For my LiA this summer, I worked with the Mexico City non-governmental organization Genera Territorios to construct an inclusive financial literacy curriculum for rural women in communities on the periphery of Mexico City (e.g., Iztapalapa) and in the state of Mexico (Amatlán, Ecatzingo). Access to financial information and control over earnings are often very limited for women in these communities, due to patriarchal cultural patterns and barriers to accessing mainstream lending institutions. Additionally, demographic changes due to migration have resulted in cumulative barriers that leave women working large amounts of land they cannot claim ownership of effectively, part of a broad trend towards the demographic feminization of agriculture in the rural peripheries of developing states despite male-favoring land laws persisting (Radel, Schmook, et al., 2012). Literacy is often low in these regions, and our partners at GT informed us that internet access was present, though sporadic, so the curriculum would need to be available for use offline, such as via a one-time download. After meeting local community members to receive their feedback on our prototype curriculum, what we ultimately built was a chatbot named Izcalli after a month on the Aztec calendar (calli, also, means house in Nahuatl). We built Izcalli using a software called VoiceFlow (to run on WhatsApp) and coded a mostly deterministic, but highly personalizable, decision tree for interactions to allow her to deliver tailored advice and incorporate cultural context, without feeding client information into uncontrollable artificial intelligences.

While I am still in contact with Genera Territorios as an independent volunteer, to continue work on the details of implementing the technology in response to supplemental feedback from their organization, I think I can speak tentatively to the SDGs that the project will target. What we built will ideally tackle SDG1 and SDG5 directly and in complementarity to one another, helping women’s enterprises reach wider markets and increase women’s domestic bargaining power and independence from dominant male figures in their communities (Asadullah and Kambhampati, 2021). SDG12 and SDG15 will hopefully be impacted, since many of Genera Territorios’s partners work in sustainable agriculture and small-scale beekeeping and will use our curriculum to help broaden and translate business models that are non-profit-maximizing and protect local ecosystems to new conditions. By increasing income for rural women without undermining the independence or non-market logic of local cooperative food production, as a solely corporate-oriented financial literacy curriculum often risks, we should be able to target SDG2 and SDG3 by proxy. Our project’s relationship to SDG8 is complex—while, on the one hand, the information Izcalli provides about local, non-predatory lending options may help many women secure gainful employment independent of their immediate agricultural responsibilities (and we hope it will), our approach has generally been growth-agnostic as far as GDP is concerned, and committed to preserving ecosystems, locality and decentralization, and autonomy over working conditions and from patriarchal violence as not only moral constraints but the principal ends of our mission. GDP metrics generally fail to capture non-market care work, are (quite reasonably) not designed to factor in supply chain length or inter-class bargaining power, and usually lack mechanics to place intrinsic value on biodiversity, resilience against erosion, and other environmental issues that impact human flourishing profoundly but are unlikely to be transparently reflected in pricing or income. In this regard, my team are unsure if our project will increase economic growth in the State of Mexico or not, and largely indifferent to that outcome.

The 6-week journey to building the chatbot was an immense and overwhelming learning experience on interpersonal, cultural, and technical levels. My cohort were lovely, supportive people, and I’ve made many friends I regularly keep in touch with. However, from the moment our unmarked van pulled up outside Triver Coliving, when I discovered my delivery driver absconded with my gluten free pizza, finding adequate food was a persistent challenge. This was not unexpected, as I struggle with eosinophilic esophagitis, an autoimmune condition that profoundly restricts my diet, and due to disordered sensory processing, new and unfamiliar food is generally very overwhelming. I experimented a great deal with new food and was surprisingly successful (I can now eat pozole if I’m ever in Mexico again!), but fitting food in logistically often proved very challenging.

Building a good working relationship with my organizational partners at Genera Territorios was challenging at times, but we were ultimately successful and have a solid basis upon which to collaborate in the future. First, their organizer, Gineth, spoke only Spanish (though she provided a translator and expected to), and our team had varying levels of Spanish fluency, from near-proficient, A-level equivalent knowledge to very little experience. We consistently made an effort and conducted our meetings mostly in Spanish, but I think that stress made it challenging for both sides to feel sure they understood what the others’ expectations or constraints were. Additionally, the GT team were profoundly committed to immersing us in the local context. For our first session, Gineth asked us to close our eyes and visualize ourselves in the shoes of the rural women we were empowering in the valley of the volcano Popocatepetl, as a colleague of hers played traditional local percussion. She stressed that time is perceived differently in the communities of the periphery, due to the repetitive and non-linear nature of agricultural labor and land stewardship, and that a curriculum centered heavily around the linear progression of savings might alienate our local partners. While I valued these insights immensely, these discussions often came at the expense of clarifying expectations about the internet connectivity available in these communities, or accessing the direct testimonies of the people we were serving. At our initial prototyping sessions, we would often build a plan to deliver the curriculum (a WhatsApp community, a video series, an offline app) and discover some aspect of it would not be feasible (‘no va a funcionar,’ en Español) and we would need to start from scratch. Often there seemed to be a great deal of frustration from the GT team, and they were very unwilling to answer direct questions about feasibility or strategy when we posed them as a group. We mostly tried to follow their exact instructions and figure out what they wanted on our own, over time. I personally regret not asking more persistent questions and building a one-on-one relationship at this stage, since I assumed that the difficulties we were having with communication were inherent to the cultural difference and I would simply irritate them more. As I later learned, this was not the case at all. Gineth and I now work together closely, and her advice and instructions are consistently clear, helpful, and top-notch. The difficulty, I figured out, is that a visible demonstration of commitment is very important for her in trusting people. When I took initiative and reached out to her about her last-minute edits for our chatbot at the end of the program, it built a rapport as she saw that I was genuinely invested in the product.

