Latin America's Middle Class

David S. Parker is associate professor of history and former Chair of the History Department at Queen’s University, Canada. He is author of The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900-1950 (1998), and articles or book chapters on topics ranging from public health reform to images of social climbers in Chilean fiction to dueling among journalists and politicians in Uruguay.Louise E. Walker is assistant professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (2012). She is currently coediting a special dossier on Mexico’s recently declassified secret police archive for the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (2013, with Tanalís Padilla). Her research projects also include the history of conspiracy theories.

• Introduction: The Making and Endless Remaking of the Middle ClassDavid S. ParkerPart 1: The Debates, 1947-1968Chapter 1: Middle Groups in National Politics in Latin AmericaJohn J. JohnsonChapter 2: Aspects of Class Relations in Chile, 1850-1960Frederick B. PikeChapter 3: Community Pillars: The Middle ClassAndrew H. Whiteford Chapter 4: The BudgetMario BenedettiChapter 5: Middle-Class RebelsFrancisco López CámaraChapter 6: The Dilemma of the Latin American Middle ClassCharles WagleyPart 2: New HistoriesChapter 7: Moralizing the MassesWilliam E. FrenchChapter 8: White-Collar Lima, 1910-1929: Commercial Employees and the Rise of the Peruvian Middle ClassDavid S. ParkerChapter 9: Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1930s and 1940sBrian P. OwensbyChapter 10: “It Is Not Something You Can Be or Come to Be Overnight”: Empleados, Mujeres de Oficina, and Gendered Middle Class Identities in Bogotá, Colombia, 1930-55A. Ricardo López-PedrerosChapter 11: Rethinking Aspects of Class Relations in Twentieth-Century ChileJ. Pablo SilvaChapter 12: We Were the Middle ClassRodolfo Barros

This book brings together foundational essays and cutting-edge pieces to map out ways to understand the role of middle classes across Latin America. It is an excellent collection and will surely inform our efforts to understand the social history of the region in the twentieth century. Long forgotten by Latin American historians, the middle classes will no longer be an afterthought.