Modernization, Adjustment, and Peasant Production

Abstract

The modernization of agriculture or green revolution in Mexico up to the 1970s was aimed at the export of commercial staples and agro-industry. The underdeveloped sector misleadingly called traditional was not fully included in it, remaining in communal ownership or ejidos with no infrastructure, low productivity, almost no capacity for commercialization, and concentration on the basic subsistence staples, especially maize and beans. During the 1980s, without having found a solution to this problem, the state introduced macrostructural adjustment policies with the aim of making the economy more competitive in international markets while ushering in a modem society organized in the interests of capital. Legal barriers to the free circulation of capital disappeared, capitalist-oriented rural enterprises were created, and state spending and services were reduced. As a result, people with scarce resources, including subsistence agriculturalists (Hewitt, 1992) and rural women, were left out of development programs. Thus the ejido, not only of social importance but the pivot of the rural family economy, was condemned (Arizpe and Botey, 1986). The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of this agrarian policy on members of the peasant family unit and, in particular, the way in which gender inequality causes these effects to vary in relation to the role each member plays in the division of labor, control over productive resources, income, and access to state services-all conditioned by cultural and intrafamily relations. Following Campaiia (1992), I view gender as a historical and dynamic concept, socially constructed by men and women and implying cultural relations among them. Development policy has always viewed men as heads of households and denied women recognition as productive and active members, and consequently women have been placed in an inferior and subordinate position with