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I Found Work! Forty Years of Research on Work in Rural Mexico
Frances A. Rothstein, Montclair State University
rothsteinf@mail.montclair.edu
Abstract
In 1974 when I went to San Cosme
Mazatecochco to do my dissertation research, I did
not expect to study work, especially not the factory
work of men in a rural Mexican community. Over the
years, however, I have found that what I thought I
would study is not what is important to the people of
Mazatecochco. However, work has been the lens that
has consistently led me to new and significant studies
including globalization, migration and, most recently,
even play.
Keywords: work, Mexico, long-term fieldwork
Introduction
When I was a graduate student in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, we did not talk much about work or
the related concepts of class and capitalism. I recently
performed a search on AnthroSource of the number of
times work showed up as a topic in the journals of the
American Anthropological Association when I was in
graduate school. In the 4 years between 1967 when I
started graduate school and 1971 when I went to the
field, it appeared only 25 times. Not surprisingly,
when I went to the field I did not intend to study work.
One of the most important lessons I learned from that
first fieldwork experience, and which has been
repeated every time I do research, is that what I might
originally plan to study can turn out not to be the
most important topic once I am in the field. When I
am in the United States preparing a proposal for field-
work I do not know what is really going on in
Mazatecochco (the community in Mexico where I
have done my research), what is important to people
there, or what is relevant to study. Even today, with
telephone and Internet contact and news of the com-
munity on Facebook, YouTube, and online newspa-
pers, when I get there I invariably end up studying
something I did not anticipate.
In a recently published book entitled The Restless
Anthropologist: New Fieldsites, NewVisions (2012), Alma
Gottlieb (2012) and various contributors talk about
how going to a new field site can have a positive effect
on anthropologists and anthropology because as
Gottlieb, citing Geertz, writes, “The intellectually
restless anthropologist, we might say, is the inquiring
anthropologist – the scholar who pushes herself to
question old truths, old habits, old systems of
Volume XXXV, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
common sense” (2012:17). According to Gottlieb,
Barth similarly suggests that “doing new fieldwork
reminds us how to be naïve, as we compel ourselves to
ask new questions in new field sites” (2012:17).
For me, and I think for many others, work has
been a lens that has enabled me to “question old
truths, old habits, old systems of common sense” in a
field site that I have continuously studied for 40 years.
My work on work in Mazatecochco, including the
analysis of women’s paid and unpaid work as well as
men’s paid work, has led to confronting questions of
equality and inequality, power and powerlessness, and
class and capitalism. More recently, work has been the
lens through which I have looked at how globalization
has impacted San Cosmeros/as, how they have
struggled against its negative effects, and how they
have taken advantage of some of its possibilities. It has
also led me to kinship, family, religion and, most
recently, to play.
I went to the field in 1971 to do my dissertation
research on political factions in San Cosme
Mazatecochco, a rural community in central Mexico.
Research on factions at that time suggested that they
were political conflict groups that were recruited by a
leader or leaders, but there was no “clear single prin-
ciple of recruitment” (Nicholas 1963:29). “Faction
members,” wrote Ralph Nicholas, “are recruited on
diverse principles” (1963:29). He noted also that they
were found “under conditions of rapid social change”
(1963:22). I decided to go to the state of Tlaxcala in
central Mexico because a summer field trip in 1968
and the anthropological and other sources on the area
suggested the presence of “conditions of rapid social
change.” I wanted to understand more about the
recruitment process and I thought it would be possible
to discern patterns. My theoretical approach was basi-
cally structural-functionalism but also was informed
by Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, and dependency and
world systems theories.
Very early during my 1971 fieldwork, I found a
kind of change for which I was totally unprepared. I
had thought I was going to a community of campesinos
(small-scale rural cultivators). I knew Mexico had
industrialized during the mid-20th century, but every-
thing I had read about Mexico written by anthropolo-
gists was about campesinos. Although I arrived with the
expectation of rapid change, I had not anticipated that
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the change would be related to Mexico’s mid-20th
century industrialization. Not only was industrializa-
tion not discussed in the anthropological literature on
Mexico at that time, but it was rarely discussed in the
anthropological literature elsewhere. In one of the few
exceptions, Manning Nash (1967), who studied
industrialization in Guatemala, noted that industrial-
ization has been “the sort of enterprise anthropolo-
gists do not often undertake” (1967:xi).
What I found in Mazatecochco, however, was
that men from the community were increasingly
working not as campesinos but as industrial workers in
textile factories in Mexico City, 60 miles away, or the
city of Puebla, 10 miles away. I did write my disserta-
tion on factions, but most of my research since then
has focused on factory work and factory workers
(Rothstein 1974, 1982).
