Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State by Nichole Sanders (review)

Mexico’s greatest hegemon is the PRI, the official party that dominated politics for much of the twentieth century. It has been roundly critiqued for its role in eroding the social inclusion and material redistribution upon which it was founded in revolutionary days. But this innovative study by Nichole Sanders of one of its most wide-reaching agencies, the Ministry of Public Assistance (SAP) (changed to Ministry of Health and Welfare, or SSA, in 1943), nuances the traditional historiographical characterization of the Mexican state as moving steadily away from welfare-based reform over the twentieth century. Through a sophisticated and consistent application of gender analysis, Sanders writes an institutional history of the SAP/SSA that sheds light on the relationships among transnational health and hygiene professionals, middle-class women, government agents, and the urban and rural poor. Sanders argues that, through welfare expansion that drew in elements from the middle class, “benevolent ladies,” and private investment, the PRI was able to keep these critical sectors vested in the party and secure its claims to legitimacy.

The book is organized into five succinct chapters that trace the institutionalization of charity into state-sponsored welfare programs. First, an overview of the participation of Mexican delegates to the Pan-American Child Congresses, in particular those held in Mexico City (1935) and Washington, D.C. (1942), demonstrates the transnational nature of the public health discourses circulating at the time. Second, a discussion of the creation of the SAP and its domestic programs (promotion of civil marriage, establishment of family dining halls, and encouragement of home-based foster care) shows how the professionals that participated in the Pan-American Child Congresses incorporated those policy recommendations, adapted to the Mexican postrevolutionary context. They premised their reforms on the idea that the creation of a stable family unit would be central to promoting national economic growth.

Third, a chapter on welfare programs destined for female-headed households, such as the Casa Amiga de la Obrera (originally founded by Carmen Romero Rubio as a Porfirian-era initiative), demonstrates both the professional and political spaces opened up to women as employees of the SAP/SSA. Fourth, a discussion of the influence of transnational agencies like UNICEF and the Rockefeller Foundation reveals a changing tack in the Mexican state’s welfare discourse. During the postwar period, the growing Cold War-era anticommunist rhetoric resulted in a departure from the socialist, redistributive narrative of the 1930s. Rather than embrace family-based social reform as a justification, welfare officials and their private partners chose to emphasize the power of the state as a benefactor, figuring the Mexican people as passive recipients of vaccinations and sanitization campaigns imported from abroad.

Finally, a chapter on the rise of social work as a profession returns to the central theme of women’s professionalization in health- and welfare-related fields, suggesting opportunities for mobility prior to women’s suffrage (1954). Social work professions were largely integrated by middle-class women, who saw themselves as more “modern” and better trained than their upper-class “charitable ladies” counterparts. In short, they considered themselves to be “at the forefront of the battle for the hearts and minds of Mexicans” (p. 119).

This book builds on important recent scholarship on state welfare, public health discourses, and transnational professional networks in the construction of the Mexican state and the “modernization of patriarchy” (pp. 6–7). Its innovation lies in its identification and attention to a few strains that run consistently through its chapters. First, Sanders convincingly argues that postrevolutionary welfare discourse built on, rather than broke from, the nineteenth-century heritage of Catholic social action. The state’s astute incorporation of existing charitable networks into its administration kept certain upper-class benevolent sectors from feeling alienated from an otherwise anticlerical postrevolutionary state-building machine. Second, Sanders departs from the...