Actually existing cooperatives: Four decades of work and reciprocity in a Mexico City’s popular neighborhood

Abstract

This article studies an actually existing cooperative without making a judgment about its advantages or limitations vis-à-vis ideal models. Based on ethnographic field work, the paper analyzes the experiences of TUYO (United and Organized Workers), a production cooperative founded in 1976 in a popular neighborhood in Mexico City. Three different approaches on cooperatives are reviewed (business-centered, cooperative-centered, and socialist), emphasizing how they paid more attention to ideal models and normative analysis and neglected the actual features of cooperatives. At this point, a switch from the debate on models to the study of cooperatives’ practices and processes is proposed. The history of TUYO is examined, from the early days during the seventies as a politically involved cooperative to its transformation into a small family company in recent years. This evolution reflects the tensions, contradictions and dilemmas faced by many cooperatives: First, the relationship between the cooperative’s political and social goals on the one hand and its economic goals on the other. Second, the adaptation to the prevailing conditions in the capitalist market. And finally, the relationship between individual and group imperatives. The experience of TUYO shows that, in practice, real existing cooperatives display and combine diverse characteristics of the different ideal models on the basis of which they are usually analyzed.

Keywords: cooperatives, economic anthropology, alternative economies, embeddedness, organizational ethnography.