The history of neoliberalism was born from the aftermath of the Great Recession. With the
political economy in crisis, historians across the Anglosphere set out to trace the genealogies
and movement of ideas associated with neoliberalism. Historians of Europe led the way,
delving into the archives of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, the League of Nations in
Geneva and the Mont Pelerin Society in the Swiss Alps. Long before North Atlantic reading
publics deemed themselves neoliberal, this research made clear, the first decades of
the 20th century had seen the forging of neoliberal ideology.
Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018)
offered a sweeping intellectual history of this process: as 20th-century empires eroded and
democratic movements gained force, European elites were convinced that private property
had to be salvaged, somehow, against budding nation-states and their empowered masses.
Along the way, influential economists, notably Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek,
became globalists, conceiving the supranational as a space where international institutions
could be built and empowered to protect markets, economic freedom and wealth from
more democratic nation-states.
Other historians have followed Slobodian’s trails, finding neoliberalism’s origins in the
deeper corners of modern European thought. With few if important exceptions, these
intellectual histories of Europe have most frankly posed the question ‘How did we, the
neoliberals, get here?’, sometimes glossing over a more existential and harder to fathom
one: ‘Who are we?’ If societies and their governments became neoliberal at some point in
the previous century, what that point was and how it arrived is important to understanding
contemporary political economy and the type of collectives and people it has produced.
Following European history, American political history joined the project of historicising
neoliberalism while redefining its goals. If scholars of the history of Europe sought the more
distant intellectual origins of the present, historians of US politics now seek to periodise
neoliberalism as a hegemonic political project. The historian Gary Gerstle’s book The Rise
and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022) makes
the case for a beginning and an end to neoliberalism through an analysis of Anglo-American
high politics, political discourse and public sentiment. While the intellectual historians of
Europe saw a nascent neoliberal project to protect markets and wealth from society in the
tumultuous interwar, historians of US politics date the beginning of neoliberal statecraft to a
more familiar point of origin in the 1970s and ’80s.
Here, amid stagnant economic growth, high inflation and public discontent in the 1970s, the
postwar, Keynesian state lost legitimacy, conditioning a neoliberal takeover of government.
The Ronald Reagan administration in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher’s in the
United Kingdom, sought to free markets from the shackles of government controls. Helping
to globalise this mission were international institutions like the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization
(WTO), which contained national sovereignty, much like von Mises and Hayek once
imagined. For historians of US politics, however, the era of neoliberalism that began in the
1970s is now over at home and abroad, with these scholars also speaking for the world
created by US postwar hegemony and the fall of the Soviet Union. A consensus seems to be
emerging that we, the people of the world, no longer live in neoliberal times.
One striking feature of this latest turn in the history of neoliberalism is Latin America’s
absence. If the intellectual historians of Europe found neoliberalism’s origins in the cafés of
Vienna and the mountains of Switzerland, the political historians of the US have found its
end on the steps of the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, as an ostensible public and
political consensus around a neoliberal project eroded. Indeed, Gerstle’s book has no index
entry for Augusto Pinochet or Chile, and Mexico appears only as the sender of unwanted
migrants or the receiver of a disenchanted populace’s racist scorn. This excising of Latin
America and much of the Third World produces a curious result: a distinct nostalgia for a
neoliberal past. If these are no longer neoliberal times, and if a post-neoliberal present is
defined through an erosion of consensus, then it follows that populations once
wholeheartedly consented to being ruled by neoliberalism. Was it part of the ‘norms’ for
which many in the US now yearn?
Now, if you’re losing patience with this topic, I do not blame you, for neoliberalism can be a
tiresome subject. Almost two decades ago, in 2007, I arrived at the University of Cambridge
to study an undergraduate degree in social anthropology. I chose anthropology because I
wanted to understand the world, and I could barely contain my excitement at the
opportunity to learn how to do this under the tutelage of its clearest-eyed professors and
alongside its brightest pupils. My relocation from Mexico to Britain to receive a world-class
education was the latest iteration of countless imperial itineraries before me. I had moved to
that metropole, to its finest of ivory towers, Trinity College, thanks to the economic sacrifice
of my parents, who took on extra jobs to afford their hardworking daughter’s ambitions and
deemed Britain’s Oxbridge the best education money could buy.
