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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|95 pages
Liberalism, the Idea of Race, and Neoliberalism
chapter 2|22 pages
“São Paulo is Modernity”
chapter 4|16 pages
The Ordeal of Decency
chapter 6|18 pages
Escaping the Carimbas
part II|88 pages
Labor, Consumption, and Political Disparities
chapter 7|16 pages
Sales Knowledge, Labor Mobility, and Working-Class Identity
chapter 8|16 pages
The Cost of Love
chapter 11|16 pages
“Cheerful, Attentive, and Polite”
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
chapter 13|18 pages
“Tigers, Cholo-Jacobins, and Red Government Officials”
chapter 14|17 pages
Towards a New Cultural Sociology of the Latin American Middle Class
chapter 15|21 pages
Silences, Confessions, and Taboos
chapter 16|24 pages
“Young People Committed to the Motherland”
part IV|144 pages
Social Mobility, Neoliberal Discourses, and the “Pink Tide”