ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how socioeconomic change has affected the contexts in which children are reared in a Mexican town from which migration to Los Angeles and Chicago is frequent. Its central point is that the Mexican communities generating migrants to the United States have been changing as environments for child development, particularly in their conditions of health, fertility, parental education, and media exposure, as well as in their family attitudes, childrearing practices, and differentiation by socioeconomic status (SES). The chapter provides information on processes of social change affecting Mexican parents and children who move to the United States. It has shown briefly the predicament of parents in a rural town of central Mexico: They are increasingly educated and look to formal education to improve the life chances of their children; but they are also poor and cannot relinquish the mutual dependence of kinship ties that has provided security to their forebears.
