This anthropological study of a mestizo village in Morelia complements the already published psychoanalytic study of the same community— Social Character in a Mexican Village—by Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby. Lola Romanucci-Ross, who cooperated with Fromm and Maccoby, presents an insightful analysis of the villagers’ concepts of morality, describes the types of conflicts that occur within and between families, and offers several vivid descriptions of behavior in actual situations. But this study suffers from the conceptual disease common to so many anthropological studies of Mesoamerican communities: it treats the village as the unit of analysis and glosses over intra-community variation and social inequality. Whereas Fromm and Maccoby link type of “social character” to socioeconomic status and conclude that the gap between rich and poor villagers is increasing, Romanucci-Ross barely mentions economic differences and leaves the reader with the impression that political leadership is based on ability, that conflict is structured by sexual differences—men and women fight over different issues in different ways—and that violence is primarily related to alcoholism. These observations are undoubtedly true, but Fromm and Maccoby tell us that political leaders tend to be older men who own ejido land (only 26 percent of adult men own such land), that alcoholism is most prevalent among poor ejido holders (men suffering from downward mobility), while common sense should allow us to relate the prevalence of conflicts between women over men to women’s dependence on men for economic survival in a community where men gain prestige from supporting mistresses.
The first chapter describes the village and its history. Although the village is very old, most of its present inhabitants are post-Revolution migrants who arrived after 1919 to take advantage of the land reform program. The early arrivals obtained most of the ejido land and became the village elite; those arriving after 1935 became landless laborers in the rich, well-watered fields.
The third chapter presents a fascinating analysis of family relations, documenting the fragile fink between spouses, the strong mother-son tie, and showing that women leave their husbands more frequently than men abandon their wives. After describing how ego-centered networks are built from kinship, friendship, compadrazgo, and patronage ties, the author concludes that vertical, asymetrical ties—cross-generation kinship bonds, patron-client relations, and compadrazgo—are more durable than the horizontal, egalitarian ties of friendship or samegeneration kinship.
The fourth chapter focuses on two components of the village status system—“categorical” and “moral” status—and contains a sensitive analysis of villagers’ concepts of egoísmo, categoría, and envidia. The chapter ends with a description of political office holders as “compromised people in undermined roles” for graft and corruption abound at all levels of government, both inside and outside of the village. The most effective leaders have been men who are capable of dealing with the outside world and who have extracted such important benefits for the community that the profits they skim off for themselves have caused little comment. While the author’s descriptions of conflict, violence, and morality are clear and interesting, her failure to link the intra-village variations she observes to socioeconomic variables leaves the reader wondering what will happen in the village if, as Fromm and Maccoby predict, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
