091

Edited by Lourdes Benería, Shelley Feldman
From book "Unequal Burden." Economic Crises, Persistent poverty and women's work" Cornell University Westview Press 1992 ISBN 0-8133-8230-0

The Mexican Debt Crisis: Restructuring the Economy e the household

In your countries those who own the banks are getting richer with our debt while we are getting poorer and poorer.
-Doña A, owner of a small vegetable stop in Mexico City, and mother of three children

The 1980s will be remembered as the decade in which the foreign debt crisis and the policies that were followed to deal with it had devastating effects on the lives of millions of people in the Third World. In many countries, after some decades of economic growth, the 1970s already represented a turning point in what had been taken to be a gradual, even if slow, path to development. The 1980s saw instead a desolated picture of negative growth and rapidly declining living conditions, raising questions about the ability of many social groups, and not exclusively the poorest, to survive under minimal subsistence standards. The structural adjustment that has accompanied the crisis has intensified the chronic problems of labor absorption by the modern sector, which cannot generate the employment necessary to provide an adequate standard of living for a large proportion of the population.
Focusing on the case of Mexico, this chapter examines the set of structural adjustment policies (SAP) that have been implemented since 1982 to deal with the debt crisis, their impact on the process of economic restructuring as well as on income distribution and living standards, and on the dynamics generated at the level of the household in order to deal with these changes.
One of the questions often posed, in Mexico and elsewhere, is how the poor survive the crisis. Given the already precarious conditions under which the poorest sectors of the population lived before the crisis erupted, how have they managed to cope with the new situation? What are their "survival strategies," or do the poor have any real choice between those strategies?' Have collective strategies to deal with daily survival emerged? How is the crisis lived within a specific household, and how does it affect different household members? Does it have a differentiated impact by gender and age? How has it affected women? What implications for action and policy do the answers to these questions suggest? These were the initial concerns behind the research done for this chapter during the summer of 1988.
The chapter has two parts. The first briefly summarizes the main aspects of Mexico's adjustment policies designed to deal with the debt crisis, with particular emphasis given to policies that have had an impact on the distribution of resources and living standards. The second part deals more specifically with the coping mechanisms that have been followed at the household level. The empirical data used for this analysis provide the basis for my main argument, namely, that the profound restructuring of the Mexican economy has been accompanied by a parallel reorganization of daily life in the area of reproductive as well as productive activities, with specific gender dimensions that make the distribution of the burden of survival among household members unequal.

DEBT AND "MODERNIZACIÓN"

The most salient facts about the Mexican debt crisis are well known: an outstanding debt of S108 billion in 1989, seven years after its severity surfaced in the summer of 1982 when the IMF and the U.S. government "rescued" Mexico from international insolvency with loans of $3.5 and 31.8 billion, respectively; the second largest debt in Latin America after Brazil; one of the heaviest long-term debt-service ratios taken as a percentage of exports; a burden of debt payments for foreign and domestic debt that, on the average, has represented close to 60 percent of the federal budget; and a declining economic performance that saw a decrease of 3.1 percent in real GNP during the 1982-1988 period and a debt/GNP ratio of over 95.
Yet Mexico is viewed by the U.S. government and the international financial community as a showcase of debt management and restructuring. It is for these reasons that it was the first country to benefit from debt reduction and renegotiation through an agreement announced in July 1989 as a result of the Brady initiative. To back up this program of debt reduction, Mexico received new loans of $3.6 and $1.5 billion from the IMF and the World Bank, respectively, during the spring of 1989. By the time the final results of negotiations were announced in February 1990, the debt had been reduced to $80 billion, the first to be completed under the Brady Plan.
This expression of support on the part of the international financial community represents the seal of approval for the very orthodox adjustment policies initiated with the August 1982 "rescue" and that continue up to the present time. These IMF-type adjustment policies also launched Mexico into a process of economic restructuring that has had a profound effect on Mexico's economic landscape. The key features in this process, typical of most SAP, can be summarized as follows:

1. A process of devaluation of the peso throughout the period, which resulted in its depreciation from 23 pesos to $1.00 in the summer of 1982 to 2,500 pesos in the summer of 1989. The price increases that followed resulted in a rapid deterioration of real wages; during the 1981-1988 period, the urban real minimum wage decreased by 46.4 percent, the largest decrease (together with Ecuador) in Latin America during that period (CEPAL 1990).
2. An austerity program that began with drastic cuts in government spending and subsidies and that decreased the amount and quality of government services to severe limits. These cuts in basic areas such as health, education, and social security resulted in unemployment among previously well-paid government employees, with its corresponding impact on other sectors. For those employed, real wages over the period fell to unprecedented low levels. Such was the case for teachers, over half a million of whom joined a wildcat strike in April of 1989 while asking for a 100-percent wage increase.
3. A process of economic restructuring that includes privatization of state-controlled firms, reduction of public investment, trade liberalization, the promotion of foreign investment, and an aggressive policy of export promotion as a means of financing the debt. This is what is often referred to in Mexico as modernización, a process very much supported by Salinas de Gortari, as current president of Mexico and as secretary of the Department of Planning and Budget (SPP) under the previous presidency of Miguel de la Madrid. Privatization has been intended to increase productivity and competitiveness through the economy as a result of the new emphasis on "rationalization" and reorganization of the public sector, the introduction and update of modern technologies in the public and private sectors, and the high priority given to the rationality of the market-all of it very much along the orthodox IMF model of SAP.

