The Sociodemographic Effects of the Crisis in...

The Sociodemographic Effects of the Crisis in Mexico

Chapter Eight:
Crisis and Change in a Regional City:
The Case of Oaxaca, Mexico[1]

Arthur D. Murphy[2], Mary Winter, Earl W. Morris, Martha W. Rees

Introduction

For three decades after the end of World War II, Mexico experienced one of the longest and strongest periods of sustained economic growth known in the world. The nation moved from a rural country in which most of its citizens worked the land to an urban industrial society boasting a significant industrial capacity. Much of that industrial growth during the late 1960s and 1970s was made possible by Mexico's increasing oil reserves.

With the discovery of large oil deposits off the coast of Campeche, international banks, large and small eagerly lent money to Mexico; loans secured by the rising price of oil and the power of OPEC to control production. The money was used to finance the development of the oil industry, but also to assure political stability through the expansion of employment opportunities in the public sector to the middle class, as well as to fund social welfare, and furnish basic food subsidies to all Mexicans. These investments, whose consequences have been discussed in Chapter One, made it possible for Mexican industry to maintain wages at approximately one tenth of those north of the Rio Grande, as well as to keep political peace by substituting economic and social welfare for political participation among the middle class.

Through the early 1970s Mexico was promoted as the example for all developing countries to follow. Mexico was seen as a stable democracy which provided opportunities for industry and basic necessities for its citizens. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI ) might be the only party, but its ability to co-opt its opposition, even and especially after the 1968 student uprisings, gave it the appearance of an open party with local support and lent credence to the frequent claim that it was the natural governing party of Mexico.

In September of 1976, President Luis Echeverría announced the first devaluation of the Mexican peso since World War II. Through most of his administration Echeverría continued the economic policies of Miguel Alemán and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz of resisting any devaluation of the peso. By 1976 however, the peso was so overvalued, and capital flight had become such a problem that a devaluation could no longer be avoided, and the peso was "left to find its own level" which only the churlish could define as a devaluation despite the fact that it quickly halved in value in relation to the U.S. dollar. However with extensive oil reserves, information on which was slowly being circulated among the political class and the international elites, no one, not even the international banks, was worried. Then in the summer 1982, Mexico announced it would not make the interest payment on its foreign debt and the peso suffered another slide. However, the price of oil was still rising and the international banks were willing to help roll over the debt on the assumption that Mexico's oil would increase in value. In the fall of 1982 the price of oil suffered a slight fall, and capital flight ensued, and the peso wavered again. The outgoing president, José Lopez Portillo promised to defend it "like a dog", but its value declined again. The resulting tale is well known. The banks were nationalized, Mexico's finances failed to stabilize and the new president, Miguel de la Madrid took office at a dangerous time. For the first time in three decades Mexico suffered negative economic growth. Factories closed, inflation rose to an annual rate of over 150% and workers began wondering how they would feed their families. Mexicans in the past had felt that, if employment was scarce in the city, and if costs were rising untenably, they could always move back to their home village. But by 1982, this solution was no longer viable because people had been gone so long they had few ties and no economic base left in the village.

In an attempt to get control of the situation, the de la Madrid administration instituted an orthodox stabilization program. It worked for a while, but by 1986 aggregate economic growth had fallen back to zero, and the combination of severe inflationary pressures, a precipitous drop in the price of oil, and renewed capital flight obliged the administration to seek a wholly new policy, that of opening up the economy to foreign competition, by joining the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and mobilizing a consensus among labor, capital and the public sector on public finances and private investment.

Other chapters in this book discuss the effects of the crisis: changes in the labor force, the structure of production, the economy of the household, and the changes in the economic class structure. This chapter examines a concrete case study of the city of Oaxaca, for which we have excellent time series data, and whose description will serve to show how the crisis affected this secondary city of Mexico. In a sense this chapter is an extension of the arguments advanced in our book on social inequality and change, which lays down the basis for the present discussion. (Murphy and Stepick 1991b).

