“We Only Want a Middle Class Society”: The Transnational Formation of the Middle Class in Bogotá, Colombia, 1959–64

Generally, historians and social scientist alike understand the consolidation of the middle class as originating first in Western Europe or United States and then radiating out to other locations around the globe, thereby reinforcing a Eurocentric historical narrative and an U.S exceptionalism when studying the formation of the middle class. In contrast, I argue how during the first years of the Cold War US officials, policy makers associated with international institutions, Colombian state representatives, private elites, politicians and intellectuals circles were actively engaged in producing new ideas about the middle class that circulated between Colombia and the United States. This uneven exchange, I contend, profoundly contributed to the global hegemony—or what I call the transnational toteminzation—of the idea of the middle class as the vital foundation of modern forms of democratic government in the Americas. Simultaneously, this paper discusses how some professionals reworked these transnational  practices, activities and discourses—and the different appropriations by the state, local elites and private organizations—in order to govern other social groups. More specifically, and in contrast to recent studies who portrayed the middle class professional as mere intermediaries vacillating between a unified state and elite, on the one hand, and other social groups, on the other, I explain how the middle class professional sought to define their own collective class politics. That is, I demonstrate, how they tried to govern—and certainly sediment—a hierarchical society in which they could not only be distinct from other social groups but also, and more importantly, to be oppositionally located above the working class, the peasantry as well as the elites.