ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the implications of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program Prospera in rural Mexico. In theory, CCTs provide cash benefits conditioned on the recipients accomplishing a set of transparent, formalized objectives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we show that titulares under Prospera are being asked for much more than the official requirements of sending children to school and attending regular medical check-ups, extending into other parts of social life in rural communities. We focus on ‘faenas of Prospera’ (chores of Prospera) and highlight how they overlap and conflict with pre-existing local faenas (what we call ‘community faenas’). The latter customarily involve the whole community or, to be more precise, its male members who are supposed to organize the management of public spaces and local forms of cooperation. Through the description of the relation between those two forms of activities, our chapter analyzes how this governmental program introduces tensions into the ways cooperation is locally managed, and contributes to broader reconfigurations of socio-political governance in rural Mexico. We also show how some women, in charge of the cash transfer program at the local level, compete with local authorities’ ability to convene free labor. This allows us to discuss how, under the pressure of Prospera, local networks of cooperation become sites of conflicts between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, local representatives of Prospera and traditional authorities.
