Paul Gillingham: belief

Transcript context

…Say I’m a leader, comisario, I have to pay for part of the fireworks, part of the beer. Isn’t my incentive as a talented person to minimize local state capacity rather than really having everything develop? That’s a good question. I would say no, actually, and that generally cargo holders work as intermediaries with the state in the 20th century. By investing in fireworks, buying a share in a bull for a fiesta, and buying some pulque, whatever your local hooch is, and not just maintaining some stability, but doing it in part by bread and circuses, gives a level of control and local nuts and bolts of knowledge, which the central government then uses as part of this basic quest for stability. With stability going all the way back to Porfiriato comes development. I think that this is a vast generalization. The cargo system has great flaws, but the reason it endures is it also has great strengths. A lot of these villages, they seem quite dysfunctional. It seems not uncommon for, say, half of the grown men to be alcoholics. There’s a major problem with imbalance. The men leave, the women have to stay. They’re abandoned, or they can’t marry, or there’s no one to support the kid. Wouldn’t the central government do better, actually, just trying to minimize involvement in the villages?…

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