In Santa Cruz, Etla, in Oaxaca, a group of 20 women asks Compartamos Banco for a single loan of about 400,000 pesos and divides it among its members. The loan is sin garantía, without collateral.
In return, Expansión reported in 2023, the group commits to pay every week, and “si alguien se atrasa: todos pagan esa deuda” (if someone falls behind, everyone pays that debt).
In 2024, a study by the Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter in Mexico looked at how Mexican families build their homes. According to El Imparcial, 42.9 percent of those planning to build trust a bricklayer most with the work, or consult one. 38.1 percent prefer an architect or an engineer.
The same study found that “el 78.7% de los albañiles consiguen empleo a través de recomendaciones de personas para quienes han trabajado anteriormente” (78.7 percent of bricklayers find work through recommendations from people they have worked for before).
Mexican credit contracts know the figure of the obligado solidario, the joint obligor. Círculo de Crédito, a Mexican credit bureau, defines this person as someone who “se compromete a cumplir por igual y por la totalidad de las obligaciones del crédito de quien lo solicita” (commits to meet the obligations of the applicant’s loan equally and in full).
Meter las manos al fuego por alguien. “To put one’s hands in the fire for someone.” The phrase means to vouch for a person. A Mexican news site used it in a headline about a politician who would vouch for a colleague.
Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. “Tell me who you go around with, and I will tell you who you are.” The newspaper El Imparcial explains that the saying suggests that “las personas pueden ser juzgadas por quienes frecuentan” (people can be judged by the company they keep).
To rent a home in Mexico City, a tenant is traditionally asked for an aval, a guarantor who owns property in the city or its metropolitan area and puts up the deeds. The custom is a rule of the market, not of the law. Landlords prefer a guarantor whose property is free of liens.
A tenant who has no such person can buy a póliza jurídica, a legal policy, for 30 to 50 percent of one month’s rent. In 2025, the magazine Expansión reported that a guarantor with property was increasingly hard to find.