This paper examines the changes that take place in want patterns when unaccustomed purchasing power is made available to peasant agriculturalists as a result of a recent Government-sponsored development project in the Mexican Gulf Lowlands. It is hypothesized that increased cash income stimulates changes in peasant expenditure patterns and that corresponding changes in wants can be identified. In order to measure the changes that have taken place in expenditure and make inferences about wants, a detailed study has been undertaken of patterns of income and expenditure in a sample group selected within the Plan compared with a control group of peasants outside of the immediate project area. The comparison between the sample groups supports the hypothesis. However, no simple link was found between increased purchasing power and consumption. The initial period of new want development consequent on income increase was characterized by extensive experimental spending on a wide variety of superficial wants, which are unlikely to be incorporated as deep-seated components of the consumption pattern since they are based on short-term impulses prompted by curiosity and prestige motives. Consequently, increased expenditure on want satisfaction had achieved relatively little impact on the standard of living. It was concluded that the main significance of increased income in this context is that it acts as a catalyst to change in wants and brings the consumer to the point where satisfaction of potential wants is possible. Potential wants are not adopted simply because the opportunity is available and the items can be afforded, but only if they are the response to a felt need and have a good fit with the existing cultural matrix. Thus, change in want patterns is a function of change in perception rather than a response to increased income. The value system, then, plays the key role in want development and it appears that change in the value system itself in terms of attitudes, motivations and aspirations, is prerequisite for the development of new wants and the modification of old wants, which in turn stimulates further reformulation of the cultural frame-of-reference. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation is an ethnography of resource control in the municipio of Cucurpe, Sonora, Mexico. The municipio itself covers 1,788 square kilometers of rugged, semi-arid terrain bisected by the San Miguel river and its tributaries. Less than one percent of the land is cultivated, the rest devoted to livestock raising, primarily cattle. Most Cucurpe households make their living as both ranchers and farmers. The control of land and water therefore becomes a vitally important political and economic issue. Twenty-one percent of the municipio is controlled by three peasant corporate communities--the comunidades of Cucurpe and San Javier, and the ejido 6 de Enero. The rest of the land belongs to private ranchers, many of whom are wealthy and reside outside the municipio. The dissertation focuses upon the history, structure and functions of the Cucurpe comunidad, the largest and most powerful of the three institutions, describing its role in past and present politics of resource control. Considerable economic inequality exists among Cucurpe households, not only among private ranchers and peasants, but among peasant households themselves. The range of economic inequality is ascertained, and conclusions about the relationships between inequality and the politics of resource control are drawn. It is argued that Cucurpe is composed of at least four different classes. These classes conflict and compete over two major issues: the control of grazing and arable land. Most households belonging to the corporate communities unite in opposition to private ranchers when their access to corporate rangeland is threatened. They battle each other over the status of arable land. Those with land consider it a private resource. Those without land content it belongs to the corporate communities themselves, a position supported by federal agrarian reform law. Such conflict seriously threatens the stability of these peasant organizations.