UCLA

This dissertation examines the lives and livelihoods of urban Mexican entrepreneurial mothers: women who balance income and children by engaging in multiple small, self-initiated economic activities that allow them the time and flexibility to care for their families. Research is based on interviews and recorded observations of the daily family life of urban families with in-home micro-retail businesses in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. I examine day-to-day economic strategizing, how integration into social networks provides economic and emotional resources as well as creating social and financial responsibility toward others, and how children incorporate themselves into parents' economic activities and linguistically demonstrate expertise and identity in the domain of the home store. The micro-retail store is used as focal point, examining its role as one element in a diversified household economy, and as site of intersection between individual responsibility and intra-household aid for both adults and children. The store is an ideal choice for this study because of its physical presence in the home space, its accessibility to child observation, and its relative permanence as an ongoing business whose activities can be easily observed.

Contrary to expectation, children are not regular workers in such businesses, but rather self-initiate their own forms of participation, which include observation of parents' activities, taking on peripheral roles, and occasionally tending customers on their own. Linguistic examination of the micro-interactional structure of store transactions reveals how participants index context-specific relationships between vendors and customers who are also neighbors, friends, or kin. These kin and social networks serve as an economic and social safety net but also entail responsibility toward others. I highlight how money and family are closely tied in this community, as in the tradition of multiple-compadrazgo to finance celebrations of life events and in day-to-day reliance on family networks for needed skills and resources.

The ways in which economic strategizing play out in everyday life, and their impact on the everyday socialization of young children, are topics in need of further research. This study aims to fill in that gap by making use of extended observations of daily routines (both audio and video-recorded) with families over an extended period of time, and by addressing how social and economic relationships are linguistically enacted in everyday life through store transactions, mother-child discussions, and narratives about economic decision-making.