National policies, local knowledge: Women's health and political ecology in an indigenous Mexican village

This thesis focuses on the control and choices that rural indigenous women have over their families' health and their own reproductive bodies when confronted with such external processes such as national and international developmental programs and missionary activities. Using data collected during two years of fieldwork in a Nahua village of Mexico, I argue that the transitions caused by developmental programs have moved health problems and solutions away from local peoples directly to government and nongovernmental organization authorities. Before the arrival of development agencies, health issues generally took place at the intersection of religious domains. Although most minor illnesses could be resolved using home remedies, major illnesses and health problems were the province of healing specialists, who used their knowledge of plants, healing techniques, and religious invocations both to local and the Catholic deities to effect cure and maintain functional positions in society. Primary caregivers, especially women, usually had agentive choice regarding the healer and the type of healing technique and over decisions regarding their reproductive body. The Oportunidades program offers financial incentives to the women of the village to keep their children in school and to attend government-run clinics. In this thesis, I argue that the financial stipend works as a "carrot and stick" approach in which the traditional healers have been marginalized or subsumed into the national health system. Furthermore, due to fears of losing the stipends, the women have fewer or no alternatives to the national public health system. I further argue that due to these decreasing choices, women find it difficult to ignore the top-down population control-sterilization programs emphasized at the clinics and hence lose control over their own reproduction. This argument ties into various emerging critiques of development, and I suggest that development policies and evaluation methods should shift from the institutional level to the local level and should take into account local cultural realities and all possible effects of development on rural and indigenous peoples.