We explain three methods for showing that the $p$-adic monodromy of a modular family of abelian varieties is ‘as large as possible', and illustrate them in the case of the ordinary locus of the moduli space of $g$-dimensional principally polarized abelian varieties over a field of characteristic $p$. The first method originated from Ribet's proof of the irreducibility of the Igusa tower for Hilbert modular varieties. The second and third methods both exploit Hecke correspondences near a hypersymmetric point, but in slightly different ways. The third method was inspired by work of Hida, plus a group theoretic argument for the maximality of $\ell$-adic monodromy with $\ell\neq p$.

Let $G$ be an inner anisotropic form of an unitary group of 3 variables over Q, such that $G_R≃U(2,1)$, and π be an automorphic representation of G(A) whose archimedean component π∞ is a degenerate limit of discrete series; such a π never occurs in the cohomology (coherent or étale) of a Shimura variety. We show that however it does ‘appear’ in the coherent cohomology of some line bundle over an associated Griffiths-Schmid variety. Moreover we study cup products between such cohomology classes and some other automorphic cohomology classes and we prove some non-vanishing results.