Although my thesis was titled “Factions in a
Rural Community in Mexico” (1974), it focused on
industrialization and how factory work had affected
the community. More than half of the economically
active males were still campesinos and subsistence agri-
culture was still very important. Only a little over
one-third of the economically active population were
obreros, or factory workers, but that number continued
to grow. The influence of factory work and factory
workers within the community was noticeable and it
too kept growing. For the next 10 years, therefore, I
focused on the impact of factory work within the
community. This included the growing differentiation
between the families of obreros and the families of
campesinos and the impact of factory work on relations
between those in the community and elsewhere
beyond the community.
Impact of Factory Work
Among the differences within the community
was that while the families of obreros continued to
plant corn (and those who did not have enough land
used their factory wages to buy land so that they could
do so), their farming was less intensive. Instead of
planting squash, beans, and corn, as was traditional,
they planted only corn. Women in the families of
factory workers also began to focus more on domestic
labor and less often worked in the fields. Although
their domestic work was facilitated by new purchases,
such as gas stoves and potable water, owning these
items increased women’s dependence on men’s earn-
ings. Campesinas cooked on wood fires that they gath-
ered on the mountain. There were other important
changes as well. Proletarian children, especially sons,
were staying in school longer than the children of
campesinos. Factory workers were able to use their
contacts from factory work, especially through their
union leaders, to press for potable water, drainage,
electricity, and two new elementary schools plus a new
Volume XXXV, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
kindergarten. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, they
were successful in getting a telesecondary school, a
secondary school in which some of the courses were
taught via television. Since the 1990s, there has also
been a high school.
The Impact of Globalization
After having been led to work, I was led also
several times to the loss of work. Since the 1980s, free
trade has led to the closing of many of the textile
factories in which the men worked because the
national industry could not compete with imports.
Hundreds of thousands of workers in the national
textile industry lost their jobs, including many of the
men from Mazatecochco. As long as the men had
factory jobs, I focused primarily on industrial work
and the changes related to it. In the 1980s when free
trade led to the loss of their jobs in the national textile
industry, I followed San Cosmeros/as, especially
women, as they moved into work in maqiladoras
(foreign-owned assembly plants) in various places in
the state of Tlaxcala, usually between 5 and 15 miles
from Mazatecochco or in Mexico City, 60 miles away,
and as men and women moved into small-scale
garment production in their own home workshops
(Rothstein 2007).
By the 1990s, hundreds of families in
Mazatecochco owned small or larger garment work-
shops in their homes. Many of the women who had
worked in maquiladoras either decided they preferred
the local work of garment production or were pushed
into garment production when their factories closed
as production increasingly moved to China or else-
where in Mexico. Although most of the workshops
were small (5–10 workers) and increasingly subcon-
tracting for the larger workshops, the larger workshops
(25 or more workers) were doing very well. In the
early 1990s when I asked people how the community
had changed, they pointed to the paved streets, the
many coches del ano (cars of the year) and large houses.
Although some of the larger workshops were
quite profitable, wages for the workers in these work-
shops were low, there were no benefits, and the very
unpredictable apparel market meant that the work was
very uneven and insecure. Smaller workshops had dif-
ficult times when sales dropped, as they often did. As
more and more people opened workshops, competi-
tion grew, including competition from the larger
workshops within the community that increasingly
subcontracted to smaller workshops. Competition
from the growth of workshops in other communities
and more cheap goods coming into Mexico from
China also grew. Increasingly, the workshops that
managed to survive were those involved in contracting
out to smaller workshops. Only those who had the
resources for trucks and to rent a stall at a regional
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 Anthropology of Work Review
market and sufficient capital to pay for more materials
for larger quantities of goods could afford to subcon-
tract to others. These merchants benefited from the
flexibility involved in hiring workers when the market
demanded but not having to pay workers if the market
was down. Even larger owners were in a precarious
position dependent on sales and prices and availability
of supplies. Owners of small- and mid-sized work-
shops, especially those dependent on producing for
contractors, were even more vulnerable to the tempo-
rary fluctuations of an extremely volatile garment
market.Those who did not have the capital to become
contractors found themselves producing more and
more for those who did. Some contractors did not pay
the producers until the garments had been sold at the
regional markets. As small- and mid-sized workshops
absorbed the slow times for the contractors, their
profits declined. As one woman whose two-person
workshop (herself and her husband) performed
machine embroidery for others said, “When times are
bad, we eat just corn.” When times are good and the
garment market is up, these producers are expected to
work long hours until the job is completed.
