The Americas: Matriarchs of the Market

She is a woman of extraordinary complexity. She fights like a man, and swears and drinks like one too. Her love affairs are legion; yet in her ample bosom, religion burns with a white flame. She thrives on a noisy 15-hour workday. In Bolivia, she is called "half-breed"; in Paraguay, "burro rider"; in Haiti, "Madame Sarah." Everyone knows her as the market woman, the indispensable harridan of commerce who easily ranks as the No. 1 retailer to Latin America's lower classes.

Miniature Macy's. Most market women started out as simple farm wives tramping into town to sell their homegrown produce. Those with a taste for trade soon bought out other peasants and moved into business full time-offering everything from mangoes to a bewildering array of cosmetics, jewelry, shoes, shirts and shawls, plus whisky from Scotland, cutlery from Germany and nylons from the U.S. From the Caribbean and Central America down through the Andes to Chile, they serve as supermarket, liquor store and miniature Macy's all rolled into one. In Guatemala City, market women and their kids and kinfolk make up 10% of the capital's 400,000 population; Lima's markets count 7,000 women; and in the island nation of Jamaica, nearly all the food-distribution system revolves around "higgler" women.

It is a hard, harsh life. The market woman's day begins at 4 a.m.; by sunup, she is ready for business—often with a derby on her head, a strong cigar between her teeth, an infant at her breast. While her five or six older chil dren scurry underfoot and her common-law husband of the moment snores the day away, she haggles and harangues, using every wile to turn a profit. She rigs prices, forms miniature cartels, organizes rock-solid unions that defy municipal authorities.

In La Paz, Bolivia, where city officials supposedly have the say on who does business where, the women openly buy and sell prime stalls like seats on the stock exchange. A good location brings as much as $600, and woe betide the male who tries to interfere. In Colombia, the mayor of Bogota once sent city officials to enforce a ruling ordering market women to don white aprons and keep their food off the ground. Market women launched a counterbarrage of rotten tomatoes, and that ended that. In Paraguay, fire hoses were used against the women but were no match for flying vegetables. Presidents & Doctors. Though most market women barely manage to keep their families alive, some strike it rich. In La Paz, a hard-working market woman can make $100 a month, which is twice what a Bolivian civil servant or factory worker makes. Two years ago, when a market woman applied for a U.S. visa in La Paz, she was asked about her financial security and produced $20,000 in U.S. greenbacks. What do they do with their earnings? They spend them on corn liquor or such local variations as Colombia's aguardiente, for radios, sewing machines or even a truck. Some women invest their savings in real estate; many yearn to send their offspring to school so that an illiterate mother can take pride in her well-educated children.