About the Book
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, 1. Introduction: "For the First Time Ever", Part I: Liberalism, the Idea of Race, and Neoliberalism, Introduction to Part I, 2. "São Paulo is Modernity": Middle-Class Identity and Narratives of Exceptionalism in Brazil, 3. Uneven Development and the Concept of the Middle Class: Costa Rica, 1890–1950, 4. The Ordeal of Decency: A Perspective on Mexico City’s Urban Space and Middle Classes (1952–1966), 5. Gender, Race, and the Evolution of Middle-class Identity in the Mexico City Press, 1820-1900, 6. Escaping the Carimbas: An Intersectional Analysis of "Black" Middle-Class Trajectories in Colombia, Part II: Labor, Consumption, and Political Disparities, Introduction to Part II, 7. Sales Knowledge, Labor Mobility, and Working-Class Identity: Store Clerks (Argentina, 1900–1940), 8. The Cost of Love: Middle Classes, Consumption, and Sentimentalism in Mexico (1880–1920), 9. Tango, Morality, and Nostalgia in the Making of a Middle-Class Subjectivity in Argentina, 10. Public-Sector Employment, the Middle Classes, and Social Position in Mexico City in the Early 1900s, 11. "Cheerful, Attentive, and Polite": Store Clerks and the Middle Class in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City, Part III: The State, Social Movements, and the Cold War, Introduction to Part III, 12. The Middle Classes and Anti-Communism During the Cárdenas Presidency in Mexico: Nationalist Dynamics in a Transnational Framework, 13. "Tigers, Cholo-Jacobins, and Red Government Officials": Roles and Discourses of the Radical Middle Class in Ecuador Between 1895 and 1938, 14. Towards a New Cultural Sociology of the Latin American Middle Class: Ecuador’s Middle-Class Revolution as a Collective Representation, 15. Silences, Confessions, and Taboos: Petit Bourgeoise’s Dissident Memories of Political Radicalization in Bogotá, 16. "Young People Committed to the Motherland": Middle Class Masculinity, Radicalization, and the Fragmentation of the "Integral Chileans" in the 1970s, Part IV: Social Mobility, Neoliberal Discourses, and the "Pink Tide", Introduction to Part IV, 17. A "Middle-Class Country": Social Mobility, Progress, and Genealogical Origins in the Public Discourse in Argentina (2002–2015), 18. Middle-Class Sensorial: Conceptualizing the Experience of Inhabiting "the Middle" in Brazil’s Post-Neoliberal Public Housing, 19. Residential Practices of Three Generations of a Middle-Class Family: Mortgages, Honor, and Inequalities in Mexico City, 20. Class Transvestism in Chile: When the Poor Became Middle Class, 21. Taxonomy, Identity, Mode of Being, or Political Project?: Epistemologies of "Middle Class" in Latin America Since 1948, 22. From White-Collar Employment to Managerial Influence Among the Middle Class in Early-Twenty-First Century Mexico City, 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
About the Author :
Mario Barbosa Cruz is Professor in the Humanities Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros is Professor of History at Western Washington University
Claudia Stern is Research Associate at The Latin American Centre for the History of Housing CEIHVAL and lecturer at the MEUVAL at the Architecture, Design and Urban Studies Faculty at Universidad de Buenos Aires, FADU-UBA.
