No social class has generated more controversy than the middle class, and nowhere has that class been more controversial than in Latin America. Once believed not to exist, then later the great hope of the Alliance for Progress, the Latin American middle class is often blamed for not fulfilling the entrepreneurial, democratizing, progressive, or stabilizing role that others ascribe to it. Yet never has a class so widely discussed been so little studied and so poorly understood. David Parker meets this challenge by combining the methods of social historians with attention to language and the...

No social class has generated more controversy than the middle class, and nowhere has that class been more controversial than in Latin America. Once believed not to exist, then later the great hope of the Alliance for Progress, the Latin American middle class is often blamed for not fulfilling the entrepreneurial, democratizing, progressive, or stabilizing role that others ascribe to it. Yet never has a class so widely discussed been so little studied and so poorly understood. David Parker meets this challenge by combining the methods of social historians with attention to language and the...