This paper compares variations in adult female role behavior among two different groups of working-class Latin American women, one resident in Cali, Colombia, the other in San Francisco, California. For the purposes of the discussion, CaleAas will refer to the Colombian women and Latinas to the San Francisco women. Using ethnographic and other published sources, we first describe the conventionally accepted dimensions of the Latin American wife-mother role and outline the normative expectations for appropriate conjugal-maternal behavior as they have been presented in the literature. We show that this role has been portrayed by investigators as an unchanging construct despite the variety of socioeconomic settings in which it is found. We next consider the economic and social resources available to working-class Latin American women in Cali and San Francisco and describe how women use these resources within the context of the conjugal-maternal role to meet their basic needs, to demonstrate that differences in the types of resources available t o women in the two settings shape the way in which this role complex is performed by the two groups.In both cities, women face restricted access to employment and must meet subsistence needs through relationships with others. In Cali, mothers have few alternatives other than to rely on men for subsistence, and Calefias use their femininity and sexuality in efforts t o establish what they wish t o be permanent conjugal unions. Latina mothers also generally rely on husbands t o meet subsistence needs, but in contrast to the Calefias, Latinas can and do seek public assistance in the event their conjugal relationships prove unreliable or unstable. Freed of the worry of satisfying immediate needs, Latinas on welfare devote 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. Calenas emphasize the dimension of wife and the importance of conjugal affiliation; thev pav relatively less attention to ties with children. B y 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 ]