The Meanings of Government Monies: Disaster Money and Historic Heritage Preservation Money in Mexico

• In Event: 50602 - Culture, Value(s), and Relationships in Economic Life

Abstract

Viviana Zelizer’s work emphasizes the meanings that individuals, shaped by their interpersonal relationships and cultural tools, creatively attribute to money and monetary transactions, which curbs the assumed homogenizing power of money. We argue that Zelizer’s conceptual toolbox, such as earmarking, meanings of money, and relational work can be used to analyze the macro transactions involved in government monies. We extend Zelizer’s framework to examine the monetary arrangements established by the Mexican government to reconstruct religious historic heritage damaged by natural disasters, particularly the September 2017 earthquakes. We reconstruct the paths, encounters, and misfortunes when two types of money interact in Mexico: preservation monies and disaster monies. Mexico is home to thousands of historic monuments from colonial times, including churches and chapels that the federal government expropriated from the Catholic Church in the mid-19th century, and which are used by religious congregations around the country. We show that preservation monies for maintenance and repair of those temples reflect the contentious, ambiguous, and unresolved relations between Church and State in Mexico since the 19th century. In this context, we analyze the interactions between preservation monies and disaster monies developed since the 1990s, when Mexico created new funding mechanisms to recover from disaster: a national disaster fund (FONDEN) and insurance. These strategies helped secure earmarked funding for recovery, depoliticized disaster money, and conditioned how monies circulated and how actors involved interacted with one another. Finally, we analyze the recent collapse of disaster monies in Mexico, as historic heritage became uninsurable against earthquakes, the public disaster fund was extinguished by Mexican Congress, and the insurer stopped paying for the 2017 earthquake loss. The end of disaster monies meant preservation officials would return to pleading the Treasury for non-earmarked money based on the state’s moral responsibility towards its guarded heritage.

Authors

• Daniel G. Fridman, University of Texas-Austin

• Eldad J Levy, Rollins College

• Benjamin Ibarra Sevilla, University of Texas-Austin