An ethnographical inquiry realized in an ejido of the region of Soconusco (Chiapas, Mexico), producing coffee, revealed a paradox: the persons ethnographed felt autonomous, managers of their own existence, when, at the same time, they expressed some renunciation to the present and uncertainty to the future. This paper will explain this paradox analyzing two historic moments - the post-war years and the neoliberal fork of the 1980s. The main objective of this text is to understand how the reconfigurations of the social, economic and political conditions of the rural area produced, according to the works of Ulrich Beck and Robert Castel, processes of individualization and social insecurity, in which the individual is not any more protected by the collective but by himself.
