Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico(Global and Comparative Ethnography)

While most research on inequality focuses on impoverished communities, it often ignores how powerful communities and elites monopolize resources at the top of the social hierarchy. In Privilege at Play, Hugo Ceron-Anaya offers an intersectional analysis of Mexican elites to examine the ways affluent groups perpetuate dynamics of domination and subordination. Using ethnographic research conducted inside three exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Ceron-Anaya focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege in contemporary Mexico. His detailed analysis of social life and the organization of physical space further considers how the legacy of imperialism continues to determine practices of exclusion and how social hierarchies are subtlety reproduced through distinctions such as fashion and humor, in addition to the traditional indicators of wealth and class. Adding another dimension to the complex nature of social exclusion, Privilege at Play shows how elite social relations and spaces allow for the resource hoarding and monopolization that helps create and maintain poverty.

About the Author :
Hugo Cerón-Anaya is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University. His work focuses on social hierarchies, inequalities, and privilege, examining how class, race, and gender inform the behavior and perceptions of affluent people. He is particularly interested in the wide array of ordinary and everyday practices that reproduce privilege.

Review :
The central paradox of the book is the contrast between the invisibility of privilege to most city dwellers and the hypervisibility of privilege to those engaged in numerous struggles over who gets to play when and with whom inside. Drawing on 58 interviews and ethnographic observations of golf clubs, tournaments, shooting ranges, nd upper-class homes, this book makes a unique contribution to the study of the upper class by providing a nuanced example of the inequalities structuring the spaces and practices through which the privileged monopolize resources at the top of the social structure. I found Privilege at Play an enjoyable and informative read. ..I closed this book a satisfied and better educated general reader Opening the gates to the hidden world of golf clubs in Mexico, Hugo Cerón-Anaya expands our understanding of elites and inequality by shedding light on the hidden interrelationship of race, class, and gender in privileged spaces." -Shamus Khan, Chair and Professor of Sociology, Columbia University This fascinating, insightful, and compelling book on the Mexican ruling class at play starts with the invisibility of elite golf clubs to the ordinary people who walk by them every day and then proceeds through revealing interviews and astute observations to show the importance of social clubs in creating the shared world view and social cohesion that helps the wealthy golfers to cement their grip on power." -G. William Domhoff, author of The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century: How They Won, Why Labor and Liberals Lost Hugo Ceron-Anaya makes an important contribution to studies of upper class sociability and leisure, using his well-informed ethnography to illuminate the reproduction of class, gender, and racial inequalities in the golf clubs of Mexico City. Inspired by Bourdieu and using a rich ethnography, he shows that the golf clubs