Heyman, Josiah McC. “Changes in House Construction Materials in Border Mexico: Four Research...

Human Organization, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994 Copyright @ 1994 by the Society for Applied Anthropology 0018-7259/94/020132-11$1.60/1

Changes in House Construction Border Mexico: Four Research

Materials in Propositions

about Commoditization JOSIAH McC. HEYMAN

In the US-Mexican industrial border city of Agua Prieta, Sonora, houses are being built with purchased, manufactured materials. many of them from outside the region, rather than with local or self-made materials. This situation provides an opportunity to explore the logic of delocalization and commoditization of material culture. Definitive explanations are not available, but four lines of inquiry are suggested. The tradeoff between time and money changes as people enter the wage economy. Houses become vehicles for investment across time. Access to local resources become constrained while new commercial channels of purchased manufactures are opened. Techniques of construction change as the regional stratification picture shifts in response to external connections.

Key words: consumption, economic development, houses, material culture, US-Mexico border

M OST INEXPENSIVE NEW HOUSES in the US-Mexican border city of Agua Prieta are built with thin walls of

fired brick and galvanized sheet metal roofs. They are blazingly hot during the cloudless daytime of the Sonoran desert, yet they retain little of that warmth in the cool high-desert nights. The older technology-massive adobe walls beneath a cane and mud roof-is better suited to the climate, yet adobes are declining in use, and no earthen roofs are to be found at all. Concrete floors costing precious money replaces dirt floors, while lumber purchased from sawmills substitutes for timbers.

The advent of brick or cement block walls, tin o r tile roofs, and concrete floors is not limited to areas bordering the US; such alterations have been observed in places as different as rural Taiwan (Wolf 1968:24), Sri Lanka (Duncan 1989), among the

Josiah McC. Heyman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society at Michigan Technological Uni- versity, Houghton, MI. He thanks his numerous informants in Agua Prieta, Sonora, and Douglas, Arizona, but accepts all responsibility for interpretations and errors of fact. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The comments there were unusually helpful, especially those of Thomas Park, Michael Schiffer, and Carlos Velez-Ibariez. James B. Greenberg introduced the author to Agua Prieta, most generously shared his 1981-82 data, and also commented on the paper. Roger Owen was very generous to the author in writing about and discussing his trips to Marobavi. The author thanks Patrick Martin, Boubekeur Rahali, and Mehenna Yakhou for assistance of various sorts. This material is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation under grant BNS-8403884, a fellow- ship from the Doherty Foundation, and a student grant-in-aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Mije of Oaxaca, Mexico (Greenberg 1990), and in a Berber area of Algeria (M. Yakhou, personal communication). Expenditure of migrant remittances on houses rather than on "productive" investments is a major area of dispute in migration studies (Du- rand and Massey 1992:25-29). Why do people alter the construction materials (and closely associated features of architecture) in their regional vernacular tradition, some obtained and processed by the users themselves, in favor of items that are purchased, some locally but in significant instances from external manufacturers?

This question touches on transformations of a profound nature. At the simplest level -comrnoditization - why do relatively poor people expend scarce cash to replace items they once gath- - -

ered and fashioned with unpaid labor? More generally, why are viable regional material cultures abandoned in favor of globally uniform goods obtained from outside the regional economy- the process of 'Ldelocalization" (Pelto and Pelto in Barkin and DeWalt 1988:53)? Regional cultures have long been connected to the world economy, and much material culture was locally sold or exchanged- that is, in some ways already commoditized. Delocalization, however, involves the intensification of external flows into regional material culture and the displacement of local material goods and producers. Finally, such changes in house construction seem to coincide with the direct impact of capitalism, in the form of wage labor, commercial agriculture, or migratory remittances. ~ o e s capitalism somehow alter the terms by which households balance time and cash expenditures? This paper, in setting forth likely lines of inquiry, suggests that the study of mere house materials may reveal the stringent organizational logic of prosaic choices under capitalism.

Archaeologists Randall McGuire and Michael Schiffer (1983) propose that architectural materials are linked to social processes

132 H U M A N O R G A N I Z A T I O N

because they embody distinct sets of construction qualities. Some are more troublesome to obtain or erect, but endure longer; others can be renewed easily but last shorter periods of time. There is no perfect material for all human uses; rather, each social order has distinctive needs that steer people to prefer certain construction qualities while forgoing other ones. For example, McGuire and Schiffer observe sedentarization and the rise of social inequality in the shift from impermanent wood and dirt to enduring and ostentatious masonry. One wonders if a similar transition is now taking place under world capitalism.

I will begin by delineating alternative qualities of building materials involved in the choices border Mexicans make. Then, as I present the empirical observations from Sonora, my major purpose is to demonstrate that choices have in fact been made among alternatives, and that certain qualities emerge as favored. Trends in choice are chronological processes, and I rely substantially on two direct sources of evidence for historical change. I compare two working class neighborhoods in Agua Prieta: Barrio Ferrocarril (built, for the most part, during the 1940s-1960s; a few houses are older) and Colonia Ejidal (built after 1975).2 For rural Sonora, I compare the reports of two ethnographers who worked in the same river valley, the Rio San Miguel, 20 years apart, Roger Owen (1959), who worked there in 1955, and Thomas Sheridan (1988), who worked there in 1980-81. By using direct historical evidence, I can show that changes in building material choices parallel major transformations in the broader society.

Simply noting parallel trends does not, however, establish a causal connection. Why should capitalism affect the relative balance of material culture qualities? I put forward four argu- ments that bridge this gap. These are research propositions, suggested but not tested by the ethnographic material at my dis- posal; they are aimed at future fieldworkers. The four propositions are not mutually exclusive, since they spring from the same broad historical process; at the end of the paper I will suggest ways in which they may be mutually reinforcing.

As Richard Wilk (1989) rightly emphasizes, house construction is a series of complex considerations within a household decision-making process. The pattern of choices made is not the same as the reason for making the choice; some logic (or competing logics) link the two. Therefore, each proposition em- bodies an assertion (in a simplified or crystallized form) about priorities and or necessities faced by households when they make decisions. Ethnographers may either agree or disagree that these are the important considerations to households, but they should explicitly address the organizational logics they do feel to hold. It is only when ethnographers explore such propositions that we can discern the links between household decisions and impressive spread of delocalizing, capitalist consumption.

