Indigenous Girls in Rural Mexico: A Success Story?

• Published in: Girlhood studies 2016-06, Vol.9 (2), p.65-81
• Main Authors: Rocha, Mercedes González de la, Latapí, Agustín Escobar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic Achievement; Beneficiaries; Boys; Children; Children & youth; Demographic aspects; Disorders; Education; Educational Development; Elementary Education; Elementary Schools; Ethnicity; Evaluation; Families & family life; Fathers; Females; Gender Discrimination; Girls; Grade 12; Grants; Households; Human Capital; Indigenous peoples; Males; Mothers; Poverty; Public assistance; Rural areas; Secondary schools; Siblings; Small Schools; Social aspects; Social Mobility; Social policy; Sparsely populated areas; Welfare
• ISSN: 1938-8209; 1938-8322
• DOI: 10.3167/ghs.2016.090206

For as long as national records have been kept, Indigenous rural girls in Mexico have spent the least amount of time in school (aside from some people with disabilities). An innovative social program was designed in the 1990s that aimed to stop the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the provision of cash transfers (higher for girls than for boys) to families, conditional upon their children’s attendance at school and health clinics. We set out to assess whether or not the program had closed these gender and ethnicity gaps and found that it did narrow substantially pre-existing inequalities among rural indigenous poor girls and their families and, in some instances, reversed them. We recognize that the program does not eliminate other structural forces discriminating against indigenous Mexican girls and that prolonged education is an instrument for mobility only if these other forces are counterbalanced by more comprehensive social strategies.