“The Last Hope for the World”: The Alliance for Progress and the Transnational Formation of the Middle Class in Bogotá, Colombia, 1958–70

This paper seeks to offer a historicized analysis of the most significant economic aid program of the 1960s in Latin America—the Alliance for Progress.  Although a part of a larger political effort to understand social change occurring in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution, I argue that the Alliance for Progress, as a project of development, was much more than a policy of communist containment. By looking at some of the major developmental programs promoted by the Alliance in professional education, state rationalization, and agrarian reforms in Colombia during the 1960s, I demonstrate how these programs created a transnational field of knowledge through which global policy makers, Colombian state welfare personnel, private elite-sponsored social programs spokepersons, and university professors across the Atlantic, became actively engaged in mutually situating the middle class as the proper and normative measure of orderly democracy. This uneven exchange of knowledge, I argue, profoundly shaped the universal hegemony—or what I call the transnational totemization—of the idea of the middle class as the vital foundation of modern democracies in the Americas during the second half of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, the paper elaborates on how this transnational knowledge-production was experienced in everyday practices. Particularly, I demonstrate how during the 1960s and 1970s in Colombia, middle class women and men appropriated these developmental programs to become not only the representative a proper/normative democracy but also the very political class—as middle class—that would question U.S hegemony by structuring new forms of a democratic state and society. Indeed, I argue that by exercising their cultural and political capital as proper representatives of democracy these professionals and white-collar workers would most radically reconfigure some of the fundamental categories, practices, meanings, and institutions of democracy across the Americas.