The Oportunidades Conditional Cash Transfer Program and its Impact on Indigenous Youth in Chiapas, Mexico

• In Event: 115 - Regular Session. Development and Gender: Paradoxes, Unanticipated Effects

Abstract

Conditional Cash Transfers are a type of welfare program in which recipients receive funds contingent on three nodes of civic engagement: health, nutrition and education. Studies of Oportunidades lack information on the quality of education, retention, employment and migration outcomes. Drawing on 15 months (2004-07) of ethnographic research in La Gloria, a rural indigenous community in the Mexican state of Chiapas, I examine the educational component of the Program. The Program’s implementation in La Gloria reveals a series of contradictions. First, teachers frame conditionalities as benign incentives that can help students’ complete school for improved earnings abroad, but is fueled by self-interest – failure to retain students may result in repercussions by the national school board toward teachers. Additionally, students face contradictory messages from migrant kin who advise youth to complete their studies to seek waged employment in Mexico. Local gendered cultural norms contradict both of these perspectives to compel young women to remain in La Gloria. I explore how these contradictions help shape the employment and migration outcomes of 31 high school students six years after receipt of Oportunidades. My findings raise questions about the Program’s ability to enable economic uplift and stem international migration patterns in rural indigenous communities.

Author

• Oscar Fernando Gil-Garcia, University of California-Los Angeles