Development and the Temporality of its Exchange. How an Eastern Yucatec Village Made Cash Transfer Promises Accountable^*

Andrés Dapuez^** - CONICET, Argentina

^** PhD in Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. His latest publications include: "Supporting a Counterfactual Futurity: Cash Transfers and the Interface between Multilateral Banks, the Mexican State and its People." The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2016. "Promesas rituales y compromisos de libre mercado. Regímenes de futuro en un pueblo de Yucatán." Cuicuilco. Revista de la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia 51: 79–100, 2011. afdapuez@gmail.com

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7440/antipoda26.2016.07

ABSTRACT:

This paper explores how three temporalities of exchange amend the reception of cash transfers for development in a village in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews of recipients of cash transfers from Procampo and Oportunidades, this study reveals that ritual promising functions as a means of temporal regulation in most transactions of this sort, and that the recipients hold their government accountable for promises and commitments regarding cash transfers. In assessing the temporal ranges and effectiveness of these transfers by alluding to previous stipulations that sustain the exchange and make it understandable and bearable as a promise, the people in this village consider the objectives of the Procampo and Oportunidades programs to be implausible. Accountability with respect to the long-term effects of these transfers is not, however, based only on local impressions of a state that procrastinates in its "engagement" with peasants. As the timetable established for the accumulation of human capital also exceeds the time limits of responsible promising, these cash transfer programs cannot be evaluated in terms of their fulfilled or unfulfilled promises.

KEYWORDS:

Exchange, development (Thesaurus); ritual, cash transfer, promise (author´s keywords).

Desarrollo y la temporalidad de su intercambio. Cómo un pueblo del Oriente de Yucatán evalúa las promesas de las transferencias monetarias

RESUMEN:

Este artículo explora cómo tres temporalidades del intercambio modifican la recepción de transferencias monetarias en un pueblo del oriente de Yucatán, México. Con base en observación participante y entrevistas a profundidad a los beneficiarios de Procampo y Oportunidades, esta investigación revela como las promesas rituales funcionan como regulaciones temporales para la mayoría de las transacciones que las transferencias monetarias implican. Sus destinatarios hacen responsable al gobierno de sus promesas y compromisos. Al calificar sus rangos temporales y su efectividad aludiendo a estipulaciones previas, que subyacerían al intercambio y que lo harían comprensible como promesa, la gente de este pueblo evalúa como improbables los objetivos de Procampo y de Oportunidades. La evaluación con respecto los efectos a largo plazo de estos programas de transferencias no se basa, sin embargo, solamente en las impresiones locales sobre un estado que pospone su "compromiso" con los campesinos. En la medida en que el calendario establecido para la acumulación de capital humano también excede los límites temporales de las promesas responsables, estos programas de transferencias monetarias no pueden ser evaluados en términos de promesas cumplidas o incumplidas.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Intercambio, desarrollo (Thesaurus); transferencia monetaria, ritual, promesa (palabras clave del autor).

Desenvolvimento e temporalidade do intercâmbio. Como um povoado do leste de Yucatán avalia as promessas das transferências monetárias

RESUMO:

Este artigo explora como três temporalidades de intercâmbio comprometem a recepção de transferências monetárias num povoado do leste de Yucatán (México). Com base na observação participante e nas entrevistas em profundidade com os beneficiários do Procampo e do Oportunidades, esta pesquisa sugere que as promessas rituais funcionam como regulações temporais para a maioria das transações que as transferências em dinheiro implicam. Seus destinatários tornam o governo responsável por suas promessas e compromissos. Ao qualificar seus intervalos temporais e sua efetividade aludindo a estipulações prévias que se submeteriam ao intercâmbio e que o fariam compreensível como promessa, as pessoas deste lugar avaliam os objetivos do Procampo e do Oportunidades como improváveis. A prestação de contas dos efeitos em longo prazo dessas transferências não somente se baseia em impressões locais sobre um estado que adia seu "compromisso" com os camponeses do povoado, mas também que, ao exceder a consecução de capital humano, os limites temporais das promessas responsáveis, as promessas das transferências monetárias não podem ser avaliadas em termos de promessas cumpridas ou não cumpridas.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

Intercâmbio, desenvolvimento ritual (Thesaurus); transferência monetária, promessa (palavras-chave do autor).

