Peter M. Ward[1]
The University of Texas at Austin
Mercedes y Agustín
It is my privilege and honor to offer some reflections about what Mercedes González de la Rocha meant to me both as a friend and as a scholar. Her research was central to my and others’ understanding of the dynamics of poverty in Mexico in 1970s-90s, and then latterly in the 2000s as she embarked on more collaborative work about poverty alleviation strategies and policies. We were close friends over many years, and she was also an intimate friend and colleague to my first PhD student the late Sylvia Chant (Professor at the London School of Economics). González de la Rocha and Chant made path breaking contributions on gender, poverty and social policy, as well as on women’s participation and household organization in Mexico and the Global South. Sadly, both passed away prematurely ravaged by terminal diseases. For me, given our mutual and overlapping closeness, it is difficult to disentangle one from the other now that I have lost two colleagues and friends in quick succession, and it hurts deeply.
That said, rather than try to cover the long arc of her research career and productivity, my comments here will largely focus on Dr. González de la Rocha’s earlier work which I personally found so insightful. As a graduate student and then faculty member of CIESAS, I am thinking about the centrality of her work to our understanding of so-called “survival strategies” of the very poor in Mexico and their intersection with the dynamics of household structure; the importance of social networks and reciprocity; and the nature of women’s engagement in the labor market, especially in informal-sector activities.
These topics were core to her early doctoral research at the University of Manchester in the early 1980s, which was when I first met Mercedes and her husband, Agustín Escobar. I was a recent PhD graduate from Liverpool and a young lecturer at University College London and our research topics closely overlapped, although as a Geographer my interest was more spatial in approach and focused upon informal housing production in Mexico City. From that time onwards we came to share so much: ongoing mutual research interests; a close friendship with one of her PhD mentors (Professor Bryan Roberts, at Manchester and later a colleague at UT-Austin); a network of friends, and in several cases some lifelong mutual friendships. We were also colleagues during her and Agustín’s visiting professorships at Cambridge (UK) and Texas, not to mention drinking and dining buddies whenever the opportunity presented itself. Along with my wife, Victoria Rodríguez, the four of us became compadres in all but name. That said, and having started with the formal compadrazgo greeting protocols, I will now switch to the less formal “Meche” from here on in.
Meche did not suffer fools readily: indeed, her personality and academic persona were infused by an irreverence and a feistiness towards anything or anyone that she did not particularly like, including colleagues or others in academe for whom she had little time or respect. When among friends, and unlike her much more mild-mannered husband Agustín, she was wont to embark (sometimes in colorful language) on a diatribe against an errant scholar or functionary with whom she strongly disagreed or disliked. But she was always loyal to her friends and, to my knowledge, was not vindictive: rather, she was one of those people who wore her heart on her sleeve. Her in-your-face style was quite refreshing to observe, and it was one of the things that I loved and most admired about her – always grateful, of course, that I was not the butt of her feistiness or the target of her invective…
However, that irreverence did not extend to her scholarship: she was a serious scholar who did brilliant work… Let me offer an example with which I am especially familiar, and which I think exemplifies her intellectual imagination and acuity. It was also one of her major early research contributions. A core element of her work as an anthropologist was the idea of taking a longitudinal perspective. This is fine in classical anthropology but is difficult to achieve in the short term as a doctoral student: one can’t afford to wait around 15-20 years before reflecting upon observed changes over time. However, it was central to her basic research premise, and as I describe below, with great adeptness she was able to offer a longitudinal understanding of how low-income households responded to poverty from the 1970s through the 1990s. It began with her doctoral thesis which examined how the working poor in the 1970s and 1980s mobilized what she called the “resources of poverty”, namely the mobilization of different types of employment (often informal), in-home production and sale of goods, mutual aid among friends and family networks. These were “survival strategies” invariably built around kinship reciprocity and local support social networks. This bears a strong reminiscence to the 1960s “urban village” anthropological studies of Young and Willmott in Bethnal Green, London, and of Herbert Gans in the Italian quarter of the West End of Boston (and many others, of course). These classic studies demonstrated the importance of working-class reliance upon support systems and reciprocal exchanges embedded in neighboring and in kin-based local social networks. Meche’s observations resonated strongly with my own research findings on informal housing and the ways in which households sought to build out their homes through self-help and mutual-aid in Mexican colonias populares. This they were often doing with remarkable success in the 1970s, at least under conditions of laissez faire on the part of the state (national and local). Her seminal study, The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City, was published in 1994, and it seemed to offer a coda on the survival strategies literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Or so we thought. But then the challenge of taking a longitudinal approach confronted her. Economic conditions in Mexico had changed both drastically and quickly; the so called “lost decade” of the 1980s was upon us, and in Mexico and Latin America more generally, the state was no longer so laissez faire, but had turned neoliberal. Withdrawal of the state, the “Washington Consensus” and austerity policies, as well as privatization, were the order of the day, all of them having profound implications for low-income household survival, creating a new precariousness and severely compromising their capacity to mobilize the resources of poverty. So how was Meche to “square this circle” and explain how her original thesis was falling apart? A dilemma, surely, for one whose book had scarcely hit the shelves!
