Neoliberal motherhood in Mexico: As birthing nations gives way to individual responsibility

This paper is about what motherhood means, in southern Mexico in the neoliberal present. I begin with what it could mean.

It could mean Coatlicue, mother of the gods, the Aztec deity who birthed not only the moon and the stars but also Xolotl, god of lightning and of death. Four hundred of Coatlicue’s children rose up, led by a sister, to decapitate their mother. The moment that she died, she gave birth to another child, Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and of war, who avenged his mother by killing his siblings.

Sometimes Quetzalcoatl is Coatlicue’s son: god of fertility, perhaps(.) god of internal political systems, the priesthood, learning and/or knowledge, the inventor of books. Was Hernán Cortez mistaken for this son? Aztec archaeologists debate. If so, Coatlicue birthed the sun, moon, stars, and a key catalyst — however superfluous — for colonization and race annihilation in the New World.

Coatlicue is often called “the mother,” but the single mothers in my own fieldsite of Huatulco do not think about Coatlicue when they think about mothering. Nor do they imagine la Malinche, another mother blamed for the ruination of the Aztec empire. La Malinche is the Virgin Mary’s foil, the Aztec slave gifted to Cortez with 20 others who then served Cortez as interpreter, lover, and maybe even advisor. While la Malinche was an actual person, she gets re-membered variously, fit with new meanings, as social and political-economic contexts in Mexico have shifted. Her story is still more fluid than the archaeological interpretations of the material evidence — the idols — of Coatlicue.

La Malinche’s agency is famous. And infamous. Girl rockers assume her name, and mothers have begun using it for daughters. To them, it means punk and counter-culture and independence and beauty to lure a conquistador and origin of the mestizo race and pride in being mestizo. Underneath, it continues to mean traitor. I wonder if it might also mean committed to oneself, to pulling oneself up by the bootstraps? Is la Malinche neoliberal?

Famous Mexican writer Octavio Paz argued that la Malinche means chingada; he cited the patriotic cry, “Viva Mexico, hijos de la chingada,” as his evidence. And I can think of no better word for describing a woman — turned symbol — who betrayed the Aztecs and mothered the mestizos with a single pregnancy, a woman ascribed towering agency, and yet iconic precisely because she was fucked by the white man. Chingada. Sometimes it means badass. Literally, it means raped.

Coatlicue and la Malinche, one a deity, one an enslaved human, are progenitors of death, genocide even, while they are, simultaneously, founders of race and life givers to entire populations. Along with Mexicanized Mary — La Virgin Guadalupe — they are the mothers that figure most prominently in Mexico’s nationalist discourses. I suspect that the coupling of this particular motherhood to nationhood is unique to Mexico, though I do not know. What I wonder immediately is what this coupling can do to the meanings of Mexican motherhood as it evolves. As rates of single motherhood rise, the women choosing to parent alone could re-work understandings of Coatlicue and of la Malinche, could fit them with their own meanings, as the punk rockers now do. But they haven’t yet.

So what does motherhood mean? In Huatulco, in the neoliberal present, I am arguing that it often means constraint. Unless one is single, and then it means freedom, along with constraint.

When we are mamás and in a marriage a mamá lives for her children, for the house, for her husband, for the work, blah, blah, blah. Mamá never has a day off. Understand? (16:10)

This was how Jenyfer described it.

When you have just begun to make breakfast, you are already thinking about what you are going to make for lunch, and you are already thinking about what you are going to make for dinner, and that you have to iron, and that you have to wash. Understand?

Jenyfer told of her grandmother who not once considered divorcing an abusive husband and who expected the same of others. She told of her mother who chose boyfriends over her own children, thus leaving Jenyfer, at nine years of age, to raise younger siblings under her grandmother’s watch. She described enduring in her own marriage, one that began when she was 17 years old — enduring despite years of infidelities and abuse, first because doing so was respectable, and maybe, she didn’t want to become her mother. Later she remained because she was afraid to leave.

