Table of Contents

Introduction: The Making and Endless Remaking of the Middle Class
David S. Parker
Part 1: The Debates, 1947-1968
Chapter 1: Middle Groups in National Politics in Latin America
John J. Johnson
Chapter 2: Aspects of Class Relations in Chile, 1850-1960
Frederick B. Pike
Chapter 3: Community Pillars: The Middle Class
Andrew H. Whiteford
Chapter 4: The Budget
Mario Benedetti
Chapter 5: Middle-Class Rebels
Francisco López Cámara
Chapter 6: The Dilemma of the Latin American Middle Class
Charles Wagley
Part 2: New Histories
Chapter 7: Moralizing the Masses
William E. French
Chapter 8: White-Collar Lima, 1910-1929: Commercial Employees and the Rise of the Peruvian Middle Class
David S. Parker
Chapter 9: Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1930s and 1940s
Brian P. Owensby
Chapter 10: “It Is Not Something You Can Be or Come to Be Overnight”: Empleados, Mujeres de Oficina, and Gendered Middle Class Identities in Bogotá, Colombia, 1930-55
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
Chapter 11: Rethinking Aspects of Class Relations in Twentieth-Century Chile
J. Pablo Silva
Chapter 12: We Were the Middle Class
Rodolfo Barros

About the Author

David S. Parker is associate professor of history and former Chair of the History Department at Queen’s University, Canada. He is author of The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900-1950 (1998), and articles or book chapters on topics ranging from public health reform to images of social climbers in Chilean fiction to dueling among journalists and politicians in Uruguay.

Louise E. Walker is assistant professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (2012). She is currently coediting a special dossier on Mexico’s recently declassified secret police archive for the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (2013, with Tanalís Padilla). Her research projects also include the history of conspiracy theories.

Reviews

This book brings together foundational essays and cutting-edge pieces to map out ways to understand the role of middle classes across Latin America. It is an excellent collection and will surely inform our efforts to understand the social history of the region in the twentieth century. Long forgotten by Latin American historians, the middle classes will no longer be an afterthought.
*Jeremy I. Adelman, Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture, Princeton University*

This important, provocative volume powerfully illuminates how the middle class in Latin America emerged and advanced its own class project. This volume offers valuable readings from now classic theorists and contemporary historians on an important but poorly understood social group and category: the middle class in Latin America. Informed by social class theories, the mid-20th century works in the first half of the volume address whether the middle class constituted a unified class, complete with 'class consciousness' and aims. They variously predict the middle class could be a force for progressive political economic change in solidarity with the working class or a dependent appendage of the upper class. New cultural historians featured in the second half of the volume shrug off the theoretical frame of the earlier generation, engaging instead in a close investigation of practices and discourses of self-definition among emerging middle classes. The result is fascinating, compelling material on how middle class Latin Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries carved out a distinct social, economic and political position.

Readers will learn how moral reformists in Mexico demarcated social and spatial boundaries separating a self-assigned respectable middle class from a vice-ridden working class; how white collar, salaried workers in Colombia represented their class and gender as if essentially different in quality and character from manual laborers; and how salaried workers in Peru and Chile successfully obtained employment privileges in part through claims that higher incomes, accompanying consumption and job stability were basic necessities required for middle classes (but not manual workers). Readers will find the middle class taking divergent political stances: retiring to the domestic sphere in mid-20th century Brazil, and protesting in the streets and taking legal action against government mismanagement of the economy in 21st century Argentina. Collectively, the works also reveal that middle class claims to the social hierarchy are importantly based on assertions of superior education and 'culture'—with or without occupational or material supports. The work provides an invaluable resource for social scientists and an excellent model and stimulus for future research into middle classes in Latin America and globally.
*Maureen O'Dougherty, University of Minnesota*