female altruism reconsidered: the Virgin Mary as economic woman

Standard ethnographic descriptions of Latin American women indicate that the wife‐mother role complex is a uniform entity despite the variety of socioeconomic settings in which it is found. Data collected in Cali, Colombia, and San Francisco, California, suggest clear differences in the way working‐class Latin American women perform this common role. Caleñas emphasize the dimension of wife and the importance of conjugal affiliation; they pay relatively less attention to ties with children. By contrast, San Francisco Latinas devote themselves to the maternal role and consider relations with husbands to be of secondary significance. These differences will be shown to arise from varying economic and social conditions present in the two settings. [motherhood, women's roles, economic strategies, Colombia, Latino immigrants, urban anthropology]