ABSTRACT
Mexican researchers have devoted much of their energies to demonstrating that rural poverty arises not as a consequence of capitalist development but rather under conditions of insufficient capitalist development. This chapter shows how the development of commercial agriculture in southern Mexico since 1880 has transformed the lives of men and women in one traditional community, Chamula, a Tzotzil-speaking municipio (roughly, a county) in the central highlands of Chiapas. It focuses the research in Chamula upon the issue of family income, that is, upon the great variety of enterprises, including commercial agriculture, in which men and women must engage in order to survive. Far from simply supplementing agricultural production or wage labor, additional sources of income actually permitted the workforce to reproduce itself. As many anthropologists have noted, almost every family in Chamula—nearly 70 percent—owned a small flock of sheep.
