Gender Progress as a Pillar of Mexico's Post-Agrarian Citizenship

Since the passage of NAFTA, peasants have been treated as marginal figures for Mexico’s economic growth and as objects of social re-engineering. One of the most insidious aspects of this social re-engineering is the introduction of ideas about “gender progress”, which are intended to re-educate the rural poor to form the kinds of gender relations that can presumably lead to economic progress and a vigorous citizenry. I draw attention to the contradictions between state formulations of “gender progress” and the racialized and gendered labor niches to which Nahuas and Teeneks of the Huasteca region and Monterrey, Nuevo León are sidelined. Ultimately, I trace how Nahuas and Teeneks position themselves vis-à-vis this form of biopolitical citizenship which emphasizes gender progress as a new metric of inclusion.

Raquel Pacheco received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2017 and is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests focus on the intersections between gender, indigeneity, citizenship, and economic restructuring. She conducted ethnographic research on the state’s propagation of so-called progressive gender ideals among rural and migrant indigenous populations in the Huasteca region of Hidalgo and the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. Pacheco is currently working on her book, Re-making the Indigenous Countryside: The Civilizing Project of Gender Progress in Neoliberal Mexico.