"Nineteenth Century Credit Associations and Cooperatives in Mexico: a Case of Misplaced Identity?"

This paper is part of a joint project with Graciela Marquez-Colin (Colegio de Mexico) that reinterprets the financial history of Mexico. The literature on financial development in Latin America posits that one of the main causes of underdevelopment was the lack of popular credit and low household savings rates. Furthermore, Mexico’s modern economic history does not even acknowledge the existence of anything resembling credit unions before the mid-20th century.
And yet we have unearthed a set of records from the Mexican Finance Ministry that show the existence of an employee credit and savings association in the Ministry between 1894 and 1906. The records reveal that an employee savings and credit bank was operational at least 50 years before the current literature claims credit unions designed to aid employees and monetize their salaries existed. In researching the origin of this employee credit union in digitized local newspapers, we also traced the existence of many other smaller credit and savings associations.
Together, these records not only shed light on consumer credit in Mexico during the 19th century, they reveal entrepreneurial activity, household savings and household investments when the literature claims there were none. This project upends many of the assumptions about Mexican household options in the 19th century and reframes the conversation about the causes of Mexican underdevelopment in the 20th Century.
In this paper, I will be placing the Mexican credit associations and cooperatives in the context of their international counterparts to better understand and contextualize the experience of Mexico in the nineteenth century and try to understand why their existence has escaped the historical record until now.