Waking from the Dream: Mexico Middle Class after 1968 by Louise E. Walker (review)

Until recently, historians treated the middle class as a self-evident reality, an inevitable consequence of the modernization process that manifested the same characteristics, values, practices, and meanings in all time periods and geographic locations. As a result, historical research on Latin American societies has conceptualized political, cultural, and social relations in terms of polar opposites: workers and employers, elites and masses, subalterns and elites. This book, as part of a recent growing body of scholarship on this topic, challenges this shared assumption by historicizing the making of the middle classes in Mexico City after 1968.

Louise Walker presents an evocative and highly informative study of the middle classes during several decades of economic and political crisis and upheaval in Mexico. And although scholars continue to discuss whether PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) ruled through stability and/or violence, what she is after is a history of the belief in, and not the accuracy of, the so-called economic miracle closely associated with the middle classes. She thus describes how a mid-century pact emerged through which the middle classes, as representation of modern and developed Mexico, helped shaped a certain perceived political stability and economic legitimacy for PRI rule. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, this perceived stability began to vanish precisely because the so-called economic miracle became a nightmare for most members of the middle classes. The author shows how “the most consequential struggles over the future of the PRI system took place among the middle classes.” (p. 2) And in order to understand this crucial participation, she proposes to analyze “the leftist students who took to the streets to protest the authoritarianism of the PRI…alongside conservative housewives enraged at the rising cost of living, alienated engineers suffering ennui, consumers falling into debt to support their lifestyle, yuppies who believed the world was their oyster, and angry homeowners struggling to defended their privileged access to housing.” (p. 2) As a result, we see how these middle classes shaped the PRI crisis, the end of the perceived miracle as well as how the PRI and the middle classes “negotiated” the historical transition from a state-led development to a neoliberal and market-driven society.

Methodologically, Walker defines the middle classes as a set of material conditions, a state of mind, and a political discourse. And, like most studies on the topic, the author relies on E.P Thompson to understand the formation of the middle class as a process of endless remaking of class identities and boundaries. She focuses on how individuals and groups struggled to “erect, maintain, break down, cross over, or ensconce themselves within class boundaries.” (p. 4) But perhaps the most important research innovation in this book is what we might call a cultural history of political economy. After at least two decades of cultural history, Walker proposes a timely research agenda. But she is not interested in returning to a traditional economic history but rather an integration of a history of structural economic changes with the very cultural repercussions of those economic changes in everyday lives. She thus argues that economic crises are simultaneously cultural and political crises. And, given the “precariousness” of middle class privilege the very economic instability proved to be particularly threatening for the middle class and their search to maintain and reconfigure class boundaries.

The book is divided into three main parts, and each part is composed of two chapters. The first part, Upheavals, focuses on the political formation of the middle class and describes the discontent with the PRI rule—from politically moderate students to radical urban guerrillas to the conservative middle classes worried about their economic situation. The second part, the Debt Economy, discusses the short oil boom from 1977 to 1981 and examines how that boom was accompanied by a political discourse centered on the economic hopes in the formation of a middle class. This part also studies the effects of inflation and...