Myths and Fantasies of the Middle Class: Changing Conceptions of the Middle-Class Family in Mexico City, 1940s–1970s

When historians of Mexico have used the term “middle class” they have often done so by falling back on definitions unmoored from specific historical contexts. By examining how scholars have defined the middle class we can parse the shifting historical specificity of the term. When did race fade from analysis and gender become more central? When and how did scholars integrate sexuality into their analysis? Between 1940 and 1960, the Mexican middle class grew both in size and in the material benefits it enjoyed. This presentation examines the several scholars paradigmatic of change over time in definitions of the middle class. Anthropologist Miguel Othón de Mendizábal (1890-1945) in El origen histórico de nuestras clases medias (1946) approached class through the lens of race and the legacies of colonialism and had little to say about women and the family. Beginning in the 1950s, scholars largely associated women with the ills of modernity. Sociologist Lucio Mendieta y Núñez (1895-1988) in Las clases sociales (1957) used the category “woman” as a metaphor to explain class fluidity (they could marry their well-off boss and move up in class status). Sociologist José E. Iturriaga (1914-2011) attributed family “disintegration” (declining fertility and increased divorce rates) to middle-class women’s workforce participation. Writing on the brink of economic decline, sociologist Gabriel Careaga Medina (1941-2004), in Myths and Fantasies of the Middle Class (1974), leveled a full-throated critique of what he termed “the colonized mind” of the Mexican middle-class family, gender relations, and sexuality. Careaga represented a return to a less fluid and more rigid definition of class identity. He focused on class-based psychology, sexuality, and consumer habits and in so doing, contributed to the normativization of heterosexuality and patriarchy, and remaining blind to how women’s labor (wives, daughters, and domestic workers) shored up the middle-class household.