This process initiated a new period for the Mexican economy following a neoliberal model that is similar to that followed by other countries. Debt-related adjustment policies have been used to shift Mexican capitalism to a new stage of higher integration with the global economy, including the opening of doors to international trade and finance and setting the stage for Mexico's participation in the proposed North American Free Trade Association. As Rendón and Salas (1988) have argued, these changes amount to a shift from a model of accumulation based on the domestic market and import substitution to one oriented toward the international market. They also amount to a major shift in Mexico's orientation toward the United States, with a profound impact on Mexico's foreign policy.
Given that exports have increased and that Mexico has faithfully kept up with debt interest payments, together with the orthodoxy with which the IMF-style adjustment policies have been followed, Mexico is viewed as the model that other countries should follow to deal with their own debt crisis. As Martin Feldstein (1987) put it at a conference on world economic restructuring held in Mexico City in 1987, "current changes in Mexico are part of a process of economic restructuring that will modify and wake up the entire world."

THE SOCIAL COSTS OF ADJUSTMENT

As observed in other countries as well, these policies have been implemented at high costs and devastating consequences for a large proportion of the Mexican population. Rising unemployment, price increases, the reduction of services, and the reorientation of the economy away from the domestic market have resulted in a persistent deterioration of living standards, particularly for those whose living depends on wages and salaries and on casual earnings. This is what some authors have referred to as the "crushing of labor" as the relative share of GNP going to labor fell drastically over the decade. The disparity between price and salary increases had an impact on most social classes, as we will see below, although it is obvious that the poor have been the most affected, given that their very subsistence was threatened.
To illustrate, according to a study released in August 1988, a standardized basket of twenty-eight products considered absolutely indispensable for survival (Canasta Obrera Indispensable or COI) was estimated to cost 12,924 pesos per person daily, almost 5,000 pesos above the daily minimum wage. Many poor households, of course, did not even have anybody earning a minimum wage-their survival depending upon the pooling of income among different household members.
To be sure, severe problems of poverty existed in Mexico before the debt crisis erupted. The poor have traditionally included peasant and agricultural workers as well as urban households outside of the formal economy (Lustig 1987; Benería and Roldán 1987). It is well known that, despite its relatively good economic performance during the post-World War II decades, Mexico maintained a very skewed distribution of income and resources, which often resulted in welfare indicators below those of other countries with a similar per capita income. This has been the case for health, nutrition and education as well as housing (Lustig 1987).
All indications seem to suggest that the redistribution of resources generated by the debt crisis and the implementation of SAP intensified these inequalities. In particular, the diminishing proportion of income going to labor and the drastic cuts in government expenditures contributed to this trend. As the modernization process and cost reduction policies to meet international competition continued, the pressure to reduce real wages and weaken labor organizations intensified. This affected precisely a sector of the working population that previously had enjoyed relatively high wages and stable employment, namely, the stable working class and middle class, whose relative position deteriorated over the decade.
Income distribution seems to have deteriorated overall. Rudiger Dornbusch (1988), for example, has stated that "there is little doubt that distribution has worsened over the 1980s." Official statistics for 1977 show that the richest 20 percent of the population controlled 54.4 percent of the income, whereas the poorest 20 percent received only 2.9 percent; more recent private surveys suggest that the tendency has been toward higher inequality (Quick 1989). At the same time, some sectors of the business class benefited considerably from the economic changes associated with the restructuring of the economy, particularly those connected with the export sector, the internationalization of the Mexican economy, and the deregulation of economic activity. The financial sector has been one of these sectors. Thus the Mexican stock exchange, like others in many countries during the period, had been booming previous to the Wall Street crisis of October 19, 1987. Brokerage houses (casas de bolsa) reported net profits as high as 88.4 percent of capital in 1987 and an average of 53.1 percent for the 1986-1988 period (Lissakers and Zamora 1989).
For some sectors of the population, drastic reductions in living standards have been quite well documented. However, the details of this reduction are still a matter of controversy. Lustig (1987:245), for example, had argued that, regarding basic food consumption, "it is possible to say that the crisis has not resulted in problems of food availability, nor has it resulted in a clear deterioration of the average daily diet." Yet, as Lustig herself also points out, average aggregate figures can be very misleading. All indications suggest that, at least for the poor, the decrease in food consumption during the decade was drastic.
Social indicators also point toward diminishing health and educational standards as toward a deterioration of the quality of life-as suggested by an increase in the crime rate and by the dramatic deterioration of public transportation problems and pollution standards (Lustig 1987; Rohter 1989). In addition, some negative consequences of economic restructuring have been felt with particular intensity in specific areas and sectors, as illustrated by the retrenchment in steel towns affected by government divestiture and the pressure of "modernization."
It is no wonder, therefore, that many of these changes resulted in a progressively more open public discontent and generated also drastic political changes. The appearance of Cardenismo as a serious threat to the governing party in the 1988 elections is an illustration. Cardenismo responded to that discontent and to the class recomposition taking place in Mexican society and that was parallel to similar changes in other countries (Cypher 1988). The political significance of these changes as a potential shift to the left was not underestimated at the time and explains the continuous and strong U.S. interest in Mexico as an economic and political partner and as a model for handling the debt. In the next section, I illustrate in more detail the effects of SAP and their corresponding social costs at the level of the household.

