Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico

Abstract

Sociological studies stress how state legibility serves as a form of control. Often overlooked is how states differ in their will to control and how this difference shapes legibility projects. To account for this variation, this article proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework to study legibility from a comparative perspective, illustrating it with an in-depth analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor families visible to implement conditional cash transfer programs. Drawing on content analysis of official documents, 100 in-depth interviews with political and bureaucratic elites, and 18 months of fieldwork, the article reveals the political and governance effects of distinct strategies of making poor families visible in the two countries. Specifically, it shows that the differences and consequences of legibility projects depended on the politics of legitimation of each conditional cash transfer program and had the unanticipated effect of making the state itself visible to broader publics and thus subject to intense scrutiny.