Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 by Louise Walker (review)

Tlatelolco hangs as a powerful specter over the latter decades of Mexico’s twentieth century. As a moment in which the weaknesses of the perfect dictatorship came fully into view (not the first moment, but a moment with global repercussions), it has long provided an easy starting point for the democratic transformations of later years. More than this, because many of the politicians of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) who came to prominence in the late 1980s and 1990s had ties to the 1960s student movement, Tlatelolco has tended to offer a narrative of democratization in which a left-leaning youth movement ultimately made a democratic Mexico. It is a romantic story, and as Louise Walker’s monograph suggests, one that needs careful reconsideration. In turning her gaze to the Mexican middle classes during the late 1960s and subsequent decades, she offers us a much more ambiguous story of democratization, and one which perhaps helps us to understand why the right benefited so much from the democratic opening.

The middle classes have recently become the subject of a growing body of scholarship on Latin America, including work by A. Ricardo López, Barbara Weinstein, and Brian Owensby. These works are part of an effort to provide us with a more substantive approach to the political and social phenomena that characterized both the Cold War and subsequent democratization. Moving away from the Manichean narrative of Left versus Right, we are instead confronted by the social sectors who largely benefited from ISI (import-substitution industrialization) and expanded opportunities within state bureaucracies, but who faced uncertain futures in the economic and political crises of the 1970s and 1980s. Their responses were far from uniform: some found that market economies provided the only viable means of securing a future within increasingly precarious social classes, while others held onto the vestiges of corporate privilege. The middle classes thus were both privileged and deeply vulnerable actors in a series of transformations over which they had little control.

Walker’s narrative is rooted in part around questions of why in 1968 members of the middle classes rose in opposition to the regime as their fortunes dwindled, while in 1982 they remained largely complacent. She offers both unsurprising and novel answers. The bourgeois quality of 1970s guerilla movements is well known, but her analysis of the emergence of a materialist-individualist middle class and the decline of a bureaucratic middle class represents a significant intervention. We see the impact of inflation on the middle classes, especially after the first peso devaluation in 1976, and their anxieties over a series of threats to their ability to consume: growing personal debt, insecurity, and a state that seemed increasingly corrupt and unable to or disinterested in defending their material interests. Walker finds novel ways to document these trends, working with traditional sources, literary texts, and the voluminous records produced by the state-sponsored spies who eavesdropped on buses, in the street, and in cafes. We are left with an impression of the middle classes as both objects of derision—for having somehow betrayed the social and cultural values of the Revolution—and as critical actors in the changes that shaped Mexico’s post-1968 history.

Waking from the Dream is perhaps a little too focused on Mexico City, giving an impression of the middle classes that might be quite different from a text that focused on places like Monterrey or Oaxaca City. Also, it could perhaps use some greater consideration of the links between the middle classes and the rise of the PAN after 1982. However, both these absences really speak to the need for further research in this field rather than to shortcomings in this excellent study. Walker’s work should point the way for a great deal of research in the years to come.