ABSTRACT
This introduction covers some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the women of San Pedro Sacatepéquez, a highland Guatemalan town. The town is a busy Indian commercial center, and its women, called Sampedranas, supply the majority of its traditional labor force. The book is about working women like Gloria, the women of her family, her neighbors, and co-workers; the woman who washes her clothes, the girl who sells her mangoes, the old grandmother who hobbles from house to house selling cheese. It is about the female family businesses that sustain San Pedro households: weavers, knitters, marketwomen, shopkeepers, traders, and the value of children to an economic system based upon the production and trade of petty commodities. The book is about a changing and developing world where once autonomous women producers are being transformed into a dependent working class.