My bedsit overlooked the cobblestoned streets of King’s Parade, and was sparsely furnished
with the contents of a suitcase, a frayed poster of the Strokes, a coffee pot and mug, two
kilos of Mexican coffee, and a carton of cigarettes. The rest, I believed, would come from my
education. I rushed to orientation and picked up my book lists and syllabi, eager to be
schooled by the masters. But when going through the course reading lists, disappointment
came over me. It was neoliberalism smeared on neoliberalism. Articles on what made the
privatisation of Bolivian water ‘neoliberal’. Books on social movements across Latin America
that analysed these movements as responses to ‘neoliberalism’. Pieces that played with the
rise of religious orthodoxy and the rekindling of Indigenous identities as phenomena that
were simultaneously ‘neoliberal’ and ‘anti-neoliberal’. Analysis that began and ended with
the ‘Washington Consensus’, insisting that since then we had come to live in ‘neoliberalism’
because we were now required to be self-managing individuals.
My British classmates were enthused, but I had not crossed an ocean to be educated on
neoliberalism. After all, I had been reckoning with the thing, experiencing, analysing and
making sense of it alongside my parents, teachers, peers and fellow Mexican citizens, for as
long as I could remember. A simple n-gram search reveals that the word ‘neoliberalism’ has
been in Latin American vocabularies far longer than in Anglo-American ones.
As a Mexican born in the 1980s, I grew up in a fever of neoliberalism. I went to a private
school in the bourgeois core of Guadalajara founded by a posh, Lefty, Cuban-Mexican
woman claiming to follow the vision of four men: Darwin, Marx, Piaget and Freud. The
school did not like it when students went barefoot, and we were allowed to smoke weed
only in the school’s garage ‘out of respect for the neighbours’. There were no exams. All our
schooling was self-managed, and we graded ourselves. We learned based on monthly study
guides on which we worked ‘at our own pace’, meeting targets alone, and we graded
ourselves based on our own assessment of ‘effort’. We all belonged to ‘co-ops’ that we were
told were collectively owned, and each student could in fact get a little money from the
profits of these enterprises at the end of the month. So we worked for them to be successful
(or to get them out of the red, which was the case for my parent-subsidised and rotund
failure of a cinematheque venture). To teach discipline and responsibility, but also because
the school ran on a shoestring budget, students were the ones who cleaned the school after
class.
Neoliberalism made an increasingly unequal society open for global investment
Back then, in between reading books and drafting essays on my own, failing to sell cinema
tickets or making salsas and marmalades for market, and scrubbing toilets and mopping
floors, I got a sort of education. The education was that neoliberalism existed and was bad.
That it hurt Indigenous peoples. That it corrupted government and nation. That it was the
new, and the heir of the old, imperialism. When the Ejército Zapatista para la Liberación
Nacional (EZLN, or the ‘Zapatistas’) came to town, they always stopped by my school. On
these occasions, the children of the professional middle classes would ritually join forces
with Indigenous paramilitaries to denounce neoliberalism. Still, at least some of us were
clearly neoliberals. We were as neoliberal as the school and the country.
Throughout my lifetime, the term ‘neoliberalism’ has been unavoidable for Mexican
reformers and resistors alike, a cacophonic echo in the tumultuous decades that remade my
country. After the end of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s, Mexico had been governed
by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), an authoritarian political party that
effectively incorporated the revolutionary factions, from capitalists to peasants, and created
political stability and economic growth through the continuous co-option of national interest
groups and planned economic development. However, as the last two presidents of the
PRI’s ancien régime – Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de
León (1994-2000) – coped with the fallout of the debt and currency crises that ravaged
Mexico in the 1980s and ’90s after the Volcker Shock, they became textbook neoliberals.
The debt crisis had halved Mexicans’ purchasing power, but the government would now
privatise public assets and streamline the economy towards export markets even if it meant
deindustrialising and further impoverishing much of the nation. Fiscal austerity became
enshrined in the law. Continuously depressing wages was now a necessary condition for
competing in global markets. Neoliberalism made an increasingly unequal society open for
global investment and structurally driven by poverty to the benefit of few. To see through
these difficult reforms, Salinas (PhD Harvard) and Zedillo (PhD Yale) appointed
administrations that increasingly saw themselves as technocrats; the same ones who would
later be charged with making politics procedural, distant and guarded from the demos of the
democracy they touted. When Zedillo rendered Mexico’s democratic transition possible by
putting a ‘healthy distance’ (‘la sana distancia’) between the presidency and his party,
loosening the PRI’s 70-year grip on power, the opposition’s Vicente Fox Quesada became
president of Mexico, and the world approved. Fox was the cheerful scion of a wealthy family
who had risen to become CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico without a BA, let alone a PhD. His quasiprovincial confidence, and his sincere love of markets and consumer culture, brought
Mexican neoliberalism to new highs.