A SAMPLE OF MEXICO CITY HOUSEHOLDS

The research on which the following analysis is based was carried out in Mexico City in the summer of 1988. In addition to posing the questions listed earlier in this chapter, the study responded to a concrete interest: How had some of the households that we had visited during a study of industrial homework in 1981-1982 (Beneria and Roldán 1987) survived under the severe burden of the crisis? Fieldwork began at the time when many Mexicans were still questioning the results of the presidential election in which Carlos Salinas de Gortari had been declared the winner. The political truce between government, business, and workers created by the pre-1988 election wage-and-price freeze (Pacto de Solidaridad) was starting to wear thin, and Mexicans seemed to be caught between the massive demonstrations in which Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas became the central figure/symbol of the opposition and the expectations created by the new presidential term.
The empirical analysis in the chapter is based on interviews with members of a nonrandom sample of 55 households scattered in different areas of Mexico City. Generalizations from this sample should be viewed with caution. However, the case study is illustrative of the type of responses generated by the crisis among urban households, and its findings are quite similar to those reported by other researchers in Latin America-(Moser 1989; González de la Rocha 1986). The interviews, which took place, with only two exceptions, within the homes of those interviewed, were carried out in a variety of colonias or neighborhoods. In most cases, the questions were answered by women-usually by the housewife/mother but also by others such as a grandmother, sisters, and daughters-although, in the few cases in which the husband/father was present, he often took an active role in the exchange.
The average household size in the sample was 5.72, slightly lower than that reported by studies carried out in the early 1980s (Benería and Roldan 1987). Variations by income category are reported in Table 4.1 and suggest a negative correlation between household size and income. Nuclear family households represented the large majority in the sample, with only 12.7 classified as extended families, and 14.5 percent headed by women. Average biweekly income was 338,712 Mexican pesos or about US$147. As expected, practically all households had more than one income earner-the average being 2.3-and 50.3 percent of those working for an income did so in some form or other in the informal sector.
Table 4.1 includes a breakdown of households categories that were estimated to represent: (1) extreme poverty, (2) subsistence, (3) poor but with basic needs covered, (4) lower middle-class range, and (5) middle-class standards. The majority of households in the sample were poor, with the largest proportion classified within the ranges of extreme poverty or bare subsistence levels. A similar picture emerges from data on housing: The great majority of the households were living in very poor housing, with the largest proportion (46.3 percent) living in dwellings with tin roofs and tenements under very precarious conditions, 24.1 percent in "poor but adequate" dwellings, and the rest (close to 30 percent) in apartments and residential homes.
Similarly, Table 4.2 presents a breakdown of consumption indicators by income categories, which shows that the possession of telephone and car was the most visible sign of a middle-class standard. On the other hand, a high proportion of poor households owned radio and TV sets, even though, as will be seen below, the crisis had made many of them useless for lack of repair.

