VALUES UNDER SIEGE IN MEXICO - STRATEGIES FOR SHELTERING TRADITIONAL VALUES FROM CHANGE

Mexico's economic crisis in the 1970s and 1980s forced middle-class families to send the wife into the work force or contemplate falling in class status. Traditional middle-class values militated against decline into the lower class, because of its associations with manual labor and lack of cultura. Although sending the wife and mother to work outside the home was also contrary to traditional Mexican cultural construction of gender and family, many Uruapan middle-class couples rationalized the wife's income-producing work by using strategies such as concealing, reinterpreting, or not directly challenging the traditional values. Despite Uruapan middle-class resistance to the transformations of the last twenty years, real changes in areas like acceptance of married women in the workplace, sharing domestic labor, fertility control, and equality between spouses in family decision making have begun to appear.