Urban Research in Mexico

A good deal of research by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists has focused on the effects of the crisis on the larger cities of Mexico (Bolís 1987; Cortés and Rubalcava 1991; González de la Rocha and Escobar 1991; Schteingart 1989; Villarreal and Castañeda 1986). In addition, much has been written on the border region between Mexico and the United States and the maquiladora industry that has grown up there as Mexico tries to create new jobs for its growing population by allowing multinational corporations to take advantage of the disparity between wages in Mexico and the price for finished products in the United States (Acevedo 1990, Nolasco 1989, Canclini et al. 1989). But the effects of the crisis on the moderately sized interior cities of Mexico has not received a great deal of attention. Prior to the 1970s, Mexico's secondary cities had not suffered from the more dramatic problems of traffic congestion and pollution found in the nation's largest centers. However, since 1970 their rate of growth has been higher than Mexico City. For example, in the decade of the 1970s the nine intermediate cities studied by Selby, Murphy and Lorenzen (1990)[3] had a global population increase of 80%, compared to 75% for Mexico City and 40% for Mexico as a whole. The difference in growth rates continued during the 1980s although not as dramatically (Figure 1). As a result many of these cities are just now experiencing the effects of population growth without economic growth or investment in urban infrastructure.



While the general outline of self-defense strategies described by Selby, Murphy and Lorenzen for Mexican urban households at the peak of the Mexican boom hold, new twists have arisen as households continue to adapt to the effects of the economic crisis.

The Data

The data for this paper have been collected over years by collaborative ethnographic and survey research done by social anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, home economists, political scientists, sociologists and just about any other discipline you wish to mention[4]. This paper draws on published work from those studies as well as specific survey and ethnographic data gathered by Murphy, Morris and Winter in 1977, 1987 and 1992 (Morris et al. 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1990). In 1977 Murphy, in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional del Desarrollo de la Comunidad y la Vivienda Popular (INDECO) carried out a survey of 1500 households in Oaxaca City (Murphy 1979 and 1987, Murphy and Stepick 1991a and b). The survey was based on a two stage quota sample designed to gather data on every kind of neighborhood in the area. The 1997 study was the pilot for a larger national study that eventually resulted in what is perhaps the most comprehensive study of household strategies in Mexico (Selby et al. 1990, 1994).

The 1987 study was based on two data sets. The first is a two stage cluster sample of the city of Oaxaca. The first stage consisted of a random sample of the blocks within each of the 54 fiscal sectors of the city as defined by the state agency charged with setting property taxes. The second stage was a systematic sample of the approximately 3600 households living on the blocks selected. In 609 households an interview was conducted with the female head (or co-head) of household. Where possible an independent interview was conducted with the husband of the married females. A total of 404 male heads of household were interviewed. The survey data were gathered over a six-month period, beginning in January of 1987 and ending in June of the same year.[5]

The second set of data is an ethnographic set which we have been collecting and analyzing since 1970, in addition to which we have done a series of interviews with a panel of households selected in the survey of 1987. These are not randomly selected households, but were chosen because of characteristics that make them interesting to the ethnographer, e.g. matrifocal households, households dependent in the main on the wages of women in the work force, households maintaining themselves by income earned in the informal sector, households maintaining themselves on the basis of their own home production, complex extended households with complicated budgeting arrangements, and lastly, households whose children working in the U.S. provide them with the economic margin to get by. To date, Murphy, Selby, Winter and their students have conducted interviews with over 100 such households. In some cases we have followed them every year since 1987.[6]

The City of Oaxaca.

The city of Oaxaca de Juárez lies in the middle of the valley of Oaxaca approximately 300 air kilometers south of Mexico City. The valley is the largest expanse of flat arable land in southern Mexico and has supported human habitation for at least 10,000 years. For the last two and a half millennia the valley and surrounding mountains have supported complex societies with major urban centers. Although the convoluted terrain surrounding the city has helped insulate it from some of the more dramatic effects of external penetration, Oaxaca has never been entirely isolated from the wider "world system" of Mesoamerica in which it was embedded. Indeed, as Murphy and Stepick (1991b) point out, it is precisely the degree of Oaxaca's integration with the wider system that has determined the level of social inequality in the city and region.

