The Guadalajara Reporter

Mexico’s middle class aspirations: Exhilaration of a new status dampened by sobering social/political circumstances

Mexico’s middle class is now the “new majority,” according to the authors of a new, and much-quoted book, “Mexico: A Middle Class Society, Poor No More, Developed Not Yet.” The authors, economist and Mexico’s former undersecretary of Trade, Luis de la Calle, and Luis Rubio, former advisor to Mexico’s secretary of Treasury, write that “Even though there is no consensus on what exactly constitutes the middle class, there is no doubt that a significant portion of the Mexican population behaves and perceives itself as one.” This will surprise many — including many Mexicans — several analysts have noted.

The rub is the long-standing problem of trying to define “middle class” in economically emerging societies, often harried by fluctuating economic circumstances, unsteady political management — and at the same time account for residual institutional non-economic problems that impede or distort reasonable change.

In Mexico that means trying to pin down — or at least shrewdly guess — how much Mexican society is earning and spending. The most obvious obstacles: the Republic’s mammoth underground economy, the tradition of false income reporting — by both the public and private sectors — the unknown expense of the drug war now and in the future, and wringing out some kind of estimate of how much institutionalized corruption costs Mexico’s citizenry.

This last has always been a major obstacle for the poor, making it difficult to merely exist, materially and psychologically, to say nothing about any possibility of “upward mobility.”

Though that term wasn’t used then, when I first began coming to Mexico the people I hung out with, matadores, were the epitome of a most obvious and celebrated example of upwardly mobile Mexicans. Poorly educated young men — beginning when they were teenagers — risking their lives not for “fame,” but for a better life for themselves and their families. Risking one’s life to leap up the economic ladder was an accepted reality. And it was possible, even though bullfighting was misshaped into a notoriously corrupt system by managers, bullring owners, even the breeders of the bulls. The ambitious, poor and aspiring novilleros were the fodder for the machine.

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