CHAPTER 12 WOMEN AND GENDER IN MESOAMERICA 461way to live. Traditionalists are concerned to preserve land and community, whereas
migrants push to introduce changes into Chan Kom’s social and cultural life. In this
conflictive context, women have ironically benefited from their association with being
guardians of tradition and symbols of the proper Mayan person.
In elections held at the end of the 1990s, traditionalists supported a woman can-
didate for mayor, an unprecedented move since only men have previously held for-
mal authority positions in Chan Kom. The woman candidate offered as her political
platform reconciliation between the opposing groups. She was bolstered in her plat-
form by traditional female symbols and women’s new positions of leverage as decision-
makers and guardians of house, land, and children in the absence of migrant
husbands. Although she did not win, the woman candidate projected a new vision of
women as leaders of Chan Kom. Her story draws attention to the diversity of effects
that modernization can have on gender systems, and as we will see next, on the strate-
gies that women create to resist the negative effects of these forces.
Responses to the Economic Crisis
As mentioned before, the region experienced a drastic economic recession during
the 1980s (see Chapter 9). Decreasing standards of living hit the lower classes dis-
proportionately hard, and among them women suffered more than men. Several
factors contributed to women’s vulnerability, lack of schooling being one of the most
significant. A large proportion of poor women never attend school, or they do so
for only a few years. Additionally, large families prevent women from seeking formal
employment, and lack of access to property and credit minimizes their entrepre-
neurial possibilities. Malnourishment tends to be twice as high among women as
among men, making their overall health more precarious. These factors push women
into the “informal” sector, which is characterized by low returns, lack of insurance
benefits, and little or no job security. This state of affairs perpetuates women’s de-
pendence on their husbands, forcing them to put up with abuse.
How have women responded to the increasing impoverishment? The case of
Marta Sandoval, a single mestizo mother of three living in a squatter settlement on
the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador, illustrates survival strategies common to
many poor women. To reduce costs and help with child care, Marta invited her sis-
ter Manuela and her two children to move in with her. Several months before Marta
had lost her janitorial job at a nearby plant and was leaving at dawn with her six-year-
old son to sell newspapers on a busy street corner. Before she found work selling
newspapers, Marta had tried her hand unsuccessfully at many different jobs in the
informal sector (Figure 12.6). All the while she paid a neighbor to keep an eye on
her children.
Living together, the sisters were able to pool their meager resources by sharing
rent, cooking and eating together, and helping each other with child care. When
Marta returns home at noon, Manuela leaves for her job washing clothes for a middle-
class family three times a week. Although the women barely have enough money for
their own needs, they send some money to their parents who live in a rural village.
The two sisters are happy that they have not had to reduce their food intake as some