Free Example of "Mexican Lives" Essay

The author of Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman examines patterns of political mobilization among groups in Mexico whose livelihoods have been endangered by the economic crisis and restructuring of the 1980s in Mexico. He argued that "[t]he economic crisis and restructuring of the 1980s did not affect in a similar way all sectors (rich, middle-class and poor) of the Mexican population. The middle classes, in particular middle-class women, have had the most difficult time and paid the highest cost."

Most probably, the power of such hearsay has a consequence on accepted responsiveness, and not just outer spectators. During the economic crisis, self and family service outburst grew quickly, and lessons formerly recognized with the contemporary economy lost ground in the professional composition. Williams fully carried the opinion which are explained “in Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman illustrates this in her chapter contrasting the lives of two women residents of urban slums - one who chooses to participate in a citizen’s movement and one who rejects political action” (83).

But although we acquire some information on the modifications in the arrangement of service system, there are no analyses of the alterations in the prototypes of mobility existing in these two complementary eras.

Many of the activities of social movements are all too familiar for those sectors of the population who have been brutally disposed by economic policies of the 1980s. Workers in the most controlled cells of official labor central were used to marching on cue, holding up signs and banners, protesting when labor leader Fidel Velasquez decided to flex his muscles (Williams 2001:83).

In many cases, the only thing that distinguishes an official group from an opposition group may be the opportunity for the rank-and-file to participate in decisions about group demands and strategy (Williams 2001:83). 

The author of Mexican Lives, Hellman makes a case study from all walks of life including class struggle of rich, middle-class and poor population, but he established that the middle classes’ women have had the most difficult time and paid the highest cost  by trade opening, fiscal retrenchment, and market liberalization in Mexico. This argument tends to be bias the economists to search out more than one viewpoint that if it confers a more comprehensive vision of the nation of Mexico or some portion of the population of Mexico.

These situations includes an increase in the number of women and children entering the informal and formal wage labor force, the self-provisioning of goods and services formerly purchased, coerced family cooperation, and continued heavy domestic workloads for women. Women received some help from husbands and children with domestic chores, but the amount of that help varied and did not include the most time-consuming domestic duties such as cooking. Conditions of economic and ecological improvement create a harsh living and working environment. Deteriorating health conditions put an increasing physical strain on women as they care for themselves and their often chronically ill children (Stephen 120). And lack of access to drinking water, transportation, and food markets in peripherals city areas often further increases the total time women spend trying to finish their unpaid chores.

Women in Mexico participate in two major types of informal-sector work. Analyses have found that women’s informal-sector participation in Latin America has grown steadily during the 1980s, rising by 24 percent from 1983 to 1987 (Inter-American Development Bank 1990:232). The middle-class women have passed struggled life in the area of subcontracting to produce intermediate of finished goods and self-generated activities as the sale of service as domestic workers, food, or other petty commodities (Stephen 120).     

In this realm middle-class women are extremely susceptible to exploitation for their country’s economic crisis as well as accepting marginal employments with inferior wages that neither male refugees nor poor urban women would think. The requirement for migrant lower class or middle class women in household job and in the professional sex dealing has grown to be a mounting predicament for Mexican middle class women who are more forced to migrate owing to the economic crisis in 1980s (Alcántara, 78) It is suggestive of middle class women in the rural survival sector who subsisidize inadequate male wages by remaining at home to farm, care for animals, and produce clothing while their husbands engaged in migrant wage labor. It is supported by the study of Guadalajara, women become visible to be financed their own as well as their husbands’ wages. Gonzalwz de la Roche also postulated that women ate lower-quality foods than men, concentrating on beans, tortillas, vegetables and fruits while men ate more meat, eggs and industrialized food produces (1991:119). Women workers is paid extremely low in their employment in home assembly work and they were not given fringe benefits (Stephen 121). 

Women’s domestic had increased significantly and older daughter were also working harder. And a key factor associated with women’s individual responses to their economic crisis is a major drop in fertility drop. A big number of middle class women were decided to either stop or postpone having children during the 1980s (Stephen 122). Mexico's middle and working classes were remade on new bases; they grew from insignificance to become the country's most important classes.