In this paper, I discuss three temporal macro-schema and their calibration as promises in an Eastern Yucatec village in Mexico. Proposed and perpetuated by different types of expertise, these three anticipations regulate the lives of peasants and their children. The first follows the ritual calendar of the village, which is focused on the regeneration of maize and is reenacted on a yearly basis. The second schema, which coincides with Procampo (Programa de Apoyos Directos al Campo) cash transfers in the region, has emerged as a long-term engagement and is expected to facilitate the conversion of the peasants to the new economy that NAFTA has envisioned for the rural sector in Mexico. Mexican and Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) economists have speculated that this generational transition should take approximately 20 years (Dapuez, forthcoming). A third temporal schema, extending well beyond a single generation, has emerged from the "human development" model promoted by international organizations. The focal point of this model, which is applied to the women recipients of Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program, is the accumulation of human capital in the children of the poor.

While the process of abstracting distinct cycles of exchange into only three different categories may adversely affect their inner workings as promises, it is nonetheless necessary to represent these cycles heuristically.¹ Tearing these promissory structures apart conceptually does not necessarily imply the existence of two opposite temporalities: i.e., an archaic one based on ritual exchange versus a modern one in line with a developmental economy. On the contrary, the local promissory repertoire studied here, as it has been deeply imbued with the contemporary circulation of money, emerges as a privileged interface in which transactions of many kinds take place. Beyond merely identifying the particularities of these schemata, the villagers explain and grasp them through their shared understanding of exchange. For them, exchange always implies a promise. They point out that a promise should have real, enforceable temporal limits. Moreover, they classify exchange pledges in two discrete categories: fulfilled and unfulfilled promises. In this sense, one of my findings has been that the local language of gift giving, based on Maya-Catholic promissory exchange, has produced a very efficient way to hold the government accountable.

The Village and the Research

Situated nine miles from Valladolid, the second largest city in the state of Yucatan (48,000 people in 2008), the village I call Ixán here has approximately two thousand inhabitants. It is one of the places where the Caste Wars and the "new religion" (Bricker 1981) of Cruzo’ob were initiated in the 19th century. Approximately ninety-eight percent of the population consider themselves Catholic. Not until the late 1980s, when electricity and running water were introduced into the town, did the authorities allow Pentecostals, otherwise known as "the brethren," to regularly visit Ixán. Until the late 1990s, it was considered a typical example of a population dedicated to a ritualized form of slash-and-burn agriculture. In the last two decades, as economic activity in this area of the peninsula has changed from full-time agricultural activity to temporary employment in tourist centers (mainly in Cozumel, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum). An inner fragmentation of the "ecological time" (Evans-Pritchard 1939, 189) of maize has led to a dual pattern in their living and migrating temporalities (outside and inside the village).

In 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011, I did fieldwork in Ixán, ranging from a period of one week in 2011 to six months in 2009, for a total of approximately 14 months. In all of my fieldtrips I observed and participated in cargo rituals (in the Agriculturalist Guild Festival in 2003, 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and in the Village Festival and the Changing of the Robe of Christ, among other festivals, in 2005 and 2009). I have participated in many cargo sponsorships, usually contributing beer, liquor, soft drinks and food to the main sponsors. I have conducted in-depth interviews with approximately 60 recipients of Procampo and Oportunidades cash transfers to understand how they framed them in temporal terms and prioritized their use.