Oaxaca's modern period of engagement with the world economy began with the paving of the Pan-American highway into the city in the mid twentieth century.[7] The improvement of the road made it possible for merchants and manufacturers from central Mexico to transport their goods into Oaxaca. Within a few years, competition from Mexico City had eliminated much of the local industry. Today, the city of Oaxaca is the capital of one of the two poorest states in Mexico. Although it contains nearly 4% of the nation's population the state produced only 1.5% of the nation's gross national product (INEGI 1990: Cuadro 3.1). Perhaps a more salient measure of the state's poverty is that the mortality rate for the state is 9.5/1000 compared to a national figure of 5.6 (INEGI 1990: Cuadro 1.6).

As in many other secondary cities of Mexico and in other developing nations this increased engagement with the metropolitan center has also increased linkages between regional centers and rural areas, transforming rural/urban relationships and leading to increased centralization and migration as the roads were built to move people and goods between urban centers and the hinterland (Rees et al. 1991). Although the rate of population increase for the city has slowed with the crisis (Figure 2), the migration stream into Oaxaca City has increased significantly. Prior to the 1970s Oaxacans looking for work to help maintain their households left for Mexico City, or one of newly developing oil cities such as Villahermosa, or Salina Cruz. Oaxaca City, with only a service and government economy was not an attractive city to move to. But even so, high immigration rates continued to maintain high percentages of household heads born outside the city. For example, in 1977 fifty seven percent of the household heads were from some place other than Oaxaca City (see Hendricks and Murphy 1981). By 1987 that percentage had increased to 73%. The crisis in Mexico transformed Oaxaca from a city of natives to one of immigrants.



Social and Economic Changes in the city, 1977-1987

One of the surprising results yielded by a close point-by-point comparison of households from 1977 to 1987, is that despite the gloomy talk of most economists and social analysts, not every change was for the worse in the city of Oaxaca.

For example, although it is often assumed that recent immigrants to a city will be worse off than the other people that live there, this does not seem to be true in Oaxaca. (Rees et al. 1991). True, they do not share the same level of urban improvements as the locally born, but this is largely because they live on the outskirts of the city, where , in time, if history repeats itself, they will acquire these amenities. Over 80% of the households in the city's colonias populares are headed by people born outside the city, in contrast to the central part of the city where less than half of the households have heads born outside (Pacheco et al. 1991).

For another example, it is clear from our surveys that the differences among different sectors of the population and neighborhoods in the city have decreased in the years from 1977 to 1987, in line with the general reduction of inequality through the sharing of poverty described by Cortés and Rubalcava (1991). To be sure, the least desirable neighborhoods are still inhabited by young families of low income living in the worst housing in the city (Winter et al. 1988a). But the center has not changed: it still houses the greatest diversity of households while at the same time housing the smallest proportion of recent immigrants (Pacheco et al. 1991). Perhaps the most interesting finding is that residents of colonias dominated by the group Murphy and Stepick call the "minimum wage households" (1991b) (hardly middle class, but not the poorest) increased their levels of education and income to the point where they sometimes surpassed those in middle income neighborhoods, although their housing quality is lower. This is quite in line with González de la Rocha's theme in her chapter in this book, i.e. that "maistros" in the minimum wage neighborhoods came to be indistinguishable in many respects from "maestros" in the middle income neighborhoods, i.e. that automobile mechanics and school teachers have converged as a result of the collapse of the lower middle class.

Perhaps surprisingly, housing has improved for all. By 1987 only 7 percent lacked a bathroom where a decade earlier the figure was 23 percent. Over 80 percent of the homes were single family detached houses compared to 60 percent in 1977, while the number of shacks (jacalitos) was reduced from 22 to 10 percent. Similar improvements in public services occurred during the crisis. The percentage of households lacking water on their lot dropped from 48 to 14 between 1977 and 1987. Those lacking sewer connections fell from 68 percent to 50 percent. Perhaps most striking in public services was the activity of the Federal Electric Commission. In the ten years between 1977 and 1987 the percent of households lacking electricity fell from 50 percent to less than 5 percent.