HOW HOUSEHOLDS COPE

The effects of the crisis were felt strongly by all households included in the sample, although there were differences across income levels. "Great difficulties" in making ends meet were reported by the great majority (over 80 percent) of the poor and lower middle class and by almost 50 percent of the middle-class households, with drastic adjustments made in their budgets and consumption habits. Even those that did not fall in this category reported that they had "some difficulties" and had made "important adjustments" in their daily expenses. Unemployment, housing, and debt were also among the problems causing great difficulties, even though the proportion of households mentioning them were significantly lower. On the other hand, unemployment and debt were reported by households in all income categories as having caused "some difficulties"-the proportion ranging between 17 and 20 percent for unemployment and between 33 and 62 percent for debt. Belt-tightening, therefore, has been felt deeply across households in different socioeconomic categories.
Interestingly enough, very few households complained about the availability of food or other basic goods. Only in a few cases there was mention of occasional difficulties finding some products in the market. During the time of fieldwork, long and tense lines developed in some colonias in front of shops that distributed government-subsidized food (Canasta Básica) at lower prices. However, the same products for which women stood in line were readily available, often in the same shop, although at higher prices. The "great difficulties" mentioned in many households therefore were not caused by food scarcity or deficiency in distribution but by insufficient income to buy iy. The problems implied were clearly summarized by a 23-year-old energetic mother: "When our income can't pay for what I need to buy every day, I feel desperate and I ask myself whether we can survive this situation." As the mother of four children and housewife of a household classified under "extreme poverty," the situation she was referring to actually meant that there were no chairs in the house for the interviewers to sit, the children did not wear shoes, the roof leaked, the floor was not paved, the inside walls were extremely dirty by any standard, the house had only three small rooms (kitchen, dining room, and a bedroom) while some extra space, with very poor conditions, was rented to another large family for very little money. Job insecurity for the father and only occasional paid work for the mother were a constant source of anxiety and even despair. Yet, despair was not exclusive to extremely poor households. Tension and anguish about making ends meet was found among better-off households as well. In all cases, the depth of the crisis was felt in a way that escaped statistics and analytical quantification.
What kind of adjustments have been made to deal with this situation? One of the overwhelming impressions during fieldwork came from the observation that, in the absence of a welfare state and of collective efforts in daily survival at the neighborhood and community level, it was at the level of the household where the fierce struggle was centered. The majority of households were surviving, even if at a very high cost. In our sample there were, in fact, two types of families. A small proportion (just over 5 percent of the total) were practically disintegrating under what seemed to be insurmountable problems: unemployment, inability to generate the income necessary for bare survival, domestic violence, housing deficiencies, absence of any community support, abandonment, and so on. These were cases often associated with a drunken husband, prostitution, drugs, or some other forms of criminal behavior; the economic crisis is likely to have intensified rather than created these problems.
The large majority of households, however, had reorganized their lives to cope with the problems brought about by the crisis and were succeeding in various degrees. In what follows, the different coping mechanisms observed are classified under three basic categories: labor market adjustments, budget changes, and restructuring of daily life.

Labor Market Adjustments

A common response to the crisis was the increase in the number of household members participating in the labor market in order to contribute to family income. Two groups in our sample were the most affected by this response. One was the population of teenagers who had to discontinue their education in order to earn an income, particularly by not moving to higher levels of schooling or by reducing it to evening classes. This was found to be common among teenagers finishing secondary education in public schools. Given the duration of the crisis, interruptions in schooling are likely to be permanent, therefore leaving a lasting negative impact on the educational and skill levels of the population.
Women constitute the second group affected; their initially lower involvement in the labor pool on which the household can rely at a time of crisis. Although increased participation in paid activities was typically observed among women without children, mothers with male partners were the last family members to engage in paid work and have remained at home to a relatively high degree (34 percent in our sample)." Still, the large majority, that is, 66 percent of the mothers with a male partner in the sample, earned same income, two-thirds of them working in the informal sector either continuously or sporadically and under the poor working conditions associated with this sector. The other third had jobs in the formal sector, but this was confined particularly to middle-class women.
The importance of the informal sector for women's earnings was therefore obvious and due to at least two reasons. First, it was difficult for poor women to find employment with any degree of job security. Second, women tended to prefer work that can be done either in the home (as in the case of industrial homework) or in the surrounding community in order to better integrate it with reproductive activities. This preference, however, was highly determined by the lack of alternatives to deal with child care and domestic work because it confined their ability to earn an income to these activities.
The increase in women's participation in paid work as a result of the crisis in Mexico and elsewhere has also been pointed out by other studies, which have also underlined the corresponding reduction of time dedicated to domestic activities and leisure and the intensification of their work (Oliveira 1988; Moser 1989; Safa and Antrobus, this volume; Pérez-Alemán, this volume; and Tripp, this volume). That this increase was found to be smaller, at least in the Mexican case, among mothers with a husband or a male partner is not surprising. There seemed to be three main reasons for this. One was the prevalent division of labor that assigned to the mother the primary task of child care and domestic work, that is, the main responsibility for reproductive activities. This division of labor, with the notion that the mother should stay at home, particularly if children are small, is still deeply ingrained in the Mexican family and reinforced by the lack of day-care facilities. Related to this was the still rather prevalent opposition of the husband or male companion to the mother's paid work. This explains, for example, the case of some women who, despite serious financial difficulties and their desire to earn an income, were not in the paid labor force because the husband "would be humiliated" or "would not let her work outside of the home. Finally, women tend to be the least schooled family members, a fact that makes them less able to find formal employment requiring even a minimum of literacy skills.
A different labor-market strategy was found among those who worked overtime or had more than one job. This normally involved the more "established" workers in the formal sector as, for example, nurses and carpenters and other construction workers. For unskilled workers, the precariousness of employment conditions made it difficult to find extra work in the formal market. On the other hand, some skilled workers had become self-employed; given the possibility to increase prices for their services, they were among those who could cope best with the crisis.
A clear conclusion to be drawn from this information is that, despite the effort at increasing the participation of diverse family members in paid production, there remained a good proportion of untapped labor that was underemployed or working at the margins, including men and women of all ages that could not find a full-time job and others looking for better job opportunities and working conditions. One of the consequences of the crisis has been that the absorption by the informal sector of this labor reserve has taken place under increasingly deteriorating conditions (Roberts, forthcoming). In addition, the debt crisis intensified the problem of labor absorption, thereby further facilitating the process of labor flexibilization, a very important component in Mexico's modernization.

