Aging and the family-work link: a comparative analysis of two generations of Mexican women (1936-1938 and 1951-1953).(Report)

INTRODUCTION

The implications of aging of the population in Mexico are complicated and in some respects, serious. Like many other developing countries, Mexico has no genuine state public policies designed to ensure the treatment, everyday care and well-being of senior citizens (such as residence or home care) (Hakkert & Guzman, 2004). At the beginning of the new millennium, even official coverage of pension systems, which are directly linked to a formal labor relationship, covered just 30% of senior citizens in the country (Secretaria de Salud del Gobierno del Distrito Federal, 2002).

Although there are a number of organizations that provide different types of support for senior citizens, these are limited to a few public old people's homes and a handful of private ones. On the other hand, in recent years, the Federal District Government has implemented a program of economic support exclusively for the senior citizen population aged 70 and over who are residents of the Federal District (the capital of the country, often known as Mexico City). This program benefited approximately 325,000 persons at the beginning of this century who, according to the Federal District Government, constituted over 90% of the total population in the group aged 70 and over living in the Federal District (Secretaria de Salud del Gobierno del Distrito Federal, 2003). Unfortunately, the amount of financial support provided is rather small, currently totaling approximately $56 USD ($700 pesos a month). At the same time, the pension system is currently in a state of crisis in Mexico. The two main institutions that provide financial pensions and health services after retirement (the Mexican Social Security Institute [IMSS] and the Institute of State Workers' Social Security and Services [ISSSTE]) are experiencing serious financial problems which, according to Federal Government, threaten their continued existence. This situation has led the authorities to attempt to implement reforms that will jeopardize workers' interests, and they have even considered the idea of privatizing the entire pensions system.

In view of this discouraging outlook, it is families, mainly women, who continue to be responsible for looking after senior citizens (Montes de Oca, 2004), thereby increasing the workload of their double, triple, or even quadruple shift. In short, both academic literature and government institutions (such as the National Population Council) agree that in Mexico, care of the elderly is largely the responsibility of the family. Only the middle-middle and upper classes are able to seek support from private services such as nurses, caretakers and in a few cases, private residences for the elderly.

This situation leads directly to the theme of the family-work link, and this article contains a proposal constituting an exploratory approach that attempts to begin from a different platform from that traditionally adopted in research on the work-family link. In other words, our starting point has been a purely qualitative study on a group of women from the urban middle class in Mexico, undertaken by one of the co-authors (Blanco, 2002). One of the objectives of this article is to analyze the interrelationship between several of the life trajectories comprising women's life courses. One of the most important trajectories is work, on the basis of which, in conjunction with the others (school, conjugal and reproductive) a typology was drawn up to describe the link between family and work. Subsequently, one of the ways we found of linking a qualitative to a quantitative source was to construct a similar typology. Thus, during the initial stage qualitative material is used to construct a typology of the intersection of work and family in the life courses of females from middle-class sectors in Mexico. During the second stage, these four types were used to find quantitative data which is used to enrich the characteristics of the typology and compare two cohorts (1936-1938 and 1951-1953), unlike the qualitative study in which only the trajectories of a single cohort are analyzed.

The article is structured as follows. The first section refers to the issue of aging in Mexico in general, in order to contextualize the processes undergone by the two generations of women compared in this paper; the second section contains a brief discussion of the methodological possibilities of linking two research styles: qualitative and quantitative; the third section contains a discussion of the wealth of information provided by the work-family link in studies seeking to understand the life courses of people, particularly women; the fourth section contains both the conceptual aspects--highlighting the polysemy of the concept of generation--and the characteristics of the sources of information used; the fifth section refers to the typology of work-family links, while the sixth section analyzes the connections among different life histories. The paper ends with our reflections on the findings obtained.

CONTEXT OF AGING IN MEXICO