Changes in house construction in Sonora involved three inter- locking tradeoffs. Materials vary in cost, and at the extreme difference between purchased versus self-obtained and processed items. For example, bricks, which can be self-made, are mostly bought; they are relatively expensive compared to adobes, which can be bought but are mostly self-made. This pattern likewise holds true for concrete against dirt flooring and metal rather than mud and cane roofs. The trend, varying from partial to complete, has been the replacement of self-made by purchased materials.

Moreover, house construction materials differ significantly in their durability. Tougher materials cost more because they embody more energy or effort to make or obtain. Therefore,

up-front cost balances against length of use-life. Bricks last longer than adobes; reinforced concrete lasts longer than wood in wall, door, and window headers; and sheet metal lasts longer than dirt and cane. In all these instances there has as well been a shift from less durable materials to more durable materials, re- quiring a lower frequency of maintenance or replacement.

Finally, the sources of materials vary between local and extra- regional. The use of non-local materials almost invariably involves cash or credit expenditures in a way that is not inherent for local materials, since the chain of commodity exchange ex- tends outside the regional economy. Delocalized materials, because they are uniform, also involve forgoing strategies of construction which are suited to local climate (e.g., heat insulation). In northern Sonora, delocalization holds true for cement, iron rods, and sheet metal, but not for sawed lumber and bricks, which are manufactured locally. Delocalization may also include consideration of resemblance to an external referent (e.g., bricks) even when the product is locally made.

These trends seem reasonably clear in the Sonoran evidence, but their causes are less apparent. Here I suggest four possible ideas as to why they may occur. First, we should investigate the use of time when it is given monetary value under conditions of capitalist production. A person may either conserve product costs by substituting greater time output (whether construction, present time, or maintenance, future time) or increase expenditures to minimize the cost in time. I suggest that in the past involvement with the markets either for labor or for rural products remunerated time at such a low rate that the optimal tradeoff was to conserve cash for a narrow range of outside purchases (e.g., coffee, sugar, salt, rice) and in all other instances substitute the unpaid labor of the household (Wilk 1989). Under cur- rent economic transformations, however, as labor time is increas- ingly occupied with either wage labor or commercial production, I suggest that households choose to trade greater cash expenditures for fewer demands on time.

Second, I propose that households are using more durable but also more costly materials in order to invest in the future. This proposition, however, does not explain why investment becomes an important criterion, and why houses are significant repositories of investments. The exploration of this limited proposition therefore permits links to more fully social ideas: that investments in houses are a form of savings in urban areas (Leeds 1973); that investments in houses are a way of resolving intra- household conflicts (Wilk 1989) and that investments are part of a shift in the use of houses from "containers of women to status symbols" (Duncan 1981).

Third, I suggest that the networks of access to resources change. Regional material resources become appropriated for private purposes and are no longer available for the general use, or they become overused with urbanization and population growth. At the same time, and largely as part of the same economic de- velopments, new lines of commerce readily supply replacements from outside the region, often with credit as an inducement to buy them.

Finally, I suggest that we investigate the status referents of material goods not in terms of the diffusion of blindly imitated global models, but rather in major distinctions of social inequality which dominate a region during long historical epochs; regional interconnections in material culture (the visible "referents" of delocalization) shift when the structure of social class radically transforms. The opportunity to spend cash on new materials

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for self-built houses offers the "popular classes" (workers, prosperous peasants, and rising middle classes) the novel possibility of taking an active role toward their social standing when in the past the status referents had largely been rigid.

Historical Background

House construction was part of a larger process of change in all domains of material culture (such as sewing machines, stoves, and trucks) which occurred within the formation of a working class and a border culture over a century of northeastern Sonoran history (Heyman 1991). The Opata were the indigenous inhabitants of northeastern Sonora. They disappeared as a self- identifying population in the 19th and early 20th centuries, merging with northern Mexican mestizos. Their blend of Opata, Jesuit, and mestizo material culture (including house forms) none- theless persisted in the riverine villages of the region (Hinton 1959, Spicer 1962).

Beginning in the 1880s, the region was dramatically industri- alized by the introduction of copper mines from the US and rail- roads connecting them to the border. The mine boom lasted until 1949, and some important mines continue to operate. The for- mative industrial period had four implications for house construction. It was a time of rapid urbanization. During this epoch large groups of people were geographically disconnected from rural resources. The mine cities were company towns in most cases, which meant that the house construction was designed and directed by the American managers rather than by the Mexican workers who built and lived in the houses.

Because the border was essentially open until 1929, there was a constant transfer of population back and forth between Ari- zona and Sonora. This resulted in a "cross-border" kinship network (Heyman 1991:63-65), which made possible the transfer of North American building styles and techniques. Wage labor on both sides of the border meant vastly increased cash flow. Credit was offered on payroll-deduction plans through mine company stores, which, along with independent peddlers, were largely stocked from the US side of the border.

During this epoch the Sonoran elite also reoriented itself from central Mexico and Europe toward the US side of the border (Balmori, Voss, and Wortman 1984). In the US, the Sonoran elite found commerce, schooling, second residences, and a whole style of life, including house architecture.

~ ~ u a Prieta, originally a small railway port on the boundary, started rapid urban growth in 1940 because of the arrival of un- employed miners, 1930s US repatriates working their way back to the border, and rural folk displaced by rural inequality and inheritance difficulties. Three elements of border urbanization are of particular interest. Agua Prieta residents had considerable access to earnings in dollars through Bracero, commuting, and undocumented labor in the US, as well as local border trade. The construction and commerce of city growth generated local jobs as well. After 1967 maquiladora export assembly plants arrived in Agua Prieta.

There was direct access to US manufactured construction materials at the border. Furthermore, US goods were relatively inexpensive to Mexican consumers before the devaluations of 1976 and 1982 undercut the buying power of their pesos relative to the dollar. Finally, and most importantly, in Agua Prieta people built their own houses on open city lots (often provided through

the municipality) so that unlike the earlier mine working class, these houses reflected their own needs, desires, and capacities. Home builders in Agua Prieta usually act as "general contrac- tors," buying and storing the materials, doing some work themselves and hiring out other tasks to laborers or specialists (Turner 1977:91).

Rural northeastern Sonora entered the circuit of cash and commerce much more slowly, but eventually rather completely, through migratory wage labor and the sale of cattle in the US and Mexico. The cattle trade was old, but its nature changed between the 1950s and the 1980s. Rural Sonorans now farm not for subsistence but to feed cattle, which in turn are sold for money to buy food and goods (Sheridan 1988). Peasants thereby join their working class kin in a cash-commodity dynamic.