Fox’s bravado and good humour delighted most Mexicans. He promised homeownership
and upward mobility for all, and Mexicans took him up on that promise. His administration
doubled down on fiscal austerity and deregulated the lending industry, flooding the country
with consumer credit to grow the middle class and the economy. His approval rates were
robust throughout his six-year tenure, almost always remaining above 50 per cent. And yet,
masses of Mexicans did not like neoliberalism; a fact that was on display when millions took
to the streets in support of the EZLN and against the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) during Fox’s first year in office.
After college, as I figured out what I would do with my life amid a Great Recession that made
highly competitive unpaid internships the new normal, I decided to stick with anthropology
and the problem of neoliberalism. If these were sunk costs, they had become mine to bear.
Since 2013, I have spent more than a decade researching and thinking about Mexican
neoliberalism. Choosing a PhD topic is a fraught business, but my questions were clear to me
all along. I wanted to understand how, why and to what end my country had changed
through its democratic transition and disillusion. More specifically, I wanted to understand
the paradoxical project of maintaining austerity and creating growth, and what
consequences ensued when Fox tried to resolve this paradox with a flood of mortgage
finance for Mexico’s impoverished masses. All of this is just a particular and substantive way
of approaching the historical origins, fluctuating qualities and real consequences of Mexican
neoliberalism. So, for years now, I have been reading the latest wave of neoliberalism
literature with interest, empathy and concern.
Neoliberalism is what Neil Brenner called a ‘rascal concept’. ‘Promiscuously pervasive, yet
inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested,’ the term lends itself
to the whims and aims of its user. The concept also signals a sticky phenomenon that
societies and populations seem to repeatedly fail to transcend. Declarations of the imminent
end or final crisis of neoliberalism have been so far met by relentless, structural continuity.
But we are increasingly told the contrary by the eminent among us, as essays and books
assert that one can pinpoint neoliberalism well enough to assert its end with conviction. In
the Anglophone academy, it has been the historians at the most elite of universities who
have touted the end of neoliberalism the loudest, producing award-winning volumes
documenting the rise and fall of a social order, the end of an era in world history or, more
modestly, the messy culmination of a global but rooted historical period. People are
understandably excited by the proclaimed ending of neoliberalism. Polished pieces in
the Financial Times and The New Yorker, alongside more mundane newspaper fodder, have
pushed the bipartisan line that neoliberalism is over.
However, the arguments supporting the new consensus that neoliberalism is over are quick
and thin, parochial or just naive: Donald Trump’s electoral triumph in 2016 had to mean the
end of something, and there’s also Brexit; COVID-19 killed global trade, and also the
populists; Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act evinced the return of the state. Inarguably, the
past decade has been eventful, and these writers have been courageous to take on such a
rascal concept on the edge of history. Perhaps, if ‘actually existing neoliberalism’
(to quote Loïc Wacquant) began in the late 1970s or early ’80s, we are lingering at the
threshold of the historical craft’s tacit norm to cut the past into 40-year tranches. But,
beyond this, a generous but shrewd reader of these accounts is left with little if not punditry.
The argument of neoliberalism’s end is so profoundly unsatisfactory that I am left asking
whether we must divide history into periods at all. I rummage through the stacks. Jacques Le
Goff argued no but concluded yes, and Marc Bloch warned about the idol of origins. What is
our answer?
