This investigation compares the computer practices of the Garza family, from the first study, with those of the Fuentes family, from the second study. As both families are of Mexican origin, they belong to an ethnicity that has been reported as falling on the "have-not" side of the "divide" (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999); however, the findings do not confirm this stereotype. Whereas the middle class Garzas have been using computers for many more years than the working class Fuentes family, at the time of the studies both families owned new personal computers used for a variety of purposes by all family members. Through contrasting the computer practices of these two families, the authors seek to get beyond the rhetoric about economic advancement through computer learning in order to explore what computers can do for people and what they cannot. Both studies were carried out in the San Francisco Bay area of California, in the 2000-2001 academic year, at a time when the booming high-tech economy still seemed to offer the promise of economic rewards for all those literate in digital technologies. This current reexamination of the economic (and other) values of computer literacies in the lives of these four Mexicano adults takes place within a social context of economic downturn.