple linear scales were also developed to represent the commodities owned by the household as well as the woman's autonomy in the household, which added dummies representing whether she owned a business, had her own source of cash, lived independently of her mother-in-law, bought tortillas, worked less hours than before, and took days off with her husband.

Results in table 1 agree with the classic studies on determinants of quality of life (Campbell) in that they show that a woman's quality of life is higher the higher is her income. Holding income constant, quality of life is lower if she is sick or a woman household head. These results differ from U.S.-based studies in that total family income and a quadratic term for age, not shown here, are insignificant: a Mexican rural woman's quality of life depends on her own earnings rather than total family income, and this increases - rather than decreases and then increases - with age. We think this is because younger women in the sample expect more out of life and have more unmet ambitions than do older women. Results on the impact of religion, autonomy, and factory income, however, were mixed or insignificant but of the correct sign: the presence of factory work/income has no significant negative impact on a woman's quality of life other than its indirect positive impact through a woman's income.

Conclusion

The case study of San Antonio Cacalotepec shows that at least in some villages in southern Mexico people are now better off than they were twenty years ago, in contrast to Barkin's picture of Mexico's "distorted development." Results of a longitudinal study of this village in which fifty families were tracked over one or two generations reveal all kinds of increased economic activity. Where villagers used to be poor full- and part-time farmers, they are now rural residents working full time either in urban businesses and factories or in rural businesses of their own. As a result, over the last twenty years the majority of families have worked their way out of poverty and improved both family income and quality of life.

The kinds and location of work women do also have changed; no longer are they confined to their family compounds. This change, clearly the result of the location of new industries and assembly plants in Puebla and the proximity of the village to them, has led to more benefits for women than just material improvements. More striking (to us) were the changes in women's values, aspirations, and worldviews, and those of their children, as a result of their new work opportunities. Now, they clearly have more of a world (tiene un mundo): they have career aspirations, desires for travel and further study, attitudes different from those of their parents (e.g., machismo, free trade, birth control, women's working), and a repugnance for "the ignorance" which, they say, characterized the old San Antonio. In contrast, many older women who had never worked outside the home still felt they couldn't take messages for their menfolk, ask them their salaries, or know where they were going or with whom or when they could be expected to return, or even complain about being hit and criticized. Instead, they took solace in traditional belief systems about the power of women to be brujas (witches) and curanderas (healers). One of the unmeasureable benefits of working, according to younger men and women, was to change that mindset. As one young man said when we asked him why he wanted his future wife to work and have a career, "That way she'll not be forever imprisoned."

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Christina H. Gladwin and Carrie M. Thompson are professor and research assistant, respectively, in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida.

The authors are grateful to the people of San Antonio Cacalotepec for their hospitality and graciousness, to Carlos Jaurequi and Bob Emerson, as well as to the Fulbright research fellowship program, the North-South Center of the University of Miami, and USDA/OICD and CIMMYT for financial support of this research. The authors are responsible for any errors or omissions. Florida Agricultural Experiment Station Journal Series No. R-04290.