Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

The Mexican middle class has generally been neglected in academic literature. Dennis Gilbert’s Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era is an important addition to the few focused studies available on the Latin American middle class, for instance, Brian Owensby’s study of the Brazilian middle class during the Vargas era, Intimate Ironies; Soledad Loaeza’s Clases medias y política en México: La querella escolar; or Larissa Lomnitz and Ana Melnick’s Chile’s Middle Class: A Struggle for Survival in the Face of Neoliberalism. These studies find a necessary complement in Gilbert’s book on the Mexican experience after the economic crises of 1982 and 1994. Using interviews with middle-class Mexicans living in the city of Cuernavaca, Gilbert achieves insightful conclusions on this sector’s influential role behind the profound political and economic transformations of the country during the last 20 years, the period known as the neoliberal era.According to Gilbert’s analysis of data from electoral polls, most middle-class Mexicans voted for political change in 2000, favoring Vicente Fox, the PAN (National Action Party) candidate. Six years later, they reaffirmed their electoral preference for the center-right PAN as they voted for Luis Felipe Calderón. For Gilbert, rather than expressing an ideological trend, these outcomes demonstrated the middle-class’s goals of maintaining economic and political stability. According to Gilbert, after the 1994 financial crisis, the ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) could no longer guarantee economic stability, and the PAN appeared as the new viable alternative for the disappointed Mexican middle class.Despite persistent income inequalities in the country, Gilbert finds that instead of decreasing during the neoliberal era, the middle class in fact expanded. Newer cars, larger houses, and more household appliances have become available for this social sector, evidencing relative economic stability for its members. Better education has also been available for middle-class young people, corresponding to the importance given by this sector to creating cultural and social capital.Education is one of the most important values for the Latin American middle class. Gilbert’s work on the Mexican middle class suggests that this sector values education above anything else. Even in the aftermath of the 1982 economic crisis, amid the implementation of the neoliberal model in the country, middle-class Mexicans limited expenses in different areas, but never in their children’s education. According to Gilbert, paying private school tuitions turned out to be a matter of middle-class survival and preservation of their standard of living.Gilbert’s analysis of the Mexican middle class is based on family households where the head falls into one of the upper white-collar categories and income exceeds 150 percent of the median household income in the country. While using this particular unit offers the advantage of grouping people sharing family income and general cultural traits, it neglects the importance of the educational status of single people, which is particularly important in defining the middle-class condition in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America. Many professionals and recent graduates live by themselves and are part of a middle class that is becoming typical of large urban areas such as Mexico City. This means that around 20 percent of middle-class households are not considered in Gilbert’s study (p. 114). This situation might not have a major effect on studying the family-oriented Cuernavaca middle class, but it would have a strong impact if we were to approach the complexities of the Mexican middle class in larger cities.Why was Cuernavaca’s middle class chosen for Gilbert’s study? He explains that Cuernavaca’s inhabitants come from different parts of Mexico and that this city congregates an important number of middle-class representatives, partly as a result of its proximity to Mexico City. Yet Gilbert recognizes that the families participating in his study “cannot be considered a statistically representative sample of middle-class Cuernavaca or middle-class Mexico” (p. 109). For example, a focus on the intellectual/academic/artistic and highly politicized middle-class group is practically absent from Gilbert’s sample of Cuernavaca. Informal merchants are not a part of the sample either. Because Mexico is a predominantly urban country, where most middle-class people live in big cities such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Querétaro, it would make sense to perform research on one of these large urban areas whose middle-class compositions show tremendous complexity and heterogeneity.Gilbert’s book offers a smart approach to the correlation between social class and recent political-economic issues that are becoming ever more important in Mexico. It is also a strong invitation to keep exploring and discussing the importance of this social sector in Mexican history.