A Tale of Two Fondas: Scrambling Gender in Tepoztlán in “the Decade of the New Economy”

Abstract

New forests of fast and slow food chains manifest the mammoth technological, stylistic, and labor process changes that have transformed Mexico's food services industry. Restructuring evidences Mexico's aggressive implementation of a world market-led development model that transferred control of a sector historically dominated by micro and small local enterprises to national and international conglomerates. Yet, far from being gobbled up, contriving to insert their operations into Mexico's functionally overlapping formal, quasi-formal, and informal economies, ¹ survivalists created a shadow economy food industry (Fernández-Kelly and Shefner 2006). Well-documented is that gender—the ways a culture[s] conceptualizes, regulates, and challenges sexual differences and identities—is organizationally central to each economic system. Evident as well is that systems shifts are contexts for “gender scrambling”: specific reversals of “workplace and organizational arrangements” (Adkins 2001:673). This anthropology of work explores this syndrome as transactions in the food sector of the municipal market of the community of Tepoztlán. The ethnographic present is 1990 to 2000, the period Mexicans (increasingly ironically) call “the Decade of the New Economy.” ² First, I describe the economic setting and profile the labor and consumer population. Then, moving into the market, I explore scrambling as it is discursively playing out in two small cafes, one male operated, the other a female enterprise. The final section relates the case study to the development establishment's current magic bullet of microfinance.

Keywords:

• Shadow economy
• Labor feminization
• Designer delicacies

Notes

Notes

1. Economists define employment as the exchange of labor for cash or kind. Work in the formal economy is regulated by the state and workers receive some benefits. However, in neoliberal Mexico, even in such highly organized professions as teaching, many legal benefits as well as minimum salaries have been either sharply reduced or revoked: hence the concept “quasi formal.” Work in the informal economy is unregulated and includes self-employment. Many studies demonstrate that whether directly or indirectly, in Free Market capitalism ultimately all economic processes encompass all ways of gaining and sustaining a livelihood. Consequently, recent studies replace the idea of informality with the concept of a “shadow economy” which exists as a product of the operations of the formal economy. Ahead, I use the terms “production” and “consumption” economies. Production is the use of resources to make goods and services that have value. The consumption economy is the sector in which consumers spend for survival or enjoyment.

2. I carried out fieldwork in Tepoztlán at various times from 1993 to 2006. I conducted many surveys, interviewed numerous Tepoztecans and others, and did extensive library research. On request, I will be glad to email the complete data sets, and sources, that back the empirical information in this paper. The labor profile is extracted from a detailed comparison of the 1990 and 2000 censuses as well as ethnographic observations and participation in the local economy, including various phases of the food services industry. I will be happy to email this detailed information to any reader wishing to receive it.

3. In their iconic monographs of Tepoztlán, Robert Redfield (1930[1972])and Oscar Lewis (1951) were the first anthropologists to explore the economic importance of Mexican women of the countryside. Tepoztlán has continued to be studied continuously.

4. Neoliberal structural adjustment policies frame the reorganization of Mexico's economy in general and the food industry in particular. While successful in its own top-down terms, the export industry was unable to stimulate domestic prosperity. Far from solving Mexico's chronic problems of the inability to create sufficient family wage-level jobs and one of the most world's most unequal distributions of income, the proportion of the employed population below the poverty line exploded and wealth and access to productive resources became increasingly concentrated. Policies directly influencing the food industry include the removal of subsidies and trading protections for domestic industries; deregulation of direct foreign investment and national financial institutions; privatization of state owned industries and social institutions; laws and practices diminishing small agriculture and small commerce; the removal of labor force wage and social benefit protections; the fact that most employment is in the consumer services sector; and the opening of labor and product markets to new demographic classes. Middlebrook and Zepeda (2003) is a superb source for understanding the development of the current Mexican economy.

5. Constitutionally, Tepoztlán is organized as a pluralistic or collective entity. Though developed land is treated as private property, legally, plots cannot be alienated from the control of the corporate municipality. The political turbulence, known as the “No to the Golf Club” movement, began in 1994 and extended through 1997. Tepoztecans united to block the construction of a multimillion-dollar tourism and commercial facility intended to be located on communal land. Led by the state governor, the ruling party, the PRI, militantly backed a group of investors that included many of Mexico's most powerful men. It was a very dangerous time during which the municipality was literally in a defensive state of siege.

6. Flexible labor is labor that is unprotected by government regulations and union contracts.

7. While all names are fictive, everyone mentioned agreed to be included in publications at the time of the interviews upon which personal information is based.