Research Proposition One: Time versus Money

This line of inquiry suggests that Sonorans now favor durable over less durable house construction materials because wage labor or commercial production limits the time devoted to maintenance and rebuilding of houses. As part of the same process, liquid cash (e.g., paychecks rather than hoarded savings) helps solve maintenance problems through the purchase of relatively expensive but durable materials. I do not suggest that people sinlply impose or reassess the calculation of how much their time is worth for both unpaid and paid labor. I do suggest that the economic environment of wage labor and commercial agriculture reduces the availability and scheduling flexibility of unpaid time, that is, time not devoted to earning cash, and that the use of purchased goods helps solve the problems of orga- nizing time that result. I will argue that for Mexican men, for example, the wage economy on both sides of the border has resulted in less time for the repair of adobe walls; they substitute purchased bricks. This change appears to be an instance in which money is directly used to buy time. I will also argue that for Mexican women, unpaid floor maintenance work was reduced when houses were built with cement rather than dirt floors; in this instance, however, women do not respond to a monetary valuation of housework time, but rather to increased time pressure from other unvalued, unpaid chores.

Research Proposition Two: Investment in Permanent Houses

Investment in the future rather than reduction in maintenance time is a distinct-but not contradictory-explanation for the shift to more durable materials. This idea suggests that durable materials are used not in spite of the fact that they are costly, but rather precisely because they are costly and effectively transmit the embodied cost into the future. The point of the proposition is not that people calculate the best possible return on any and all investments, including houses, but that social changes may bring houses into prominence as a way of transmitting value into the future, and that durable houses may then become the best or even only alternative investment among those options that relatively poor people do in fact face. I will consider several investment scenarios that emphasize the role of capitalist change. Both the time and the investment propositions direct our atten- tion to household decision-making within a context of changing


domestic relations and regional econo-geography; I will therefore also examine several actual house-building histories.

BRICK VERSUS ADOBE WALLS. Adobes, called tierra muerta (dead earth) or adobe crudo (raw adobe), are unfired, sun-dried bricks of clay, sand, and straw. Adobes in Agua Prieta have the relatively small dimensions of eight inches deep by twelve inches long by four high. Fired bricks are often called adobe quemado (burnt adobes), and that is exactly what they are. Made of clay and sawdust, they start out with smaller dimensions than adobes (six inches deep by eight long by three high). The bricks are fired in brick ovens fueled with firewood and using only the natural draft. They often come out not very well - warped and sometimes friable. Bricks are made and sold locally.

Bricks are clearly superseding adobes in the border city, and making in-roads on adobes in rural Sonora. As shown in Table 1, bricks are used more frequently in Agua Prieta's newer Col- onia Ejidal (1975-present) than in the older Barrio Ferrocarril (1940s- 1960s). This pattern underestimates in fact the temporal contrast, since numerous houses in Barrio Ferrocarril have been reconstructed using bricks since the early years of that neighborhood. The chi-square test for non-independence of neighborhood and building material, which is very strong, does not establish causality-in fact, a neighborhood logically does not "cause" a building type-but it does indicate that they covary. This finding suggests that Agua Prieta's shift from adobe to bricks occurred in the time span from the late 1940s to the early 1980s.

During these decades households, newly arrived in Agua Prieta, would rent for a few years or live with kin. As children were born and matured, and as they settled into the booming economy and accumulated a little money, families began their own houses. The city government made it easy to obtain house lots. Brick house construction thus occurred during domestic growth cycles set within a regional context of wage-earning and relocation to the border; we shall consider some instances below.

The demand for construction materials surged in Agua Prieta in this epoch. Brick was first manufactured there around 1955. I conducted several oral histories of brickrnakers, including one man, Manuel Becerra, who claimed to have been the introducer of the technology; he certainly was one of the earliest. He told me that he first saw adobes being fired in Nogales, Sonora, from which he brought it to Agua Prieta. Brick technology diffused in the following two decades until it was widely known in the mid-1970s. This shift occurred when former employees of Be- cerra (one of whom I interviewed) entered the business for themselves, since equipment was self-made and it had a low entry cost. Eight brickyards were in operation in Agua Prieta in 1986.

A similar replacement of adobes by bricks is beginning in rural highland Sonora, the hinterland of Agua Prieta. Roger

TABLE 1 Brick versus Adobe in Two Agua Prieta Neigh- borhoods

Other (includes mixed

Brick Adobe brickladobe)

Barrio Ferrocarril post-1940 16 33 11

Colonia Ejidal post- 1975 17 7 8

Chi-square test of non-independence significant at .O1

Owen, who did fieldwork in the village of Marobavi in 1955, found that all but two houses were made of adobes; these were two older ones made of cobblestones (1959:16-17). Only one adobe house was completely plastered so that it could endure the weather. Most peasants simply rebuilt adobe houses when they deteriorated. Owen writes:

When a house is no longer structurally sound it is abandoned, the us- able beams salvaged, and then used in the new house, usually located nearby. . . . One old man could point to the ruins of two houses near the one in which he now lives wherein, during his seventy eight years, he had resided (Owen 1959:19).

Thomas Sheridan, upriver in Cucurpe during 1980, docu- mented a very gradual incursion of brick and slump block-14% of all houses-and he observed that new brick additions were added onto adobe houses (1988:34).

What explains the shift from adobes to bricks? I interviewed six masons, both professionals and self-builders. They all gave me the same reason: bricks require no maintenance, whereas adobes readily erode when exposed to the elements. Mainte- nance interferes with their work and it costs money for materials (mortar) itself. Since this was the accepted local explanation, it therefore behooves us to explore the idea that initial cost is traded for reductions in future demands on time.

Bricks are substantially more expensive than adobes. Table 2 presents the cost of a small, self-built two room house in early 1986. Bricks are purchased whereas adobes are self-made and essentially costless. Bricks also require a small expenditure for mortar, whereas adobes are bound with a simple earth mixture. Adobe construction, on the other hand, takes fifteen days longer than brick construction because the adobes have to be shaped and sun-dried. Table 2 presents costs in two formats: cash-expense plus non-monetized time (the self-builder's perspective) and the imputed monetary value of time at the local going wage. This table presents the possibility that people weigh the cost of their

TABLE 2 Cost estimates for two-room house, brick vs. adobe, early 1986

Adobe Brick

Required materials

Cost of materials when purchased

Time cost of making materials (adobe only) and construct- ing house

Total cost (a) in time and cash

expenses (b) in foregone

wages and cash expenses

2,200 adobes 4.000 bricks mortar

n.a. 60 pesos per brick (240,000 pesos)

9,000 pesos for mortar

45 days (86,250 in 30 days (57,500 in foregone wages) foregone wages)

45 days and 30 days plus 249,000 0 pesos pesos

86,250 pesos 306,500 pesos

Foregone wages calculated at 11,500 minimum wage for a six day work week (1986).

