In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue Still a Culture of Everyday Credit In 1950 a feature film entitled Monte de Piedad told stories of people whose lives intersected with the charitable institution. Throughout the century before, investigative news pieces, poetry, novels, political satire, and even the theatrical stage had featured collateral credit. Now it became part of the golden age of Mexican cinema. The film was made during the heyday of the ‘‘economic miracle,’’ a period as much heralded as the Porfirian progress of fifty years earlier, with just as unequal a distribution of the wealth generated. In the film María walks away from the clerk’s window with one hundred pesos, which means that she and her sick mother, Doña Lupita, will avoid eviction from her rooming house by the evil casero, Don Pedro, though her rent has been raised. Another story revolves around the ‘‘cabaret dancer’’ Margarita, who secures a loan for two hundred pesos, an amount that does not satisfy her ‘‘exploiter,’’ René. Margarita ends up turning in René for killing Don Ruperto, whom the two of them have tried to fleece. The next tale concerns Mario, an old musician who pawns his beloved violin for three hundred pesos in order to pay his rent. Dejected when the Monte de Piedad refuses to let him pawn his equipment, a bolero (shoe shiner) bribes a police o≈cer fifty centavos to not take away a little boy accused of stealing . He then buys medicine to save a girl’s life after selling a valuable jewel of his mother’s to a ‘‘coyote’’ at the Monte de Piedad. In the last story Marcos tries to pawn his watch because he is unemployed and his son is sick. An old priest, Gabriel, pawns a valuable crucifix for two thousand pesos, which he gives to Marcos. The child gets better without the need for medicine, but the priest dies shortly after his visit.∞ These cinematic vi- Epilogue 269 gnettes, taking place in downtown Mexico City in the midst of an economic boom, demonstrate that in the mid-twentieth century Mexico still had a culture of everyday credit. After the boom went to bust in the 1970s and early 1980s, credit cards were an alternative to pawning for awhile for those in the middle class. But with constant peso devaluations and rapidly rising bank interest rates, the line at the Monte de Piedad has gained even more adherents, as has the practice of pawning jewelry with neighbors. The institutionalization of the revolution during the boom years saw the establishment of other state credit institutions such as infonavit, which builds apartment complexes and then makes fixed-interest housing loans to middle-class and workingclass employees through employers or unions. The welfare apparatus also continued to evolve, with new institutions such as the national healthcare system, family programs, and child development centers. The Monte de Piedad expanded into a multifaceted charitable institution, with new branches all over the city (some lending without interest) and the country . In addition the Monte established a mortgage lending service, built a housing project for Monte employees (called Colonia Romero de Terreros ), a school lunch program, artisan workshops for carpenters and seamstresses, a rest home, a recreational center, and worker training centers . In 1990 the institution was transformed from its quasi-public character , becoming a completely private charitable institution.≤ Wages improved steadily after 1920, and a legal industrial minimum wage was established in 1934. Women retreated from the paid labor force after the 1940s, despite the fact that the budget to meet basic needs in 1970 was almost twice the minimum wage, which only a minority of working people received. The ‘‘lost decades’’ of economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s have only exacerbated this chronic inability of incomes to meet needed expenditures.≥ There is today an organized middle-class debtor’s movement nationwide, which stages regular protests in front of government ministries in the city.∂ In this context the continued importance of the Monte de Piedad is easily understood, as is the establishment of new private pawning chains such as PrendaMex. A hugely profitable consumer culture has taken hold in Mexico in the midst of a chronically troubled economy in terms of wages and salaries that would cover rising costs of living, and Mexico City’s now 25 million people have led this cultural process. The Parián market, with its luxury clothing imports and jewelers along Plateros Street early in the nineteenth century, the Palacio de Hierro...

Share