Learning the software to build the chatbot was challenging, but my teammate Liam and I (neither of whom had any real coding experience) collaborated and burned the midnight oil. Within a week, we were experts at using the flow structure, and had completely digitized the curriculum they had given us. When we presented a rough sketch of the curriculum to a local audience in the underinvested borough of Iztapalapa, we received valuable feedback and immense enthusiasm from the audience, some of whom voiced aspirations to use our information to build financial independence from their controlling husbands. However, Gineth had concerns, for cultural reasons I still don’t fully understand, and asked us to start over from scratch a week before the end of the program with coding a new curriculum. Fortunately, the expectations were clearer this time, and Gineth was very responsive to my questions. Liam and I split the work and pushed hard over the weekend to build the new modules she wanted. I couldn’t be more grateful for his help and support and presence throughout all of the adversity and changing expectations. Annie and Eve converted Gineth’s new curriculum into graphics and supplemental materials again, and I don’t think I could have built the app if they hadn’t taken the weight of managing the multiplicity of deliverables off of me and Liam. Thank you so much.

For me personally, figuring out how to code using Voiceflow was a challenge, but not nearly so great as managing team morale and client expectations in an environment with a substantial cultural divide. I am very proud of myself for keeping a level head, validating the frustrations of all parties when I spoke to them, and moving towards fair solutions that did not involve sacrificing anyone’s core interests, but rather built bridges for long-term collaboration. I struggle profoundly with self-loathing and compulsion on a personal level, and I worked hard to separate that from my work as much as possible and avoid being debilitated by guilt over the projects’ challenges, or placing myself in a role of unilateral dominance over the deliverable that would create guilt or resentment in others and fray the relationship between the rest of my team and the organization even further. (In fairness, my extremely hardworking and caring teammates deserve a great deal of credit for this, too. Adore you guys.)

This was greatly beneficial to me on a personal level too. Discovering that I was capable of success despite adversity, that people would care for me despite my burdensome esophagus, helped me overcome the existential guilt that often paralyzes me. I often panic a great deal about my exploitative role within a patriarchal society, and greatly appreciated how many young women my age felt comfortable challenging me as equals professionally and personally, and actively sought my support as friends and peers. While I am very comfortable supporting friends and family as they process patriarchal abuses they have faced, I felt more able to do so independently and without fear, and to see how that independence and confidence was itself reassuring and nurturing, this trip than ever before. I had many valuable discussions with friends from a wide variety of backgrounds and viewpoints about key issues including the work of John Locke and Thomas Paine, strategy for reparations for Black communities in the USA, how American democratic socialists should communicate about gender in politics, migration and civil rights in Britain, the proper relationship between theology and transformative justice, and even how GDP should be used in political rhetoric. Thank you to Mila, Blake, Evie, and Spencer especially for the very best political conversations, I’m excited to hear more of your views over the years, even before I’m seeing them published in journals and cited in party manifestos.

Even though my project touched on education a great deal, the authors I read last year were principally concerned with primary and secondary school child development, and the applications to my project weren’t immediately obvious. Nonetheless, I ended up bumping into many of their ideas in odd places in the back of my brain as I worked. For example, Levinas’s concept of subjectification, which is a major influence on the theory of Gert Biesta, repeated in my mind like an eerie ostinato bassline during a dungeon-creeping movie scene this entire time. Levinas’s doctrine states that the ability to assume moral responsibility, or independent personhood, requires a moment of dissolution of previous roles and identities and active engagement with something in the world which is wholly other and beyond your previous cognitive grasp. Gert Biesta applies this to both teacher and pupil and argues that there is an inherent risk in education, because teaching a subject, from calculus to budgeting, to some degree involves giving a student the tools they need to develop their own, externally unmappable system of independent judgement and fluency. The student cannot know this before they build it, and it will always be hidden to the teacher. I thought about this a great deal as I built the chatbot, since the mystery and distance between “teacher” and “student” (though those words feel crass and crude in this context) is so much greater. I cannot know the problem my student is trying to solve. Formal financial institutions, and financial independence, are often inaccessible in many of these communities, so what is being offered may contain wholly unfamiliar elements. Hence, a rigid rubric is inappropriate—we are not even offering a toolkit, we are offering, hopefully, an opportunity to step out of existing roles and reflect on them, choosing what agricultural traditions to preserve and what aspects of precarity or male dominance to reject. Additionally, I thought a great deal about the sociological role-identity theory of delinquency which we studied last year, as I wrestled with communicating with Gineth. Not only do self-perpetuating role expectations impact students, but the roles we assign others can impact our relationships as well, and dissecting what role Gineth was assigning us in her mental script was key to unpacking a new strategy for communicating.

Across the board, this summer was an occasion for immense growth, and I am very proud in retrospect of how I’ve handled it (well… I could have had more groceries delivered from Walmart) and excited to continue working with Genera Territorios and apply these lessons to partnerships with new NGOs and research teams in my professional life. Thank you again to the Laidlaw Foundation for this opportunity, to Saskia Fredericks and Benjamin Margetts for booking my flights, to Kení and Aide for their guidance throughout my time in Mexico, to my group-mates for being the most tenacious partners in crime imaginable, and to Gineth Alvarez and Genera Territorios for guiding us through this project. I am excited to see the next chapter.

Best,

Peter Tarson