500 Mexican pesos equaled $1.00 US in early 1986. Sources: interviews with house builders; comprehensive written records

of a brick house built in 1982, updated by informant to early 1986 prices.

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unpaid time but does not presume it. Under any son of calculation, in the short-run adobes are much cheaper than bricks. The fact that bricks are favored over adobes in most new houses tells us that some other consideration than initial cost must be at work among border Sonorans (and most Mexicans), since brick houses represent a significant expenditure versus incomes; in 1986, buying and piling up the materials for a humble two room brick house would take 40 weeks at the minimum (stan- dard) wage paychecks in one of the local factories, without a cent for food or other expenditures.

Brick walls take resources up-front, but they require no maintenance and last indefinitely, whereas adobe shifts time and effort to the future. Adobe walls crumble and eventually fall when exposed to water and wind. One option is to let adobe walls erode, simply rebuilding the house when needed. The life of an adobe house in the relatively wet desert around Agua Prieta is, unfortunately, unknown. Roger Owen's elderly informant in Marobavi lived in three adobe houses in 78 years, or one for every 26 years (1959:19). Longitudinal evidence on a process of such duration will be hard to obtain, but it may be possible to set up an artificial time-series of less and more eroded adobe houses using informant estimates of the age of the actual dwel- ling. The abandonment and reconstruction of adobe homes may be more difficult as houses become larger, more elaborate, and otherwise built with permanent elements (e.g., wiring and plumbing). The restored adobe Casa Cordova in Tucson began eroding at wall bottoms and a junction with a stone facade within five years; the use of impermeable concrete floors (one change in house construction which appears linked to the use of bricks) encouraged trapped water to rise into and break down the po- rous adobe walls (Hunt 1978:60).

Perpetual maintenance is the other option. If adobes are to be protected from the elements, they have to be plastered ("stuccoed). Plastering adobe runs roughly 17,000 pesos in materials for the two-room example. Plastering adobe is difficult, for the plaster does not bind well to the vertical edge of raw earth. In order to hang the plaster, small stones are placed at intervals in the adobe wall or, more recently, the wall is hung with purchased wire laths. Even after a wall has been stuccoed, the plaster continually develops cracks which allow in moisture, which in turn causes even more plaster to pull away from the wall. There- fore all flaws have to be repaired quickly.

Researchers may also wish to ask if the incomplete replacement of adobes by bricks reflects income differences within mixed, but poor city neighborhoods and rural towns. Bricks may simply be too expensive for some households ever to afford, even saving brick by brick. Therefore, if we follow this line of investigation, we will require more adequate data on maintenance time and costs, and on the distribution of materials versus economic resources at the time house construction is started.

BRICKS AS INVESTMENTS. I suggested above that more durable and costlier materials may be introduced during periods when houses become regarded as value-holding investments in addition to being shelters and spaces for meaningful activities. Wilk (1989) studied just such a case among the Kekchi Maya of Belize. He suggests that under egalitarian restrictions, wealth was inherited as a limited set of personal luxuries (the few things the expenditure-conserving Kekchi bought with cash). As cash income rose with rural commercialization, the Kekchi faced an "allocational crisis" in which individuals within households (espe-

cially fathers and sons) contested the uses of the new wealth; they tried to resolve tensions by investing the resources in in- disputably shared uses, the pre-eminent one being houses.

In order to generalize Wilk's outline of house consumption, we will need to follow several lines of inquiry. What are the alternative inheritance possibilities that households around the world face when they become involved in increased cash flows-for both urban and rural households, is additional land, tools, and children's education available, as well as houses? In what social and physical structures (e.g., bounded city house lots) do each of these inheritances ameliorate versus exacerbate intra-household tensions over who gets what?

Inheritance involves the embodiment and transmission of resources from the present to the future, which impels choices to minimize the erosion of the investment. Leeds (1973) suggests that people without the social power to use the banking system and speculate with capital have limited ways of preserving their meager resources when faced with chronic inflation and devaluations (which most people in most of the world witness as their expectable future). He suggests that people invest in homes when there are few other forms of savings. Durand and Massey (1992:25-26) likewise argue that wage labor migrants spend their money on houses in areas of Mexico where weak agrarian economies leave few alternative uses for remittances; land is typically scarce and little enters the market, while busi- nesses are highly competitive and small in scale).

Does Leeds' argument apply to the choice between bricks and adobes? Bricks hold up better over time than adobes; however, the cost of bricks is so much greater than adobes that one could envision making adobes and allocating the remainder of the resources to alternative forms of savings, if they exist, while pe- riodically paying for the inexpensive replacement of adobe houses from the earnings ("interest") on the savings.

We know that adobe buildings wear out, although we do not have the research to tell us exactly how often they do so. If the non-house savings of adobe construction over bricks can be put to use at a high real interest rate (the increase in nominal currency value minus the rate of inflation), then adobe houses can be replaced frequently, which avoids the physical problems of decay. If the real return on non-house savings is low, however, then a new adobe house can be paid for less frequently, and the physical problems of decay become more pressing. Money and time may have to be put into costly maintenance, which reduces the value of building with adobes in the first place. If the return on non-house savings is negative, that is it falls behind inflation, then it is never worth building an adobe house because savings are lost every time one pays for replacement. In other words, alternative possibilities and levels of real interest rates- the social economy - powerfully structures the decision-making context households face.3

In fact, the "interest" on houses is complex. Bricks may cost in real interest (raising the net benefits for adobes) if the money to buy the house is borrowed. Only one of the 63 households I interviewed in 1986, however, had had a mortgage, and the man in question was connected with Mexico's ruling party; many others had credits to buy house materials such as roofing and lumber but never bricks. The typical strategy of amassing house materials gradually, brick by brick, obviated the need for borrowed money.