If the breaking point of neoliberalism came around Trump and Brexit, then it would appear
that its ascendancy was a time of relative consensus, peace (in Europe) and optimism. In
fact, conflict, war, violence, pain, pessimism, frustration and illiberalism abounded in the
past four decades, but the reigning rhetoric is otherwise. For scholars and natives of Latin
America, the narrow, triumphalist if mournful viewpoint of Anglo-American elites avoids the
discomfort of addressing the Latin American experience of, and abundant scholarship on,
neoliberalism. We should not be surprised. Including Latin America in these nominally global
histories would make it impossible to suggest that neoliberalism is tantamount to
consensus; that it was peacefully developed, not violently imposed; that it is defined by a
sense of optimism; that it is not imperial. Without Latin America, we forget about the
intimidating rise of Third World power before the 1980s, epitomised by movements for a
New International Economic Order. We forget about the weaponisation of the Volcker Shock
and the destruction wrought by its ensuing debt crises. We forget the reassertion of First
World domination through enforced ‘structural adjustment’. More importantly, we are able
to ignore that neoliberalism is structurally ongoing.
Mexican perspectives have a special timeliness in the face of epochalism, or the tendency to
define change as a paradigmatic rupture between eras. The preoccupation with carving eras
out of our immediate past has not been limited to the public-seeking, higher echelons of the
Anglo-American academy. Epochalism has also taken over politics, and nowhere has this
been more glaring than in Mexico, where the previous president, Andrés Manuel López
Obrador (AMLO), declared the end of neoliberalism with his inauguration in December
2018. The Left-wing populist regime that currently governs Mexico, and which its new
president Claudia Sheinbaum has inherited, is so epochalist that it understands itself as the
‘Fourth Transformation’ (‘la Cuarta Transformación’, or ‘la 4T’ for short) of Mexican history.
The First was independence from Spain; the Second was Liberal Republicanism, or the
separation of Church and state; the Third was the Mexican revolution; and then there was
AMLO. It is easy to mock the audacious naivety of the ruling party Morena’s periodisation,
but there is more to its historical idealism. For the party’s ideologues, these transformations
do not constitute mere chapters of national history. Rather, they are also iterations of that
which came before them. In each, a break for transformative change, or justice, is asserted
only to deteriorate through the decades, as anti-democratic powers regain control. The
transformations of la 4T are sublimations, rendering neoliberalism the affirmation and
negation of everything that came before it. Just as neoliberalism was the last four decades of
a post-revolutionary Mexico that had gradually lost the revolution it once won, it is the
ground for a new break.
So then, when the former president López Obrador spoke of the ‘neoliberal period’ as
something that had been overcome, he engaged in a kind of historical mysticism. The
message is that neoliberalism had retreated into the past but is also still with us, and this
message resonated well enough. López Obrador’s approval ratings leaving office reached 77
per cent. Sheinbaum campaigned on nothing but continuing López Obrador’s Fourth
Transformation and finished 33 percentage points ahead of her challenger, with a legislative
supermajority to boot. Morena now controls three of every four governorships in the
country and will soon control the Supreme Court. In other words, the promise to continue
overcoming the phantom of the past radically increased Morena’s mandate.
Under López Obrador, Mexico has remained one of the most regressive fiscal states in the
world
Today, Mexico is a case study in why declaring neoliberalism dead conceals much more than
it reveals. The urge to pronounce its end speaks to a grave discomfort with being stuck,
suspended, with how it is not as easy to overcome as we want it to be. López Obrador’s
administration increased the minimum wage significantly above inflation for the first time
in 35 years of stagnant real wages, but, by any serious measure, Mexico remains deeply
neoliberal. Take, for instance, basic economic growth. As Thomas Piketty and others have
pointed out, the decades since the 1980s have been characterised by slow growth in most
countries. In Mexico, the average GDP per capita growth rate between 1982 and 2018, the
year that López Obrador came into power, was below half a per cent. Yet, throughout López
Obrador’s term from 2018 to 2023, Mexico continued to grow slowly, again below a half per
cent. These rates contrast with those preceding the 1982 debt crisis, from 1961 to 1981, in
which Mexico grew at an average of 3.6 per cent per capita, faster than the US.
