The Peasant Marketing System of Oaxaca, Mexico

By Ralph L. Beals

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520319431

Ralph L. Beals

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The Peasant Marketing System of Oaxaca, Mexico

The Peasant Marketing System of Oaxaca, Mexico

Ralph L. Beals

University of California Press Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright © 1975 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN: 0-520-02435-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-76098

Printed in the United States of America

Contents 1

Contents 1

Acknowledgments

1 Purpose and Nature of the Study

2 Making a Living in Oaxaca

3 Setting and Extent of the Oaxaca Market System

4 The Production System

5 The Consumption and Expenditure System

6 The Structure of the Marketing System

7 Dynamics of the Marketing System: I

8 Dynamics of the Marketing System: II

9 Price Making and Market Results

10 Growth and Change

11 Growth and Change in Mitla

12 Concluding Observations

Appendixes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This report on the peasant marketing system of Oaxaca, Mexico, and the studies on which it is based, are the product of many persons and institutions. To name every individual who contributed to the research and writing is impossible, and to those whose names are omitted I extend my apologies and assure them of my gratitude for their help.

The greatest debt is owed to the villagers and traders who provided most of the information used in this report. In few places in the world are people so friendly to strangers or so cooperative and frank as in the region of the Oaxaca marketing system. As Bronislaw Malinowski wrote in the preliminary report (Malinowski and de la Fuente 1957-13-14) of his earlier study of the market system of the Valley of Oaxaca in 1940 and 1941:

I am gratified to say, finally, that in no other field study—whether it be in New Guinea, in Melanesia, in Bantu Africa, or among the tribes of North America—have I found the actual ethnographic technique more pleasant, easy, and fruitful than among the Zapotees of the Valley of Oaxaca. A certain number of informants whom I had the personal good fortune to discover, contributed more to success than all the methods and clever tricks of previous field work [my translation].

These sentiments are not overdrawn, and to the hundreds of people in Oaxaca who helped the staff of the project, many of whom became good friends, it is a pleasure to extend in the names of all of us, our warmest thanks and best wishes for their future. But for them this study would have been impossible. Had their assistance been less generous, the results would be far less.

Various officials in Mexico also provided invaluable aid. The late Eusebio Davalos Hurtado, then director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, gave the project the official sponsorship of the institute, provided letters of introduction to officials in Oaxaca, and made it possible for members of the institute staff, especially Prof. Fernando Camara and Dr. Ignacio Bernal, to attend a three-day discussion and planning Round Table at the end of the first year of field research. The late Dr. Alfonso Caso, director of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, discussed the project with me at length and made it possible for various members of his staff to participate in the Round Table. These included Dr. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, Dr. Daniel F. Rubin de la Borbolla, and Prof. Ramon Hernandez.

We benefited from the knowledge and advice of Drs. Bernard Siegel and John Hotchkiss, who also made available to us student reports from Stanford University’s field training program in Oaxaca.

In Oaxaca the Governor of the State of Oaxaca, H. Lie. Rodolfo Brena Torres, through his secretary, provided letters of introduction for staff members which greatly facilitated acceptance of the project by various municipal officials. The rector of the University Benito Juarez of Oaxaca, Ue. Alberto Canseco Ruiz, provided facilities for the planning conference and later, as mayor of the city of Oaxaca, opened the municipal archives to us. The Administrador de Mercados, Carlos Lopez, gave the project free access to the archives of the Administración de Mercados.

The necessary financing of the field research was provided by the National Science Foundation. The foundation also provided funds for secretarial help in organizing the extensive field data and research assistance for its analysis and the preparation of this manuscript.

