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

110 reframing latin america
broadening of the electorate. This image of progressive, reformist middle
sectors had already appeared in earlier writings by Latin Americans, but
Johnson’s succinct formulation made a profound impression in both Americas
and came to symbolize the vision of mesocratic reformism as one guiding
theme of twentieth-century Latin American history [. . .].
If scholars of the 1960s and 1970s found in Latin America’s middle class
everything from modernizing democratic reformers to status-obsessed clients
of the aristocracy to frustrated revolutionaries, what are we to do today
as the very concept of class has come under increasing attack? Two major
difficulties immediately come to mind. First, of course, is the problem of
defi nition. What is the middle class? How is it possible to describe the class
characteristics of groups as diverse as shopkeepers, lawyers, teachers, stockbrokers,
medium-sized farmers, bureaucrats, and white-collar employees?
Johnson deliberately used the term “sectors” rather than “class” in order
to underline this heterogeneity, but his choice merely begged the question:
If the middle sectors were too heterogeneous to be a class, could anything
at all useful be said about them? The second, more basic problem arises
from the temptation to conceptualize classes as concrete, conscious historical
actors. Was there, to cite a well-known analogy, such a group as “the
bourgeoisie” in eighteenth-century France and did it bring about the French
Revolution? A generation of revisionist scholarship has answered in the
negative. At the very least we must reject the idea that social classes speak
with a single voice, act as a single individual, or play a single role in the
shaping of historical destiny. Classes are, at the end of the day, abstractions
that we reify at our peril. Splitting classes into “residual” and “emergent,”
“bourgeois” and “proletarianized,” “old” and “new” cannot solve this fundamental
epistemological problem.
In the case of Latin America, precious little seems to unite the millions
of lives we tend to lump together statistically as middle-class. The closer
one looks, the greater the differences appear: immigrant versus native born,
white versus mestizo, salaried versus independent, public sector versus private
sector, university-trained versus self-taught, urban versus rural. These
distinctions create an enormous spectrum of living standards, consumption
patterns, cultural tastes, social circles, economic interests, and political affi
liations. If our social history is a study of daily life, then there can be no
such thing as a single social history of the middle class, for Peru or for
anywhere else. We would need a hundred different histories before a suffi
ciently complete picture emerged [. . .].
From whence did that palpable cultural reality, that widely shared understanding
of what the middle class meant, arise? This book hopes to show