This is where Meche’s anthropological imagination kicked in. Her ongoing observations of household networks and female labor participation allowed her to document that the resources of poverty were being severely stretched: there was an intensification in the hours worked in order to maintain a minimal income; the ability to create a small surplus for domestic inhouse production was being undermined, as was the capacity to fall back upon reciprocal exchange since one could no longer reciprocate: the cupboard was bare! Hence Meche was able to explain how the earlier resources of poverty were now characterized by a poverty of resources and the erosion of the survival model. This insightful quickstep became the title of a 2001 paper in Latin American Perspectives (28, 4, pp. 72-100). Meche’s work and findings were corroborated by many scholars working in different arenas, and of the growing evidence of increased social exclusion of and within the poor, and of what was in the 1990s increasingly referred to as the contemporary “New Poverty”.
Working closely with Meche and Agustín in 2003 I organized a Research Forum at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress in Dallas. It brought together several of the “many” (researchers) mentioned above: Meche, me, Elizabeth Jelín, Alejandro Portes, Janice Perlman, Bryan Roberts and Helen Safa. In a series of brief interventions, we each explored the extent and possible ways in which neoliberalism and the new poverty was similar and akin to the classic marginality theory of the 1960s (à la Aníbal Quijano, José Nun, and others). We agreed that it was different in several important ways: “social exclusion” was replacing marginality as a more appropriate means of characterizing the poor, and inequality and vulnerability were becoming the major contemporary challenges in urban environments. After the panel we adjourned to the bar and excitedly continued our discussions. It was Meche who insisted that we should each write up our ideas in a joint article. This was published a year later and proved to be a very widely cited paper: González de la Rocha, et al., From the “Marginality of the 1960s to the ‘New Poverty’ of Today: A Research Forum, Latin American Research Review, 39(1), 183-203. To my surprise, and to my regret, I now realize that this was my only joint publication with Meche, and yet we overlapped and built-off one another’s work so often and powerfully.
Throughout most of Latin America the wider economic environment improved during the first decade of the 2000s, and inequality and vulnerability were increasingly addressed through social protection and targeting programs – cash transfers, etc. Meche and Agustín (especially), were involved in several major evaluations of those programs, and I leave it to others to comment on that corpus of her engagement in that work. That said, I never felt that she was overly comfortable in engaging in policy development and policy prescriptions. Moreover, I also suspect that her feistiness and irreverence probably did not serve her well in drafting policy evaluations. This is speculation on my part, but if my words bring a smile to those readers who knew her well, then I rest my case.
To end on a very poignant and personal note. In the last few years Meche and I shared the same affliction: that of leukemia. Thus our (e-mail) conversations over the year or two before her death tended to mirror our respective symptoms, chemotherapy treatments, and ultimately contemplation and search for a possible cure. In the end I was fortunate and was able to move ahead with a bone marrow transplant and I survived. Tragically, Meche could not. Victoria and I can only begin to imagine the intense and devastating angst that her family and friends went through in those final few months as hope surged and then evaporated, before she finally passed. One hopes that opportunities such as these – offering personal and intimate reflections about her life and legacy as wife, mother, friend, teacher/mentor, and scholar, will help to ameliorate some of the pain of their still relatively recent loss. In her spirit, her being, her loyalty, and in her love, Meche was quite simply unique. Although cut short, hers was a wonderful and productive life, and she gave so much. She is sorely missed.
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Among her major earlier works:
González de la Rocha, M. (1994). The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City. Basil Blackwell.
González de la Rocha, M., et al. (2004). From the marginality of the 1960s to the ‘New Poverty’ of Today: A LARR Research Forum, Latin American Research Review, 39(1), 72-100.
González de la Rocha, M., (2001). From the resources of poverty to the poverty of resources: the erosion of the survival model. Latin American Perspectives, 28(4), 72-100.
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Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Emeritus C. B. Smith Sr. Chair in US-Mexico Relations. e-mail: peter.ward@austin.utexas.edu ↑