In turn, adobes may give a real interest benefit if the savings can be put to a positive alternative use. During the long period


from the late 1940s to the early 1980s when brick construction arose, urban Sonorans were increasing their real wages against inflation; they were always aware, however, of the potential de- valuation of pesos against the dollar, which threatened to sud- denly reduce their savings (Heyman 1991:43-45). There were few ways for them to embody their savings. Small savings ac- counts in banks in Mexico lost interest to inflation until 1988. Furthermore, the popular classes feel, with considerable reason, socially discriminated against in Mexican banks, and generally avoid them. After 1982, the need to hedge against inflation was dramatic, as inflation rates hit one hundred percent and the peso fell to one-fiftieth of its dollar value (early 1982 to late 1986).

There are several non-bank forms of saving money against inflation. On the border one could buy dollars with pesos, a good strategy with little risk; one either had to hold this as physical currency, and resist intra-household pressures to spend it, or put it in an American bank, which again was easier for the Mexican elite than the working folk. One could put the money in consumer durables, which can be resold at future prices (thus matching the rate of inflation), or invest in a small store (whose inventory plays much the same role). Doing so may preserve value against inflation but it subjects the investment to the risks of buying and selling. Durable resale strategies were important to Aguapretense but, in keeping with Wilk's findings, they wor- sened household tensions because they took money from youthful wage-earners for ends controlled by older women and men (Heyman 1991:184- 185).

An enduring brick house may be chosen over a replaceable adobe house because positive alternative uses of the cost savings are either non-existent or they are difficult for the family as a whole to chose them. The brick house may be, but does not have to be, resold on a speculative real estate market in order to stay ahead of inflation; durable construction may also represent the preservation of a use-value, housing, in the face of inflationary increases in house rentals. Faced with a paucity of data throughout, we need research on both the economic and social investment qualities of houses; we need to specify the alternatives available to the relatively powerless before we view expensive house construction as irrational.

HOUSEHOLD DECISION-MAKING: Two HOUSE HISTORIES. House histories recorded in Agua Prieta indicate that considerations outlined above-collective consumption and inheritance, the pressure of wage-labor on available time, and lack of alternative means of savings - all moved in the same direction, toward the use of durable and expensive materials, and thus suggest that the logic of capitalist development may enter natural decision- making at several mutually reinforcing points.

The allocational crisis of which Wilk speaks had likely already occurred in Sonora (under the impact of vast industrial and migratory wage labor) before.families started coming to Agua Prieta in large numbers; my evidence for such disputes between fathers and sons dates to the 1930s and likely the decades before this. It also involved women in favor of collective household investments (Heyman 1990). When young households relocated to the growing border city, however, they recapitulated many of the allocational dilemmas of earlier generations.

Jose Hernandez and Mercedes Romero de Hernandez (pseudo- nyms) moved to Agua Prieta from the peasant village of Pivipa, Sonora in 1941. In 1947, Jose and his father-in-law built two adobe houses on three lots in Barrio Ferrocarril. This arrange-

ment lasted ten years. Jose and Mercedes by this time had nine children living in the two room house. The two oldest daughters were reaching an age at which they could marry, although they had not yet done so. Mercedes' younger brother, who lived with his elderly parents next door, had married and had several children.

In 1957 Jose and Mercedes bought an existing adobe two room house one street over. Jose added a kitchen and two back bedrooms, all made of brick. During this time Jose, a legal US resident ("green-carder") commuted across the border to work at a mine in Arizona. Jose therefore had the income-in dollars- required to buy bricks and other construction materials. The house construction was done by hired masons, while Jose re- turned on weekends to inspect the progress of work.

In the long-run, both sets of houses were used as inheritances. After Mercedes' elderly parents passed on, the 1947 adobe houses, now joined, were given to her eldest daughter when she married in 1964. Mercedes' brother, who had taken over a store, built an impressive new brick house on the remaining lot. The now elderly Mercedes and Jose lived in the 1957 house with a divorced daughter and grandchildren. In parallel with the houses, it is worth noting that the Hernandez parents had also invested Jose's earnings in the education of their sons and daughters.

The Cordoba family moved from a terminated mine company- town to Agua Prieta in 1962; they joined kin and later rented apartments. In 1965 they bought a house lot from the municipality. They built a four room brick house (two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a front room which may at one time also have served as a bedroom). The bricks for the house were shaped and burned by Carlos Cordoba himself, during evenings and weekends after his duties as a mechanic and electrician in a marginal mine outside the city; at this time Carlos was making, in Mexico, roughly one-fifth of Jose Hernandez' US income. He hired one assistant. The family hired a mason to lay the foundation, walls, and roof, while Carlos and his sons did the finishing work inside and out. At the time the Cordobas built the house, the oldest son had begun work at a lumberyard, and his income was substantially directed to collective ends by spending on house materials (see below, on credit) and appliances for his mother.

Later on the same lot the Cordoba family built a two-room brick house, occupied by a married daughter, a machine shop for Carlos, and a small structure where a divorced son sleeps. The Cordoba family told me with pride that they had helped all of their six non-resident children own houses. At the same time, Carlos confessed that he worried how he was going to be able to be fair in dividing up his house among his eight children when the time came for (theoretically partible) inheritance. The oldest son who contributed so much, for example, no longer lives in the house.

The Hernandez and Cordoba households differ in how they acquired bricks - bought versus self-made - related to differences in the relative balance of income versus free time on the part of the principle earner. Nevertheless, both households clearly operated in a wage-earning and not a cash-conserving context. In both cases the families needed to pool major sources of cash income toward collective ends; both families thought of houses as lasting investments; and both families later used the houses as the major form of security transmission to the younger generation.

DIRT VERSUS CONCRETE FLOORS. Houses in Sonora tra- ditionally had hard-packed dirt floors; only the elite would have

V O L . 5 3 , N O 2 S U M M E R 1 9 9 4 137

had wooden planks. Concrete has almost completely replaced dirt in house floors in Agua Prieta. None of the 63 houses visited in 1986 had dirt floors; only one of the same houses visited in 1982 by James Greenberg had a dirt floor and that family had installed a concrete floor by 1986. The change has also happened less completely in the countryside. In 1955 only two houses in Marobavi had partial concrete floors; the rest were dirt (Owen 1959:17). In Cucurpe in 1980, two-thirds of the houses had concrete floors (Sheridan 1988:34).