Outside the village, I also traveled to the nearby city of Valladolid to interview Procampo and Oportunidades officials, among other research errands. Drawing on a total of twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews with development officials in Yucatan, Mexico City, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC, I also explored how conditional and unconditional Cash Transfers and cargo-ritual exchange patterns contribute to a series of enforceable or labile "promises" (Dapuez 2013; 2011; Dapuez, Dzib and Gavigan 2011).

Ritual Promises, Their Calendrics and Short-Term Expectations of "Rebirth"

I found that Procampo’s yearly payment (around US$100 per hectare)² and the monthly and bimonthly Oportunidades payments not only produced masculine and feminine moneys and that they could provoke different types of "turbulences." Maya terms such as xe’ek’ and xa’ak’ (mess, jumble, mix-up) constitute an ample semantic domain, which ranges from the morally wrong to the ill formed, the sick, the decomposing, and those undergoing other processes of fission. People in Ixán frequently use these terms to qualify the effects of money coming in from outside the village. In the case of Procampo and Oportunidades transfers, however, most men used these terms to describe social turmoil associated with the cash while the women recipients applied them to the destabilizing effect that the cash had on the equilibrium of their bodies.

As in most parts of Mexico, Oportunidades receipients in Ixán spend the transferred money on everyday needs such as buying maize flour or paying exhorbitant costs of medicine and traveling to the nearest medical centers. Procampo recipients, on the other hand, told me that they used the cash transfers to buy fertilizer and food. Nevertheless, ritual activity is a part of everyday life in this village and consumes a good share of people’s resources, even more so when they are village leaders. The kucho’ob (ritual supporters) are constantly called on to propitiate the regeneration of life (ka’a síijil or "rebirth"). As future-oriented intentional action (see Dapuez 2011 for more detail), most people in Ixán consider ritual practice to be consequential for obtaining "even," congruent, "sustainable" livelihoods and, therefore, a means of coping with turbulences. Ritual activity in Ixán thus tends to recompose not only social relationships but beings as well.

With that aim in mind, the ritualists weave a very complex net of "promises" and "commitments" or mookthan. Such a promissory web stabilizes the village’s annual social calendar, the main goal of which is to ensure the regeneration of life. People regard mookthan ("engagement" or "commitment") to be an ongoing, prospective relationship, which is both the cause and effect of exchange. Going from the long-term past to the short-term future, sanctions of promises, pacts, and exchanges come back from the natural realm, especially from the reproductive cycle of maize, as their expected returns. Festival sponsors, for instance, consider themselves to be exchanging with powerful non-human masters (yùuntsilo’ob in Maya and dueños or señores in Spanish) in terms of responding to obligations that are not reciprocally enforceable. In this sense, shamans have taught humans to engage humbly with masters, first, by making a request, then propitiating it through self-obligation and promises, and, finally, compelling the piousness of the powerful. This is the only way, they say, that human persons can hope to receive something in return from the more powerful but invisible masters. Therefore, before giving, receiving, and giving-back (the three Maussian obligations (1925) according to which almost all gift analyses are framed), requesting emerges as foundational to the initiation of every exchange in this Mayan-speaking village.

Rituals Making Requests and Exchanging Gifts

The people of Ixán apply the verb máat (demanding, asking for, begging or ordering) to a variety of contexts, from asymmetrical requests made by invisible lords called yùuntsilo’ob to humble supplications in human prayers addressed to them. They also frequently use the transitive form máatik to refer to accepting or receiving a gift or offering, while the requested gift or offering is referred to using the past participle máatan. In this sense, prayers take on a familiar but hierarchical form. When I was taught to pray by an elderly sponsor, for instance, he suggested that I ask for favors from divine entities by affectionately calling them "little-father" or "little-mother." Making requests, therefore, appears to be the most important obligation in many contexts. Everyone in Ixán is expected to make requests of masters and gods in a humble way by praying to and respectfully engaging with them, but it is the task of kucho’ob, the festival sponsors, to act as representatives of the family and the entire community in crucial calendric festivals.

