Gendering and Engendering Capital: Conditional Cash Transfers in indigenous and rural households. Yucatan, Mexico

Abstract

Since theirinception in the 1990s, studies concerning Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have included analyses of their effects but, most interestingly, havefocused on the relationships they propose within beneficiary households.Crafted with the language of behavioral economics, CCT programs are expected topositively or negatively modify typical household conducts. With the programs so-called "conditionalities", aimed to induce real and imaginary behavioralchanges, the programs? architects and promoters rethink money as a reinforcerof family behaviors. Based on extensive fieldwork in the Inter-American Bankand in a Mayan-speaking rural community in Mexico, this paper reveals how moneytakes on different roles in human and non-human regenerative processes. Cash,in its double role of bondage-creator and liberator, is depicted as theultimate tool for refashioning gender relationships in rural households,empowering girls and women. It is also a monetary token that connects slash andburn agriculturalists with CCT policy architects, development economists at theIADB and the Mexican government. By comparing metropolitan images of ruralhousehold reproduction to those actually produced in an Eastern Yucatan village, I intend to illuminate mutual misconceptions of cash. This proposed chapter focuses on the particular perception of cash as a vital force that communicates expectations concerning human procreation and house hold reproduction. The CCT monetary flow, originating from the government and other development agencies to reach rural agriculturalists, directly influences family planning,insinuating a limit on the number of children rural households should rear.Likewise, if the cash transfer enterprise suggests that money begets money, not children, this paper analyzes how CCTs refashion capital in idealistic terms.Proposing a new denomination of progressive and developmental intellectuals idealistic capitalism this paper finally address the human capital accumulation process as transcendence (aufhebung) of monetary reproduction.