Opinion • Yuteita Valeria Hoyos Ramos • February 27, 2025 • Leer en castellano

On February 19, 2025, Mexican legislators presented Congress with the third component of a bill that would mandate the creation of a National Caregiving System. NGOs such as Oxfam and community and grassroots collectives including the National Network of Indigenous Women Lawyers have pressed for this among legislators and the public as a whole. Their efforts have prompted a much-needed discussion of caregiving from an intercultural and anti-racist perspective. Proponents presented the first piece of the legislation on November 30, 2021 and the second on October 15, 2024. 

Advocates want to enshrine the right to care in the Constitution and to create a National Caregiving System, but congress has not yet passed any of the proposed measures. Historically, gender stereotypes and ultra-conservative patriarchal norms have ensured that women have shouldered the heaviest burden in caregiving. This reality became especially visible during the Covid-19 pandemic.  

The Mexican Supreme Court recognized the right to care in 2023. It decreed that “all persons have the human right to care, to be cared for and to self-care, and the state plays a central role in protecting and guaranteeing this.” It also recognized that care work should not fall disproportionately on women and girls and stated the government must ensure dignified conditions for care provision.

Despite its importance and virtues, the proposed National Caregiving System fails to integrate community-based or Indigenous perspectives. The legislation reflects urban and peri-urban settings and does not address forms of economic and social organization in rural towns and villages, which require a distinct reflection and analysis.

Questioning individualized, market-based care

The proposal for a National Caregiving System recognizes that women play a central role in sustaining and reproducing life. The bill’s preamble acknowledges that patriarchal gender stereotypes shape the Mexican economy and drive women toward invisible, undervalued and unpaid domestic work. 

If adopted, the proposal for a National Caregiving System would require changes throughout the government. It would have to find a way to define and track domestic labor, create day care centers staffed by qualified personnel, provide extended maternity and paternity leave and offer psychological, legal and economic support to caregivers, among other transformations.

One iteration of the legislation mentioned interculturality, but an intercultural, antiracist perspective was not integral to the effort in the way that it should be. 

The first segment of the package states that the National Caregiving System will attempt to reduce inequalities between women and men by redistributing care work, and that it will do so in a way that accounts for economic, social, political, cultural and biopsychosocial factors. However, nowhere does the legislation mention that Indigenous, Afro-Mexican and racialized women suffer inequalities related to ethnic and racial discrimination derived from colonialism (in addition to gender-based bias). This should shape how we understand care work and its distribution. Although the bills recognize that the social organization of care occurs within a broader ecosystem of collective and community care, they fail to integrate the situated ways of life in Indigenous communities into the analysis. 

Instead, the proposals focus on urban contexts, where services like day care centers, clinics, state hospitals and educational institutions are accessible. Many rural areas lack these basic services, which means that this model would not be applicable without addressing the structural inequalities that people living in rural areas endure, and especially Indigenous women and girls. 

Care, gender and territory

In the 1960s, feminists challenged Marxist ideas about wage labor that minimized exploitation in the home and erased women's struggle. Silvia Federici’s work naming the patriarchy of the wage was a key voice within this current. Feminists disputed the idea that caregiving is always an act of love and reframed care work as a form of exploitation. Feminist economists have continued writing about the issue, but it is complex in Latin America, given that our societies include many Indigenous nations with diverse lifeways, each with distinct forms of economic organization and modes of community cooperation. 

While it is true that we must undo the traditional sexual division of labor, this outlook doesn’t cut the same way across all contexts. In Indigenous communities, both men and women carry out care and support work as part of community life, as in the case of the tequio or faena [modes of collective work]. Both participate in collaborative undertakings that are typical of Indigenous social organization, which is not to deny the presence of machismo and imposed gender roles.

While some tasks are divided along gender lines, others are shared. There are also cases in which women learn to work the fields and, if there are no sisters, cases in which men learn to cook. These things are not necessarily common, but they are not particularly rare either. 

There is also the figure of the younger brother, the xocoyote, who takes over caretaking tasks from his parents because he will one day inherit their property, or that of muxes [in Zapotec language, people who are assigned male at birth but who identify as women or as gender fluid] who assume caregiving tasks. In addition, many Indigenous women learn caregiving activities related to medicine and traditional cooking, which are widely respected. 

Communities also provide care by managing cemeteries, churches, schools, and waterways. Indigenous communities commonly care for territory collectively. However, the legislative proposals draw on the International Labor Organization’s Convention 156 on workers with family responsibilities, which does not address this form of caregiving. This convention recognizes caregiving in the workplace and unpaid domestic and care work, but fails to recognize the collective modes of care that are typical among Indigenous communities. 

From the perspective of Indigenous peoples, territory deserves care, and providing it is part of collective and individual life. This reality is disregarded due to  exclusion and legislative racism that fails to look beyond European ways of life. Advocates for the creation of a National Caregiving System in Mexico have called for broad participation in the creation of public policies. They must create consultative mechanisms that allow communities to be heard from the first moment that laws are written.

The acknowledgement that care is a human right and that care work merits regulation is a step forward in a struggle shared by all women. It is a step toward the respect for and guarantee of women's rights. But without an anti-racist and intercultural appreciation of the diverse ways of understanding and practicing care, the imposition of regulations could create an extra burden and be a colonial act.

The challenge is to craft legislation that does not undo or invalidate communal forms of care. Caregiving takes place in the public and private spheres, but also in a communal context. For Indigenous communities, this begins with the act of caring for their territories, identities and ways of life.