ABSTRACT
The survival and social reproduction of the poor in Mexico amidst a general economic climate marked by diminishing local resources increasingly relies on two sources of income: remittances from migration to the United States and other (richer) Mexican regions, and cash transfers from social policy programmes such as Oportunidades. Oportunidades, a pioneering cash transfer programme, operates on the basis of conditionalities or “co-responsibilities”: In return for the entitlements provided by the programme certain obligations are to be assumed by the participating mother. The emphases on co-responsibility and investing in the future generation of citizen/workers entailed several significant limitations in the programme. First, households with low incomes but no children were, until 2000, likely to be excluded from the programme. Second, households that failed to comply with the conditionalities, for whatever reason, were likely to be dropped, first temporarily and then permanently.
