Mexico's Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era (review)

One of the important achievements of this book is the integration of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to study the evolution of the Mexican middle class in the twentieth century. To this end, this study uses several data samples from diverse historical periods as well as individual oral histories based on in-depth interviews and archival research.

In the case of developing countries, and particularly in the case of Mexico, to use quantitative methods is often difficult due to the lack of available—to the public at least—probabilistic samples that allow the researcher to test sociological theories rigorously. In addition, it is often a challenge for sociologists to operationalize the concept of social class, as in the case of the middle class in Mexico, the central topic of this analysis. Dennis Gilbert bases his conceptualization of the middle and popular classes on Max Weber's definition of class as a market situation, emphasizing income and occupation of the individuals and households under study:

I conceive the Mexican middle class as consisting of families headed by individuals with non-routine, non-manual occupations, living on incomes comfortably above the popular average but below the peak of the national pyramid. I particularly have in mind independent and salaried professionals, managers, teachers, technicians, bureaucrats, and merchants (but not low-level office workers or retail clerks), with household incomes at least 50 percent higher than the median household income

(12).

Mexican families below this cut-point are part of the "popular classes," according to the author. Similarly, Gilbert argues that less than one percent of Mexican households in the surveys under analysis have incomes above sixty-five thousand pesos at the time of the study to consider this "upper class" statistically significant in his study (Instituto Nacionalde Estadistica, Geografia, e Informática, 2001; Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares, 1984, 2000). Thus, under this standard, 19.5 percent of Mexican households are middle class in the year 2000.

To provide a closer illustration of the middle class, as well as to obtain relevant information that can be used to theorize the evolution of the middle class in Mexico, Gilbert collects oral history interviews from several middle-class families living in Cuernavaca, Morelos—a neighbor state with Mexico City—with varied levels of income and occupational characteristics. This addition of oral histories, which include a rich collection of photographs of the families interviewed in the book, is of paramount importance in adding to the information and quantitative analysis in the book. Indeed, given that the graphic images and oral life histories of the different segments of the middle class in Mexico could be missing from the abstract quantitative analysis, the oral history interviews provide a deeper understanding of the social phenomenon under study, especially to those readers that are not familiar with the Mexican social stratification system. Furthermore, the combination of oral history methods with statistical quantitative analyses shows how these methodologies clearly complement each other to contribute to a richer understanding of the problem of the middle class in Mexico.

Comparing the middle and the popular classes, Gilbert's results show that the middle class is more urbanized, concentrated in the economically dynamic urban metropolitan areas of the northern and central regions of the country, formed mostly of households headed by men, spatially segregated from the popular class, skewed to the lighter skin pigmentation end of the racial spectrum, and has significantly higher levels of education than its counterpart, including higher levels of education obtained at private institutions. Furthermore, the middle-class economic survival and social mobility strategies are based on family networks, family wealth, and an extraordinary focus on obtaining high educational levels, while the survival strategies of the popular class are mostly based on family, neighbors, and more work hours beginning at an earlier age.

The middle class in Mexico experienced a significant growth from 1940 to 1982, the decades of economic development in the country, but it has been significantly...