The Mexican Oportunidades Program: Questioning the Linking of Security to Conditional Social Investments for Mothers and Children

Abstract

The article examines the ways in which the Mexican Oportunidades program, a neo-liberal social investment program, is applied in Mexico. It comments on both the efficacy of the program and the ways in which motherhood and citizenship are redefined. The Oportunidades program is a conditional cash transfer program that provides money for nutrition and educational scholarships to poor mothers on condition that the funds are used toward enhancing their children's human capital development. These conditions are intended to lead to the eventual integration of the children into the market economy as skilled individuals. The article points out how the Mexican conditional cash transfer program has shifted the responsibility for social security from the state to the non-state sector, namely to mothers and families, banks and markets. The investment in children is done through mothers' regulated participation, based on conditions, and designed along gendered, cultural norms of mothering. I argue that the conditional cash transfer system attempts to insert mothers into the market as creditworthy consumers, yet it has inserted them into the economy and into political discourse not as citizens with rights, but as mothers with increased social responsibilities. Furthermore, even if mothers abide by all the conditions and children have access to additional years of schooling, the efficacy of this social investment model is called into question due to the instability of the Mexican economy, the precariousness of work, and high levels of poverty and inequality in Mexico.