An initial comparison of some educational and labor characteristics of our sample of youths with youths in the same age range both at a national level and in only rural areas, shows that this group of PROSPERA beneficiaries have disadvantageous conditions: they had lower levels of school attendance, number of years of schooling, labor income, occupational status and access to health services. When contrasting the characteristics of the different subgroups of interest, it showed that women have more schooling and occupations with higher status, but lower labor income and less access to health services, which is consistent with the gender inequalities that have been extensively documented before. It should be emphasized that indigenous people, in comparison to non-indigenous, have lower labor remunerations and less access to health services, which may be associated not only with ethnic discrimination, but also to the fact that their residences are, in greater proportion, in localities with very high marginalization. Migrants, in contrast with non-migrants, have more schooling, occupations with higher status, a higher labor income and greater access to health services. This may be associated with the change in context of labor insertion, since youths who migrate from their place of origin now reside in predominantly urban localities (half of them are in metropolitan areas), with lower levels of marginalization than their localities of origin.

An analysis of intergenerational mobility emphasizes the strength and pattern of association between the origins and destinations of individuals. The people in our study’s sample, as beneficiaries of PROSPERA, come from disadvantaged social origins. In the area of occupation, this is reflected in a higher proportion of youths (7 out of 10 cases) with an occupational origin within the agricultural stratum, which is the bottom step of our proposed stratification. A movement towards occupational strata of higher hierarchy entails the access by individuals to better life opportunities.

From their position of origin, half of the studied youths experienced absolute upward mobility, while one-quarter inherited their provider’s occupation and the rest moved downward to a stratum of lesser hierarchy. Although upward mobility rates have a more significant magnitude, we also saw that the probability of having a destination at the bottom of the stratification is very high for youths of all origin strata, while the probability of having a destination at the top was low, except for those whose origin are already located there. The relative mobility analysis provided additional evidence in this regard, since it showed that the association between the youths’ occupational origin and destination, once the structural changes are controlled for, is mainly determined by intergenerational inheritance, which is stronger at both extremes of the occupational stratification. That is, those who stem from the highest and lowest strata have a high probability of remaining where they begin. The barrier in long-distance occupational upward mobility for those who have their origin in the agricultural stratum is added to this, which increases the difficulty for upward social mobility of youths with more disadvantaged origins.

When observing the behavior of the absolute mobility among the analyzed subgroups, the differences by sex and, even more, by migratory status are emphasized. Women and migrants experience higher upward mobility rates, in contrast to a greater immobility by men and nonmigrants, respectively. This is also reflected on the fact that women and migrants are less likely 52