ABSTRACT

As a collective effort, this volume locates the formation of the middle classes at the core of the histories of Latin America in the last two centuries. Featuring scholars from different places across the Americas, it is an interdisciplinary contribution to the world histories of the middle classes, histories of Latin America, and intersectional studies. It also engages a larger audience about the importance of the middle classes to understand modernity, democracy, neoliberalism, and decoloniality. By including research produced from a variety of Latin American, North American, and other audiences, the volume incorporates trends in social history, cultural studies and discursive theory. It situates analytical categories of race and gender at the core of class formation. This volume seeks to initiate a critical and global conversation concerning the ways in which the analysis of the middle classes provides crucial re-readings of how Latin America, as a region, has historically been understood.

chapter |6 pages

Foreword

chapter 1|16 pages

Introduction

“For the First Time Ever”*

part I|95 pages

Liberalism, the Idea of Race, and Neoliberalism

chapter 2|22 pages

“São Paulo is Modernity”

Middle-Class Identity and Narratives of Exceptionalism in Brazil

chapter 4|16 pages

The Ordeal of Decency

A Perspective on Mexico City's Urban Space and Middle Classes (1952–1966)1

chapter 6|18 pages

Escaping the Carimbas

An Intersectional Analysis of “Black” Middle-Class Trajectories in Colombia1

part II|88 pages

Labor, Consumption, and Political Disparities

chapter 7|16 pages

Sales Knowledge, Labor Mobility, and Working-Class Identity

Store Clerks (Argentina, 1900–1940)1

chapter 8|16 pages

The Cost of Love

Middle Classes, Consumption, and Sentimentalism in Mexico (1880–1920)

chapter 11|16 pages

“Cheerful, Attentive, and Polite”

Store Clerks and the Middle Class in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City1

part III|102 pages

The State, Social Movements, and the Cold War

chapter 12|18 pages

The Middle Classes and Anti-Communism During the Cárdenas Presidency in Mexico

Nationalist Dynamics in a Transnational Framework

chapter 13|18 pages

“Tigers, Cholo-Jacobins, and Red Government Officials”

Roles and Discourses of the Radical Middle Class in Ecuador between 1895 and 1938

chapter 14|17 pages

Towards a New Cultural Sociology of the Latin American Middle Class

Ecuador's Middle-Class Revolution as a Collective Representation

chapter 15|21 pages

Silences, Confessions, and Taboos

The Petite Bourgeoisie's Dissident Memories of Political Radicalization in Bogotá

chapter 16|24 pages

“Young People Committed to the Motherland”

Middle-Class Masculinity, Radicalization, and the Fragmentation of the “Integral Chileans” in the 1970s*

part IV|144 pages

Social Mobility, Neoliberal Discourses, and the “Pink Tide”

chapter 17|18 pages

A “Middle-Class Country”

Social Mobility, Progress, and Genealogical Origins in the Public Discourse in Argentina (2002–2015)

chapter 18|19 pages

Middle-Class Sensorial

Conceptualizing the Experience of Inhabiting “the Middle” in Brazil's Post-Neoliberal Public Housing

chapter 19|18 pages

Residential Practices of Three Generations of a Middle-Class Family

Mortgages, Honor, and Inequalities in Mexico City

chapter 20|16 pages

Class Transvestism in Chile

When the Poor Became Middle Class

chapter 21|21 pages

Taxonomy, Identity, Mode of Being, or Political Project?

Epistemologies of “Middle Class” in Latin America Since 1948

chapter 23|20 pages

Equality or Hierarchy? Solidarity with Those Above or Below?

Dilemmas of Gendered Self-Identification in a New Bolivian Middle Class

chapter |11 pages

Epilogue “Was It Worth Coming?”

The Global Drama of Middle-Class Lives in Latin America