Additionally, as young workers matured and
moved into the next stage of the life cycle and as
people became more dependent on purchased goods,
garment workers and small owners found that their
earnings, which had never supported even themselves,
could not support families. Even with two members of
the household employed, many families found their
earnings inadequate. By 2001, workshop owners fre-
quently commented on the growing competition and
some workshops were closing. Workers and small
owner-workers were also talking about poor wages
and the low earnings derived from working for a con-
tractor. Owners began looking to even poorer com-
munities for new workers because, they said,
experienced workers in Mazatecochco wanted higher
wages.
San Cosmeros/as On the Move for Work
During the 1990s, I had received a few calls and
visits from men and women from Mazatecochco who
were living in the New York area. When I visited
Mazatecochco in 2005, I heard that many people had
migrated and communities of hundreds of San
Cosmeros/as had developed in New Jersey and Con-
necticut. Most had been small workshop owners who
had been subcontractors for the larger owners and/or
workers in others’ workshops and had found getting
by was increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, an increasing
demand for service workers in the United States,
especially in flexible services such as domestic work
for women and landscaping and construction for men,
provided attractive alternatives to the worsening situ-
ation in Mazatecochco and elsewhere in Mexico. As
Volume XXXV, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
more people migrated, they facilitated more migration
by helping to pay the costs of migration for family
members and providing assistance for new arrivals.
In the winter of 2006, I received a call from a
woman I knew who had moved to a city in New Jersey
that I call “Riverview.” When I visited her, I learned
that hundreds of people from Mazatecochco were
living in that city. I began reading about migration and
doing some exploratory research. There is a substan-
tial literature on Mexican migration to the United
States, mostly by sociologists. I began to wonder if
there was any room for more research. What, I
thought, could I possibly add to the huge literature on
Mexican migration? However, when I thought about
what I was reading, what I knew about Mazatecochco,
and the migrants I knew in Riverview, I wondered why
almost all the literature was about men. There was a
small and growing body of work on women migrants,
including some by anthropologists, but in most dis-
cussions of women migrants, they were portrayed as
“associational migrants” (Kanaiaupuni 2000) who
came for family reasons, usually following their hus-
bands. Among the migrants who I met in New Jersey
or heard about in Mexico, however, were many single
women who had not followed their men but gone on
their own – for work.
I began doing research among migrants from
Mazatecochco in New Jersey. Again, I must admit that
what I thought I would study has not been what I have
studied. I thought I would focus on gender and
employment. Instead, most of my research there has
focused on how San Cosmeros/as have adapted to the
United States by, in their words on a banner made for
the celebration of Carnival, not forgetting their roots
(“Porque las raices no nos olvidamos”) (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Banner proclaiming “We Don’t Forget our
Roots.”
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More specifically, I have examined how kinship and
ritual practices are modified in the United States to
adapt to the new circumstances of living and working
in communities with new neighbors, new challenges,
and new threats. By recasting their expectations and
behaviors, as San Cosmeros/as have always done in
response to numerous changes, they maintain former
practices and values that help them survive in new
circumstances.
Although I have done research in Riverview on
employment, I have focused primarily on the unpaid
work, especially of women but also of men, in devel-
oping and maintaining social networks though the
celebration of life cycle and ritual events. Through
these networks, they build social capital that is crucial
to their survival in the United States. They acquire
information about jobs, schools, healthcare, childcare,
how to get a driver’s license, and housing.
More recently I began hearing about people
returning home. It was not surprising given the eco-
nomic recession in the United States and the decline
in work opportunities, hours, and pay that people
were experiencing. In August 2012, I returned to
Mexico to do an exploratory study of return migra-
tion. Contrary to my expectations, although the inse-
curity of work in the United States was important,
what appears to be more important in migrants’ deci-
sions to return home was family support. Many
migrants are here without family, and I heard repeat-
edly about how hard living in the United States is if
one does not have money. In Mazatecochco on the
other hand, one always has family, something to eat,
and a roof over one’s head.
When I asked people why they had returned,
most stressed returning for family reasons. A daughter
was getting married. A parent was sick. A single
mother came back to be with her child. A man came
back because his mother found his wife living with
another man.They also talked about the United States
being a place where one has to work to pay the many
bills. One of the women said if you did not work, there
was no one who would give you food.That same point
was raised by the wife of a return migrant who said she
had not wanted to go to the United States because
there, if you had no food, no one would give you any.
Although some migrants join family members and
others form new families in the United States, most of
the return migrants I talked to were men who were
single or who had families or girlfriends in Mexico.
Although the local economy has improved in the last
few years and everyone who I talked to who returned
found work, most of the employment opportunities
were as workers in garment workshops. Pay was not
only low but often if there was no demand, they were
out of work. However, they were not alone. They were
surrounded by family and broader social networks.