Budget Changes

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the austerity programs altered the budgets of practically all Mexican households. Budget adjustments gradually turned drastic for a large proportion of the population. In our sample, 69.4 percent of the households regularly bought less food, clothing, shoes, and other daily expenses such as transportation, drinks, and snacks than during the pre-1982 period. What exactly had been cut, however, varied according to household income and class background. Thus, although practically all households had curtailed meat consumption, poor families had eliminated it altogether from their diet. Similarly, the poor had completely eliminated other products, such as canned foods and a rather large number of fruits and basic foods, such as milk, unless they were subsidized. Most poor households were no longer buying new clothes and shoes nor could they afford to replace any household equipment that, in some cases, had been sold for cash.
Middle-class families had a thicker cushion to start with. Their budget cuts concentrated primarily on nonessential goods such as olives and wines, photography related expenses, gifts, domestic service, clothing, trips, particularly trips abroad, and parties. For many, this appeared as a shift down the social ladder that for some households was a source of great anxiety.
For households under extreme poverty or at subsistence levels, the pressure to concentrate on the most urgent needs implied a continuous neglect of other expenses such as home upkeep. Unpainted walls, unpaved floors, leaking roofs, and broken tables and chairs were a common sight not just in the poorest homes but in others that had regularly taken care of these tasks. We found several homes with a variety of broken household items (refrigerators, TV sets, washing machines, radios, mixers) that could not be used because repairs were not affordable. As one mother with five school-age children put it, "our priority is to buy the minimum of school supplies that we can afford and to postpone repairs." This implies that the infrastructure of households was deteriorating, leading to an underestimation of the negative impact of the crisis. Likewise, some households had sold their consumer durables and had recurred to indebtedness as the only means to obtain urgently needed cash.

Our data also suggest that the crisis has had an effect on fertility rates; 46.7 percent of the families in the sample had decided either to stop or to postpone having children during the 1982-1988 period. Perhaps as a result, and in comparison with the fieldwork carried out in 1981-1982, women were much more open to talk about birth control and family planning. Although it is difficult to sort out the effects of the crisis in this respect from those resulting from longer-term fertility trends, its connection with the economic crisis was often pointed out. Among poor women, the most common form of birth control was the operación or tying of the tubes, often performed under stress after a birth and, in same cases, without consultation with the husband or male companion.

The Restructuring of Daily life

Budget adjustments had generated many changes in the way households organized themselves and lived their daily lives. The following changes were typical among these readjustments.
Changes in Purchasing Habits. Close to 73 percent of the households in our sample stated that they were shopping in cheaper markets, most of them regularly. For poor families, this often meant buying daily supplies from street vendors whose products tend to be of lower quality than those in regular shops. The tightness of budgets and the difficulties of storing food-such as with cases of unrepaired refrigerators-also reinforced this tendency; in such cases only small quantities can be bought at a time, therefore making shopping a daily chore, with the corresponding intensification of time spent on this aspect of domestic work. Among households that could afford weekly shopping, trips to the large central market were common in order to obtain better food at lower prices. Given the size of Mexico City, these trips could be done only with a car or by organizing several family members to help with the shopping, usually on Saturdays; the latter required a planning effort that only a few households could manage.
For middle-class families, the search for lower prices often meant shopping in markets away from their neighborhoods. In some cases, it also meant the coordination of shopping with other family members, including the use of extended family networks. A young middle-class woman who had married in 1985 explained, "my aunts know where the bargains are; I see them and my mother more than I ever did." In any case, the greater availability of private transportation, and also of cash, for middle-class families made it more possible for them to benefit from shopping in large quantities and in the less expensive markets outside of their communities.
Intensification of Domestic Work. The crisis had resulted in an increase in the number and often length of activities that make up domestic work- from daily shopping due to more restrictive budgets, to the need for increased cleaning and tidying when spaces are reduced, to more cooking, fixing, mending, and sewing at home. Although all family members participate in these tasks, a large proportion of this work fell upon women, regardless of whether they were also working in the labor market or not. Thus, in 68.8 percent of the households in which the crisis had generated changes in domestic work, it wes perceived that women's work had increased. For some middle-class housewives, this was accompanied by a reduction in domestic help, with the subsequent perception of isolation, loss of social status, and downward social mobility. The intensification of work for women was therefore a significant factor in their daily life, an aspect still in need of quantification.
For working daughters, the pressure to participate in domestic work had contributed to what seemed to be a rising consciousness regarding a gender-based asymmetry in the division of labor, thus creating new tensions between them and, in particular, their brothers. Thus, in 53.1 percent of the households in which the crisis had generated changes in domestic work, it was felt that daughters had to help more. Older daughters in particular felt this burden most intensely; even when they held a full time job, they were expected to take a great deal of responsibility in the home-responsibility not expected from their older brothers or fathers. In comparison with their mothers, the daughters' higher level of skill made them more likely candidates for the labor market and raised expectations regarding their contribution to household income ("they expect that I can solve all their problems"). This "oldest daughter syndrome" resulted in a few bitter complaints by some daughters, leading to "defensive" strategies on their part, such as an early marriage or threats of migration.

