In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

93 4 “Love Makes a Family” Globalization, Companionate Marriage, and the Modernization of Gender Inequality Jennifer S. Hirsch At a recent meeting of the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano (Christian Family Movement) in Degollado, Jalisco, Mexico, we celebrated the six couples who had just returned from a three-day marriage retreat. They spoke about how they felt closer to each other and to God, about the importance of being reminded not to take their spouse for granted. Afterward, there were tacos de papas (potato tacos) and cake; as they cut the cake, couples stood up to feed each other a piece as they had done, perhaps, the night they were first married. Between the testimonials and the tacos, one of the town’s four Roman Catholic priests rose to praise these couples and the Christian Family Movement for serving as a counterweight to globalization’s bad influence on marriage. He mentioned Britney Spear’s recent same-day marriage and divorce, the work of animal rights advocates who are, according to him, trying to legalize marriages between people and animals, and the international gay marriage movement, which, he said, is clearly working against what the Bible tells us, which is that a man should marry a woman to love and to procreate with. In small-town church halls, big city newspapers, and national TV channels, debates rage in Mexico about globalization, love, and marriage. The hotly contested Ley de Convivencia, for example, a law that would grant domestic partner benefits to homosexual or heterosexual unmarried couples, was roundly condemned by the conservative press in Guadalajara as a part of the international gay rights conspiracy.1 On the other side of the spectrum, progressive social activists complained vociferously about how the Third World Congress on the Family, entitled La familia natural y el futuro de las naciones: Crecimiento, desarrollo y libertad (The natural family and the future of nations: growth, development, and liberty) reflected the George W. Bush administration’s moral colonialism and its efforts to impose neoconservative family policies on their southern neighbors (Sánchez 2004). All this speechifying, however, is essentially screaming to close the barn door after the horse is gone. Love already makes a family in Mexico; over the past generation, intimacy and pleasure have come to be seen as the building blocks of modern kinship. In this chapter, I describe these changing Mexican marital ideals, explore their relationship to globalization , relate this change in Mexico to broader historical and current global shifts 94 Part II: Love, Sex, and the Social Organization of Intimacy in ideas about love and marriage, and close with some questions we might explore about love and globalization. Degollado, Jalisco, is a small town in rural western Mexico. The 2000 census counted nearly fifteen thousand people, but the actual population depends greatly— as it has for nearly a century—on the season: in the late autumn the returning norteños bring dollars, Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Braves baseball hats, DVD players, pickup trucks, and—perhaps most important—a chance for all the girls promenading around the plaza to get married. The economy of love is intricately interwoven with the political economy of migration: young men return in November and December to court, marry, or march in the procession of returning migrants during the fiesta of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but they also come in the winter because it is the slow season in the U.S. agriculture and construction businesses. Today’s migrants are the sons and grandsons—and, increasingly, daughters and granddaughters—of those who built the railroads, followed the harvests in California, and worked in the meat-packing industry in Chicago. Los norteños say that there is no work in Degollado, but this is not entirely true: in this thriving county seat, which supports five money-changing places and two Internet cafes, there is serious money to be made in residential construction, in the workshops that carve the local pink sandstone for regional use and for export, in agave for tequila production, and in the commercial aspects of social life: the two discos, the cantinas, the billiards, and the table-dance halls that ring the town. Others eke out a living in the local pork-production industry, in its death throes since the early 1990s, in beauty salons, grocery stores, and ice-cream parlors, or as doctors, teachers, and accountants. Couples who married in the 1950s and 1960s talked about marriage as a bond of obligation, held together by an ideal of respect...

Share