The Oaxacan household, 1977 to 1987.

The improvement of housing amenities, such as water, sewer, and electricity and the closing of the housing and service gap between the poor and more affluent regions of the city may explain one of the more intriguing findings of our studies. Heads of households did not react to the crisis in the manner we would have expected. Less than one-third of them state that they are worse off since the crisis began than they were before. The reason for this is that most of Oaxaca's households did not benefit directly from the pre-crisis boom. Thus, for most Oaxacans things today are very much as they were before the crisis. The city continues to be a city where the government and tourism sectors of the economy dominate, where only 50% of the households have refrigerators and 20% own automobiles. These figures have not changed much over the past ten years.[8]

Our working class informants have little faith in national economic figures indicating a rebound. One informant invited the finance minister to visit him and his neighbors to explain why things had not rebounded for them. Another was a bit more eloquent, "Crisis? What crisis? There has always been a crisis around here!" he snorted to Selby and García as they politely asked if they could interview him about the effects of the crisis on his family (Selby 1991).

This is not to say that nothing has changed. The presence of the federal bureaucracy has been increased since the Echeverría administration (1970-1976). The increased federal presence coupled with the increasing undesirability of living in Mexico City as a result of pollution, unemployment, the earthquakes of September 1986 have noticeably increased the number of government bureaucrats in Oaxaca, although their relative numbers have remained the same (Table 1). The importance this group has for the economy of the city lies in their salaries. They tend to be middle class people who demand the services of professionals and entrepreneurs (architects, doctors, accountants, etc.) whose prosperity increases as a result. In addition they have caused a housing shortage leading to a mini building boom reflected in increased rent prices and increased numbers of blue collar workers, many of whom are in the construction trades (also seen in Table 1). The increased employment and wages currently seen in this sector may easily evaporate when the current building boom associated with the movement of middle class families from Mexico City to secondary cities ends. This process may have started already.[9]

At the other end of the economic scale we see a dramatic increase in the number of street vendors in the city. The restructuring of the Mexican economy during and after the crisis has meant that more and more people have had to generate income by selling whatever they can. At the same time that street vendors and small stores have proliferated, the city and state have intensified efforts to control this activity through licensing and street inspectors who confiscate goods from unlicensed merchants, especially in the current years of the Salinas presidency, which has launched neoliberal reforms and a program of "modernization".

[Table 1 goes in here]

Also on the gloomier side, households lost significant ground to inflation during the crisis (Table 2). Median household income dropped 45% in real terms between 1977 and 1987 compared to 23% for urban Mexico as a whole (Selby, this volume) and 11% for Guadalajara for the period 1982-89. (Escobar and Roberts, 1991). This, despite the fact that most households significantly modified their employment structure. By 1987 the average household in Oaxaca had two workers (half a worker more than in 1977) in the labor force. At the same time, household size has not changed significantly and remained at about five and a half individuals per unit. One way of measuring the impact of the real value of wages is to see how many more members are required in the work force for each dependent (i.e. the decrease in the worker dependency ratio).

Women have increased their participation in the work force: households have increased the number of workers by increasing the number of female heads of household in the work force (Winter et al. 1988b). By 1987 over 40% of the female heads were earning a wage (Table 2), whereas before the crisis it was unusual for a female head to be working outside the home since normally the wages would have been earned by her co-resident children or other people in the household (Selby et al. 1990: Chapter 4).

[Table 2 goes in here]

In Oaxaca, as in other cities during the crisis, women entered the work force to satisfy their needs, in contrast to pre-crisis urban Mexico where about one third of the women in the work force were there for career reasons beyond sheer economic need. (Kim, 1987). Close to 60% of the female heads in 1987 indicated that they had contributed to the wage income of the household in the past (Table 3). What is distinctive in the crisis is that women from all socioeconomic levels are working. It is no longer just the wife of the telegraph lineman who runs a restaurant. Today middle class women sell consumer durable goods such as microwave ovens from their

living rooms, and school teachers raise and sell chickens from their front steps.[10] Half of the women surveyed indicate that they had been at their current job for five years or less (Table 3) indicating how recent their labor force participation was.

