Mauro and Guillermina Hinostrosa's Domestic Enterprise (no. 14 in fig. 2)

Mauro, father (fa), 38 years old.

Guillermina, mother (mo), 34 years old.

Son (so₁ ) 14

Daughter (da₁ ) 13

Daughter (da₂ ) 11

Son (so₂ ) 8

Son (so₃ ) 3

Mauro and Guillermina's household enterprise is typical of those migrants to Lima who arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s establishing themselves first at the coralon in Petit Thouars and then eventually moving to the barriadas (shantytowns) that were to emerge as so distinctive a feature of the Lima

landscape from the 1950s on (Matos Mar 1961; Mangin 1970; Collier 1971; Turner 1972a , 1972b ). Of the roughly 1,000 adult Huasicanchinos living in Lima, some 40 percent gained their living in enterprises similar to Mauro and Guillermina's.

Mauro and Guillermina live with their five children (all under 15 years old) in a barriada called La Campifia, a half hour bus ride from the commercial area of Lima. The household as a unit is engaged in at least fourteen different kinds of livelihood, and each of these involve household members to varying degrees with extrahousehold people. They have had their house of part concrete slabs, part straw-matted walls for the past eleven years in the barriada, and before that Mauro had been living in the Petit Thouars coralon since 1958.

For all household members skill in systematic, long range planning is less useful than skill in rapid responses and adaptibility to opportunities as they arise. Indeed, in turning to Mauro and Guillermina's household, it is well to remember the haphazard nature of opportunities: it is not easy to convey time and energy expended in tasks nor the unpredictable nature of daily meetings with other Huasicanchinos at which information is exchanged, credit and labor arrangements made, and so on, nor even the very small amounts of cash and material which each small operation involves. To get some sense of this, I will describe a day's fieldwork in 1972 (see table 2).

I first met Mauro at Petit Thouars in October of that year before the strawberry season had begun. It was three in the afternoon, and he was reorganizing the fruit on his tricycle prior to handing it over to his eldest son, who had just arrived from school to take over the selling. "I do the regular customers, going from door to door," Mauro said. "Then Felix, he is young and can move the tricycle fast; he unloads as much of what is left as he can, by touring the streets for casual sales." He then invited me to join him in his 1950 Ford pickup for a trip to his piggery. After about an hour's journey out of Lima we turned off the main road and followed a track over a hill in the desert to encounter a sight perhaps beyond the inventive powers of the greatest satirist. Stretching beneath us in neat rectangular plots was a vast shantytown made up of what appeared to be miniature shacks. Many had small gardens laid out before them with a few flowers and possibly a vegetable or two. A few even sported the Peruvian flag. It was a barriada of pigs. In reply to my astonished inquiries, Mauro laughed and said, "It is forbidden for people to stay here overnight. Only the guard lives here," and he pointed to the guard house as we passed. The bloated carcass of a dead pig lay beside it on the road. We had loaded the truck with spoiled fruit from the coralon, and after feeding it to the pigs—seventeen full grown and a litter of eight—we fetched water from a large tank at the end of the road. Mauro told me that he is one of seven partners in the piggery and that they take turns in coming out here each

day. His partners were all Huasicanchinos, and they hoped to expand to about forty pigs.

We returned home via Petit Thouars. It was now after six o'clock. Felix had returned with the tricycle but had disappeared again. Nobody knew where or if he was coming back. Most other tricyclists had finished and either gone home to their barriadas or sat outside their shacks at the coralon. A couple of tricyclists passed by on their way back to the Surquillo coralon, and there was some discussion about a social event. The two men began to apologize to Mauro because he was not included in the band which was to play that night. Mauro replied that he was not at all put out. He had enough work as it was, and he was going to give up saxophone playing anyhow. Discussion turned to fruit selling: the unstable prices, the relative value of domestic versus Chilean apples, a particular wholesaler who had cheated them in the morning, the risks of tampering with their own weighscales on the tricycles, and the uncertainty of the enforcement of new laws concerning ambulant selling.

We then drove back to Mauro's barriada, about three quarters of an hour's drive away. On arrival I met Guillermina, and we began to talk about her day. It had consisted of shopping, then picking up two children from a neighbor for the day, then preparing food, then receiving a visitor who brought a

pile of washing for her to do, then putting aside food preparation to attend to the washing, then persuading her second daughter, who had returned from school at the lunch break, not to go back to school but mind the children while she did the washing, then back to the food preparation, then returning the two children to their home, then cooking the meal, and now talking to a polite but somewhat inconvenient gringo visitor. At this, she laughed and left me with Mauro as she went to the kitchen to finish preparing supper.