Through these celebrations, sponsors seek material regeneration —of the maize cycle and of the health and power of the people of Ixán— within a time frame of less than one year. The social engagements between sponsors are arranged in biennial terms while the resulting development of a class of "elders" or ritual specialists (those who have learned a particular function through these sponsorships) is nested in the medium and long term. The formation of yùuntsilo’ob, a mostly invisible class of lords who inhabit the realm of nature, extends to the very long term. Each of these temporal schemas is marked by anticipatory transactions that seek to address and answer uncertainties over what is to come next (in time).

The kucho’ob, or sponsors, expect material rebirth following four major calendrical festivals in Ixán:

The Kucho’ob sponsor these festivals for their own prosperity and that of their families, crops, and animals. The shamans point out, however, that the prosperity of the entire village also depends on the successful performance of these sponsorships. In this context, the act of "buying" future "life" and "rain" can be partially compared to local ideas of loj, meaning "redemption" and "getting power" through exchange, as they put it, during particular rites in these festivals. Here, buying is based on the purchaser’s intentions or on the ex-post evaluation of the result produced by these intentions as a transcendental act, i.e. the change in the possession of an object. People also imagine power, poderiil or paajtalil, to be a material but invisible return that enables some forms of futurity (generally called "rebirth" or ka’a síijil) and avoids others (categorically called "punishment," castigo, jaats’ or toop).

A skeptic might suggest that this power supposed to be inherent in objects is nothing more than the expectations of the people of Ixán transferred onto the objects being exchanged. Nevertheless, the Mayan-Catholic villagers expect their redemption to be material; it should take place in events of "this" world. To that end, their festival sponsorship is not aimed to produce a heavenly segregated form of what has been called an "economy of salvation" (Parry 1986; 1994; Cannell 2005; 2006). Indeed, the economy of redemption that sponsors in Ixán pursue is not premised on one-directional transactions. Ixán villagers believe that lords "receive" offerings and gifts (here they frequently use the verbal phrase ch’a’, meaning "appropriate" and máat, in the sense of "begging"). While masters are mostly situated in the forest outside the village and although they are not exactly coeval with the people, they are still said to reciprocate the people’s offerings. After the masters receive these offerings, the ritualists expect them to be pleased, calm, and satisfied. If this is the case, it is expected that the lords will not only take care of the people, the animals, the fields, and the weather, but that they will administer and successfully "work" for the people as well. They believe that rain, health and prosperity result indirectly from their timely human exchange with yùuntsilo’ob, and also directly from the acts of yùuntsilo’ob. Poverty, tragedy and disgrace on the other hand result from human neglects or refusals to exchange with these lords as well as the lords’ neglect of humans. In these unequal exchanges, most of the offerings are explicitly aimed to "appease" or "feed" the masters.

Reciprocally, sacred lords, Mayan-Catholic crosses, images of the virgin, the saints and the Christian God do not just respond to offerings if they are rightly and timely addressed; they have the ability to "request" (k’áatik) offerings as well. These requests take the form of "warnings" or "punishments" sent through natural events such as illnesses, hurricanes or accidents. After people recognize these warnings or punishments, they make promises to reestablish a virtuous exchange cycle. That is to say, the yùuntsilo’ob will reciprocate in a positive way only if the practitioner has a committed "engagement" with them, i.e. only if the one making the promise really means to fulfill it. Furthermore, many people also request the work of a shaman called j mèen to help trade with yùuntsilo’ob (for a spatial depiction of yùuntsilo’ob, see Vapnarsky and Le Guen 2011). However, rather than just seeking "redemption" of their bodies, animals and land, ritual sponsors actually put themselves at stake with promises. Dexterity in promising is fundamental for balancing elements in a turbulent milieu in which demands can turn into turmoil and disaster.