Most women who head households work as vendors, domestics, or are owners of small commercial establishments. The common feature for these occupations is that they fall in what is known as the informal sector of the economy (Smith 1990, Roberts 1990, Murphy et al. 1990, Uzzell 1990). Seventy three percent of the women heading households receive no fringe benefits such as access to public medical care (Winter et al. 1988c). Their median salary of $50 U.S a month[11] is only 55% of that of their male counterpart heads of household ($90 U.S./month), but they work 85% as many hours to earn it (44 hours vs. 52 hours per week, see Table 3).

[Table 3 goes in here]

The one place where women are more or less on a par with men is in the field of education. Twice the number of women work in education as men. And, because salaries are standardized at all levels there is little salary discrimination within rank on the basis of gender. However, women tend to be underrepresented in administrative posts. Most school directors are men and since that position carries a salary bonus, males in education tend to earn more than females.

The problem for the Oaxacan household is that it can no longer rely on male heads to provide the social services such as medical insurance and year end bonuses which provided the safety net for many of Oaxaca's poor prior to the crisis. The restructuring of the Mexican economy has significantly increased the percentage of male heads of household who no longer enjoy fringe benefits, aside from the minimal benefit of emergency medical care (what is called Seguro Social). In Oaxaca even this minimal increase in coverage does not exist: in 1977 over sixty percent of the male heads of household held a job providing their family with minimal medical coverage and other social benefits. By 1987 that percentage had dropped to just over forty percent. Men may still hold jobs that previously provided benefits (skilled construction, transportation, private blue collar), but in the context of the current economy they must pay for medical and other benefits themselves (Table 4).

[Table 4 goes in here]

It is not just the private sector which is converting jobs from the formal to the informal sector. The municipal government recently organized a new garbage collectors' cooperative. The workers in this new organization are not represented by any union and have no job security or fringe benefits. While they receive a higher wage than those who work under the old contract, they are not allowed to scavenge the garbage they collect for recyclable materials and they must work two shifts. Even professionals and intellectuals working for the new agencies that have moved to Oaxaca as part of the decentralization program find themselves under contracts as "empleados de confianza" with no long term security or benefits.

Coping with the Crisis

The image in both the popular and professional literature is that the Mexican household is a large family that has formal and informal ties with kin, fictive kin, friends and neighbors. And, that households survive by virtue of networks exchanging goods and services according to Sahlins' (1965) models of generalized and balanced reciprocity. Such exchanges are described as especially characteristic of poor households (Keefe 1979; Keefe et al. 1979; Lomnitz 1977; Logan 1981; Vélez-Ibañez 1988), where the household's network of support provides the edge needed for survival. This is what we, too, expected to find. We found, however, that only the first part of this model holds in Oaxaca, and that exchange as a means of survival was either never as widespread as was once thought, or is a thing of the past (Selby et al. 1990, Winter 1991).

While more households are extended/complex (they have members not of the nuclear family) and have increased the number of workers, they are not using linkages between households to support each other. They do not report daily, on-going help from friends, relatives or neighbors. This is not to say that Oaxacans do not value exchange, simply that it is not reported as frequently as we expected. Morris (1991) indicates that in house building exchange does occur among poor people who do not have any other means for finishing their dwelling. However, even among this group the most construction was done with hired labor. Fewer that 15% of the households in the city ever participated in any type of exchange related to home-building.

Nor are other types of exchange more frequent: on a city-wide basis, fewer than 50% of the households reported in any type of exchange with other households. Fewer than 15% ever helped or received help with child care, food, or housework. Only 40% had received or given a money loan (Winter 1991).

Most exchanges fall in the category of ritualistic events, for example, a specific meal to celebrate an event such as a girl's fifteenth birthday (coming out) party, saint's days (birthdays) and the like. While a good deal of food and drink may be consumed on these occasions, it is stretching the notion of adaptation to argue that this shared food is a material help in survival. This is emphasized by the fact that interhousehold exchange is not affected by socioeconomic status. That is to say, no one is doing much exchanging, rich or poor (Winter 1991).

