OCCUPATION AND CHOICE: THE WOMEN OF TOTIMEHUACAN, MEXICO (MICROECONOMICS, INDUSTRIALIZATION, PUEBLA, ETHNOGRAPHY)

The study consists of a thorough ethnography of Totimehuacan, a rural industrial town in the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley of Mexico, complemented by a monograph on the labor force participation patterns and occupations of women in the community.;The ethnography (Chapters I through V) includes essays on territorial organization and history, economy, political organization, religious organization, and social organization. The analysis of women's occupational behavior (Chapters VI through VIII) relies on work history and other data from two samples of local women: twenty-five women selected on the basis of age and residence to represent the adult female population of the community; and fifteen local women with industrial employment experience.;Totimehuacan women behave as rational economic decision makers, seeking to maximize their permanent income through human capital investment, marriage, paid employment and other means. The data suggest that factory work and other non-traditional forms of paid employment do not yet offer most local women sufficient long-term economic security to attract them away from self-employment in commerce and domestic service.;Totimehuacan lies directly in the path of a rapidly growing city. Social change in the last forty years has been dramatic and promises to be even more so in the coming decades. The ethnography, and the monograph on women's occupational behavior, detail the some of the consequences of social change and suggest directions for future research.;Women's labor supply behavior is approached from the perspective of human capital investment and permanent income strategies. A review of microeconomic concepts used in economic anthropology, and an extensive critique of division of labor theory in anthropological women's studies, are presented in the Introduction.