Making of the Middle Class

A. Ricardo LÓpez is Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University.Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in SÃo Paulo, 1920–1964.

"The Making of the Middle Class is a first-rate collection of essays by top scholars writing on a topic of enormous interest: the middle class as an evolving conception and historical reality. The contributors focus on locales around the world. While the issues that they raise take locally specific forms, their essays converge around shared central questions, giving this stimulating collection a rare intellectual unity and focus."-Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, SUNY "Both materially grounded and sensitive to notions of subjectivity and discourse, this timely and provocative volume challenges us to historicize the multiple, transnational formations and meanings of the middle class. Modernity itself is thus recast as a set of entangled, locally rooted processes that did not begin in 'the West' and travel elsewhere, but were mutually constituted and reconstituted in a global and colonial context."-Florencia E. Mallon, University of Wisconsin, Madison “The Making of the Middle Class brings together new work on a subject-the history of the middle class-that has previously seen only fragmented historical discussion.Yet, the volume does more than simply bring the middle classes back into the fold of global history. Rather, by taking a transnational lens, it has spurred an ambitious project to connect the history of the middle classes to broader discussions onglobal cultural identities, the history of globalization, practices of modernity, imperialism, and neoliberalism.” - Lisa Ubelaker Andrade (H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews) “The book is a welcome addition to a historiography that, at least for Latin America, has focused too much on elites and/or subalterns...This book, however, is important in that it allows us to take a fresh look at what the ambivalent and ‘fuzzy’ realities of middle class(es) might mean for the modern age.” - Stefan Rinke (Hispanic American Historical Review) [T]he volume undoubtedly represents a step forward in the development of a field of middle-class studies. The insights of the introduction, the intelligence of the commentaries and afterword, and the variety of methods at play and of issues dealt with in each individual article will surely make of this book a fundamental read for scholars to come.” - Ezequiel Adamovsky (Social History) “[A] carefully crafted anthology…The panorama of the book's examples dazzles the reader's mind.” - Linda Young (Canadian Journal of History)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class / A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein 1Part I: The Making of the Middle Class and Practices of Modernity 27Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India / Sanjay Joshi 29The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives / Michael O. West 45Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class / Simon Gunn 58"Aren't We All?": Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class / Marina Moskowitz 75The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada / Franca Iacovetta 87Commentary on Part I / Barbara Weinstein 107Part II: Labor Professionalization, Class Formation, and State Rule 119The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional Managerial Workers' (Folk) Dance around Class / Daniel J. Walkowitz 121Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story—Colonial Bombay, 1890–1940 / Prashant Kidambi 141Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá During the 1950s and Early 1960s / A. Ricardo López 161The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution / Michael A. Ervin 196Commentary on Part II / Mary Kay Vaughan 223Part III: Middle-Class Politics in Revolution 233A Middle Class Revolution: The APRA Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931–1956 / Iñigo García-Bryce 235Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City's Middle Class, 1915–1928 / Susanne Eineigel 253Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908–1936 / Keith David Watenpaugh 267Commentary on Part III / Brian Owensby 288Part IV: Middle-Class Politics and the Making of the Public Sphere 297The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany / Gisela Mettele 299Putting Faith in the Middle Class: the Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France / Carol E. Harrison 315Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas, and Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860–1930 / David S. Parker 335"Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos": The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina, 1920–1960 / Enrique Garguin 355Commentary on Part IV / Robyn Muncy 377Afterword / Mrinalini Sinha 385Bibliography 395Contributors 431Index 435