Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000

Five. The Middle Classes

C entral Mexico’s middle classes span a wide social spectrum, the top and the bottom of which overlap with the upper and lower social strata. At the same time, they constitute a much smaller proportion of the total social system than is the case in more industrialized societies such as the United States or Western Europe. In this chapter, we distinguish the upper-middle, solid-middle, and lower-middle classes. Until the 1910–1920 Revolution, Mexico had a basically two-class system : the superordinate sector and the masses, mediated by a small middle class of merchants and professionals (Granato and Mostkoff 1990; Stern 1994). The Revolution most famously brought dramatic changes in the composition of the superordinate stratum, but it also generated a degree of upward social mobility that significantly expanded the middle classes. This has been especially the case since about 1950, owing to increased formal education opportunities and industrial growth (Careaga 1974; Contreras S. 1978; González C. 1976). The middle stratum is hard to conceptualize in provincial cities and regions precisely because of this recent surge in upward mobility, which has taken two major forms: a rapid rise from the ranks of the dispossessed into the lower-middle and working classes; and generational mobility from the lower-middle to the solid-middle class (Nutini 2005). The picture is further complicated by the geographic mobility of the rural dispossessed , almost entirely to the dominant regional cities, where they enter the marginal class (see Chap. 6). In fact, the great majority of the urban marginal class consists of displaced rural folk, few of whom were in the working class in their natal communities. This is another way of saying five: THE MIDDLE CLASSES T H E P O S T R E V O L U T I O N A R Y P E R I O D ( 1 9 2 0 – 2 0 0 0 ) 124 that provincial cities do not themselves breed a marginal class; rather, this stratum originates as dispossessed labor migrants from rural communities . Furthermore, once settled in the provincial cities, they seldom move to Mexico City or other large cities, which instead receive almost all their marginal components directly from rural communities. Thus for those at the bottom of the system, upward mobility (if it occurs) is almost always local. The migrants’ entry into the working class is a matter of securing at least an urban survival income from one or more jobs, serially or simultaneously . Upward mobility to the solid-middle class, though, is more complicated. It is achieved primarily by lower-middle- and working-class young people whose parents (and sometimes other family members) work long hours and sacrifice some of their own consumption desires to secure their children a university education. Mostly, these young people study law, medicine, engineering, chemistry, veterinary medicine, economics , business administration, accounting, and primary or secondary education. One significant consequence of this considerable mobility by the working and lower-middle classes is their lack of verbalized class consciousness , in contrast to the three main classes of the superordinate stratum who have a clear conception of who they are and can articulate their position in society. When pressed to state their class position, almost all identify themselves as middle class, regardless of occupation or social function. This situation became abundantly clear in Nutini’s (2005) study of the Córdoba-Orizaba area of Veracruz state, where more than six hundred questionnaire respondents were asked, “To what social class do you belong?” Although the project’s field-workers hoped to elicit differentiation among middle-stratum components, the invariable answer was a stark “clase media” (middle class). As we will see in Chapter 6, the lower and middle classes of Mexico City are similarly inclined to report themselves as “middle class.” The foregoing does not mean, however, that working- and middleclass people truly see themselves as an undifferentiated stratum, only that they cannot readily make distinctions using the sociologist’s terminology . There is, in fact, a pronounced ideological and expressive distinction , drawn almost universally in Mexico, between what U.S. sociologists would call blue-collar and white-collar workers, roughly corresponding to the working class and the lower-middle class, respectively. The distinction is underlain by differences in formal education and earning power T H E M I D D L E C L A S S E S 125 but is more...