“Jesus, When Did You Become So Bourgeois, Huh?”

Abstract

In Chicana/o cultural production, upward mobility has often signified cultural betrayal, and representations of middle-class Chicana/os have been largely absent. This essay surveys the historical and sociological reasons for that tendency, arguing that much of Chicana/o cultural production has exhibited anxiety around representations of class. However, Chicana/o texts that portray middle- and upper-class Mexican Americans, especially in the past decade, suggest the emergence of an alternative identity politics. Richard Rodriguez’s 1982 memoir, Hunger of Memory, articulates the psychic crisis that can arise when one negates a minority identity in order to identify as middle class. By contrast, The George Lopez Show (2002–7) suggests that Chicanos can ascend to the middle class while still retaining a working-class consciousness. Finally, Michele Serros’s young adult novel Honey Blonde Chica (2006) shows how transnational social hierarchies linking the United States and Mexico are also involved in expanding and policing the boundaries of ethnic identity. All three texts dramatize an anxiety about the instability of the class status they represent while also indexing the status of middle-class Mexican Americans in the contemporary Mexican American cultural imagination.