Welfare Reform and Social Security in Post-Revolutionary Century Mexico, 1943-1970

• In Event: New Histories of Public Health and Social Policy in Latin America

Abstract

This paper examines the overhaul of Mexico’s system of welfare provision introduced by the enactment of the Social Security Law of 1943 and the creation of the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS), which provided social security benefits as well as comprehensive healthcare for salaried workers. Through an examination of laws, congressional debates, newspapers and institutional memoirs, I analyze the ways in which IMSS represented an innovation to Mexico’s traditional system of welfare provision, offering unprecedented health coverage to its beneficiaries as well as a host of insurances against life’s most common risks, such as orphanhood, widowhood and illness. At the same time, I show how its “workerist” design, financed by salary contributions and closely tied to Mexico’s labor market, left outside its safety net the majority of Mexico’s population, whom instead of these entitlements would have to receive health and social services from traditional charity institutions that dated to the 19th-century. In this way, despite its novelty, I argue that the Social Security Law of 1943 and the welfare system it introduced ended up reinforcing labor market inequalities based on gender and class as well as long-held notions of “deservingness” that permeated state assistance since the 19th century.

Author

• Sara D Hidalgo, Columbia University