Teenage pregnancy and neoliberal subjectivity in Mexican television series La Rosa de Guadalupe

This article examines teenage pregnancy narratives in Televisa's La Rosa de Guadalupe, Mexico's most-watched television programme. Adolescent pregnancy in Mexico is considered a pressing social and political challenge, cutting across broader efforts by the state to regulate population growth and lower maternal morbidity during the second half of the twentieth century. The series models personal sexual responsibility and ‘good’ motherhood yet simultaneously confirms the Virgen de Guadalupe as intercessor in complex social issues in Mexico. Didacticism towards responsibilisation confirms modern, neoliberal subjectivity, but obscures the socio-economic conditions within which those complex social issues are embedded – conditions themselves shaped by neoliberal policy.