The Fight Against Poverty and the Gendered Remaking of Community in Mexico: New Patriarchal Collusions and Gender Solidarities

Abstract

Mexico's antipoverty program Oportunidades (previously Progresa, and now Prospera) was designed to reduce poverty rates by augmenting the “human capital” of poor children. The program targets women in an effort to achieve this end, and employs a conditional cash transfer (CCT) mechanism to incentivize new kinds of care work. The program's creators intended for this maternalist approach to supplant community‐based initiatives, thereby shifting the locus of poverty alleviation from communities to mothers. Nonetheless, this article shows how Oportunidades’ maternalist approach intersected with a community‐based public health initiative to position recipients as new kinds of communitarian citizens in a Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) village. Other villagers and officials colluded in using the CCT mechanism to transfer previously communal responsibilities to the “poor women” designated as program beneficiaries. Without concomitant access to decision‐making processes, the women came to occupy a truncated form of communitarian citizenship. Program recipients took advantage of the contradictions that this created to form new solidarities with municipal officials and to stake out a new voice in the process.