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In Latin America, women's ability to participate in the paid workforce on equal terms as men is constrained by many cultural and political obstacles, and this reinforces women's unequal citizenship status. Even though unions have rarely supported women's rights historically, and are currently losing political power in the neoliberal economic context, I argue that union women have a crucial role to play in the social struggle to expand women's labor rights. Building on theories about the social construction of citizenship, I develop an original theoretical framework suggesting that civil society acts on three levels to expand citizenship rights: the individual level (working with individuals to make them more rights-conscious), within social institutions (working to ensure that policies within social institutions actually reflect the rights of individuals), and at the level of the state, where civil society contributes to the construction of new citizenship discourses. / The framework is then applied to the Mexican case. Examining the rise of working class feminism in the context of the debt crisis and transition to economic liberalism in the 1980s, and the subsequent democratic transition in 2000, I show how these contexts led union women to participate in civil associations active at each of these three levels of citizenship construction. More specifically, this participation has been important in raising awareness of women's labor rights among women workers, challenging patriarchal union structures, and bringing the issue of women's labor rights into the debate over reform of Mexico's Federal Labor Law. I ultimately conclude that in the absence of support from a broad women's labor movement, the chances that women's labor rights will be supported by the Mexican government and Mexican unions will be low.

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This thesis explored a regional comparison of education in post-revolutionary Mexico. It involved a micro-look into the relationship between violence, education, religion, and politics in the states of Durango and Jalisco. Research methods included primary sources and microfilms from the National Archives State Department records related to education from the internal affairs of Mexico from 1930-1939 from collection file M1370. It also utilized G-2 United States Military Intelligence reports as well as records from the British National Archives dealing with church and state relations in Mexico from 1920-1939. Anti - clericalism in the 1920’s led to violent backlash in rural regions of Durango and Jalisco called the Cristero rebellion. A second phase of the Cristero rebellion began in the 1930s, which was aimed at ending state-led revolutionary secular education and preserving the folk Catholic education system. There existed a unique ritualized culture of violence for both states. Violence against state-led revolutionary secular educators was prevalent at the primary and secondary education levels in Durango and Jalisco. Priests served as both religious leaders and rebel activists. At the higher education level there existed a split of the University of Guadalajara but no violence against educators. There existed four competing factions involved in this intellectual battle: communists followed Marx, anarchistic autonomous communists, urban folk modern Catholics, and student groups who sought reunion of the original university. This thesis described how these two states and how they experienced their unique culture of violence during the 1930s. It suggested a new chronology of the Cristero rebellion. This comparison between two regions within the broader context of the country and its experiences during the 1930s allowed for analysis in regards to education, rebellion, religion, and politics.

This cross-cultural inquiry focuses on the involvement of mothers in their children's education and the ways in which motherhood impacts the personal identities of mothers. The Second-wave feminism started thirty years ago and questioned the role and position of mothers in society. The objective of this movement was to free women from the exclusive responsibility of childcare. However, three decades later women are still the primary caregivers for their children. The study involves 36 middle-class mothers, 12 each from Canada, India and Mexico. Irrespective of their cultural backgrounds, these mothers participated actively in the domestic work related to childcare and in their children's schoolwork. Participants in this study expressed their views about intensive mothering and how they sought their personal identities from the work of mothering. The majority regarded motherhood as a unique and rewarding role, and wished to continue mothering despite the frustrations and stresses they experienced. The findings concerning the childcare strategies of mothers from Canada, India and Mexico highlight some cultural differences. These cultural differences also had an impact on how these mothers perceived their roles and identities.

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Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The intended contribution of this work is to systematically discuss a selection of methodological topics and some of the empirical and technical issues that have been driving the measurement of inequality in Mexico so far. This discussion has two strands: firstly, the general case, and second, the particular case of Mexico. The general case include some philosophical concerns, along with a review of the traditional inequality measurement, the most common operational decisions in empirical calculations, and the recent methodological contribution of development literature that is mostly centered around the capability approach of Sen (1985b). The philosophical part contrasted with other approaches and rejected the Marxist view of economic inequality, which is mostly viewed as an outcome of exploitation. The distributional judgments are compared with more ancient schools of thought in regards to justice. Another methodological issue is such that social inequality, approximated by income inequality, might be considered as an additional functioning that measures the degree of social cohesion in the country, this finding is an implication that comes from the definition of functionings within the capability approach; then, social inequality is a functioning that is different in nature from other measures of destitution, and it is also different from the destitution that is captured by absolute poverty measurement. Our general case includes a review of the most popular ways to measure inequality, such as normative and pragmatic inequality measures that are mentioned with their properties, with their rankings of the distributions provided by the use of stochastic dominance and quantile comparisons, and the construction of statistical models and some graphic representations of income economic inequality; the approach of inequality concerns included in the measurement of relative poverty is rejected for the sake of clarity. Then this general view would guide us to a better understanding of the Mexican literature for the consideration of income distribution. The measurement of destitution provided by governmental offices is necessary to discuss, because there might be some lack of coherence between the design of the measurement and the complex legal system in Mexico. We also consider a set of regulatory concerns that might not be unique to the Mexican law, but may be generalized for developing countries as a whole. Some of the methodological discussions that show how the Mexican research has been influenced by the international literature about human destitution will be good to clarify, looking at the value judgments that have been automatically accepted by the researchers. A sensitivity analysis was performed to the empirical calculation of inequality in Mexico, so the measurement showed to be different in regards to a variety of operational concerns: the recipient unit, the different data from income and consumption-expenditure surveys, various non-responses and underreported biases, the inclusion of a regional price index, among other things. In this work was also covered the reasons why it might be the case that destitution and poverty assessment was studied more deeply than inequality itself, so the possible ambiguity of inequality with poverty measurement is challenged in this work with a variety of theoretical remarks and empirical arguments. The final topic for the particular case of Mexico is to shed light in regards to the context of the capability approach and the use of equivalence scales, because these methodological approaches consider respectively directly and indirectly the assessment of distributional judgments. This discussion is followed by an empirical assessment of inequality measures that is related with a set of functionings and services, where a direct relationship of measures of inequality with other measures of destitution is made clear.

This research is an exploration of the applicability of a methodology to the study of decision making on migration in Mexican households. This thesis shows the importance of using multiple respondents in order to examine the role of women in decision making within Mexican households that have migrated. Women's roles in the processes of decision making and migration are varied, but individuals in all households studied indicated that migration is a family, rather than individual, decision. Gender differences appeared in responses to many questions, emphasizing men's and women's different priorities. The most striking differences emerged between spouses in the same household, and the results show the inaccurate picture that can develop if one household member is used to represent all members.