In the case of households headed by women, the burden on the mother (or grandmother) depended on the age and composition of other family members: Although the burden could be heavy if children were smell, it was alleviated when they, and particularly daughters, were old enough to contribute some income and share responsibilities. The absence of an adult male income in any case explains why all women who headed a household in our sample were engaged in paid work; the choice between work at home and work in the market was even less possible in their case.
Changes in Social Life. A different type of adjustment resulted from the need to save on transportation and other daily expenses. Thus, almost 51 percent of the households in our sample had decreased or eliminated trips to visit relatives and friends and attendance at family parties and religious holidays. This applied to intracity visits as well as to traditional annual or semiannual trips to other parts of Mexico, such as for those associated with Christmas and other religious holidays, vacations, and other family gatherings. Recent immigrants to Mexico City complained bitterly of their inability to return to their hometowns "as they were used to before the crisis." Others pointed out that, as new immigrants to Mexico City, they had not been able to fulfill the promises of remittances to their aging parents and other family members. For some sectors of the middle class, the curtailment of travel abroad as an important reduction in their expenses represented a drastic change in their living standards and also a source of bitter complaints.
Social life had also been affected by the reduction or elimination of expenses associated with parties and other social activities. The traditional and important "fiesta" organized for the fifteenth birthday of daughters in Mexico could no longer be afforded by many families. In one neighborhood, at least one of the churches had begun to organize parties to honor several 15-year-olds at the same time. This was, in fact, one of the few coping mechanisms encountered that represented a semicollective form of dealing with the crisis. Finally, the need to reduce expenses had changed the way different household members organized leisure time. For example, some parents of teenagers pointed out that, on Sundays, they no longer went anywhere outside of their neighborhood ("weekend movies have been cut to a minimum") and preferred to let their children go out.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF SURVIVAL
AND THE FAMILY

