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

identity construct #2: class 109
argumentative threads in cultural theory which propose that members of
any given economic stratum inhabit too many confl icting worlds of identity
to be limited to the singular realm of class. In addition to their income or
their possession of property, they are motivated by ethnicity, gender, family,
region, nationality, neighborhood, and so forth. Because semioticians see
all these identities as discursively constituted, they consider the members
of Peru’s middle class in the early twentieth century to have framed their
world with multiple discursive lenses.
Therefore, Parker insists that Peru’s middle class identity did not spring
forth naturally from objective or material conditions, like a volcanic eruption
resulting from changes in the earth’s inner core. Instead, Peru’s middle
class was nothing more than an idea, cobbled together from a swirling mass
of local and international discourses about what being middle class meant.
Parker argues that to understand the emergence of Peru’s middle class we
must study the content of the relevant discursive threads and then determine
how they coalesced in the minds of the people who voiced them in
Peru’s literary and political arena. Only then, Parker insists, will we be in
position to appreciate how this notion of middle class identity impacted
Peru’s history.
David Parker, THE IDEA OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 2
Sep tem ber 1919 was Lima’s fi rst citywide white-collar strike ever, and more
important, it was the fi rst time that any group of demonstrators had taken to
the streets in the name of “the middle class,” a concept virtually absent from
the discourse of the previous century. Employees made it a point to emphasize
that theirs was not the case of the proletariat but of the forgotten, longsuffering
clase media. Underlying their rhetoric was an increasingly clear
picture of what it meant to belong to that middle class, an assertion of what
separated them from the workers below and from the aristocrats above [. . .].
The middle class is hardly a new topic for Latin Americanists. As early
as 1958, John J. Johnson’s Political Change in Latin America exploded the
myth that the nations of Latin America had no middle classes to speak of. 3
Against the popular stereotype of a continent peopled only by landed oligarchs
and impoverished masses, Johnson described a region in which large
and growing “middle sectors” increasingly dominated public life. Among
their political achievements were the promotion of economic nationalism
and state-sponsored development, the rapid expansion of public education,
the introduction of social welfare policies, and, perhaps most important,
the impulse, albeit halting and imperfect, toward democratization and the