Description
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
Foreword
Gilbert M. Joseph
1. Introduction: "For the First Time Ever"
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
Part I: Liberalism, the Idea of Race, and Neoliberalism
Introduction to Part I
Claudia Stern
2. "São Paulo is Modernity": Middle-Class Identity and Narratives of Exceptionalism in Brazil
Barbara Weinstein
3. Uneven Development and the Concept of the Middle Class: Costa Rica, 1890–1950
George I. García-Quesada
4. The Ordeal of Decency: A Perspective on Mexico City’s Urban Space and Middle Classes (1952–1966)
Sara Minerva Luna Elizarrarás
5. Gender, Race, and the Evolution of Middle-class Identity in the Mexico City Press, 1820-1900
Susie S. Porter
6. Escaping the Carimbas: An Intersectional Analysis of "Black" Middle-Class Trajectories in Colombia
Mara Viveros-Vigoya
Part II: Labor, Consumption, and Political Disparities
Introduction to Part II
Claudia Stern
7. Sales Knowledge, Labor Mobility, and Working-Class Identity: Store Clerks (Argentina, 1900–1940)
Graciela Queirolo
8. The Cost of Love: Middle Classes, Consumption, and Sentimentalism in Mexico (1880–1920)
María Graciela León Matamoros
9. Tango, Morality, and Nostalgia in the Making of a Middle-Class Subjectivity in Argentina
Enrique Garguin
10. Public-Sector Employment, the Middle Classes, and Social Position in Mexico City in the Early 1900s
Mario Barbosa Cruz
11. "Cheerful, Attentive, and Polite": Store Clerks and the Middle Class in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City
Cristina Sánchez Parra
Part III: The State, Social Movements, and the Cold War
Introduction to Part III
Mario Barbosa Cruz
12. The Middle Classes and Anti-Communism During the Cárdenas Presidency in Mexico: Nationalist Dynamics in a Transnational Framework
Sebastián Rivera Mir
13. "Tigers, Cholo-Jacobins, and Red Government Officials": Roles and Discourses of the Radical Middle Class in Ecuador Between 1895 and 1938
Valeria Coronel
14. Towards a New Cultural Sociology of the Latin American Middle Class: Ecuador’s Middle-Class Revolution as a Collective Representation
Celso M. Villegas
15. Silences, Confessions, and Taboos: Petit Bourgeoise’s Dissident Memories of Political Radicalization in Bogotá
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
16. "Young People Committed to the Motherland": Middle Class Masculinity, Radicalization, and the Fragmentation of the "Integral Chileans" in the 1970s
Claudia Stern
Part IV: Social Mobility, Neoliberal Discourses, and the "Pink Tide"
Introduction to Part IV
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
17. A "Middle-Class Country": Social Mobility, Progress, and Genealogical Origins in the Public Discourse in Argentina (2002–2015)
Sergio E. Visacovsky
18. Middle-Class Sensorial: Conceptualizing the Experience of Inhabiting "the Middle" in Brazil’s Post-Neoliberal Public Housing
Moisés Kopper
19. Residential Practices of Three Generations of a Middle-Class Family: Mortgages, Honor, and Inequalities in Mexico City
Claudia Zamorano
20. Class Transvestism in Chile: When the Poor Became Middle Class
Azun Candina Polomer
21. Taxonomy, Identity, Mode of Being, or Political Project?: Epistemologies of "Middle Class" in Latin America Since 1948
David S. Parker
22. From White-Collar Employment to Managerial Influence Among the Middle Class in Early-Twenty-First Century Mexico City
Terioska Gámez
23. Equality or Hierarchy? Solidarity with Those Above or Below?: Dilemmas of Gendered Self- Identification in a New Bolivian Middle Class
Miriam Shakow
Epilogue: "Was It Worth Coming?": The Global Drama of Middle-Class Lives in Latin America
Brian Owensby
