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Although there have been many articles and books on street vendors, ambulant and fixed, around the world, and many works written about them in Mexico, little has been done on the ubiquitous ambulant beach vendors in tourist centers.

This paper offers an analysis of the backgrounds, levels of contentment, and aspirations of 25 women beach vendors interviewed in Acapulco in 2010.

A third of the women beach vendors had fathers who were peasants, and others had grandparents who were. Thus the article shows light on the fate of some of the offspring of a dispossessed peasantry. Far more than half of the women vendors were very content with their self-employment vending wares on the beach, a few because they could set their own hours, and a few because they had no boss. Other’s contentment was linked to the fact that they could help support their children. Part of this help meant keeping them in school. This was true whether the women were married, widowed, or abandoned. Not all were content, however, and this underscores the importance of their income to their households. Most of the women, though not all, had aspirations for more education and better work, whether in the formal or the informal economy.

The women can be seen as marginalized because of their current poverty, and many because of past poverty leading to a lack of educational opportunities when they were young. They value education for their children.

Technostress - the difficulty of adapting to technologies - is a psychosocial condition that can affect one’s emotional state and certainly seems to be affecting today’s society. This is no longer a concept that is exclusive to workers whose work activities are directly related to technology; it now also affects millions of students in education.

Digital migration forced by compulsory confinement has led to technostress in students all over the world, with consequences such as rejection, denial, fear, uncertainty and a series of other problems that affect students’ mental state and integrity. These conditions in turn lead to a decrease in the quality of education, as students become fatigued, tired, or bored by having to spend so much time in front of information and communication technologies.

The purpose of this chapter is to measure the level of technostress in higher education students who have been forced to change from on-site to the online educational models. It is also intended to compare the perception of the same students regarding these two educational models, in order to detect variants that affect their academic performance. The research uses a four-dimensional construct, in addition to analysing students’ perception of each educational model through a fifth dimension. The results show that for students, the forced change from on-site to online education has posed a great challenge, resulting in negation, rejection, and addiction, among other conditions, which together account for a high level of technostress.