Editor's Page: Introduction

Introduction

Welfare states provide services to groups of peoples as part of the rights of citizenship. Ranging from help to the needy, retirement funds, workingmen's' compensation, medical services, pensions for new mothers, unemployment benefits and public education, in theory they should be available to all, but in practice societies have limited benefits to some groups while focusing more attention and resources on others.

The subject of this special issue is the rise of the welfare state in Latin America, a relatively new topic for historians. Pioneering work published in the 1960s did not lead to a flurry of research as rapidly or as systematically as the literature on Europe and the United States. Beginning with Ricardo R. Moles' Historia de la previsión social en Hispanoamérica and Carmelo Mesa Lago's classic 1978 Social Security in Latin America: Pressure Groups, Stratification, and Inequality, it was not until the economic crises of the 1980s that Latin Americanists, particularly political scientists, returned to the subject. ¹

Nevertheless, welfare politics have a long history in Latin America. Beginning in the colonial period, pension plans, poor houses, and publicly sponsored welfare institutions existed. After independence, depending on the country, both the Catholic Church and the emerging state developed local, municipal, and national policies to deal with the poor, minors, mothers and workers. ² Yet before there is a strong understanding of how welfare states developed and the strengths and weaknesses of each, there is considerable interest in the recent collapse of welfare states in Latin America.

The topic of gender, specifically the role of mothers and mothering as defined by the welfare state, has become a focal point for new European and U. S. studies. ³ Latin Americanists are exploring this topic as well. Beginning with the history of Latin American feminism, it has extended to the role of mothers confronting dictatorial governments, as well as women's role in charities and welfare organizations. Some of them analyze the gendered tensions resulting from women attempting to define and direct state policy, while others examine how women's welfare issues mobilized both women and men to act, not always for the same ideological reasons. ⁴

The following essays represent new approaches to the history of the welfare state in Latin America, ones that refine theories and approaches suggested in European and U.S. literature, but also challenge and expand the implications of the welfare state. The first two essays deal with Mexico. Ann Blum begins by analyzing the Porfirian approach to welfare, a combination of public adherence to laissez-faire social philosophies that viewed welfare as the appropriate domain of private charity combined with expanded governmental expenditures for public assistance in Mexico City focused principally on children. The selection of the "most dependent clientele," accompanied by "an ethos of elite private charity . . . justified the unequal distribution of wealth." ⁵ Thus, the Porfirian welfare state had no desire to be all-inclusive or egalitarian. Over time, the Porfirian government expanded its role, while women who traditionally dispensed good works and charity were eventually relegated to the private sector as male politicians and specialists operated the national welfare state. Children in the care of public institutions were taught to be obedient, good workers who followed prescribed gender roles, and the benevolence of public authorities linked them to the nation state even though private benefactors played critical roles.

Enrique Ochoa examines the content and meaning of a post-Revolutionary campaign against beggars in Mexico City. The desire to rid the capital city of urban poor who did not, or could not, work, according to Ochoa, linked earlier Porfirian concerns with later efforts to control the movements of poor people. In the 1930s the definition of beggars changed, but the coercive techniques remained the same. After being rounded up, sanitized, and studied, most of the poor arrested as beggars returned to their earlier lives of poverty, unaided by a state bureaucracy that had neither the money nor the expertise to help them. Curiously, once again among...