The Result of the First Promise: Commitment or Engagement

The people of Ixán are not only particularly careful in the art of engaging people and divine entities but also in the logical opposite of this procedure. As Vapnarsky (in personal communication) has encouraged me to note, there is a whole series of polite linguistic and non-linguistic modes of procrastinating "engagement" in social activities. In using polite excuses to reject or deflect engagements, people maintain a social art of non-commitment. This is a fundamental tool for keeping oneself centered in one’s own business but still appearing to be responsible in the eyes of others. The polite deferral of requests can also help to give particular engagements the importance they deserve. Otherwise, a person who engages in too many sponsorships or ritual activities might be regarded as incapable of performing any of them in a sufficiently committed way. Having already channeled one’s energies into another task can be a perfect excuse to avoid contributing to a common sponsorship. Most people understand that other people are also highly intentional beings and that coordinating wills is not an easy task. Furthermore, people usually prefer not to engage unduly or to coerce others into common business, because an ill-formed agreement is sure to end badly.

There are many codified strategies both for requesting and deflecting engagement among ritual sponsors. Alcohol and tobacco, for instance, always serve a purpose in formal requests. They are widely associated with the task of asking another person to engage in ritual or social activities (Gabriel 2004), but they also work as tokens of engagement. So much so that a friend of mine jokingly told me that when he sees someone carrying a bottle of liquor and cigarettes approaching his house, he hides. In bringing alcohol and tobacco as gifts to the host’s house, the giver may ask the host if he would be willing to engage in a major gift-giving enterprise. Once the parties have smoked tobacco and consumed shots of liquor, the conversation turns towards the main purpose of the visit. At this point, the host might find it difficult to reject the visitor’s request outright and will therefore usually say that he or she is not feeling well or suffering from a long illness or, while tentatively agreeing to provide the service or the object requested, will also make it clear that he or she is not sure of being able to fulfill the request for various reasons. Having to work outside the village or having too much work to do in one’s own field plot is always an effective excuse for deferring engagement. However, engagement sometimes turns out to be the desired result of such a visit, in which case, the typically incremental series of engagements occurs in the following way:

Commitment or engagement is thus a central institution in Ixán. So much so, that the villagers use a lingua franca or translanguage (Hanks 2010; 2014) of promesas and compromisos to express almost every aspect of their political and ritual life. However, it should be noted that the English terms "commitment" and "engagement" lack the forceful images that promesa and compromiso in Yucatec Spanish and mookthan in Maya Yucatec call to mind. These words would be more accurately translated as "entanglement" (lit. "knot word" but also "word that knots") or k'aax than (lit. "tied word" but also "word that ties"). Indeed, contractors bind themselves through words, using verbal phrases such as mook than to make promises, engagements, alliances, pacts and commitments. It is important to note that when cash is introduced into these self-enforced agreements, it embodies some "tying" qualities as well.

While many anthropologists consider the acts of selling, distributing, and gift-giving as different phenomena, the expressions for these transactions are almost interchangeable in Ixán. The Maya speakers I worked with referenced an exchange logic that was far more complex and integrative than the discrete categories of commodity and money or their popular anthropological counterparts: gift and reciprocity (Gregory 1982). In almost every situation —political, economic, etc.— the people of Ixán tend to allude to a previous stipulation that both sustains exchange and makes it understandable and bearable: the promise.

Developmental Cash Transfers and Current NAFTA Expectations

Mexico’s first cash transfer program, Procampo, was implemented in 1993 to promote the decline of popular agrarianism and radically transform the rural sector in Mexico as the Mexican state adjusted to NAFTA. The cash transfer program was initially designed to last 15 years, from 1993 to 2008, accompanying the full enforcement of NAFTA’s liberalization of crops such as maize. However, in 2006 Felipe Calderón promised a new Procampo to increase voter support and the program was thus renewed for 6 more years in 2008. Cash transfers for development were initially distributed to help usher in an envisioned time horizon called NAFTA. This horizon has since arrived and, for those who have lived and experienced it, has entirely lost its promissory glow. For many, the free market is no longer a promising future but part of a difficult present reality.

