Women in Mexico's Popular Movements

Abstract

The Mexican economy, along with those of other dependent capitalist countries of Latin America, has often been described as characterized by functional dualism (Cockcroft, 1983; de Janvry, 1981; Faber, 1992 [this issue]). In many parts of Mexico, a dominant capitalist export sector acquires a cheap labor supply by perpetuating and maintaining impoverished subsistence and informal sectors. Broadening the concept of dependent development allows us to see impoverishment in environmental as well as economic terms. For example, as Faber (1992) and Millikan (1992) point out in this issue, it highlights the impact that poor semiproletarianized peasants can have on their environment in their struggles to survive without land (Faber, 1988). It also reveals the social movements focused on the ecological and communal conditions for the reproduction of labor-power as class-based opposition to the ecological conditions of capitalist production (O'Connor, 1988). Although the demands of such movements are often phrased in terms of consumption needs and access to resources and services instead of specific conditions of work (as within a factory), they are nevertheless an aspect of class conflict. The basis of this conflict is not a capital/labor split in the industrial division of labor, but an unequal distribution of the ecological and economic hardships at the level of both the household and the gendered division of labor resulting from dependent capitalist development. The economic crisis of dependent capitalist development in Mexico has exacerbated the hardships faced by women in both the urban informal sector and the rural subsistence and wage-labor sectors.' Impoverishment in the