Volume XXXV, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
The Sons and Daughters of the Factory
Workers Decades Later
I suggested above that I found work and the
anthropology of work unexpectedly through the
factory work of Mazatecochco’s obreros. Over
the years, work has been a lens that has enabled me to
explore almost all aspects of life in Mazatecochco and
in the United States, ranging from men’s industrial
work, women’s paid and unpaid work, and growing
inequalities between women and men and campesinos
and obreros. In New Jersey, my interest on work led me
also to kinship and religion. Recently, my work on
work has led to play. At the same time, while many San
Cosmeros/as are now on the move for work, cheaper
workers in other communities to sew garments that
they then sell in various markets, another new form
of movement involves a different segment of
Mazatecochco’s population. Increasingly, some resi-
dents of Mazatecochco are moving as tourists
throughout Mexico. One day in 2009, as a rented bus
on Main Street in Mazatecochco was filling up with
men, women, and children to go on a trip sponsored
by the local Catholic Church, an onlooker com-
mented, “Where’s the economic crisis?”
While much of Mazatecochco’s population is
reaching across the border or to elsewhere in Mexico
for necessary income, others apparently have money
to spend on travel as domestic tourists. One family,
consisting of a married son, his wife, his mother, their
married daughters and their families who live in
Mazatecochco, the wife’s sister with her extended
family from another nearby community, and a
married daughter who lives about 5 hours to the north
and her in-laws all traveled to Cancun on a luxury bus
they had rented. In Cancun, they stayed at the Fiesta
Americana, an all-inclusive resort on the beach.
Another couple, along with their married son and two
married daughters and their families flew to Chiapas,
rented a van, and toured the sights, including San
Cristobal, El Sumidero, and Lagunas de Montebello.
Like the woman who asked, “Where’s the crisis?” I
wondered how some were faring so much better than
others. Again I found work to be at the center of what
San Cosmeros/as were doing, even while they are
playing.
As indicated earlier, during the postwar eco-
nomic boom, many of the men from Mazatecochco
worked as textile workers. Although most lost their
jobs in the 1980s, many not only received severance
pay and have pensions but with their earnings from
factory work they had bought land on which they still
grow corn that they consume and sometimes sell.
Furthermore, in the 1970s, many invested heavily in
the education of their children. They took advantage
of a time when the Mexican government was expand-
ing educational facilities and providing training for
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teachers, nurses, and other professionals. Today, it is
the former factory workers and their sons and daugh-
ters – teachers, nurses, and other professionals often
working for the government – that is, people who are
in their late 40s, 50s, and older who travel throughout
Mexico and sometimes also to the United States as
tourists.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican state,
like many other governments that experienced eco-
nomic growth and pursued Keynesian policies, took
an active role in supporting health, education, and
welfare. Many, including myself, were critical because
the benefits from the economic miracle were very
unevenly distributed. Despite the fact that inequality
in Mexico persisted and grew, especially for those at
the lowest income levels, there were very high rates of
occupational mobility for many. What Agustin
Escobar Latapi and Bryan Roberts (1991) call the
“new” middle class (professional, managerial, techni-
cal, education, and clerical workers) grew significantly
as the service sector expanded. This expansion was
due largely to the state’s active involvement as an
employer, especially in health and education.The new
middle class was “an open class, in the sense that it
was growing much faster than the economy, and there
was a degree of upward social mobility for those
children of workers and petty merchants who
acquired the right credentials” (Escobar Latapi and
Roberts 1991:587). For some of the children of
Mazatecochco, especially the educated sons and
daughters of factory workers, the Keynesian policies
of the past enabled them to rise during the postwar
economic boom in the growing service sector. Today,
the policies of the post–World War II period and the
opportunities they afforded are allowing these more
educated San Cosmeros/as to take advantage of some
of the possibilities of the shrinking globalized world.
Conclusion
In the 1970s, I found work, particularly indus-
trial work, as a lens to understand factional politics. In
the 1980s, the loss of that factory work led me to
globalization. Initially, the impact of globalization was
through free trade and the decline of the Mexican
textile industry and more recently migration to the
United States. Over the years, work has led me also to
kinship and ritual. Just as work has been a lens to
understanding kinship, family, and religion, one of the
more surprising patterns I found recently, tourism, is
also made understandable by looking at work.Work in
the past and the broader climate of Keynesianism
Volume XXXV, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
has meant that various segments of Mazatecochco’s
population are differentially affected by today’s
neoliberalism and globalization. For many, globaliza-
tion means a dangerous and expensive trip to the
United States for work, separation from their families,
insecure employment, and constant fear that they will
be apprehended and sent home. Others are staying
home and visiting national tourist sites or coming to
the Unites States as tourists and enjoying at least some
benefits from that same globalization.
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DOI:10.1111/awr.12029
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