In Ixán and other villages with rain-fed field plots, the Procampo calendar entails a yearly disbursement. The people to receive news from Procampo in April, May or June, informing them of the year’s particular disbursement schedule through press releases issued by the Secretary of Agriculture (SAGARPA). When cash transfers were made in the past, people in Ixán would have to cash their checks, but nowadays they can withdraw the funds from ATMs. The transfers usually amount to almost US$200, which is the amount given for two hectares of land, the number that most Procamperos have been allowed to declare since the program was first implemented twenty years ago. They spend this money almost immediately on food, exchanging it primarily for bags of maize ready for consumption. Every year since 1994, the Procampo comptroller in Ixán has filed complaints and received requests from villagers who are not enrolled in the program but who want to receive the cash transfer. There are around 200 Procampo beneficiaries in Ixán, yet there are more than twice that many villagers who were eligible but did not enter the program in 1993 and now want to get into the program and receive their money for working at the Ejido like the Procamperos do. Moreover, Procampo has also actualized the ritual repertoire of promesas and compromisos as a way of maintaining a relationship with the government.

In 1999, a few years after Procampo was first implemented, villagers from Ixán who received seasonal money transfers from Procampo traveled to the nearby city of Chemax to claim an alleged "engagement" regarding a transfer that failed to materialize. In Chemax, the state governor promised to pay the total amount of the subsidy without charging any "interest." Since the stipend money was paid by check, the government had authorized banks and other financial institutions to retain a percentage for the service of cashing them. According to the villagers’ narratives, trucks loaded with money arrived. After giving his speech, the governor left and farmers from many nearby villages ended up receiving only half of what they had been promised. According to the diary of the Comisario of Ixán, when the farmers realized that the "promise" had not been completely fulfilled, they tried to lynch the official in charge of making the payment (Terán and Rasmussen 2004, 105-106).

From this example and others concerning Procampo cash transfers, it is possible to conclude that the recipients have always considered Procampo’s promise of money insufficient to promote a desired evenness (toj). Nevertheless, when the promised amount is not forthcoming, villagers respond with sanctions of unfulfilled promises, and there have indeed been many such episodes, even in recent years. In all of these instances, the villagers have incarcerated or threatened to incarcerate politicians and state officials until they make good on their promises. As in the Procampo case in which the mob tried to kill the official, there is a logic of compensation at work here which stipulates that transfers (or promises of gifts) have the potential to liberate or incarcerate, to entangle or disentangle.

However, according to many young people from Ixán, these practices are no longer as common as they were in the past. They have discovered that even if this particular course of action might ensure that the villagers get what they feel is owed to them in the promised exchange, it also results in strained relationships with the world outside the village. For instance, a candidate campaigning for election as a Federal Representative came to the village in 2008 seeking to win its support. The Comisario at that time was from the opposition political party and remembered a promise the candidate had made while he was the mayor of Valladolid, the city on which the village depends in many ways. The Comisario mobilized soldiers and other people of the village to incarcerate the candidate, who fled rapidly when he learned of their intentions.

Cash transfers have thus entered into the beneficiaries’ lives at the same time that an intergenerational change was taking place in Ixán. Many of the Yucatan villagers now describe themselves as moving away from agriculture toward "easy employment" or "smooth jobs" in the service sector. Temporary jobs are said to be abundant, especially considering that the tourism industry in nearby Cancun, which underwent major development in 1973, continues to grow exponentially every year. The majority of the workforce, however, does not succeed in obtaining these "smooth jobs" but are hired as manual labor instead. Most young people leaving the villages imagined that they would be leaving behind physically intensive activities and moving on to less demanding work attending tourists in the service sector. Among the most successful have been those who could afford to buy their own cars and become taxi drivers. However, some of these migrating workers also portray the process as a "return to servitude" (Castellanos 2010). Instead of leaving physical effort and tiring tasks in their past, they only find more of the same in their new temporary jobs on the so-called "Riviera Maya."³ Most male workers leave the field plots for construction sites where new hotels, neighborhoods and restaurants are being built, only to come back again after their contracts expire to burn, to sow seed, or to harvest their field plots. The generation that was in school while these changes occurred, even if they did not get the easier life they were promised, still believes it is possible for their children to do so.

