ABSTRACT
The “making women productive” strategy is back. The framing of women’s role in development in terms of efficiency and effectiveness – a framing that has its roots in the 1980s – has once again come to dominate the agenda, both within the international community and in the Mexican context. The manifestation of the “making women productive” strategy in the Mexican context has to be understood against the backdrop of processes of global and regional neoliberal restructuring, which have led to a fundamental reorganization of the Mexican political economy. The modernization and restructuring of the Mexican economy meant a complete transformation of agricultural and industrial production oriented towards export. The restructuring of the Mexican state was influenced by two generations of SAPs that transformed the social sector, with wide-ranging implications for welfare and poverty reduction policies. The consequences of this restructuring are multi-fold: agricultural crisis; growing pressure on labor to become more mobile and flexible, resulting in migration; decreasing social welfare provisions by the state; and growing inequality and poverty. The rural population has been hit particularly hard, and the rural crisis extended to the cities through growing rural – urban migration, but also resulted in an increase in mainly male and undocumented international migration. Thus, Mexican communities have experienced profound demographic, socio-economic, and cultural transformations that are deeply gendered. Situated within this context, the
“making women productive” strategy takes on specific forms, emphasizing the duty of women to get involved in income-generating work as a counterpart to the remittances sent by their migrant spouses. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the sightings, sites, and resistances of
the “making women productive” strategy as a dimension of global restructuring, focusing on the Mexican context. This involves analyzing the assumptions of the “making women productive” discourse, examining the different forms and localities in which it manifests itself, and tracing the various forms of resistance and empowerment that it generates. I argue that, in the context of global restructuring, there has been a resurgence of the discourse of “making women productive,” which in the Mexican context involves a complex combination of disciplining, resistance, and empowerment. This chapter draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation
undertaken during recurrent periods of fieldwork research in two rural Mexican communities between 2005 and 2008: Los Pilares, a mestizo2 community in the state of Tlaxcala, and San Lorenzo, an Indigenous community of the Purépecha region in the state of Michoacán.3 These two rural Mexican communities are of similar size, and characterized by a relatively high rate of poverty, a high degree of illiteracy, and a general lack of basic infrastructure and services. Both communities have a high rate of mainly male and undocumented emigration to the US, as is generally still the case for rural Mexico (World Bank n.d.). The international migration of Mexican women (either independently or to join their spouses) has increased considerably over the last decade, but generally represents only a small, albeit growing, percentage of emigrants from rural communities. This means that a significant number of households live on remittances,4 either as a complementary or single source of income. Within both communities, there are efforts under way to link migration to development, that is, to harness migration and remittances for some project which would contribute to the development of the community (see Kunz 2008 and forthcoming). While San Lorenzo is situated in Michoacán, a state with a long tradition of migration and a considerable number of migrants in the US, Los Pilares is located in Tlaxcala, a state that has only recently joined international migration flows, but has a long internal migration tradition. The chapter proceeds as follows: the next section outlines the analytical
framework; section three traces the manifestations of global restructuring in Mexico; section four explores the sighting of “making women productive” in the Mexican context and its embeddedness in the global context; and section five examines its implications for rural Mexican communities, identifying sites and resistances.
