UC San Diego

Gender and sexuality are a field through which modernity is imagined, measured, and used to justify racial hierarchies, colonization, and dispossession (Stoler 1995; Rofel 1999; Povinelli 2006, Hirsch & Wardlow 2006). Nation-states have played an important role in mobilizing modernity as an aspirational pathway (Dirks 1990). In Mexico, state policy has become especially interested in socially engineering gender practices since the 1970s within a global preoccupation with overpopulation (Soto Laveaga 2007). My dissertation traces how the notion of gender progress, which in the 1970s was expressed as a concern for smaller families, agentive and working women, and a rejection of the Mexican macho, broadened to include the objective of eliminating gender violence and parentally arranged marriages.

I explore how local public servants in the Huasteca region are not only steering the indigenous population towards the ideal of the small nuclear family through conditional cash-transfer programs (Smith-Oka 2013), but also towards the ideal of the dual earning family and non-violent and egalitarian masculinities. I show how, ironically, indigenous women fulfill the ideal of the agentive working woman by working as maids in Nuevo León and Hidalgo where they are vulnerable to sexual violence. I also show how in the process of seeking wage-labor, young indigenous male migrants who aspire to a notion of liberal love by dating outside their local communities learn their subordinate place in the nation by dating mestizas.

My dissertation argues that both state practice and indigenous peoples’ moral reckoning conceptualize gender progress as a move away from the gender barbarous, non-reflexive Indian. In this way, both state practice and indigenous peoples are placing value on a reflexive and modern indigeneity through the embodiment of new kinds of courtships, marriages, and paternities. I posit that, in Mexico’s post-NAFTA economic conjuncture, gender progress is filling the vacuum left by the end of state-sponsored peasant agriculture and peasant citizenship. Thus, while gender progress serves to reproduce new (albeit rehashed) categories of otherness, it may be the most accessible platform by which otherwise marginalized indigenous subjects sidelined to precarious forms of employment can make claims to agency, respect, and national relevance.