Concrete for floors is expensive. A two-room floor in 1986 cost 44,800 pesos for concrete materials alone, a little less than four weeks pay at one of the assembly plants. So why use concrete? This is a decision in which women are prominent. In order to keep dirt floors hard and clean, my women informants reported, one had to sprinkle water on it every three days, close the windows and doors, tamp it down vigorously, and let it dry. Not only was this hard work, it interfered with everything else that had to be done in the home. A properly laid concrete floor will last without maintenance for years.

Why might women conserve on labor time and effort? There has been a long-lasting trend in working class Sonora, and more recently in rural Sonora, for women to use new technologies to reduce the drudgery of housework. They are not reducing overall effort but reallocating their time to cover for the assistance lost when children (especially daughters) stay in school for much longer periods, and while husbands are away from home working in the US and in mines (Heyman 1991:136-145, Simonelli 1985). The case of women's work on floors suggests that the timelmoney tradeoff should not be restricted to direct wage-earners, but rather extended to cases when cash expenditures can be used to relieve the pressures of changing time allocation within the larger context of capitalist development.

Certainly with respect to the elimination of dirt floors one has to consider the alternative hypothesis that ideologies of hygiene, propagated in school and on television, have made dirt in the house abhorrent. One woman interviewee did describe modern houses with concrete floors as more "hygienic" and "scientific."

Research Proposition Three: Availability of Resources

The historical shift from the rural economy to the urban and wage-earning economy causes a shift in the availability of construction materials which favors purchased over gathered materials. This shift is due to three factors: the extremely dense concentrations of population in urban centers; the direct com- petition for resources between the external and the regional economies; and the penetration of a new network of credit and manufactured supplies.

LUMBER. The first case is the replacement in post and roof beams of raw timbers (visas) by sawed lumber (madera). No one I spoke to who built a house later than 1940 in an urban area used raw timber. In the 1986 survey no house had visible timbers protruding from its roof frame, although conceivably some may have been hidden inside adobe walls.

From its beginning, the mine economy competed with the local economy for the lumber supply found in the high mountain ranges. American mining engineer Morris B. Parker, who worked in the large industrial mine of Pilares de Nacozari around 1902, wrote:

During this time and for years thereafter, power for all purposes was dependent on cordwood from the surrounding hills. Thus the countryside for fifteen to twenty five miles in all directions was entirely de- nuded of trees, and later along the railroad for forty miles north as far as Cos, an equidistance on either side (1979:79).

Construction-quality timber was used for the enormous number of mine posts in underground operations.

Around 1925, the Meza family started their first commercial sawmill, in the mountains above the village of Bacadehuachi. The mill moved several times as it stripped timberland around itself. The Meza family moved to Agua Prieta after 1940 to market the lumber produced by their nearby mill. In Agua Prieta the Mezas and their in-laws the Terans sold construction supplies in this rapidly growing city. We shall look shortly at several house histories which involve the marketing of lumber on credit arrangement to prosperous working class families.

ROOFING MATERIALS. The vernacular roof began with a ceiling of sahuaro ribs laid across the parallel timbers of the roof frame, then numerous layers of earth interlaid with cane (curizzo), sahuaro ribs, or ocotillo, and a final heaping of dirt (Owen 1959:17, Hunt 1978:19). One of my informants described the cane as being woven into a mat (sahuaro ribs are unavailable at Agua Prieta and the higher elevations of the Sonoran sierra). The manufactured, purchased alternatives are carton, water- proofed corrugated cardboard roofing, and lamina, galvanized sheet metal. Because carton, which is less durable. has fallen out of favor, I will concentrate on the choice of dirt versus metal.

In terms of functioning at a given time, dirt and metal each have strengths and drawbacks as roofing materials. Sheet metal is blazingly hot. A ceiling dropped beneath a sheet metal roof offers only slight relief. Layers of dirt and cane, on the other hand, are a superior insulator, well-suited to the climate. A dirt roof, writes Owen, "sheds water until it reaches the point of saturation, then it begins to leak continuously, often after the rain has stopped (1959:17). However, Owen noted (personal communication) that this leakage was rare, since it could be reduced by the installation of drain pipes (canales) of wood or tin. Sheet metal also leaks if it is second-hand (as it often is), or amateurishly installed. One of my first, and indeed most sat- isfying, interviews was held during a driving rain, dodging the waterfalls emerging from ceiling below a second-hand tin roof held down with scrap iron. Dirt could not have been worse; certainly it would have been cheaper for this very poor family.

I actively searched for dirt roofs in Agua Prieta, and there were none. Seventy-seven percent of all roofs in the 1986 re- survey were sheet metal; the remainder were tarpaper and carton. A similar pattern emerges in rural Sonora. In 1955 Owen reported that only two buildings in Marobavi had tin roofs: the wealthiest house and the largest store (1959:17). Owen told me that on a revisit in 1985 he saw only six or seven houses without sheet metal roofs, and that in his opinion they were worse, being much hotter. Sheridan in Cucurpe in 1980 reports that 78% of all roofs were lamina, and 18% carton. Only three houses there still had earthen roofs.

This shift may have taken place both because of maintenance time and availability of supplies. Although I was not able to get any estimates on the repair of dirt roofs, it is likely to have been very frequent. Wet earth accelerates the decay of wooden roof beams that hold up the structure. Furthermore, as McGuire and Schiffer point out, insect infestation of earth loaded dwell-


ings may make them unlivable even before wood decay sets in (1983:291). Sheet metal costs quite a bit up-front-113,000 pesos, nearly ten weeks in the factory, for the two-room house example- but if it is well-maintained by tarring leaks and rusty spots, it has an indefinite life.

In addition, it is worth suggesting that the riverside sources of reeds harvested for mats would have been quickly exhausted by a city the size of Agua Prieta (over 40,000 people). It is worthy of note that I have interviewed two men who made earth and cane roofs in Agua Prieta during the 1930s and 1940s (when its population was around 6,500). They lived on the ejido of Agua Prieta which controlled access to the damp bottomlands southwest of the city. I argue, therefore, that the economic forces which bring people together in unprecedented urban units may outstrip older uses of regional resources, and force reliance on manufacturers which can be supplied in large quantities.

A key figure in the history of sheet metal for Agua Prieta was a second-hand goods dealer, now retired. He began in 1956 by tearing down a house he bought in Los Angeles "for a dollar," taking the doors, windows, and roofing paper to resell in Agua Prieta. He soon made a practice of attending auctions in the US, and buying construction and consumer goods. He allowed me a quick look over his books, being somewhat suspicious of my intentions. It was clear that by far his highest volume was in the sale of used sheet metal. Furthermore, the notations in his books demonstrated that he sold much of the sheet metal on credit, accepting payment in installments.

