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Rough draft (31/III/2014)

CULTURAL SHOCK AND SOCIAL POLICY: INDIGENOUS URBAN FAMILIES AND THE OPORTUNIDADES PROGRAM

Guillermo de la Peña

[Presented at the Mexican Mondays Series, Center for Mexican Studies and Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University)

In this presentation I attempt to analyze the implementation of the Oportunidades Program by looking at the linkages and interfaces of the social actors involved in the process. In particular, I focus on the interactions between officers and operators of the Program, on the one hand, and on the other indigenous families living in cities.

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The main analytical questions are, firstly: How the different cultural categories and values of these actors (concerning, for instance, ethno-racial hierarchies, conceptions about the family, definitions of “good life”, etc.) condition the manner in which the Program is implemented, as well as its results? Secondly: How the Program conditions the type of citizenship construed by its recipients?

For the analysis, I use data collected in seven Mexican cities (Ensenada, Chihuahua, Monterrey, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, Tehuacán and Oaxaca) and 60 colonias (neighborhoods) by a team of researchers in 2010-2011.

Fieldwork included direct observation and extensive interviews to members of 119 households affiliated to Oportunidades and identified as “indigenous”. For purposes of contrast and comparison, we also interviewed members of 52 households identified as “non-indigenous”. We also conducted conversations with Program officers and with non-affiliated persons. Most of the indigenous adults interviewed were migrants of first or second generation, with very little schooling or no schooling at all, and they earned their living in “the informal sector” as producers of artesanías (handicrafts), street vendors of artesanías and prepared food, domestic servants, gardeners, unskilled masons, and casual laborers in public markets and small workshops. In contrast, many non-indigenous adults were born in the same city where they lived, or in other city, had more schooling and often had formal blue-collar jobs. Another contrast was that non-indigenous households were occupied by a single nuclear family, whereas indigenous households frequently included other kin.

I shall begin by briefly referring to the context in which a discourse of “social policy” gained strength in Mexico during the last decades. Then, I shall describe the main characteristics and activities of the Program, and finally I shall present a number of situations of significant interaction.

The context

In Mexico, before 1990, the term “social policy” was not commonly used in official discourses to justify public actions. The term frequently used by State representatives was “development policy”, which included (a) public investment in agricultural and industrial infrastructure, (b) subsidies to basic

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food production, (c) protective measures and fiscal incentives for industry and selected commercial agriculture, (d) the monopoly of the federal government in the generation of energy (oil, electricity), and (e) the direct involvement of the government in the production of steel and in many businesses considered important (or “convenient”) for the progress of the country. There was also the agrarian policy devoted to distributing land for landless peasants and the indigenist policy for “Mexicanizing” the Indians, as well as the educational and health policies which aimed at providing some coverage of these services to the whole population.

In the period from 1940 to 1970, developmental policies existed in the context of a master economic format which combined Import Substitution Industrialization (the ECLA recipe) and Modernization with Unlimited Provision of Labor (“the Lewis Model”). Such format, reinforced by a strong national-popular propaganda, proved to be successful enough to provide the country with economic growth and political stability –what was called “the Mexican miracle”. The benefits of this “miracle”, however, mainly went to the middle classes and the sectors incorporated or co-opted by the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). But in the 1970s the system began to crumble, and in the 1980s, with collapsing oil prices and rocketing interest rates, the miracle came to a terminal crisis.

As it is known, during the last two decades of the 20th century, Mexico went through a process of “neoliberal structural adjustment” leading to the dismantling of the vast majority of public companies, the end of subsidies and protectionism to production, the liquidation of the agrarian reform program, and the generalized opening of the country to the international market. It was at this juncture that the government began to use the expression “social policies”, in contradistinction to “economic policies”. Thus, economic policies are those directed to stimulate market competition and competitiveness. In contrast, social policies have the purpose of compensating those sectors of the population which are considered incapable of being competitive. This “vulnerable” population has to be protected from starvation and, if possible, provided with the means of acquiring an increasing capacity to participate in the market as producers and consumers. However, the diffusion of this concept of social policy coincided with the wave of democratization which

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was taking place in many countries of Latin America, even in Mexico; therefore, the concept was --rather vaguely-- connected to the idea of civil society.

During the presidency of President Salinas (1988-1994), social policies were mainly carried out by the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), which funded small enterprises in rural areas and was widely accused of corruption and paternalism, and of creating or reinforcing political clienteles for the PRI. In the period of President Zedillo (1994-200), PRONASOL was replaced by the Programa de Educación y Salud (PROGRESA), with very different standards of operation. These standards were basically maintained when a different political party, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) won the presidential election in 2000, except that the name changed to Programa Oportunidades de Desarrollo Humano (known simply as Oportunidades). According the official data, in 2012 the number of individual beneficiaries of Oportunidades reached six and a half millions.

The Program

Oportunidades gives cash directly–without intermediaries--to households classified as being “under the poverty line”. The money is delivered not to the husband but to the wife, or to the woman who has the role of household head. Such transfer of money is subject to several conditions. All the members of the household –and more frequently pregnant women, infants and senior adults-- have to go for periodical medical check-ups to public clinics. Children between five- and 18-years old have to attend school punctually and proficiently. Households receive a basic amount of money (“beca alimentaria + beca energética”) for each registered adult, plus additional quantities for each registered infant, each registered senior adult and each registered schoolchild (beca escolar).

There are seven types of actor involved in the functioning of the Program: (1) High executives –national directors and regional delegates--, in charge of technical planning, supervision and evaluation. (2) Field operators, who are in direct contact with the beneficiaries. They are usually young, college trained, and enthusiastic about their demanding jobs. Many of them were previously linked to NGOs and community activism. (3) Municipal liaison officers

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(enlaces), appointed by the local authorities to facilitate the activities of field operators. (4) The beneficiaries themselves: the titulares (entitled female household heads) and the registered members of their households . (5) Vocales or promotoras comunitarias, chosen to monitor a group of 10-15 titulares, who are expected to diffuse information of the Program in their neighborhoods and advise the titulares about their entitlements and duties. Usually, vocales are literate and have work experience outside the household. (6) The personnel of the clinics where beneficiaries attend: doctors, nurses, social workers and administrators) (7) The personnel of the schools: teachers, educational psychologists and administrators.

From its inception, the Program has been subject to independent evaluations, mainly through quantitative methods, in order to ensure efficacy, transparency, and independence from electoral interests. Funding for evaluations and for specific aspects of the Program has come not only from the federal government but also from international agencies (World Bank, Inter American Development Bank, and others). These agencies as well as Mexican civil society groups have insisted in the necessity for the Program to have components of gender equity and citizenship. The question of gender equity has been approached by selecting women as titulares, and more recently by giving slightly larger becas to high-school girls. As for citizenship, the Program purports to strengthen individual consciousness and individual responsibility in the fulfillment of duties as a strategy to create better citizens. (From this perspective, a good citizen is she or he who complies with the Program expectations). But the main general objective of the Program is that, through better health and educational services, the young generations become able to transcend their condition of poverty.

The theme of equity in relation to ethnic diversity was not mentioned in the Program norms and objectives until very recently. The Program initially operated in rural areas only, where members of indigenous communities –most of which are very poor-- were easily selected as vulnerable population. In 2002, Oportunidades gradually expanded towards urban areas. In fact, 70% of the Mexican population, indigenous people included, live now in cities, as a result of the torrential rural-urban migration which took momentum in the 1970s and has only increased during the neoliberal decades. It is estimated

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that at least one third of the population classified as indigenous is now urban. Most of them are to be found in the urban peripheries, in illegal or recently legalized colonias (neighborhoods), where they have built houses using whatever materials they had at hand—from bricks and stones to tin and cardboard. It is frequent for these settlements to be situated on steep hills or ravines and to have dirt streets. Electricity, drinking water, drainage, security, and transport services are very scarce. In such places, information about the Oportunidades Program is rather difficult to obtain, especially for indigenous people.

Every year, the Program convokes people to apply by posting notices in schools, clinics and municipal offices –which are effective for people who go to those places, if they can read-- and occasionally through radio and television announcements which are not very clear for people whose native

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language is not Spanish. What is more effective is the transmission by word of mouth; for instance, when a cluster of families from the same community or region live in the same neighborhood and are in communication with each other, or when information is diffused in a given colonia by a religious organization (as in Chihuahua), a political group (as in San Luis Potosí) or a NGO. There are also vocales who visit families in their neighborhoods and encourage them to join Oportunidades; but we only found one vocal who spoke an indigenous language.

What we did find was resistance on the part of many Oportunidades executives to create a special strategy for recruiting indigenous persons in the

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cities, arguing that the Program cannot treat people differently. As a regional delegate put it:

“What is relevant for the Program is that families fit within the profile of poverty, no matter if they are indigenous or not (...) For the requirements and operative success of the Program it is not necessary to make any distinctions towards the indigenous, because that could be discriminatory for the non-indigenous. [In any case], it would make no difference, because the operative processes cannot be changed”.

I shall refer now to four types of interface, i.e. situations of interaction which are conditioned by the different “lifeworlds” --interests, experiences, categories and values-- of the participant actors. These situations are: (1) Affiliation to the Program; (2) Delivery of becas; (3) Revision in clinics; (4) Attendance to schools. Then I shall examine some causes for suspension of the Program which can be related to cultural differences. Finally, I will come back to the questions stated in the beginning of this paper.

Affiliation

The first requirement in the process of affiliation is the presentation of three documents for each member of the household: birth certificate or CURP (Clave Única de Registro de Población), certificate of valid address (domicilio vigente), and ID with photograph (preferably the ID given by the Federal Electoral Institute). We found that non-indigenous adults produced birth certificates without much trouble. But many indigenous migrants were not born in a cabecera municipal (municipal capital) and did not have easy access to a civil registry office. In their places of origin they had not needed that document, or any other. In theory it is possible to obtain an extemporaneous birth certificate from the city –sometimes with the help of the municipal liaison officers and the mediation of the vocales--, but the procedures are slow, complicated and expensive.

As for certificates of valid address, streets in peripheral settlements often lack names or numbers and, particularly in illegal settlements, people do not have receipts for the payment of services. Again, such problems can be solved, again with the help of vocales and enlaces but this takes time and negotiations

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which could be disheartening. For people with a very recent rural past, this urban world where one’s existence has to be proved with a piece of paper is strange and alien.

The second requirement for affiliation to the Program is to respond to the encuesta económica, which implies a visit to the applicant household by a field operator, who has to interview the wife (or the responsible woman) in order to collect data on all household members and assess their economic profiles: jobs, salaries, state of the house, possession of cars and appliances. The interview is conducted in Spanish; obviously, this implies that many indigenous applicants have to find someone who translates the questions for them –for instance, one of their children born in the city, a relative or a neighbor--; even then, sometimes the problems of communication are not

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solved, the interview is not completed, and the application fails. A frequent complaint from failed applicants is that field operators “are always in a hurry”.

Delivering money

Once their applications are approved, the new titulares receive an official notification, sign a contract specifying their duties to the Program and then wait to be convoked to their first entrega de apoyos (delivery of cash). These events usually take place in public open spaces, such as parks, squares or sport grounds, facilitated by the municipal liaisons. Since these spaces are often distant from the neighborhoods where titulares live, they and their vocales rent a bus or a truck to get there. The journey begins very early, at five or six in the morning, to ensure a good place in the queue. Field operators in charge of delivery arrive at 9.00. In the big cities the titulares miss a full day of work,

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since the ceremony congregates as many as three hundred of them, and lasts for six or seven hours.

When her turn comes, the titular receives an envelope with money. If her name does not appear in the list, or the money is less that the approved amount, there is nothing she can do at that moment. In order to file a

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complaint, she has to wait at least one day and go personally to the Program office (Centro de Atención y Registro). Those titulares who do not have a good command of Spanish need to find companions who translate for them.

Clinics

Periodical check-ups in a public clinic are mandatory for all beneficiaries. At least twice a year, and more often for pregnant women, people with chronical illnesses, and infants. In addition, titulares are obliged to attend monthly workshops led by doctors, nurses or social workers on family health, feminine cancer, household economics or problems of adolescence. They are also obliged to send their teenager children to receive instruction on sexual education.

Interaction within the clinic can be very conflictive for the indigenous patients, and not only because of the language barrier. Doctors, nurses and social workers often have a negative –racist-- image of the indigenous world, as a sort of anachronism, or worse, a world of ignorant, lazy and careless people.

In their words:

“Even Indian women who speak Spanish never understand my questions, I have to repeat, and repeat… They are incapable of describing the symptoms and the evolution of an illness… It’s a waste of time…”

“Their children are always sick because the parents do not follow my orders”.

“The husbands are terribly machistas… They want to be present at their wives’ and daughters’ consultations, and sometimes they prevent them from coming for revision”

“Some Indian women stubbornly refuse to have a Papa Nicolau, out of ignorance, and we have to threaten them with suspension”.

And numerous doctors and nurses told us that the Oportunidades Program was putting an excessive burden on saturated clinics and overworked medical personnel. (Which could be true). A doctor angrily said that the Program “should send the Indians and other beneficiaries to different clinics, not to us.”

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Others recognized, however, that there was an urgent need of having translators in the clinics, and blamed Oportunidades for not being aware of this. We also collected some testimonies from medical personnel about the gentleness and humility of the indigenous patients.

In their turn, the indigenous beneficiaries complained that they had to reach the clinic from distant and badly communicated neighborhoods, and then queuing during long hours before being received for consultation. Particularly for older people, the clinic represents an impersonal authoritarian world with strange furniture and machines. And we heard expressions of helpless anger against despotic treatment and scolding from certain doctors and nurses, who even call them “dirty” and “stupid” and despise their traditional medicine as mere superstition. There are clinics that demand that indigenous beneficiaries help in the cleaning of the premises, without payment, as if it were a part of their duties.

It does not help that the majority of clinics are not well equipped and lack medicines. As a consequence, many indigenous families prefer to go, for minor illnesses, and even emergencies, to curers and private doctors, or to pharmacies that offer consultation at low prices.

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Schools

In Mexico, public primary schools have proliferated since the 1970s. As a result, most of the urban colonias where the indigenous families live, even those which are illegal, have a primary school nearby. The buildings are usually in good state, although the classrooms are sometimes overcrowded. In contrast to the medical personnel, teachers and headmasters do not express negative opinions about the indigenous pupils, when they recognize them as such. But there are teachers who think that those children who struggle with the Spanish language simply have learning problems and have to be sent to special institutions. In any case, Oportunidades is considered a privilege which is not always deserved. Teachers resent not being consulted about the strategies of the Program, which they think should reward academic excellence. They also resent the additional task of completing bimonthly

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reports about the performance of children with beca, and complain that the majority of indigenous parents do not participate in the school assemblies.

In the classroom, indigenous children tend to seat on the back; and at the breaks they do not to mix with their non-indigenous companions, lest they make fun of them because of the way they speak or dress. For most non-indigenous children and their families, school is an obvious step--a predictable stage in their life--whereas for the indigenous families school is both a window to the unknown and the strenuous but uncertain possibility of coping with it. As one mother put it:

“education may be the key to success, but at the cost of many sacrifices. Our boys and girls have a great many difficulties and we feel shame when we have to talk to the director”.

Actually, 30% of the children in school age in the indigenous households we studied were not attending school nor registered in Oportunidades (though others members of their household were), and an additional 10% had previously interrupted their studies for a year or two. Only a small proportion of indigenous children complete secundaria (junior high school) and carry on studying.

Remaining in the Program

The fact that indigenous adults have precarious employment means that their households live in a perpetual need of cash. This causes children, particularly teenagers, to feel pressured to help the domestic economy and also to earn some money for their own expenses. Informal occupations like street commerce or fabrication of artesanías easily incorporate the work of children. This results in frequent absence from classes and even in abandoning the school altogether. When this happens, the titular has to give notice to the Program and drop the name of the child from the list of the household members; failure to do so could lead to disaffiliation of the entire household. In turn, adult males also may be absent from the city for a period of time, for work reasons. For instance, masons are recruited by builders to work in another town, and artisans travel to their places of origin to look for raw materials. One artisan who weaves hammocks spends half of the year with his

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wife and daughters in Ensenada, and the other half selling his products in tourist places along the Pacific Coast. Inevitably, such travels affect their attendance to medical check ups and endangers the permanence of their households in the Program.

But there is also a crucial aspect in the social organization of indigenous families which causes dissonance with the norms of Oportunidades. For the Program, the basic unit of organization is the household: a group of people who live in the same house and share expenses. But for the indigenous world the basic unit of cooperation is the three-generational extended family, which is seldom contained in one house or in a single locality; on the contrary, it has members in the community of origin and it is often dispersed among several villages, towns or cities. As it has been documented by numerous studies, survival in the cities is, for poor migrants, a function of the possibility of having recourse to family networks, and such networks have their pivot in the community of origin. Most indigenous extended families meet there every year for the celebration of the patron saint; many also do it for the día de

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muertos (Day of the Dead) or Christmas, and also for family birthdays or días de santo. And some of them go to help in the harvest. We also found cases of children who are sent to keep company to grandparents, elderly uncles or aunts who live back in the community or in other locality. Moreover, it is not rare that all the members of a household move from one city to another for reasons of work or in order to be closer to a cluster of relatives.

The Program has established procedures for reporting change of address or locality, or to inform about temporary absences, but again they imply complicated paperwork and are sometimes ineffective.

A sort of conclusion

The nature and results of a social program –or any government or private program, for that matter—do not simply depend on its content on normative structure but also, crucially, on the type of “lifeworlds” and social relationships that intervene in its implementation. Thus, rather than as a linear process, Oportunidades can be best analyzed as the development of a series of social fields where actors confront categories and values and forge or reinforce alliances and oppositions.

From the perspective of the Program officers, bureaucratic rationality should prevail in the relationships of beneficiaries with clinics, schools and with the Program itself. But these relationships have additional and unexpected components, such as problems of physical and linguistic communication, class and ethno-racial hierarchies, racist prejudices, survival strategies, family values and community commitments, as well as limits and practices imposed by institutional norms which are not controlled by Oportunidades. In this sense, the implementation of the Program has unintended consequences.

In an essay published more than 100 years ago, Georg Simmel analyzed “the poor” in Germany as a category created by the State in order to define their needs and limit their political mobilization. The norms of the Oportunidades Program explicitly condemn its utilization for political / electoral purposes and emphasize the importance of enhancing the sense of individual responsibility in its beneficiaries, so that they may become better citizens. However, the Program does not promote the idea of the right to adequate representation. The

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vocales are a vital element in the functioning of the Program, because they provide what some authors call “embedded knowledge”, i.e. specific knowledge about local limits and possibilities; yet in practice they are not elected but appointed. Most of them are very helpful to people, and, in the last analysis, their job is not to transmit demands from the base, but to make sure that norms are obeyed. Neither the Program promotes the idea of social rights; access to health and education and to an appropriate level of living is presented as a benefit from above. Finally, the idea of the right to cultural diversity is also absent; implementation is planned as if beneficiaries were culturally homogeneous, in spite of the fact that the Mexican Constitution recognizes indigenous people as an essential component of the nation as well as their right to the public use of their languages and customs, whether they live in the countryside or in the city.