Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico is an in-depth examination of the ways in which the neoliberal Mexican state attempts to control women's reproductive practices and intervene in child-rearing and family relations through the cash transfer program known as Oportunidades (“Opportunities” in English). With more than a fifth of Mexico's population enrolled, Oportunidades uses access to monthly cash benefits for women and children to induce women to take responsibility for health, nutrition, and education in their families. The program requires women to attend informative pláticas and special events, to make sure their children go to school, and to take their children regularly to the doctor. In addition, women are often required to do physical labor such as sweeping health clinics, cleaning bathrooms in health clinics or schools, and other public maintenance work.Evoking a Foucauldian analysis of surveillance and biopower, anthropologist Vania Smith-Oka has produced a convincing ethnographic account of the ways in which teachers, doctors, nurses, and health workers systematically assume that Nahua indigenous women of Amatlán, Veracruz (a pseudonym), do not know how to be good mothers, routinely have too many children, and need to be repeatedly instructed in sound child-rearing and health practices. Smith-Oka frames the Oportunidades program as part of a continuum of state interventions, beginning with indigenismo in the 1920s, that seek to convert indigenous peoples into modern Mexicans who follow Western health, education, and family practices.The book makes a contribution to Mexican historiography of the state and its manifestation at the local level — particularly through gendered state practices. It seriously challenges the idea that Mexico is a poststate society in which government interventions are minimal. At the time I am writing this, the Mexican senate has just approved a major energy reform that will have long-lasting consequences in many indigenous communities. Engineered to provide private transnational companies access to subsoil resources such as natural gas and oil in indigenous territories, current legislation known informally as the energy reform is a major piece of government legislation that, like Oportunidades, will remake communities and lives.Smith-Oka uses the strengths of ethnography and participant observation to illustrate the major points of the book. She draws strong portraits of key women protagonists in her story and shows how they are affected by and also push back against the regimentation, reporting, and surveillance that come with participation in the Oportunidades program. Many of her insights come from long-term observation of women from Amatlán interacting with nurses, doctors, and other health practitioners at local clinics and hospitals.A particularly compelling section of the book describes a series of highly coercive practices whereby many women are sterilized or, if they are not, are constantly harangued at every medical appointment (whether related to reproductive health or not) to get “the operation” (p. 69). Reluctant husbands can also be intimidated as well. Smith-Oka describes one scene in which a woman came in with her husband and two children for a medical visit. She did not want “the operation” and requested an IUD. She was told her uterus was too big for the IUDs available. She was then asked if her husband used condoms. She said little, and the husband was ushered into the room, where, with his eyes facing down, he was instructed in condom use by a female doctor pulling one over her fingers. Such intimate ethnography goes a long way toward convincing readers of the fundamental lack of respect with which women and men are treated.Smith-Oka takes seriously trying to understand the point of view of doctors and nurses as well. She accurately concludes that the world from which health practitioners come and the kind of socialization they have by and large involves preconceived racist conceptualizations of how indigenous women think, what they respond to, and what they need. Her analysis suggests that those who design and implement development programs for the Mexican state such as Oportunidades continue to begin from a paternalistic viewpoint with regard to how they frame and engage with indigenous peoples. Indigenous women are seen as needing strong guidance and intervention in order to improve their lives. While the rhetoric of cash transfer programs like Oportunidades is often about participation and women's empowerment, Smith-Oka's ethnography suggests the opposite.The book also contributes to a larger conversation about how good and bad mothering have been defined historically and contemporarily not only in Mexico but also in other parts of the world. I was hoping that Smith-Oka would spend more time discussing her findings in relation to the rich literature on women's history and the state in Mexico as well as Mexican women's responses to state interventions. This book will be of most interest to those teaching women and gender studies, Mexican history and society, public health studies, and medical and cultural anthropology.
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Jan 1, 2021
Helena Corrales-Herrero + 3
Open Access