During the time of our fieldwork, the Mexico City daily El Excelsior published an article emphasizing the role of the Mexican family as the main pillar in the effort dealing with the crisis. Our study confirms this thesis. The 'culture of ingenuity" around which daily life was being organized for daily survival was indeed centered in the family. There had been a major gathering of forces at the household level together with a privatization of the struggle; in the absence of a welfare state and in the face of decreasing governmental services and subsidies, the family had become the only source of support and of alternatives for survival. Its role in this respect is best understood as being facilitated by the traditionally close Mexican family ties; although it may have parallels in other Latin American countries, it should not be generalized to other culturally specific contexts.
An initial question in our research was to investigate the extent to which some collective efforts had been developed, as had been the case with Peru's comedores populares, or soup kitchen, and with the olla común, or common pot, in Bolivia and Chile (Sara-Lafosse 1986; Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987). Despite the fact that much collective organizing at other levels had developed in Mexico City and elsewhere, the virtual absence of such efforts at the level of daily life provided a sharp contrast. The private household, therefore, had been left facing the crisis alone, with some help received only from the extended family. However, given the nuclear character of the urban household in Mexico City, this help was found to be minimal-the most common in our sample being the grandmother's help in domestic work and child care so as to allow the mother to participate in paid work.
To be sure, this predominantly private struggle for survival was devastating for the households that were disintegrating. However, for the large majority, the gathering of forces and pooling of resources represented a heroic effort, described by some of our interviewees as resulting from greater family unity ("we are more united now because we can't risk fighting among ourselves") and ability to plan ("we have to plan everything and our level of communication has increased"). No family member could evade this effort, particularly in poor households. This is not to say that tensions did not develop within the family but that a conscious effort was made to avoid them in order to deal with the most pressing issues.
Tensions in fact did develop because this unity and resourcefulness came at a cost and the burden of survival was distributed unequally. First, the continuous struggle of each household seemed to be accompanied by mistrust and hostility toward outsiders. Thus, interviewees often complained about the behavior of their neighbors and community members ("They stole chickens from our backyard" or "we cannot rely on them for help"). A question inquiring about the extent to which the neighborhood organized around common needs often was met with a smile and a sarcastic comment about the absence of such an effort. Likewise, feelings of frustration were often expressed as aggression toward outsiders ("when I am upset, I don't want to take it out on my sister, so I push people when I get on the bus").
Second, tensions resulted from the unequal distribution of the burden of survival among family members. Although all household members had to mobilize their effort as a result of the crisis, women had been particularly affected due to their increased participation in the labor market and the intensification of domestic work. As shown above, this had affected women of all ages and had made gender asymmetries within the household more visible.
In addition, the crisis did not visibly change previous inequalities in income pooling and intrahousehold distribution of resources; although this was not the focus of our research, we found no clear change in previous patterns by which women's income is totally used for household expenses while men's is pooled only partially (Beneria and Roldán 1987). As in the earlier study, many women received an allowance from their husbands or male companions, often without knowing the men's total earnings. When the allowance was viewed as very small, or when it was sporadic and uncertain, it tended to be a source of bitterness and complaints. In households at the verge of collapse, the burden on the mother tended to be overwhelming; the usual problems of survival in these cases were intensified by the tensions generated by domestic violence, inability to meet the family's needs, and the awareness of sinking into a world of despair.
In sum, the crisis intensified the contradictory forces within the family. On the one hand, it was the only source of protection for all members; there was nowhere else to turn. The family was essential for survival, even for fun and social activity, for warmth, love, and protection. The degree to which these functions have been exercised in the midst of such difficulties is indeed moving. The household represents the locus of this survival-realized through the interdependency of its members. On the other hand, this should not be perceived as a romanticization of the family; the effort takes place within the context of a "forced" unity, a patriarchal family structure and other existing tensions, which are intensified by the sheer weight of the struggle as well as from its unequal distribution among family members. As the young married woman who reported seeing her mother and aunts more often as a result of the crisis put it, this family unity resulted out of need rather than out of choice (por necesidad más que por gusto). Likewise, this should not be understood as an "inevitable mechanical solidarity between members of poor families" (Wolf 1990). Our sample suggests that, first, family ties are being used by households across income categories and, second, solidarity is different from the mutual dependency among household members; it is the latter that gets intensified at a time of crisis. This dependency might best be represented by a model that includes ties of love and solidarity as well as bargaining, tensions, and conflicts among family members. The fact that the family might turn inward and behave aggressively toward outsiders underlines the negative aspects of the family, as emphasized by Barrett and McIotosh (1982) in The Anti-Social Family. However, the picture emerging from this family dynamics is best captured by a view of the family as contradictory and paradoxical.
Some family tensions generated by the crisis might be at the root of future changes. For example, the pooling of work and income and, in particular, the responsibilities taken on by women might undermine some patriarchal privileges. As expressed by a man whose relative contribution to household income had been declining while that of his daughters and son increased, these changes might result in his loss of authority ("they no longer pay attention to me") and be at the root of bitter and unsuccessful complaints. The outcome of those tensions will depend on a variety of factors, including the length of the crisis.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS:
ADJUSTMENT, POLICIES, AND
TRANSFORMATIVE STRATEGIES

This chapter shows that the profound restructuring of the Mexican economy resulting from the debt crisis and subsequent SAP also forced the restructuring of daily life. The privatization of the economy has a parallel in the privatization of survival, which in Mexico City centered around the (mostly nuclear) household. Although the cycle of social (and class) reproduction was indeed shattered, most families have survived the crisis through a heroic effort in which all members have participated through new combinations of work for self-consumption and work for income. This increased the involvement of different household members in market work, but it also intensified work in reproductive activities, often resulting in an unequal distribution of the burden within the household. The irony of these "strategies" is that they made possible the continuation of adjustment policies imposed at enormous social costs.
Perhaps the most painful legacy of the past decade is that no alternatives to the IMF-type policies of adjustment have emerged. The Brady Plan of debt forgiveness and renegotiation might alleviate the debt burden of a handful of countries but is unlikely to change it significantly and to shift their development prospects. Even if Mexico can overcome the most severe consequences of SAP and embark on a new path of economic growth, the deterioration of living standards of the 1980s will not disappear easily while new SAP packages are being adopted in other countries. To be sure, a series of alternative proposals have emerged that suggest other adjustment paths aimed at overcoming the shortcomings of the orthodox model (ECA 1989; ECLA 1990). Some of them include a gender dimension as an integral part of the policies suggested (Commonwealth Secretariat 1990). How these general recommendations will be translated into concrete policies and changes signaling the beginning of a truly democratic and equitable development model remains the big challenge of the 1990s.
In the meantime, what actions can be recommended at the level of daily survival? What kind of "transformative strategies" (Elson, this volume) are likely to help in the fierce struggle under way for a large proportion of the population? A variety of actions have emerged from different countries and others could be recommended for the short run. The following are given as illustrations:

1. The implementation of national policies to counterbalance some of the most urgent problems generated by SAR The Ecuadorian government, for example, has initiated a program to set up open markets, collective kitchens, and neighborhood stores that would provide goods at relatively lower prices, thereby alleviating problems created by inflation (Lind 1990). Such a program could build on the various efforts that have already been initiated at the local level.

