Biography:

Kate is a second-year PhD student in History. She holds an MPhil in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford and an AB in History from Princeton. Broadly, she is interested in social histories of development in twentieth-century Mexico, with a particular focus on questions of social reproduction and the politics of gendered labor. 

Project Title: Desequilibrios y Desigualdades: Development, Work, and Family in Twentieth-Century Mexico 

Abstract:

Mexico's mid-twentieth century has often been described as a "miracle": rapid economic growth; industrialization and urbanization, with all of their attendant infrastructural and environmental transformations; the consolidation of mass--albeit undemocratic--politics under the umbrella of the PRI. On paper, and incrementally in practice, there was a dramatic expansion of social and economic entitlements, including a massive program of agrarian reform, a bevy of labor rights (at least for formal sector workers), and healthcare and education systems. These transformations have often been collectively shorthanded as "development," even as Mexico remains one of the most unequal countries in the hemisphere. Yet surprisingly few social historical accounts of this process, and what it entailed for the people whose lives and labor quite literally constituted development, exist. What did "development" mean for those who lived it, contested it, desired it, made it? This project seeks to answer this question by addressing three interlinked processes--development, work, and family--from the heyday of developmentalism in the 1930s and 1940s to its unraveling during the 1980s. Holding work and family, production and reproduction, together is a central analytical ambition of the project, not least because many of the most desired and demanded aspects of "development"--healthcare, schooling, housing--were intimately linked to, even constituted by, women's labor. Centered on Coatzacoalcos, a major port, railroad hub, and oil city located in an important agricultural zone, the study will draw on public and company archives, and hopefully oral histories, to shed light on the paradoxes and profound inequalities of Mexican development.