House histories among my principal informants make clear the importance of credit and commercial channels of supply in their choice of materials. Beginning in 1965, the Cordoba family obtained a revolving line of credit with the hardware store of Decorson, owned by Gustavo Teran, while their son Jorge worked in the woodworking factory of his in-laws, the Mezas. Jorge bought the sawed lumber, sheet metal roofing, windows, doors, and cement that he, his father, and his brother, as well as hired help, used to build the house. Plumbing and electrical supplies were bought with cash in the US.

The Durazo (a pseudonym) family used a 7,800 peso credit, worth $902 in 1952, to buy sheet metal, concrete, and building materials. They were given this credit by the Meza company without interest as long as it was spent at that firm. It is worth mentioning that Pedro Durazo was an active and loyal member of the PRI, Mexico's governing party, with which the Meza family was associated. Again, the plumbing and electrical material was bought in Douglas, Arizona.

The lines of supply in border Mexico were rearranged so as to make it difficult for a person to choose anything but a manufactured commodity. The Mezas and others like them played the smaller part, making an unprocessed regional product into sawed lumber; the larger part was played by the power of the North American economy, which supplied mass manufacturers both through US stores and via intermediaries in Mexico which resold them.

Research Proposition Four: Status Systems

Houses may change because new materials and forms are introduced which have higher "status." This proposition is not as obvious as it may seem. We cannot assume without proof that people simply imitate the next higher status; people in stratified

societies imitate some things, resist others, and often act with reference to their peers. I suggest that we specify our models of "status." I propose that each region has a major historical axis of inequality. Status is a socially cognized model of inequality that fixes on a very small number of material features to represent the polar contrast in each historical epoch of inequality. I draw on Stanislaw Ossowski's work (1963) on folk classifica- tions of inequality; Pavlides and Hesser (1989) emphasize the historicity and external contexts of vernacular architecture. Re- gional axes of inequality change as fundamental socio-economic transformations take place. These rearrangements are linked to the world economy, so that delocalized goods versus vernacular goods come to represent new poles of inequality.

In order to understand status not as imitation but as action, we must ask how subordinate groups come to obtain the cash needed to purchase some of these external material symbols. Sidney Mintz, in Sweetness and Power (1985), suggests that capitalist consumption gives the sense that previously exclusive status goods can be bought by all, even if in small amounts: the idea of democratic participation by which the market society is sold.

ROOF SHAPES. In northeastern Sonora before the industrial epoch the main axis of inequality lay between the native American Opata and the mixed race but Euro-cultural mestizo Mexicans who were moving into the area and aggressively capturing local resources such as river water, bottom farm land, and upland pastures (Sheridan 1988, Spicer 1962:Chapter 3). (See also Dun- nigan 1969 for the nearby Lower Pima area.) Owen in Marobavi in 1955 heard the echoes of this stratification when people dis- tinguished between families that had "always" lived in the village (sometimes called indios but never to their face) and wealthier 'blancos" (whites) whose families had moved there within re- cent memory.

This alignment of stratification was associated with different forms of houses. The upper, white or mestizo level was affiliated with the flat roofed northern Mexico vernacular house, which is a rectangular house with a single roof, sloping from the front to the back at a very gentle angle (in English this is called a "shed" roof). The other house, called the casa de dos naves (the house of two church naves, or figuratively two pitches), was associated with autochthonous Opata ancestry. It has six posts: four shorter corner posts and two higher center posts which define a central roof ridge. It therefore had a roof with two equal slopes, called in English a gable roof, somewhat obscured by the great masses of dirt piled on the earthen roof. The floor was excavated some twelve to eighteen inches below ground level, a device well-known to the indigenous people of the area as a way of keeping the structure damper and cooler (Hinton 1959). (The houses and their social associations are discussed in Owen 1959:17, 39; illustrations of each type are found in Figures 2 and 5. An even older photograph of an Opata house in nearby Tuape, Sonora, taken by Ales Hrdlicka in 1898, appears to have six beams and thus a similar shape, a brush or thatched roof, and ocotillo instead of adobe walls as were found in Marobavi [Hinton 1983:326].)

With the advent of capitalist industry and agriculture, the social structure of Sonora began to change to one of non-racial social class. In 1985 Owen reported in Marobavi the advent of 'a much more open class system" (personal communication). According to my oral histories, the supersession of race by class occurred much earlier in the mine and border cities. With re-

V O L . 5 3 , N O . 2 S U M M E R 1 9 9 4 139

spect to prestigious house forms, we must pay particular atten- tion to the Sonoran elite. As we have noted, the regional elite turned their own reference system northward, toward the US. New house styles drew on the bungalows of the American west. The gable and hipped roof forms (two and four sided, respec- tively) ironically became more prestigious than the older Mexican flat-roofed vernacular house.

The shift in house style set up a permeable social distinction in which people could assert status claims by building more complex roof types. The shape of roofs in two Agua Prieta neighborhoods is recorded in Table 3. The older Barrio Ferrocarril has more flat Mexican roofs whereas the newer Colonia Ejidal manifests a trend toward gabled roofs. I found no examples of the casa de dos naves.

The question of roof types is not one of simple social reflec- tion. A more complex roof style requires more materials and greater skill in framing the roof. It was the consensus of builders with whom I spoke that single-sloped roofs (called un agua) could be framed by the houseowner himself, since one simply lays a set of parallel beams across from the higher to the lower wall, nailed to a roof plate on each end. This is the modern equivalent of the timber and adobe construction of older Mexican vernacular houses. On the other hand, a peaked roof presents a greater challenge. Depending on the skill of the homeowner, it may require a professional carpenter. A central beam must be raised, and rafters with cross-ties run up to it. This structure must rest on a set of ceiling joists, since unlike the flat-roofed house the rafters stand above the ceiling line. The additional lumber forms two sides of a triangle whose base is the flat roof, so that a peaked roof requires more cut lumber than a flat roof.