Most other significant trends have stayed on course since the 1980s. This is the case of
austerity, which López Obrador rebranded ‘republican austerity’ (‘austeridad republicana’) in
homage to the great Mexican liberal, Benito Juárez, but which translated into a continuation
of low public spending. Austerity is the tendency to cut or maintain low public spending in
the name of economic solvency and private industry, uniting most common tropes of
contemporary politics, from budget cuts to employment deregulation. López Obrador’s
administration spent heavily in its final year, largely as an electoral strategy, but total public
spending during the first five years of his government remained virtually unchanged from
the preceding administrations. In fact, the administration decreased the budgets of 30 of 48
federal branches of government and of nine of 17 ministries to fund an oil refinery, a train
for tourists, an airport, the armed forces and new social programmes. The Fourth
Transformation’s social programmes, which include small but universal transfers to the
elderly, have been celebrated by Leftists. However, these programmes are more regressive,
or less redistributive, than those of previous administrations. In the lowest deciles, D1 and
D2, poverty deepened under López Obrador, and the general population’s ability to access
health services and social security decreased while the education gap increased. The
‘rheumatic elephant’ of Mexican bureaucracy, to use the president’s own epithet valorising
austere government, overall suffered from diminished capacities due to personnel cuts,
decreased salaries, and lower budgets.
Neoliberal or ‘republican’, Mexican austerity is rendered a necessity by the country’s tax
code, which overwhelmingly benefits the rich, the very rich and large corporations against
state capacity and the general interest. Mexico is an extreme case, but the rise of regressive
taxes was not a particularly Mexican phenomenon. Indeed, with or without the ideology of
trickle-down economics, the previous four decades saw the widespread erosion of
progressive taxation. Under López Obrador, Mexico has remained one of the most regressive
fiscal states in the world and has continued to register the weakest fiscal capacity in the
OECD. The country’s fiscal revenue trails far behind the OECD and Latin America averages,
and is even lower than that of the poorest countries in the region. Yet, to this day, López
Obrador’s Fourth Transformation has repeatedly refused to take on fiscal reform, promising
increased tributary efficiency instead of changing the tax code.
Along with protecting monopolies, a regressive fiscal state continues to enable the
disproportionate enrichment that Mexico’s rich and very rich have enjoyed under Morena.
In the first two years of López Obrador’s administration, for instance, Mexicans with more
than 500 million MXN (roughly $24 million) saw their income grow 117 times faster than the
Mexican economy but contributed only 0.03 per cent of total tax revenue. Mexican oligarchs
have doubled their wealth during the Fourth Transformation, and the wealth of the richest
amongst them grew twice as fast as that of their Latin American counterparts. Directly and
indirectly, neoliberalism overwhelmingly helps the wealthy, and that is still the case in
Mexico. Against all expectations, the Fourth Transformation has been resolutely pro big
business. After all, why did López Obrador and Trump, despite their discourse and the
desires and needs of their bases, ratify NAFTA?
The point is not that López Obrador is neoliberal. It is rather that, beneath a proliferating
discourse proclaiming otherwise, most of the great structural tendencies that began in the
1980s remain on course, often exacerbating – in Mexico, but one could easily argue the
same for most societies, including the US and the UK. The structural pull that we are
experiencing should not surprise us, for it is processual, following from that which
came before it.
The progressive impoverishment of most and the enrichment of few tends towards its
reproduction. It also tends to generate political responses that are discursively antagonistic
to the social structure but in practice reaffirm it. My research into the housing and mortgage
markets in Mexico shows this is exactly what happened in 2001. At that time, Fox’s
administration deregulated the lending industry to double down on austerity, spike the
economy, and give a leg-up to poor Mexicans. Their plan to turn Mexico’s poor into
homeowners through mortgage finance seemed to promise a win-win for all. On the one
hand, the Mexican masses would benefit from the sudden opportunity to formally acquire
property and build assets. Financial inclusion would in fact make history, and a new middle
class, for most Mexicans had historically lacked the right or ability to access consumer credit.
On the other hand, the extension of mortgage loans to the Mexican masses would benefit
the owners of capital and global investors, triggering positive feedback cycles across the
Mexican economy and feeding financial markets with new securities and stocks. The Fox
administration’s decision to deregulate lending while subsidising private lenders created a
pipeline of prequalified homebuyers for the construction industry; a housing boom that
moved 20 million people, or a fifth of the country, from old informal settlements and
shanties into freshly built suburbs.
In Tlajomulco de Zúñiga alone, a once sleepy municipality to the south of Guadalajara, 200
macro housing complexes were built in a few years. Today, just one of these complexes,
Hacienda Santa Fe, is home to more than 100,000 people. Over years of ethnographic
fieldwork, I witnessed how the beneficiaries of Mexico’s housing boom continuously fell
back on mortgage payments and found themselves further impoverished by
homeownership. Yet, they were not evicted, remaining instead captive to further extraction
of fees and interest while failing to contribute to equity. The owners of the construction and
lending industries, and the many investors who had capitalised on Mexico’s democratising
feat, grew only richer, offering more and more debt-based products that Mexico’s poor
bought to try to make ends meet.
