Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico

3. Conflicted Relationships at Home and at the Clinic

98 chapter 3 ❖ Conflicted Relationships at Home and at the Clinic A poster hangs prominently in the clinic at Tepatepec. A picture of a happy extended indigenous family—mother, father (carrying their one daughter), and grandparents—reads “¡Que no te discriminen! Tienes derecho a que te traten con respeto. Si alguien te trata mal, o te condiciona la prestación de un servicio, repórtalo a Oportunidades” (No one should discriminate against you! You have the right to be treated with respect. If anyone treats you badly, or places conditions on [your receiving] services, report it to Oportunidades). It then lists various toll-free numbers that can be dialed. Perhaps this poster shows that the government is becoming aware of the drawbacks of conditional cash. It might also reflect the class and social structure of Mexico, where social programs have been historically used by the elite classes to control the behaviors (and votes) of low-income populations. Embedded within the structure of Oportunidades is that women must be obedient to the program , to clinicians, and to husbands, or face consequences. This reality is deeply ironic as it runs counter to the apparent goals of empowering the women by making them beneficiaries of the cash transfers. There is a direct impact on the women’s reproductive health that emerges as a result of the conditions of Oportunidades, whose ground evaluators have their own professional missions and goals. For the clinicians at the clinics and hospitals, population control and demographics are key objectives—for both medical and pedagogical ends. It is at the clinic where all these unintended consequences and the confluence of all these state-level forces—Oportunidades, population control, health-service provision —are enacted on women’s bodies, demanding compliance. Oportunidades is very clear about the rights of its enrolled families. Among the many rights that the families have—including access to basic Conflicted Relationships at Home and at the Clinic 99 health services and educational facilities—there is also the explicit right to reproductive freedom. Beneficiary families are, theoretically, permitted to have as few or as many children as they wish—as stated in the Mexican Constitution.1 This right is included on posters and other informative material provided to the enrolled families. These state very clearly that women can choose to have as many children as they want because they have reproductive freedom. Though there is no actual connection between Oportunidades and CONAPO—the National Population Council—the intermediary ministries of health (SSA, IMSS, and so on) are the ones that implement population and family-planning policies. In this way, the idea of full reproductive freedom espoused by Oportunidades is cleverly circumvented , and thus the population policies become intimately connected and implemented among the enrolled mothers, who are also the poorest members of society. The Population Policy Mission After establishing the General Population Law in 1936, Mexico experienced a demographic momentum (Cabrera 1994) whereby the “right” type of Mexicans were encouraged to marry and to increase their birthrate . Schoolbooks included ideologies of Mexico’s greatness and its large population. Monetary rewards were given to families with many children, which also gained them social recognition. The sale of contraceptives was prohibited. And some states even established a tax on unmarried people over twenty-five years old and on divorced or widowed people without children (Cabrera 1994). Because of the pronatalist push, Mexico’s population increased exponentially from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century (Braff 2008). Over these one hundred years, the population grew from 13.6 million people to over 103 million, a sevenfold growth. From 1900 to 1974, the country experienced an annual growth rate of 1.1 percent and an emphasis on urbanization. From 1974 to 2000, concern arose about the large population (in 1970, Mexico had fifty million people) and its associated problems and dangers. From 1974 to 2000, the population growth rate was almost 3.5 percent. By 2000, the country had a growth rate of 1.4 percent annually, which was almost the same as the growth rate for the beginning of the twentieth century (Ordorica Mellado 2006). During Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s presidency from 1964 to 1970, in a directly anti-Malthusian frame, the rapid population growth was hailed as the vehicle 100 Shaping the Motherhood of indigenouS Mexico for Mexico’s move into a modern and developed nation. However, Díaz Ordaz’s successor, Luis Echeverr...