While we found interhousehold exchange to be relatively unimportant as a survival strategy, households have made other adaptations to the crisis. We find that households that are best off are the ones that have increased the numbers of workers (Selby 1991). In the ten years covered by the study the top 40% of the households have increased the number of workers by over half a worker per household. The lower three quintiles of the household income distribution increased by less. Since we calculate that half-time workers earn their expenses, the top 40% of the households have experienced a net gain. For the rest, it appears that half-time workers do not cover their living expenses. That is not to say they are not valuable additions; any income is helpful at the bottom -- the soup does not have to be thinned quite as much to make it stretch to all household members.

Conclusions

The Mexican crisis affected rural and urban populations generally by lowering wages and incomes. In the city of Oaxaca, household income fell by 45% between 1977 and 1987 and employment shifted from the formal to the (lower-paid) informal sector. Households have adapted to these conditions by manipulating the resources they control: workers and household composition. One result is migration; by 1987, Oaxaca City was a city of immigrants. Migrants are not very different from nonmigrants in terms of income, education, and other socioeconomic variables; only in terms of access to urban services are migrants less well off than natives. In the city, household size has remained the same, although the composition of the household is more extended than before. There are fewer children (a lower birth rate) and more collateral kin in the household. The structure of the work force has shifted, households have added the equivalent of one half-time worker, in response to lower wages. This additional worker is most often a woman, usually the household head, working in the informal sector. However, half-time workers only earn enough to cover their living expenses in richer households; in poorer households, these workers merely help out, which may be one of the reasons why these households are poorer. One way Oaxacan households do not adapt to the crisis is by interhousehold exchange. We find no relation between exchange and need (socioeconomic status), and most people report no exchange except intermittent, ritual, exchange (feasts). In conclusion, after the crisis, more people (women) work, but they earn less; households include more non-nuclear members, but engage in little interhousehold exchange.

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Vélez-Ibañez, C. G. (1988) "Networks of Exchange among Mexicans in the U.S. and Mexico: Local Level Mediating Responses to National and International Transformations" Urban Anthropology 17: 27-51.

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TABLE 1.
1977/87 Work Force Distribution, 1977-1987: Oaxaca



1977


1987
JOB SECTOR
(N=2089)
(N=1028)
AGRICULTURE
5%
3%
PETTY COMMODITIES
5%
5%
VENDORS
9%
15%
PRIVATE WHITE COLLAR
19%
13%
PRIVATE BLUE COLLAR
23%
30%
SERVICE WORKERS
17%
8%
PROFESSIONALS /ENTREPRENEURS
1%
5%
GOVERNMENT
21%
20%
Source: Surveys carried out by the authors.
Table 2.
1977/87 Socioeconomic Comparison of Households in Oaxaca



1977


1987

(N=1547)
(N=604)
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME
$111 US
$66¹ US
NUMBER OF WORKERS
1.4
1.9
0
6%
1%
1
61%
43%
2
22%
36%
3+
10%
20%
DEPENDENCY RATIO
3.9
2.9
HOUSEHOLD SIZE
5.3
5.6
1-4
41%
37%
5-7
43%
45%
8+
16%
18%
FEMALE HOUSEHOLD HEADS IN THE WORK FORCE²
26%
41%
NUCLEAR HOUSEHOLDS
80%
71%
1 1977 dollars

2 People were recorded as employed if they reported earning income from any source.

Table 3
1987 Comparison of Male head, Female head, and Other Workers.