Mauro started working in Lima when he was eighteen, twenty years ago (the "present" now being 1973). He was a bachelor, and he lived with his aunt at Petit Thouars. He started out by selling fruit from a basket, walking the streets. He did this on behalf of another, older migrant who gave him an allowance, but for the first year he did not partake in the profits and losses of his sales. He then began selling on his own account. By 1958 he had bought a tricycle with credit from his uncle, Victor, at no interest. He had married Guillermina in Huasicancha the previous year, but she did not move permanently to Lima until 1961, when they moved to the barriada. At that point the livestock that Guillermina had been shepherding were moved into Victor's flock.

Mauro and Guillermina are engaged in the running of a multioccupational enterprise. During much of the day Mauro is engaged in selling strawberries from a tricycle, but he stores his tricycle at Petit Thouars, together with other barriada dwellers, as well as the people who live in the coralon themselves. In return for this he transports fruit each day from the central wholesale market to the coralon. The fruit is bought in bulk by partners who then divide it up before setting out on their day's selling. Those not involved either in Mauro's buying partnership (there are five of them) or in storing his equipment, pay him a fixed amount per day for transportation.

From roughly 9:30 to 3:00 p.m. Mauro is involved in retail selling. But he also devotes time to a number of other ventures, one of which is the piggery already described and which takes up one afternoon each week. Another is his ownership of a small plot of irrigated land on the edge of Lima. This is owned by Mauro and three Lima partners who work the land with him and two Huasicancha partners who were asked for credit when the land was bought. One of the Lima partners is Mauro's brother (no. 13, fig. 2), and one of the Huasicancha partners is his uncle, Victor. Their ambition is to grow strawberries and other cash crops on the land, but at present all the land is devoted to growing foodstuffs for the immediate families. This plot of land requires considerable attention that Mauro and Guillermina can ill afford to give. For two years, Victor's unmarried daughter (no. 18) was brought from the village and lived at the plot, working the land, but she had recently married, and now Mauro and Guillermina have to try to get there as often as possible.

For five months of the year, Mauro is involved in various aspects of strawberry selling as are most other ex-residents. The work involves Guillermina too and often the children. Mauro advances cash to the owner of the strawberry fields in order to acquire rights to buy his strawberries. He then makes agreements with various Huasicanchino retail sellers to come out with him between 5 and 6 a.m. and pick strawberries. Mauro divides up the unsorted fruit among the pickers and sells it to them. He then pays the grower on the basis of what has been picked. He claims that his profit covers no more than the costs of transport and other "costs." The pickers are then brought back to the inner city where a hectic job of washing the strawberries and sorting them into categories according to size takes place. They then, by about 9:30, set off for their various locations in the city where the strawberries are sold from baskets.

The strawberry pickers consist of two groups. On the one hand, Mauro brings down people from Huasicancha for this job. Victor comes down each year, as do two other men with whom Mauro has a variety of other economic ties (one of them is Grimaldo of our next case study). Whether or not these people sell entirely for their own account or pay a small amount to Mauro per week, depends on the degree to which they are performing tasks for him in Huasicancha. It also depends on the continuity of their past connections with him. Thus, in 1972 Victor stayed with Mauro, ate at his table, and used his equipment (baskets, scales etc.), but sold for his own account. But at that time he was deeply involved in Mauro's affairs, caring for his sheep, and having advanced capital for at least two of his Lima ventures. But, by 1981 Victor was still doing the same thing, and still selling on his own account, though by then he no longer performed any reciprocal favors for Mauro.

The other group of pickers and sellers are people already living in Lima. For these people the relationship with Mauro is based strictly on cash terms and, moreover, on daily cash terms; fruit is paid for before Mauro pays the grower. These people arrive for the picking either by turning up at Mauro's point of departure in the morning or by getting word to him the previous day so that he can pick them up. The number and personnel of the team, then, varies each day, and this is primarily because retail selling is so hazardous that people do not know from one day to the next if they will be able to generate enough cash to buy the next day's fruit. Even so, Mauro only takes people he knows well and whom he can trust not to damage the plants or pick fruit before it has properly ripened, or avoid picking fruit that may appear overripe and thus subject to quick spoilage. Since pickers are likely to be tempted to do these things, depending on the going price for fruit, it is important for Mauro to be able to control the quality of picking through personal influence. Hence, Mauro favors pickers from the Petit Thouars coralon where he has much influence. Some loss from spoilage can be marginally offset by taking the fruit to the conserve factories in the evenings where a price, usually

below the original purchase price, is paid. Mauro uses his truck for this job. He collects the fruit, sells it, and then delivers the money the next day, taking off a fixed price for transportation.