Most of the data on which this report is based were collected by a dedicated staff of field assistants consisting of Richard Berg, Martin Diskin, Theodore Downing, Paul Steinberg, Charlotte Stolmaker, Ellen Waterbury, Ronald Waterbury, and Clyde Woods. Among them they spent approximately twelve years in the field. In addition three local Oaxaca residents must be mentioned. Federico Jimenez Caballero, a student at the University Benito Juarez of Oaxaca, was with the project for some two years, working not only as a field assistant to members of the staff but also conducting many interviews. His sister, Maria Dolores Jimenez Caballero, assisted at times by typing notes and copying documents. Miguel Ramirez Ochoa did much of the work of locating and copying documents and also made a survey of traders and artisans in the village of Mitla. The field notes, collected and collated in a central file, supplied much of the data used in writing this report. While specific credits are given to the field staff from time to time in the text of this report, this does not adequately reflect the importance of their contributions. Although the interpretations and the text in this report are primarily my responsibility, members of the field staff must be considered as major collaborators in the enterprise. Fundamentally this is their report more than it is mine.

Various researchers working in Oaxaca independently of the market study project were helpful. Beverly Litzler Chinas, studying a community in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, made many of her field materials available to us and participated in meetings of the field staff. Herbert Eder, working on the economic botany of Oaxaca, discussed many matters with us and made some of his unpublished materials available. Kent Flannery and Aubrey Williams discussed their research at length. Cecil Welte, head of the Office for the Study of Man in the Valley of Oaxaca, contributed freely of his knowledge of the Valley and made the resources of the institute, especially its excellent library, available to staff members. We are especially indebted for permission to use his detailed map of the Valley. To all those we express our gratitude.

Mention must be made of the part played by Ronald Waterbury in preparing the initial project proposal and getting the project started. The project had its genesis, in part, in a seminar I conducted on Latin American markets, but it took form principally in discussions between Waterbury and myself. In view of my impending absence from the country, Waterbury volunteered to undertake the onerous task of putting the proposal into shape for submission to the National Science Foundation. If my memory serves correctly, I wrote the initial plan in Los Angeles, the principal draft proposal in Buenos Aires in 1962, and signed the final papers in Kano in 1963. To these, Waterbury not only contributed many suggestions but did most of the tedious detailed work involved.

Acknowledgment must be made of the aid given by research assistants working in Los Angeles. These included Ellen Waterbury, Myrna Berg, Luanne Hudson, and Charlotte Stolmaker.

Two persons require special mention. Ralph C. Cassady, Jr., professor of marketing in the School of Business Administration at the University of California, Los Angeles, served as an unpaid consultant to the project from its beginning. He made three trips to Oaxaca and suggested many problems for field investigation. He also reviewed a draft of the manuscript for this report in great detail. Not only did he aid in clarifying much of the discussion of economic and marketing problems in the report but he made innumerable editorial suggestions for improving the manuscript as a whole. Charlotte Stolmaker served as research assistant for two years. She prepared many of the tables, organized and supervised the preparation of maps and figures, and not only made many suggestions for improving the organization and wording of the manuscript but rewrote numerous passages that I have incorporated with little or no change. She did much of the onerous work of checking bibliography and putting the manuscript in shape for the press. She could with justice be classed as a coauthor.

R. L. B.

1

Purpose and Nature of the Study

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

This monograph summarizes the findings of a detailed anthropological study of an extensive traditional marketing system and its modern transformations. The major questions considered are (i) the scope and structure of the system, (2) its functioning, and (3) its responses to the relatively recent impact of a modernizing and industrializing national economy. The first of these questions involves identifying the geographic limits within which the system operates; the formal institutions, information networks, and conventional understandings, and the relationships among them, which constitute the system; and the range of goods and services handled by the system. The second question requires us to ascertain which goods and services enter the system through production and which through importation, and the extent and nature of the transactions by which they move through the system to the point of consumption or export. Here must also be identified the people who participate in the system, their varied roles as producers, intermediaries, and consumers, the alternatives open to them, and the kinds of decisions they make and how they arrive at them. The third question requires some minimal consideration of the national economy, particularly with respect to the new goods and services it makes available, the expansion of regional markets it provides, and modern forms of distribution, as well as adjustments and responses to these on the part of peasants.

The locale of the study is the eastern sector of the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, a region retaining a high proportion of Indian population. The society of this region clearly is market oriented and has been so for a very long time.1 As the society and its culture are in considerable measure traditional and non-Western, consideration is given to the ways these affect the functioning of the marketing system and the economy that it serves.

