Gender equality, community divisions, and autonomy

What is it about?

My article draws on long-term ethnographic research in La Gloria, a settlement of indigenous Mayan refugees from Guatemala in the Mexican state of Chiapas. I examine the Prospera conditional cash transfer (CCT) program – a “poverty alleviation” scheme framed by the Mexican state and multilateral banks as an effective program that improves health, education, and employment outcomes. Prospera provides cash to recipients’ contingent on their meeting conditional requirements in the areas of health and education. The Prospera program also explicitly links gender equality – strengthening women’s position in the family and society – as part of its goal to eliminate the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The two primary mechanisms used to ensure receipt of cash transfers – educational and health requirements – are framed as promoting gender equality. For instance, cash transfers target mothers, who are framed as more responsible than men in maintaining the family and the home, and to close the gender gap in educational attainment, starting at middle school, girls receive 10% more in cash transfers than boys.

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Why is it important?

My research reveals how racial ideology along with the neoliberal forms of governance at the core of Mexico’s Prospera program reinforces race and gender hierarchy across generations. I argue that Prospera ignores structural factors – poor health, lack of education, discrimination, and high unemployment – and the larger political economy, which collectively fuel poverty and international migration from indigenous communities. This article’s focus on how each of these factors impacts indigenous women’s political agency has important policy implications for the ability of conditional cash transfers to promote gender equality, respect the cultural autonomy of indigenous peoples, and reduce poverty in the global South. The implementation of CCT programs in 29 ‘developing’ countries, and the role multilateral banks and state technocrats in framing CCTs as a social good that should be replicated in other ‘developing’ nation-states, augments the importance of my article to the study of poverty.