Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

chapter 7
Identity Construct #2: Class
As a concept, class is at once easy and difficult to comprehend, especially
for Americans who tend to be ignorant of economic differentiation. For example,
polls show that in 1940 fully 80 percent of Americans identifi ed
themselves as middle class, even though data revealed America’s economic
stratum to have been much more complex. While class would appear to
be an objective condition based on one’s wealth, semioticians view it as a
construct no different from race, gender, nationality. It is an identity, the
meaning of which varies in accordance with the particular discourses that
went into its making at any given time and place.
In this chapter we provide some context for and then provide excerpts
from a text by David Parker, a contemporary historian of Latin America, in
order to examine two commonly held essentialist interpretations of class.
The fi rst contends that class position is a product of individual essence; the
second holds that class consciousness springs from objective economic criteria.
Parker challenges these essentialist arguments. He devotes his study
mostly to the second interpretation, but it is necessary for us to understand
the fi rst to fully appreciate his argument. 1
By defi nition, class differentiation implies that society allows its people
to have unequal access to wealth. The question then becomes how society
rationalizes that inequality. Prior to the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution in the 1700s, Western society was divided into two classes: the
aristocracy and everyone else, also commonly called the third estate. The
third estate were typically rural workers, or peasants, who produced wealth
that the aristocracy consumed. Such premodern societies were manifestly
hierarchical and marked by a severe maldistribution of wealth. The peasants
were poor and did manual labor their entire lives; the aristocracy was