A visiting economist surveying the traffic, color, and scale of exchange of the main Oaxaca City peasant marketplace exclaimed, There isn’t an economic theorist in the United States who has the faintest idea what goes on in a place like this! If this remark be only reasonably true, then perhaps this study needs no other justification. With some exceptions, economists not only of the United States but also of Europe have been notably ethnocentric. Until recently, too, anthropologists usually have ignored the work of economists, whose treatment of indigenous economies has been superficial or lacking. In classical ethnographies, if economics is mentioned it generally is limited to a discussion of technology, with perhaps a few brief words about trade and division of labor. A noteworthy change was stimulated by the early work of Malinowski (1922), Firth (1939), and Herskovits (1940), and the past decade has seen several important studies of indigenous economies. Many of the studies have dealt with problems of the distribution of goods, that is, problems of trading and marketing, and the functioning of specialized personnel.

In Mesoamerica, the indigenous marketplaces and trading activities have attracted the attention of laymen and professional anthropologists alike since the earliest contact period. 2 Cortés described the marketplace of Tlaxcala in his second letter to the crown. Bernal Diaz del Castillo and Bernardino de Sahagun wrote of the principal marketplace of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, and Sahagun (1950) delineated the various specialized traders in the marketplace. Sahagun and other chroniclers dealt with the special class of long-distance traders, the Pochteca. The principal significance of those early accounts for this study is the evidence they provide for the pre-Columbian existence in Mesoamerica of daily and cyclical marketplaces, specialized traders, and extensive marketing networks.

Numerous modern anthropological and geographic studies dealing in varying degrees with Indian or peasant economies in Mesoamerica are listed in the bibliography, for example, Beals, de la Fuente, Foster, Kaplan, Leslie, Marroquin, Nader, Nahmad, Parsons, and West in Mexico; McBryde, and Tax in Guatemala. Some of these offer data on marketing networks or systems, but the majority are village-oriented rather than system-oriented; for example, Tax (1953) described the market system of the Lake Atitlán region of Guatemala from the viewpoint of the village of Panajachel. The most noteworthy exception is the partially published study of the Oaxaca market system in 1940-1941 by Malinowski and de la Fuente (1957), although much of the data for it were collected in the city of Oaxaca and a few nearby marketplaces. (As yet unpublished notes and papers from this study, currently being edited by Ronald Waterbury, will contribute greatly to the analysis of recent changes in the system.) Marroquin (1957) described another market system in the state of Oaxaca, centering in the Mixtec town of Tlaxiaco. While this study has many merits, it is based upon a limited degree of field research, deals almost exclusively with Tlaxiaco, and uses a simplified and rather doctrinaire Marxist interpretive framework.

Among the economists, some have sought to cast their theories in universalist terms even in the last century, but the economic phenomena they knew were primarily those of the early industrializing economy of western Europe. Lacking a comparative perspective, they rarely recognized the extent to which the economic processes they discussed were embedded in and modified by the cultural values, traditions, and social structures of the societies in which they lived. Hence they were led to consider economics as an isolated system with its own internal dynamics. The major exception, Marx, saw the interrelationship of economics and society, but he drew upon the early anthropological works of Tyler and Morgan and accepted their evolutionary orientations uncritically. The state of primitive communism hypothesized by some early anthropologists of evolutionist persuasion became a basic element in Marxist theory. The efforts of evolutionary anthropologists to trace uniform stages of social development and to link these with stages of technological change undoubtedly influenced Marxist thought. Although Marx went beyond his contemporaries in perceiving the interrelations of economics and society and used the rudimentary anthropological knowledge of his time, his cross-cultural knowledge was second hand, and he did not test his theoretical conclusions against the realities of non-Westem economies.

Modern economic theorists have tended to dedicate themselves to systems of model building within either a capitalist or socialist framework or some combination of the two, and to the extent that they have dealt with data they have applied themselves primarily to the macroeconomic phenomena of Western society. Studies of microeconomic phenomena and behavior have been limited. These deal mostly with the firm or with aspects of marketing behavior, again in the context of industrialized Western society. Until fairly recently few economists evinced any interest in non-Western economies, and of these, some either questioned the applicability of economic concepts to simpler situations or denied that indigenous economies had relevance to modern economics. An economist’s plea for the study of indigenous economies is eloquently voiced by Polly Hill in the opening chapter of Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (1970).