2. The setting up of policies to redistribute productive resources, such as expansion of credit programs of medium and small firms, creation of cooperatives, and self-help programs for peasants and small farms. Many of these policies can easily include a gender dimension specifically dealing with women.

3. A new set of tax policies to redistribute the burden of adjustment as part of a progressive tax reform.

4. An intensification of actions taken by political parties, unions, and other appropriate institutions that will exercise pressure toward establishing mechanisms to provide social services, such as child care, nutrition programs, health clinics, and training programs for different groups of workers.

5. The fostering of traditional self-help institutions and support mechanisms that, particularly in urban areas, might have been weakened by modernization, such as extended family networks and relations of compadrazgo (parent-godparent ties) that extend beyond the nuclear family.

6. The fostering of women's networks, many of which have begun or intensified their efforts to deal with crisis-related programs at the local and national levels.

Measures such as these will tend to alleviate the symptoms rather than deal with the roots of the debt problem. In the long run, they will only succeed if current trends in the flow of resources from the debtor to the creditor countries are reversed.

NOTES

This chapter has benefited from the work of a variety of people. I thank M. A. Díaz González for her research assistance and A. Bottum, E. Harber, and A. Lind for their help with computer work. My special thanks for W. Goldsmith, O. Hernández, and P. Olpadwala for their comments on the original draft.

1. As has been pointed out by other authors, the word "strategy" implies the possibility of choosing among alternatives. Yet, choices are very much reduced by the extreme scarcity of resources and precarious living conditions. In such cases, the expression "survival strategies" is therefore not very appropriate.

2. For more detail on these policies, see Benería 1991.

3. By 1982, this share represented 36 percent of GNP, down from 40 percent in 1987, and it declined further throughout the decade (Edel and Edel 1989).

4. The basket of 28 products was selected from a larger basket of 118 products or Canasta Obrera Básica (COB) considered to be basic for an adequate working class standard of living (Uno Más Uno, August 8, 1988).

5. The proportion of total income going to wages and salaries diminished from 42 percent in 1982 to less than 30 percent in 1987 (Lustig 1988).

6. Such is the case with the cities of Monterrey and Monclova in the northeast, which were rapidly affected negatively by the government's policies toward the steel industry, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs, with their corresponding negative impact on the cities' economy.

7. Close to 50 percent of households were derived from an original list of 140 on which the 1981-1982 study had been based. This nonrandom sample included the first 27 households that were found living in the same address as in the first study. The rest were arrived at through a snowballing technique that included middle-class households for comparative purposes.

8. They concentrated in the following colonias: Palmitas, San Rafael, San Andrés de Atoto, Lázaro Cardenas, El Molinito, Moctezuma, Oriente, Candido Aguilar, Narvarte, Coyoacán, and Portales.

9. The tension was due to the fact that shops often run out of the subsidized product and those in line (overwhelmingly women) were fighting to be as close as possible to the head of the line.

14. By collective efforts I refer to community- and neighborhood-based strategies of dealing with the crisis, such as collective kitchens, which require an important organizing effort beyond the nuclear household.

11. This is a conclusion arrived at also by other observers (conversation with J. A. Alonso).

12. Some families survived literally with a few basic staples, namely, rice and beans, oil, tortillas, chiles, milk, and some inexpensive fruits. During fieldwork, we encountered anxious housewives worrying about how they would pay for the beans and rice that they needed for the day.

13. In her study of the effect of the crisis on households in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Moser makes a similar point and adds that this has a specific negative effect on the education of girls, given that they have less time to do homework than their brothers "causing them to fall in school and this in turn may affect their future educational potential" (Moser 1989:15).

14. One example is provided by the many groups that over the decade organized around housing and tenants' rights at the city level (symbolized by the popular figure of Superbarrio, who by 1988 had become a national figure). Similarly, other forms of organizing developed around food distribution and urban services issues at the community and neighborhood level (Ramirez 1986). Political mobilization intensified around issues connected with the crisis. Municipal election campaigns, for example, have been used to organize around basic needs and democratic rights. However, most of these efforts have been carried out at the political level, such as through political parties and numerous women's organizations, not at the level of daily life around the household, as has often been the case in other collective efforts in Latin America. During the past few years, however, many efforts have emerged, particularly among women's organizations, to organize collective projects around basic needs issues. I

15. Feminist analyses have criticized the concept of the household as a harmonious unit and have emphasized the need to focus on unequal gender relations and asymmetries within it (Beneria and Roldan 1987; Folbre 1988; Wolf 1990). However, much remains to be done to conceptualize the complexities of the contradictory nature of the family that is emphasized here. Amartya Sen´s theoretical insights into "cooperative conflicts" provide one of the most appropriate and useful models for capturing bargaining processes within the household (Sen 1990).

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