Jenyfer cried and then laughed and then cried again when she remembered how hard the decision to divorce had been to make, recounted losing economic stability, assuming a new job as a taxi driver, refusing to feel embarrassed about this “man’s” job because she knew she was working for her children. She resented the friends and family who could only see stupidity and stubbornness, rashness, and sometimes immorality in her decision to leave the father of her children. It hurt that these friends and family were unabashedly outspoken. Jenyfer told of her own alcoholism and loneliness and then of empowerment, of finding girlfriends and dragging them to the strip club to find out “what the husbands do” when they go to see a “table.” She smiled again and told me how it is to be a chingona — and not care what society thinks.

What happens after the divorce? — You say, “Okay, we’re going to share everything, all the responsibility. On your days to take care of the kids, they’re your responsibility. On the days they’re with me, they’re my responsibility. And on the days that they are your responsibility, on those days, it doesn’t matter what time I come back to my house, if I don’t come home to sleep, if I want to sleep somewhere else. This is my problem. This is my space.” (16:10)

Jenyfer was particularly attentive to the gender based inequalities inside the marriage institution.

A man, even though he marries, never loses his freedom. A man can fail to come home and nothing happens. You as a woman, you can’t, because you have to take care of the kids.

Viviana had been a single mother when her first child was born. Three years later she was in a monogamous relationship with Eyik, and 3 years after that they were married — in civil and religious ceremonies — and expecting their first daughter. For many years, before and after marriage, Eyik wrestled with addiction. To cocaine. And then to crack when it surfaced in the region in 2008. In little Huatulco drugs are too easy to come by. You go out of the house and you run into your dealers. Viviana was trying to move her Forever 21-like clothing boutique to Cancun where, despite the much larger tourism economy, coke would be more expensive, harder for Eyik to find. She was certain.

Viviana admitted to wondering if she was making a mistake by remaining married. She was apologetic, but sincere, and she foresaw temporary separation from Eyik — in an attempt to force him towards maturity.

I could have saved so much sentiment. I would have been with a man, if I had been more intelligent, who gives me security. I say to my sister, if he doesn’t support you economically, then emotionally, but there are times they [male partners] don’t even help you with this. It’s happened to me with Eyik. It comes to pass that you arrive at a moment when having a partner is a burden, something else to carry. With [the responsibility of] your kids, your work, and there you are carrying your partner, no? I say this to my girlfriends now. I could have been more intelligent, looked for another type of person, no?

Eyik tiene un buen look — Eyik has a good look. Viviana remembered being drawn to his smile when he was the bartender at the nightclub. But, in the ethnographic present, she isn’t sure what that is worth.

One year ago I wrote an abstract for a paper about neoliberal motherhood. Six months ago I uploaded my interviews with single mothers in Huatulco to an old school ipod and started listening to them all over again. I was listening for the parts where the women described the domestic work and play key to raising their children. Instead, I found declarations of commitments to children:

“My children are my priority.”

“All that I do is for my children.”

“I am much different with my children than my parents were with me.”

The last meant adolescent daughters were allowed to go to the movies with friends, and learned to use a condom.

I have 200 hours of interviews with single mothers who described migration, work, marriage, divorce, and the tourism economy. They said things like, “I don’t care what the others say; I know that I am doing it for my children.” For Jenyfer “doing it for my children” meant driving a taxi. For other women with whom I worked, this meant working days in the hotels and restaurants and then selling sopes or tamales informally in the evenings.

I have written elsewhere that surviving single motherhood in the neoliberal present often requires splicing multiple jobs together in a low-waged service economy. One third of the women in my study have outsourced the work of childcare to grandparents still living in the campo to enable this working of multiple jobs. I should have been less surprised, therefore, that my interviews around single motherhood with women in Huatulco returned narrative accounts of daily life in which children were only marginally present. These were their narratives of motherhood. But I had failed to notice.

When I returned to my interviews something else fell out. This was the frequency with which single mothers were using the word “freedom.”

Freedom. By maintaining an untouchable, uncriticizable status — for who can argue against freedom in the age of democracy — the word lends credibility to, and more dangerously, begins establishing hegemony for, that which can assume relatedness to it. Hence the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology, built around freedom, reworked, today. The irony, of course, is that freedom — polysemous freedom — does not discriminate. The single mothers who are at the center of my research, too, have re-appropriated the word, filling it with still more meaning.