Economists may find in this book not only data useful for a variety of purposes but also evidence of the applicability of economic concepts in the study of a regional peasant economy that has long been relatively isolated from the main current of Western economic life. In some measure it builds on the work of Malinowski and de la Fuente, but it attempts to go further in depth and to examine the relations of the marketing system to the economics of village life. It is essentially an anthropological study, and its handling of economic theory and concepts, and the use of economic methods of analysis, leave much to be desired. For example, economists may be disappointed that no systematic attempt is made to test economic theories. Formal models in economics are not utilized, and technical methods of analysis found in economics are employed only occasionally, at best. There are many passages that invite reference to the substantivist-formalist controversies in which some economists and anthropologists have engaged, but there is no systematic discussion of the issues. Such comment was omitted not because the staff was unaware of the controversy but because, as the report indicates, it has limited relevance for the Oaxaca marketing system and economy. This is not to deny that gifting, reciprocity, and redistribution mechanisms exist in Oaxaca; they do, just as they do in all Western societies, and they have about the same importance. The main objective has been the analysis of a market-oriented economy and the way it functions within a non-Western culture and society in terms that have meaning for economists as well as anthropologists.

More specifically, the analysis gives at least some insights into the use of capital and credit, the nature of supply and demand functions and their influence on the formation of prices, the variety of economic alternatives, the nature of the choices made, and the extent to which choice-making is influenced by maximization principles or modified by noneconomic aspects of the culture and society. An important aspect is the understanding it may contribute to the workings of peasant marketing systems. Possibly, also, it may suggest ways in which more technical economic analysis might be applied, particularly in testing economic theories.

The choice of Oaxaca as the locale for the study of a peasant marketing system was influenced by several considerations. One was familiarity with the region as a result of an earlier study of one of its groups (Beals 1945) and extended, if unsystematic, observations of Oaxaca marketplaces beginning in 1933. A second important consideration was the prior study of Malinowski and de la Fuente, dealing with the traditional marketing system in the Valley as it was in 1940-1941, which could provide a baseline for the analysis of change. It seemed evident that (1) the traditional marketing system of the Oaxaca region retained great vitality and integrity and offered good opportunities for a study addressed to the nature and operation of the system, and that (2) since 1940-1941 the influence of the modern national economy had expanded enormously. Corollaries to these points were the significance of the adjustments that the traditional marketing system has made to the modern economy, and the relevance of these adjustments for enlarging our understanding of processes of modernization and for projecting the future of the traditional system. Any consideration of change and adjustment, however, depended upon knowledge of the nature and operation of the traditional marketing system.

Another factor that influenced the choice of the Oaxaca system was its extent and the number of inhabitants it embraced. The extent of the system is dealt with in chapter 3, but it may be noted here that, conservatively, at least 1,044 localities are involved, with a total population of more than 750,000, and that the minimum value of goods and services consumed annually is nearly a billion pesos.

PLANNING THE STUDY

Given the incompleteness of existing knowledge of the region, the formulation of initial plans for the study, which were necessarily cast in general terms, presented methodological problems. Some of the problems are inherent to any holistic or systems type of study, particularly when one is concerned with process rather than with the relatively obvious structural features of the system. As Cook notes (1971), our knowledge of such a complicated system will always be conditional and incomplete. Its processes would have to be studied segmentally since time, manpower, and funds were finite, and the results could be only a series of approximations of a reality that is dynamic and ever-changing. We would have to deal with innumerable transactions occurring in distinctive social and cultural contexts, with relatively differentiated production and supply subsystems, and a complex, culturally conditioned consumption subsystem. The first problem, then, was to identify the segments, aspects, or processes for the beginning of a systematic study.

Several basic questions had to be answered. These included the range of products marketed, where and by whom they were produced, where and by whom they were consumed, the routes they followed, the sites where they were exchanged, and the personnel involved at various points in the exchange process. The investigation of these questions could profitably be accompanied by the accumulation of specific materials relating to the marketing system, including not only its transactional aspects but also production and consumption. The studies of the total economy would include such matters as resource control; the roles of capital, savings, and credit; supply and demand factors; facilitating services; prices and price formation; the nature and conduct of transactions; restraints and available options in marketing; and the strategies employed by participants in the marketing system. At the same time data concerning cultural and social factors affecting the marketing system were gathered.

An associated problem was selection of the locations for data-gathering. An obvious first step was a replication of the Malinowski and de la Fuente study of the Oaxaca City marketplace. This central marketplace not only offers the widest variety of marketing situations but also draws products, vendors, and buyers from all parts of the system. Observation of products sold, interviews with buyers and sellers and, ultimately, precise counts of vendors selling each item, provided firm data concerning the variety of goods traded in this city and the number of vendors handling them, as well as information about the origin and destination of goods. This part of the study was conducted by Ronald Waterbury and Ellen Waterbury. Martin Diskin carried out a similar study at Tlacolula, one of the largest secondary marketplaces in the Valley, and Richard Berg studied Zoogocho, a small marketplace in the mountains north of the Valley.3 Surveys were made of all the other large marketplaces in the Valley on their respective market days, and the smaller marketplaces were examined in varying detail. In those marketplaces that were intensively studied, special attention was given to their roles in the communities and in the areas they served.

The marketplace studies, supplemented by product surveys carried out in the northern Sierra, furnished information on the origin of goods and vendors and indicated the relative importance and distinctive characteristics of the various marketplaces. The results permitted us to ascertain the geographical range of the marketing system and the variety of products traded, and to identify types of traders and trading activities in the marketplaces as well as the ways exchange is conducted.

The investigation of the exchange system was further advanced by a series of village studies that demonstrated the varied character of villages’ involvement in the market system, and suggested the extent of exchange activities that do not take place in the periodic markets. Field work also furnished data on production and consumption systems. Villages studied in some detail included Diaz Ordaz, a farming and weaving village (by Theodore Downing); the farming and metate-making village of Magdalena Ocotlán (by Scott Cook); the market gardening and trading village of San Antonino Ocotlán (by Ronald Waterbury); the farming and pottery-producing village of Santa Maria Atzompa (by Charlotte Stolmaker); and the dairying village of San Lazaro Etla (by Clyde Woods). Cook had earlier and independently studied other metate-making villages, San Juan and San Sebastian Teitipac, and the Waterburys had spent some time in a farming and weaving village, Teotitlan del Valle. Separately financed, Beverly Litzler Chinas carried on a related study of the town of San Blas Atempa in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The village of Mitla was investigated to discover what had happened to the intervillage traders of this community since Parsons’s (1936) account. And virtually all villages in the Zapotee Sierra, including all marketplaces, as well as many villages in the Valley, were visited briefly.

With the cooperation of the Mayor and Administrator of Markets of the city of Oaxaca it was possible to examine the complete records of the market administration for recent years and such older records as we could locate in the municipal archives, dating back to 1938. Union officials assisted us in examining the records of the Federación de Expendedores de Mercados Públicos de Oaxaca (the federated unions) and some of its constituent unions, virtually since their founding. Data were also secured from records in state and federal offices.

PROBLEMS OF TERMINOLOGY

Many of the common terms that occur in this study are used in a specific regional sense and hence require definition. For example, the terms village, town, and city differ from the official census classifications. The term city is applied only to Oaxaca de Juarez, with a population approaching 100,000 at the time of the study. Although five localities in the isthmian region have populations between 10,000 and 20,000, none, because of the importance of farming, is classed as a city.

The term town is used in a more ambiguous sense. In the Valley and isthmian subregions I have applied this term to localities with secondary marketplaces (that is, those secondary in importance to the principal marketplace of Oaxaca City). Tlacolula, in the Valley, has a population of nearly 7,500; other secondary marketplace towns are smaller. For example, Zoogocho, a relatively important marketplace town, has a population of about 1,000 (1,083 in the 1960 census, 957 by Berg’s observations); Yalalag’s population in 1960 was 3,117. Marketplace towns also are the locations of civil administrative offices and services such as secondary schools; health, postal, and telegraph, and electricity services; and offices serving judicial, police, tax collection, and forestry control functions.

Village is even more loosely used. Generally the term refers either to a municipio (a political unit similar to the United States county) or to the principal settlement or cabecera of a municipio. In some municipios, all or virtually all of the population lives in a single nucleated settlement. In others, there are one or more smaller settlements subsidiary to the cabecera. Most cabeceras are larger than settlements recognized as rural communities by the official census classification. The village of Mitla, for example, in 1960 had a population in the neighborhood of 3,651, and the municipio of which it is a part numbered nearly 5,000 inhabitants. The Mexican National Census recognizes more than a thousand towns, villages, and hamlets for the region. The municipios of which they are a part, however, are more-or-less integrated social and cultural systems as well as administrative political units.

Although towns and villages are not clearly differentiated by size, they tend to differ in other characteristics. The populations of most villages are wholly or primarily Indian in origin and are engaged in farming, craft production or, to a varying degree, trading operations in the marketing system. Town populations often include a significant proportion of mestizos, and substantial numbers depend on marketing operations for all or most of their income. Towns with marketplaces also usually are centers of state and federal offices and services.4

Such terms as market and marketplace also are used with limited or special definitions. In this study the term market refers solely to the interplay of demand and supply at any given time or place. This differs from the usage frequently found in the literature for Mesoamerica where it refers to a place where goods are customarily interchanged. Technically, of course, any spot where a market transaction occurs is a marketplace, and the restricted meaning in this study must be kept in mind. Throughout, a marketplace (and what in much of the Mesoamerican literature is called a market) refers to a specific area in a community where numerous (but not always the same) buyers and sellers assemble to exchange commodities on either a daily or weekly basis. It follows from this restricted use of the term marketplace that in Oaxaca not all transactions occur in a marketplace. Some goods are exchanged in stores or warehouses that are not part of the marketplace as here defined.

Many marketplaces have two components, for which the local terms mercado and plaza are used. (The Aztec word tianguis is sometimes used in place of plaza, especially in Oaxaca City.) The mercado is a permanent structure occupied primarily by full-time traders or vendors with fixed locations, operating on a daily basis. In contrast, the plaza is an open-air marketplace occupied primarily by intermarket traders or producer-vendors, and is normally a weekly event. This distinction breaks down somewhat in the isthmian subregion, where plazas are daily although some of the personnel are irregular in attendance. It is also less clear-cut in villages with permanent buildings used part of the time by a few permanent vendors but fully used only on plaza days.

The term marketplace district includes not only the marketplace as above defined but also stores, depots, warehouses, and other enterprises clustered around the peripheries of the marketplace and depending in part for their custom on the buyers and sellers attending the marketplace. In Oaxaca City, for example, most of the coffee and chocolate mills are in an area occupied by the Saturday street marketplace. In that area are also cheap hotels, inns, saloons, and restaurants deriving most of their patronage from buyers and sellers in the marketplace. Around the peripheries of the district are the termini of most of the bus lines.

The term marketplace area refers to the cluster of villages from which a given marketplace draws most of its buyers and producer-vendors of local products. The majority of these come from nearby villages but the term is imprecise, for the marketplace area may differ with respect to particular products. Thus most buyers of cattle in the northern Sierra travel to Tlacolula in the Valley when they are in the market for such a large purchase, while vendors of deciduous fruits or lumber or other forest products may travel to distant marketplaces. Moreover, many villages, because of location, may be in the market areas of two different marketplaces.

The term marketing system refers to the interrelated and interdependent market activities and processes found in a regionally delimited group of villages, towns, and marketplaces. It includes those mediating social understandings specific to the market situation which enable diverse social groups to function and interact in it. The system is not completely closed but encompasses most of the economic transactions of the various components.

No distinction is made herein between marketing and trading. Paul and Laura Bohannan, writing on the economy of the African Tiv (1968:241), pointed out that the Tiv concept of marketing is to sell one’s own products and buy one’s own requirements, whereas trading involves the transport of goods for profit. This distinction was made by Marx in 1867 (1936:164), but he did not consider the two institutionally separable. The Oaxaca peasant is aware of this difference and distinguishes between the producer-vendor (propio), who sells his own product, and the trader (regatón), who buys and sells for a profit. Some of the differences in marketing behavior between the two types will be pointed out later, but the Oaxaca peasant pays little attention to them. In fact, the propio at times transports his own product some distance and sells in quantity, while some traders buy and sell within the same marketplace.

Throughout the study the terms traditional and modern have been used extensively. They are used here more specifically than in the general literature on development. Shils recently wrote:

The terms tradition and traditional are used to describe and explain the recurrence in approximately identical form of structures of conduct and patterns of belief over several generations of membership or over a long time within single societies (with a more-or-less delimited territory and a genetically continuous population) and within corporate boundaries as well as over regions which extend across several bounded territorial discrete societies which are unified to the extent of sharing in some measure a common culture—which means common traditions (1971:123).

Shils further points out that societies that change relatively slowly or which explain or legitimate actions of authority by reference to the past are commonly called traditional. Societies that undergo relatively rapid change or which seek to account for actions without recourse to tradition tend to be classed as modern.

Shils’s analysis has the merit of eliminating the directional quality found in much development literature that tends to measure modernity by the degree of change toward Western capitalist or Communist models (depending usually on the national affiliations of the writer). His approach admits the use of criteria internal to the society for measuring its modernity or traditionalism, without recourse to external yardsticks. As applied to this study, this means that the Oaxaca peasant society and its economy should provide the bases for evaluation, and when I have used the terms traditional and modern I have attempted to keep to these internal criteria. As applied to marketing in Oaxaca, the terms are used in a special sense that becomes clear in the following discussion.

What I have termed the traditional marketing system in Oaxaca is the system existing before the completion of the Pan American Highway in 1948, and such aspects of it as have continued into the present. It includes a broad spectrum of peasant producers, consumers, and traders, based primarily in rural villages within a definable region, who participate in an exchange system with minimal extraregional involvements. The system deals in products of farm, forest, and ocean, a wide variety of village handicrafts, and a few town or city products that are extensively used in villages. The limited consumption of urban products is underscored because some basic metal tools are still forged in villages. Much, but far from all, of the trading in the traditional system has taken place in marketplaces, most of them periodic, which serve for the assembly and dispersal of products. Most vendors are either peasant producers, or traders and middlemen of various types who also are usually peasants or have peasant antecedents. Likewise, the majority of retail buyers are village-dwelling peasants although, now as in the past, town and city dwellers also have acquired their provisions largely in the peasant marketplaces. This system is traditional in that it has a long historical background. While it has aboriginal antecedents (Whitecotton 1968), its basic patterns and relationships were modified in Colonial times. Changes have occurred over time but they were slow and relatively minor. Because of limitations of resources and time, little systematic effort has been made to trace the origins and development of the traditional marketing system. It is taken as a given, to be examined as it exists now or in a recent past.

The term modern is at times applied in a general sense to the marketing system as a whole as it has developed since 1948. It thus covers both the contemporary peasant system and the local aspects of the national economy. More frequently the term modern refers to the marketing system of the modern economy characterized by stores, warehouses, wholesalers, and other essentially recent commercial types of establishments dealing largely in industrially produced goods from outside the region. In designing the project, the modern marketing system also was taken as a given. I was not concerned with the origins and nature of the modern economy exceptas they affected the traditional marketing system and its adjustments in recent times.

The traditional and modern systems are noncompetitive to some extent, for they deal in different kinds of goods. They also interdigitate to a degree: modern products, formerly not available or available only seasonally, have a limited distribution through the traditional marketing system, while the modern commercial marketing system provides new outlets for some traditional products, especially external outlets. The line between the two systems is also somewhat blurred. For example, to exclude from the traditional category all fixed vendors in mercados and stores, and all trade in modern industrial articles or all extraregional trade, would be misleading. Stores and daily vendors have existed in most of the larger localities for a long time; some of the operators are peasants. Extraregional trade also has long been important, for example, the export of silk and cochineal in Colonial times and the importation of cacao even in pre-Columbian times. Industrial or quasi-industrial goods have entered the market on a limited scale for some time. Some of them, such as iron products, woolen textiles, leather and shoes, milled sugar, distilled liquors, and roof tiles, were of Spanish introduction. The quantity of goods imported was small. Until completion of the railroad in 1892 all imports reached Oaxaca on pack animals, and even afterward exterior commerce was limited.5 Not only was the railroad an inefficient, high-cost line, but the demand for industrial products was small.6 Only with the rising industrialization of Mexico, beginning in the 1940s, and the opening of the Pan American Highway link from Puebla to Oaxaca City in 1943, did the flow begin to quicken. This was the watershed era that divided a regional economy dominated by a traditional marketing system from the massive introduction of a modern economy of national dimensions. Much of the expansion in Oaxaca was commercial, and it was dramatically symbolized by the opening of a Sears, Roebuck retail store in Oaxaca City.

In my terminology, then, what is traditional includes the categories of goods and services, the techniques and patterns of production, the kinds of consumption (both concrete and in terms of values and preferences), the modes of exchanging goods and services, and the various kinds of economic actions and interactions that the Oaxaca peasant has acquired as part of his cultural tradition. The term modern refers primarily to those goods and services, techniques and technology, and ways of responding to economic situations which represent modifications resulting from recent external contacts, pressures, and opportunities. In adopting these meanings I do not imply that all changes from the traditional are the result of external influences. The traditional market system has its own dynamics of change, and the Oaxaca peasant has been independently inventive in adapting to the new and the external. Nevertheless, because of their relatively important effects on the Oaxaca peasant, as well as for their more general significance for the problems of socalled developing societies, those changes are emphasized which result from the impact of the external industrializing economy. Such changes are considered to have begun at the time that external influences became numerous and change became rapid.

THE PEASANT CHARACTER OF THE OAXACA SYSTEM

In this study the traditional marketing system is referred to as a peasant system. Other writers have used the term Indian when discussing the traditional economies of Mesoamerica, or Zapotee when referring to the Oaxaca region. Indian is unsatisfactory because many of the component parts of the Oaxaca system are villages where no Indian language is spoken today. The term is much less commonly used in Oaxaca when compared with other parts of Mesoamerica. Zapotee is also unsatisfactory because, although the majority of inhabitants involved do speak Zapotee or did in the past, speakers of other languages such as Mixe and Mixtec are an integral part of the system, while Zapotee is applied to a cluster of at least six languages or dialects, in some cases mutually unintelligible. I have used the term peasants to refer to those people locally known as campesinos—village-dwelling farmers, artisans, wage workers, and traders living in rural settlements that are usually nucleated, essentially endogamous, and partially closed communities. These communities exhibit similar social and cultural characteristics but may have distinctive local variations culturally, socially, and economically. They are involved in varying degrees in an economically interdependent system functioning through the market.

According to most of the rather vague typological definitions of the term peasant, the Oaxaca country folk are readily identifiable as such, but they differ markedly from the peasants of Haiti or China or Medieval Europe. I do not intend to enter into the extensive and somewhat fruitless attempts to define peasantry. In this study the term conveniently identifies a rural, village-dwelling segment of a larger society which shows points of similarity to groups that have been classified as peasants in other parts of the world.

One point of difference requires clarification. I have characterized Oaxaca peasants as usually living in partially closed communities. Eric Wolf (1955) characterized Latin American peasantry, and peasantry in general, as consisting of either closed corporate or open communities. In so doing he was not dealing with polar opposites but rather with a continuum extending from closed to open. The criteria he used were mostly economic: a closed community is one with no involvements in an external market. In describing Oaxaca peasant communities as closed, I refer rather to their cultural and social characteristics,