“Mothers are our safe haven”: gender, poverty and moralities in social accompanying policies in Uruguay

Abstract

This article discusses the main developments and dilemmas involved in accompaniment programmes for families living in extreme poverty in rural and semi-rural areas of Uruguay. Accompaniment is a mechanism used by various social programmes run by the Ministry of Social Development, based on the premise of intervening in vulnerable families through close relationships, with the dual objective of integrating them into the social protection system and strengthening their family capacities. The research is based on ethnography conducted between 2019 and 2020 as part of my doctoral thesis, in which I followed the daily life of a technical team from the Family Approach Programme - Cercanías, in different localities in the department of Horneros. Within this framework, I explored the moral economies and gender and family imaginaries that permeate and underlie state interventions on poverty. In this sense, I analysed how, in everyday life, accompaniment operates on strong dichotomies and paradoxes, which oscillate between helping and restoring social rights, while revealing forms of control and guardianship over the vulnerable population, anchored, in turn, in the presumption that poor people are not fully capable of conducting themselves. In this article, I am primarily interested in discussing the imaginaries that fall upon poor families as subjects of state intervention, the formulas projected as ways out of poverty, and how these government strategies operate particularly on women, as poor mothers, by reproducing and reactivating hegemonic notions of motherhood and care.