The relative affluence, stability, and urbanization of Mexico in the 1940-1970 era, a period dubbed desarrollo estabilizador or Mexican Miracle, expanded the urban middle classes. Thanks to increased educational and employment opportunities and the development of new credit instruments, millions arrived in the middle class, and confirmed their new status with consumption. They lived in modern high-rise apartments, purchased automobiles, enjoyed new leisure activities, and set aside savings. Anxiety over how the period’s increased access of women to educational and employment opportunities affected family life and redefined community standards fueled debate between liberals and conservatives. Anne Rubenstein looks at how cinema made new opportunities for consumption visible to women. Rubenstein and Nichole Sanders look at how conservative groups criticized consumer culture and mass media, and Sanders analyzes how Catholic women’s lay organizations policed the boundaries of appropriate material and media consumption by creating alternative educational programs, periodicals, leisure activities, and the exercise of a moral civic duty. Víctor Macías-González explores how in the 1950s and 1960s, transwomen sought acceptance by constructing middle class identity through their consumption and domesticity in photojournalists’ representations of their lives or through letters to early transnational trans publications. These strategies also allowed gender ambiguous persons to contain their gender and sexual transgression by embracing a domestic ideal that did not challenge social order. Susie Porter explores the evolving definitions of class identity in 1940-70 and the increased importance of domesticity and gender in defining the boundaries of middle-class identity and practice. These four papers analyze how gender-inflected class identities developed during the mid-20th century and its intersection with notions of race as evident in spaces, practices, and material cultures. This panel contributes to the literature on the development of the middle classes in 20th c. Latin America and the role that women played in defining, expanding, and questioning what it meant to be middle class.