MALE HEAD


FEMALE HEAD
OTHER WORKERS
ALL WORKERS

(N=515)
(N=229)
(N=284)
(N=1028)
AGE
43
41
16
35
EDUCATION (years)




Mean
7.2
5.5
5.7
5.9
Median
6.0
5.0
6.0
6.0
EVER CONTRIBUTED TO HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES


100%


57%


18%


37%


HOURS OF WORK LAST WEEK
52
44
51
50
YEARS AT CURRENT JOB




Mean
13
10
7
10
Median
10
5
3
6
INCOME[12





] Mean
105
63
61
82
Median
90
50
50
80
FRINGE BENEFITS
41%
27%
34%
36%
JOB SECTOR




Agriculture
4%
1%
3%
3%
Petty commodities
3%
13%
3%
5%
Vendors
8%
34%
12%
15%
Private white collar
10%
12%
18%
13%
Private blue collar
41%
2%
33%
30%
Service workers
5%
16%
8%
8%
Professionals /Entrepreneurs
21%
3%
6%
5%
Government
24%
19%
16%
20%

Table 4
1977/87. Occupations of Male and Female Household Heads



1977


1987

(N=1547)
(N=604)
EMPLOYED MALE HEADS (1)
96%
96%
MALE HEADS - INFORMAL SECTOR (2)
42%
59%
EMPLOYED FEMALE HEADS
26%
41%
FEMALE HEADS - INFORMAL SECTOR
63%
73%
INFORMAL SECTOR HOUSEHOLDS
39%
63%
(1) People were recorded as employed if they reported earning income from any source.

(2) A job with no fringe benefits was considered to be in the informal sector.

[1]Data for this paper are from the project, "A Decade of Change in Oaxaca, 1977-1987," funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support was received from the Department of Family Environment, and the College of Home Economics, and the World Food Institute at Iowa State University, Baylor University, and the Center for Applied Research in Anthropology, Georgia State University. The original paper was prepared for the conference "Socio-Demographic Effects of the 1980s Economic Crisis in Mexico," April 23-25, 1992, at the Mexican Center of the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. The authors want to thank the conference organizers and participants for their comments on the original paper.

[2]Significant contributions to this paper were made by Henry A. Selby, University of Texas and Pedro Pacheco of Iowa State University.

[3] The cities are (in addition to a delegation of Mexico City): Mazatlán, Mérida, Mexicali, Oaxaca, Quéretaro, Reynosa, San Luis Potosí, Tampico and Villahermosa. While perhaps not representative in a statistical sense, these cities do represent a cross section of secondary cities with respect to economic activity, size, and place in the national system of cities.

[4] For comprehensive bibliographies see Kowalewski et al. 1986, Murphy and Stepick 1991 and Urban Anthropology Vol. 20, No. 1.

[5] Published studies based wholly or in part on these data sets include Morris 1991; Morris et al. 1987; 1988a; 1988b; 1988c; 1989; Murphy 1991; Murphy and Finsten 1988; Murphy et al. 1990; Murphy and Stepick 1991; Pacheco et al. 1991; Rees et al. 1991; Selby 1991; Selby et al. 1990; Winter 1991; Winter et al. 1987; 1988a; 1988b; 1988c; 1989; 1990; 1993)

[6] In 1992 Murphy, Winter and Morris started the third stage of the project. They are currently re-interview the households studied in 1987. This provides a longitudinal look at what households have done to cope with what many of them see as a continuing and never ending crisis.

[7] In 1993 a superhighway was begun which is to cut the travel time from Mexico City to Oaxaca in half.

[8] Except for the ownership of refirgeatorsa whixh is now about 70% of the households of Oaxaca, according to preliminary results of the 1992 Oaxaca Survey

[9] Figures from the 1990 census indicate the process may already have begun in some of the secondary cities whose boom was associated with oil development in the 1960s and 1970s. This is reflected in the dramatic drop of population growth rates for secondary cities, as seen in Figure 1 between 1980 and 1990. Much of this is accounted for by cities such as Tampico/Cd. Madero and Villahermosa which have suffered dramatically due to the world drop in oil prices.

[10] See González de la Rocha (this volume) for similar results for Guadalajara.

[11]At the time of the study in 1987 the average exchange rate was 1000 Mexican pesos for one U.S. dollar. For the sake of normalization all monetary figures in these papers are in United States dollars.

[12]1987 U.S. dollars.