We say that it is beautiful to be a single mother when we show up and see those households in which one partner doesn’t agree with the other. I think in this moment, how good that I am a single mother — because I don’t have to endure all those things. I say, ‘Ay, how good that I’m a single mother, no? And well, I have my freedom.’

Freedom from partnership is the most obvious of the meanings that single mothers attribute to the word — and freedom from compromise. But women’s descriptions of their lives and experiences link these freedoms to the freedom to move, to think, to break rules (gendered and not), to compete and to succeed, to perform (put on a show) for one’s neighbors and the world, to escape the lot in life lived by single mothers’ mothers — who remained in the campo while husbands drank too much, or migrated and forgot to send remunerations, or didn’t migrate and were poor and abusive.

Like neoliberal politicians, single mothers are using freedom to give legitimacy to their lives and decisions. It is not that they have borrowed a discourse born of neoliberalism, but it is that they, too, are reconceptualizing freedom in a powerful self-defense.

Pierre Bourdieu, citing Bakhtin, wrote that “the polysemy of religious language, and the ideological effect of the unification of opposites or denial of divisions which it produces, derive from the fact that, at the cost of the re-interpretations implied . . . by speakers occupying different positions in the social space — and therefore endowed with different intentions and interests — it[(religion)] manages to speak to all groups and all groups speak it” (1991: 40). Freedom, I believe, bound up with democracy, is our religious language of the present — speaking to and spoken by all groups, though they are variously positioned in “the social space.”

The paradoxes of neoliberalism, the unified opposites and denied divisions that arise when markets are freed alongside of masses constrained by resultant poverty, and the diversity of individuals who, nonetheless, are convinced by neoliberal economic policy, add weight to my belief.

So, too, do the paradoxes that arise when one juxtaposes the discursive use of freedom by single mothers (in all of their diversity) to the discursive use of freedom by those who expound neoliberalism.

The project of my dissertation, its end goal, is the presentation of this juxtaposition. It is a study of the freedom that sits at the very center of our global neoliberal political economy, freedom of markets and of capital. But it very quickly becomes an examination of the freedoms that arise unintentionally out of neoliberalism, including freedom as it is understood and used by the single mother migrant laborers with whom I work.

Both Coatlicue and la Malinche are sometimes identified as la Llorona, the weeper. This mother roams the earth, turned away from the gates of Heaven for murdering her children. She roams and she weeps, “mis hijos, mis hijos” (my children, my children), and as she does, she reminds that mothers’ commitments must be to their children and not their husbands. In the most famous versions of the story, as in the horror movies of her name, la Llorona is motivated to kill her children by her desire to be with a man who does not want them. Later, as a ghost, she wields an irresistible sexuality, luring unsuspecting men to her in the vacant streets at night, before she transforms — in the kind of transformation that is rapid and loud and that makes cinema viewers jump in fright — to a cannibalistic Freddy Krueger, leaving male bodies, slashed, bloody messes, where they fall. This is la Llorana’s revenge, perhaps, directed towards the men who lured her while she was still alive.

I think of Jenyfer and of Viviana. Their commitments are to their children. In both cases this has meant leaving their husbands (temporarily or permanently) to be better mothers. Neither would cite la Llorona as a source of inspiration, nor would they mention Coatlicue and la Malinche, so it is not fair that I do so. I argue only that decisions to parent alone in the present are in accord with the lessons that these mythologized mothers teach. More importantly still, women’s decisions to parent alone are legitimated by a discourse that they actively construct, one that is particularly infallible at present and which is linguistically, if not semantically, similar to that of neoliberal pundits.

Single mothers, not because of but like neoliberals, are reappropriating freedom. For neoliberals, that project of reappropriation includes reifying the market so that it can be freed. It then includes convincing a global population that only by freeing markets can people be freed. It includes convincing a global population that government intervention is constraint, and that constraint, in any form, is bad.

For single mothers the project of reappropriating freedom hinges on their ability to show that marriage is constraint. And without access to capital, without leaders of global super powers ascribing to their ideologies, without any formal promotional efforts at all, and despite moralistic discourses that construct single motherhood as a social ill, they, like the neoliberals, are constructing a hegemony. In practice if not in discourse. And they are reworking the family as they do so.