All this pretension to fancier roofs is thus more costly; it provides an opportunity, if the money is there, to buy upward in the class system. I therefore suggest that it is no accident that peaked roofs are spreading in Agua Prieta: first, because money is available to the working class from work in the US, smuggling, assembly plants, and broom factories; second, because Agua Prieta is largely a self-built city, permitting people to act on their mental models of inequality insofar as their income al10ws.~

Conclusions

The research propositions highlight our need for more direct ethnography of household decision-making and house histories in order to go from abstract logic to actual choices about construction. Throughout the text I have noted empirical lacunae. Here I will sketch one model of possible steps between contingent decisions for further investigation. First, all the decisions are based on proposition three, the question of the availability of

TABLE 3 Roof Types in Two Agua Prieta Neighborhoods

Data 1 slope 2 + slopes missing

Barrio Ferrocarril post-1940 20 18 0

Colonia Ejidal post-1975 5 18 2

Chi-square test of non-independence significant at ,025.


materials in the transformed regional economy and geography. If natural materials are scarce or unobtainable, further decisions lie only among varied manufactures. Only in cases such as adobes versus bricks, where the natural materials are still available, can housebuilders move on to decisions possibly based on propositions one, two, and four.

Propositions one and two, although they appear intellectually distinct, are in fact mutually reinforcing since durability generally implies greater initial cost and longer life-time, thus solving problems both of maintenance time and of investment. I suggest that we investigate if there is a threshold income in the decision- making sequence, above which all decision-makers opt for the use of durable, purchased materials, thus accounting differently for what we might assume is a causal relation of building materials with social status via income level. With regard to proposition four, we need to isolate key historical distinctions in vernacular architecture and elicit responses to them among homebuilders, rather than working with gross judgements as to the status of total house appearance and poorly articulated assumptions about sources and paths of status imitation. Fur- thermore, the treatment of proposition four shifts emphasis away from the status of the good itself and toward contexts of change: the new economies of households which make possible the de- mocratization of cash-consumption in societies where class boundaries have been ostentatious and bitterly galling. Thus it is, I suspect, that we find much house construction taking place among international migrants returning with cash in their pockets to places in which there were previously vast rural inequalities.

Even at the preliminary stage of inquiry, however, these ar- guments extend importance well beyond house traits to the "commoditization" of material cultures. Such a term gives the process a spurious uniformity that anthropologists resist, but nevertheless highlights a strikingly repetitive set of events on a world scale. Some of the complexity can be restored by following Wilk's model of households making decisions among alternatives, with inevitably varying considerations and resources. The real question is, does capitalist development change the logic of decisions? To the extent that the four propositions will be found to hold true, and that they interact together, I suggest that there is a strong, perhaps even coercive, logic to the delocalization of consumption in the world around us.

The novel equation of time equals money forces a series of subsidiary judgements including those of replacing effort with expenditures, and investing against the national economy over time. As people spend less time in unpaid labor on vernacular products (thus not including commercialized crafts), complex skills, such as the woven-cane and mud roof, fall by the way- side. This loss becomes acute at the point of transmission between generations. Once skills are lost, then manufactured goods (in which the knowledge of production is deposited in special- ized sectors of the world-economy) have to be used, for there are fewer and fewer alternatives. The regional network of flows, both environmental-economic and social-conceptual, becomes polarized in a well-defined alignment which limits the available choices. Anthropologists have long observed the reorientation of regional material cultures in the world economy, yet we have had little to say about it beyond lamenting the loss of the past. It is, however, too important a dimension of human lives to continue to skirt; whether these propositions are correct or not is less important than that we begin systematic work on this topic.

N O T E S

1 In addition to the changes discussed in detail in the text, numerous other elements of house construction have changed in northern Sonora. Fences used to be bound together from the tall, thorny stalks of the ocotillo, which is gathered from desert hillsides. Ocotillo has been par- tially replaced by wire fences, in some cases made of chain link. Win- dows and doors had been used sparingly; those that existed were closed wood. Now glass windows, often used American ones, are purchased, while doors may be made of locally worked decorative cast-iron. In addition, the lintel above the window and door has shifted from wood, which corresponded with adobe construction, to concrete reinforced with iron bar, which binds better to brick walls. Reinforced concrete is also used to strengthen the corners and top of the first floor in brick construction when a second floor is intended; second floors are rare in poor Agua Prieta neighborhoods, however. Manufactured plumbing and electrical supplies are purchased; this is not a case of the replacement of vernacular material culture, but rather the addition of a novel set of amenities and construction techniques. Traditional Sonoran desert houses had a cooking ramada (a four cornered pole structure with a brush roof) behind the house, which appears to have been superseded by the interior kitchen. Pader (1993) discusses changes in the room arrangement of Mexican houses as a consequence of migration to the US.

2 I draw on a survey of 92 households in two working class neighborhoods done in 1981-82 by James B. Greenberg, and a follow-up survey by myself in 1986, during which I managed to recontact 63 households and note changes and additional features. The households that were lost tended to be rental apartments, and thus irrelevant to ques- tions which concern people's self-built housing.

3 We can illustrate the effect of real interest rates on the potential replacement period of an adobe house using an annual worth method, which annuitizes the difference in the cost of a brick house minus an adobe house at different interest rates:

P,, = Price of an adobe house Pi, = Price of a brick house i = Interest n = Lifetime of an adobe house

The results for the annual worth model using the house material costs in Table 1 (including the cost of time) are presented for different interest rates in Table 4:

The equation as written assumes that the lifetime of brick walls ap- proach infinity compared to adobe walls. This is the simplest possible assumption, since then we do not have to assume a second set of unknown values for the lifetime of the brick. The longer the actual lifetime of the brick walls, the less difference this assumption will make to the result. The assumption biases the calculated replacement times of the adobe houses upward.

TABLE 4 Adobe House Replacement Period using Annual Worth Model

Real interest on non-house House replacement period savings (percent) (years)

20 6.96 15 9.08 10 13.31 5 25.99 2 64.07 1 128.14 0 approaches infinity

James Duncan (1981) would link house construction to stratification in a different manner. He paints a sweeping portrait of modernization. A collectivistic social structure required houses to be similar; they served purely functional purposes where goods, women, and children were kept. As an individualistic ethos has spread, houses are built with materials of varying expenses in order to indicate household differences in resources. In this case, the investment is in society rather than in a market return. Unfortunately for the application of Duncan's hypothesis to Sonora, northern Mexico has since its frontier days had a very individualistic ethos concerning the display of wealth and power (Sheridan 1988:144-45). Nevertheless, community ethics which cen- sure the display of wealth in houses, and their breakdown, should be investigated in historically and ethnographically appropriate cases.

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