While most Procampo support has been given to older male farmers, Progresa-Oportunidades was later implemented as a cash transfer program aimed at their children and almost exclusively administered by the mothers. It is devised to identify the "beneficiary holder" or la titular de la familia beneficiaria as a mother over the age of 15 (Oportunidades 2012, 17). On behalf of her family, each beneficiary holder receives the whole amount of the "monetary support" or apoyos monetarios. Recipients of Oportunidades cash transfers are supposed to spend the money strictly to support their children’s nourishment, health and education. Women are not only required to manage the Oportunidades cash transfer money, they are also made responsible through obligaciones and co-responsabilidades, which are also translated in terms of compromisos, for ensuring the success of the transfer’s goals: i.e. the transformation of the life and the economic conversion of future individuals.

The Moral Imperative to Invest "Human Capital" in Humans with No Capital

NAFTA has liberalized the investment and commerce of almost everything, including staple foods such as maize and beans in Mexico. It has also helped to accelerate expectations of development in the present. The children of the poor, who receive Progresa-Oportunidades cash transfers as they grow up and prepare for the future, stand as both objects and subjects of greater development expectations than those envisioned through idealized NAFTA labor markets. The more open-ended objective of the Oportunidades program works towards investment in "human capital" for the next generation. Therefore, the temporal images the program provokes in beneficiaries and developers do not simply end in a long-term progressive transition such as that of NAFTA, but also imply a great transformation marked by its human development goals.

Considered exemplary in the transnational development industry, Progresa-Oportunidades has served as a model for many similar programs all around the world. The reasons for the program’s perceived success are many, but one of the most important is its sanitized depictions of the canonical transformation of poor children into bearers of "human capital."

In short, Oportunidades’ promises of "human development" will materialize with the end of "the new generation’s inherit[ing] poverty and the impossibility of generating incomes to allow them to overcome their [poverty] condition" (Oportunidades 2012, 2). To this end, its action is considered transformative, discrete and measurable. It is believed that once normal brain development in children is secured via hospitals, food, and care, and their choices are broadened through education, they will become productive youths. As youths, they will engage in economic activities that will lift them out of the cycle of poverty demonstrated and otherwise perpetuated by their parents. Such development programs thus take for granted a transformation of youths from support-receivers into support-givers.

Most of the younger generations in Ixán are expected to undergo a process of transforming themselves into definitive economic agents, either by switching from agriculture to another economic activity or by leaving high school to engage in whatever full-time work they can find. However, unlike unconditional cash transfers such as those of the Procampo program, Oportunidades transfers imply some responsibilities. Spoken in the behavioral economic language of conditions and incentives (Deeming 2013), conditional cash transfers such as those provided by Oportunidades entail the fulfillment of obligations and commitments. Mothers who receive and administer the transfers must respond by fulfilling their "obligations" or "commitments" (Oportunidades 2012, 11). Furthermore, they must also enforce or comply with their children’s obligations and engagements in school and health centers to facilitate their proposed life transformation.

Item 3.6 in the program’s Rules of Operation specifies these "rights, co-responsibilities, obligations and suspensions of the beneficiary families" (Oportunidades 2011, 28). Item 3.6.2, titled "Co-responsibilities," states, "The fulfillment of co-responsibility" by the beneficiary family is "essential for the fulfillment of the program objectives," but it is also the sine qua non condition for receiving the monetary support (Oportunidades 2012, 10).

These co-responsibilities are itemized as follows:

Point 3.6.3 also describes obligations. They are itemized as follows: