From Inclusive Informality to Alienating Inclusion: The Rise of Mexico’s Debtfare Society on the Urban Fringes of Guadalajara

Abstract

This article ethnographically traces the social transformation brought about by Mexico’s 2001 housing reform to argue that financial inclusion restructured Mexican society and conditioned a shift away from a social order of inclusive informality to one defined by alienating inclusion. Financial inclusion upended the social arrangements that underpinned Mexico’s old urban periphery, which exhibited high levels of social cohesion and strong horizontal relations based on reciprocity and trust. As the reform unleashed mortgage finance to erect vast, peripheral housing complexes and make formal homeowners out of Mexico’s urban poor, the households inhabiting these new urban worlds came to experiment with, and ultimately depend on, consumer credit finance to sustain themselves. The “debtfare” society that matured with the financial inclusion of Mexico’s urban poor is now marked by atomization, social isolation, and uncertainty as the beneficiaries of Mexico’s housing reform adapt and respond to their incorporation into global financial flows.