As the people of Hacienda Santa Fe and neighbouring complexes grew desperate, holding on
to their homes by remaining on the giving end of rentierism, a new political party emerged
to gain their sympathy and votes. Movimiento Ciudadano, or Citizens’ Movement, was an
early exponent of the political discourse that Morena would later join: they berated the
neoliberals, the elites and their technocratic bodies, for they had destroyed the country.
They also promised a return to politics and the arrival of true democracy. And they told the
beneficiaries of Mexico’s homeownership venture that, through them, they would keep their
houses and regain control of their lives.
They built a pyramidal bureaucracy that runs on free labour in the name of civic virtue
In 2010, thanks to the overwhelming support of the hundreds of thousands who had arrived
with the promise of homeownership and upward mobility the decade prior, the municipality
of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga gave Movimiento Ciudadano its first electoral triumph. The party
inherited a political nightmare. The municipality’s population had grown fourfold with Fox’s
housing boom, but its coffers were empty, and its mounting municipal debt had been
downgraded by ratings agencies. Much like its constituents, the municipal government could
not afford to service its own debt. Nor could the government’s running costs be covered,
since the new homeowners who now called this place home were too destitute to pay
property taxes. The level of disorder brought on by the housing boom was so severe that,
nine years into the flood of mortgage finance, a government survey revealed that 72
per cent of inhabitants did not know that they lived in a place called Tlajomulco de Zúñiga.
So how does a broke government, with no fiscal base and hundreds of thousands of equally
broke constituents in need of infrastructure and services, actually govern? The antineoliberal Movimiento Ciudadano came to find neoliberal solutions.
Movimiento Ciudadano began to crowdfund government, building a pyramidal bureaucracy
that runs on free labour in the name of civic virtue. This structure is organised into territorial
confederations under the supervision of a handful of paid party officials, but daily
governance is the responsibility of citizens acting as coordinators of councils entirely made
up of unpaid inhabitants. This pyramidal network enables the municipality to distribute and
allocate austere resources to its citizens at low cost. More importantly, though, it recruits
citizens into performing administrative and collaborative functions on behalf of government,
for their own wellbeing. Tlajomulco de Zúñiga’s civil councils oversee and administer their
localities, organising neighbours into putting in time, labour and resources of their own to
patch up streets and sidewalks; paint crosswalks; cover up graffiti; clean and sweep public
spaces; guard the entrance of schools; organise disaster relief and public health campaigns,
and many other actions that were the responsibility of government. In other words,
Movimiento Ciudadano meets its liquidity problem by turning citizens into self-managing,
unpaid civil servants. For a moment, I am reminded of cleaning my Lefty school and of the
unpaid internships I did not take.
This neoliberalism from below was developed as a response to the same from above.
Structurally, if decades of neoliberalism bankrupted people and state, what was at hand but
austerity? In places defined by this double bankruptcy, the only alternative to neoliberalism
tends to become a neoliberal government touting an anti-neoliberal discourse. The extreme
case of this corner of the global periphery should remind us of the power of structure in the
face of epochalism.
Social change is rarely epochal, and epochs are bigger than presidential administrations.
Decades of political policy create social structures that engender tendencies that are hard to
break, even when we want to. Future events are deeply rooted in past conditions. For
example, López Obrador’s social programmes greatly increased the wealth of Ricardo Salinas
Pliego, the main owner of Mexico’s usurious lending industry for the poor. But this was
because he owns the infrastructure necessary to quickly start distributing government
transfers to all Mexicans.
In times of moral panic and ontological fear, it is only human to want to take control of time,
to declare the end or beginning of something. Which is to say that, when our present feels
disjointed, we try to break history at its joints. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the
term epochalism to name the anxious discourses of postcolonial states that had attained
legal freedom but remained captive to the economic and political power of their former
rulers. Much like the old imperialism, the neoliberal past will not be so easily transcended if
the structures that it built over decades remain. Careful longitudinal research often reaches
conclusions that are as truthful as they are tedious to publics demanding radical change.
Even when we are trying to break free, we are always in the middle of history.
In memory of my mother, Mercedes González de la Rocha.