Changes and Inequality in Latin American Families

INTRODUCTIONPeople place great trust in family, seeing it as the first resort institution in times of hardship or crisis. Family has been described as "a field of action where the most basic dimensions of human security are defined: the processes of personal physical reproduction and social integration" (UNDP, 1998, p. 192). Most analyses and policy proposals accord a central role to the family in explaining individual behaviour and when designing policies to tackle a variety of social problems. At the same time, changes in traditional family structures are frequently associated with social disintegration.During the 60s and 70s decades, a prevailing development model stressed a need to strengthen the family, which was visualized implicitly or explicitly in terms of a. unique desirable model, and studied as an intermediary between individuals and public policies. The gap between this unique family model and reality compounded by outdated approaches to the family in public policies, hindered analysis on the effects of such policies on families and their members. There is a striking mismatch between the importance given to the family in government discourse and the public utterances of civil and religious institutions and individual people2 on one hand and a scant attention paid to it in social diagnosis and public policies, on the other hand. This is reflected in the time it takes, for legal aspects of the family to be adapted into the new social realities.As a complex and dynamic institution, family faces an additional paradox, it provides shelter and support when its members face changing conditions that generate insecurity related to the domains of work (e.g. unemployment, low salaries); health (drug addiction, sickness and death); education (exclusion); and violence (delinquency). At the same time, the changes that families have undergone over time, compounded by the effects of external tensions and relations inside families, can generate major sources of internal insecurity including changes in marital status (separation, divorce), migration and domestic violence. From this standpoint, while family is highly vulnerable to crises, it is also the institution that most often is turned to in dealing with them.This article adopts a perspective gender: while family is analysed as a domain for exercising personal rights, individual family members interact with unequal and asymmetric power. New combinations of inequality are emerging in terms of gender, life cycles and income together with new paradoxes that families display in a context of modernity and modernization tempered by exclusion, typical of Latin American societies. This paper aims to shed light on the changes that have affected family in a wider analytical context, and to highlight existing relations between modernization and modernity and changes taking place in family. In doing so, it provides a diagnostic study of Latin American families, which describes the changes that have occurred and the diversity that exists among families in different socioeconomic strata.It is very difficult to carry out diagnostic studies and formulate family-oriented policies, because family concept itself is ideologically biased. Subjects cannot be approached dispassionately because all individuals have empirical knowledge as they were bora in and/ or have formed a family by themselves. Family is perceived as an immutable institution that performs functions which are essential for people 's well being - functions that have remained constantly through time. In many cases; knowledge, feelings and individual perceptions in relation to family become stereotyped into uniform models and ideals that obscure the situations and experiences diversity that exist in reality.Another problem in analysing the situation of families is a non-historical approach that it is normally used. Among many other aspects, there are two basic time dimensions that need to be considered: the historical evolution of family structures associated with modernization and their individual development paths in different social classes and the evolution of a given family throughout time as it passes through a family life-cycle, addressing the fluidity of family structures and changes taking place on them (ranging, for example, from consensual unions through marriage and divorce to "blended families")3. …