ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of the author's research with children in rural Mexico. The research focused on children’s understanding of the tensions underlying the coexistence of traditional and modern gender expectations. Throughout his fieldwork in Metztitlán, a Mexican village, references to marital unfaithfulness continually emerged in people’s narratives as villagers joked about hypothetical and suffered over actual infidelities, confessed their own, cried over their partners’ or gossiped about their neighbours’ transgressions. Most people censored both men’s and women’s extramarital affairs, but the evaluations of female infidelities were strikingly more derogatory and their social implications more far reaching. While women perceived infidelities as a threat not only to their relationships with their partners but also to the well-being of their children and the future of their families, they had no doubt that the conflict over this issue should be settled between adults.