Finally, Guillermina usually tries to sell strawberries on her own account during the season, though she often finds it hard to put together the time. Mauro encourages her in this because they always need the money but also because Guillermina is able to provide him with reliable information on trends in retail selling: prices are very volatile from day to day, and Mauro must know them in order to negotiate the price he pays to the grower.

The Hinostrosa domestic enterprise is, then, a composite of multifarious activities. And just as this variety of occupations should reflect for us, not wealth, but poverty, so we should be careful too not to overemphasize the systematic nature of the operations. If there is anything of regularity it is a propensity to act quickly in response to opportunities and the absence of any huge bounty deriving from them. Despite the continual manipulation of trading capital and the number of activities that are undertaken, the insubstantial and spasmodic nature of the income thus generated mitigates against its being systematically accumulated. Moreover calculating the "profits" from the various livelihood activities is further limited because the Hinostrosas do not make a distinction between domestic outlay and entrepreneurial outlay.

Household consumption, capital, outlay and expenses for social events are all lumped together as the overall costs of reproducing the viability of the enterprise. And this is to be expected. Take the example of the household's need for rice. To get it cheap Mauro buys in bulk at the wholesale price, and then Guillermina sells off the balance. She does this partly through the network she has available within the context of the confederation of households, partly through a looser network she has with other women in the barriada, and partly by herself selling small quantities in the barriada market on subsequent days. In all three cases, however, the price is scarcely above the original cost. Even if she sells at cost, "taking a position" in rice has still allowed them to acquire domestic needs below retail prices, and the entrepreneurial function and household consumption have been united.^[2]

This is not to say that savings are never accumulated, but in this respect it is important to note precisely what was involved on those occasions when Mauro and Guillermina needed to produce cash for investment into fixed equipment such as the plot of land, the piggery, or the old pick-up truck. On all such occasions money was raised, without interest payments, through interpersonal ties, and in most cases this was done through the sale of livestock.^[3] Advancing credit in this way is an essential component of keeping a wide network of interpersonal channels open, and a persistent inability (or unwillingness) to find such credit when called upon can have the effect of isolating an enterprise. As a result household members will liquidate one branch of the household's operation to provide capital requested by a confederate

household elsewhere. In this way Mauro and Guillermina sold their entire holding of pigs and terminated their partnership in the piggery in 1974 to provide capital for a confederate in Huancayo.

The use of credit to maintain relationships and the use of relationships to acquire credit are two sides of the same coin. But what are the kinds of relationships in which Mauro engaged to acquire labor? Broadly speaking they were of three kinds: labor mobilized by the use of a domestic relationship, labor mobilized by the use of a relationship to a broader field of reciprocity, and labor mobilized by the use of (a relationship to) money. The implications of these differences are the subject of the next chapter; here I may simply note that the first two require the parties involved to stand in a particular relationship to one another prior to the transaction: they must be categorized as domestic and community members respectively (G. Smith 1986). As for the third, the relationship is indifferent as to person. In Mauro's case this only occurred with some of the people who picked strawberries and, even here, the parties were not entirely "indifferent as to persons," but came in great measure from the Petit Thouars coralon.

Besides the various occupations of the Hinostrosa's enterprise in Lima, they are also tied into a confederation of households in Huancayo and Huasicancha, of whom I have so far mentioned only Victor's by name. In fact, however, the confederation of which Mauro and Guillermina were a part is going through a process of reformulation. Victor, who provided one of the chief partners in the pastoral side of things, is getting old. Moreover many of his Lima connections are being concentrated in the enterprise of his son, Salvador (no. 22, fig. 2), who has gradually become established there. Indeed in 1973 and 1974 Victor no longer stayed with Mauro on his trips to Lima. As a result Mauro is becoming increasingly involved in another confederation that itself is undergoing reformulation. This link has been made because one of its members is Victor's next-door neighbor in the village, Grimaldo Pomayay (no. 29 in fig. 2), who has increasingly through this proximity been of assistance to Victor. In anticipation of this new alliance, to oil the wheels of good will as it were, Victor agreed to become Grimaldo and Angelina's padrino at their wedding in 1972. So we can turn now to Grimaldo and Angelina's enterprise, focusing this time especially on their links into the confederation of households of which they are part.