(Second and last part)
For a better understanding of how the middle class emerged, developed and reached the present moment, I took from the bookseller a publication by the sociologist Gabriel Careaga (1941-2004), entitled “Myths and fantasies of the middle class in Mexico”, where he makes an exhaustive exposition of the process through which it is possible to explain the thinking and behavior of this social fraction in whose ideology, in Careaga’s opinion, “religious, moral, social, economic ideas will be found (…) the product of a strange story, of simulation and of concealment ”.
In the previous installment, I referred to the birth of the aforementioned social class during the colony (16th century). This was formed, mainly, by the Creoles who were displaced by the peninsular. Later, after the fall of Santana in 1855, an intellectual and nationalist middle class emerged, whose liberal thought made possible the Constitution of 1857, the promulgation of the Reform Laws and the triumph of the Republic over the Empire.
The author of the book considers “the theses that sociologists have called ‘alternatives’. In these, the middle class would be, in a first stage, a group that supports social change, but in a second stage, once its aspirations have been satisfied, it would ally itself with traditional sectors that are in no way in favor of social change ”.
The 19th century liberals, with the creation of the National Preparatory School, imposed positivist education that instilled the idea that ‘there is no order without progress and progress without order’, “a philosophy that was successful among the incipient middle class because it allowed them to develop without conflict and without violence ”This belief was one of the important ideological instruments that sustained the Porfirian dictatorship.
From the Revolution, the middle class began to have an important weight in national life. “In the governments of Calles and Cárdenas it is when economic development (…) makes possible the creation of a whole system of organization that will need executives, employees, secretaries, administrators, technicians, students, leaders, intellectuals, professionals of all the levels (…) From the economic policy that creates infrastructure works, the middle class is consolidated by creating and developing a conformist and reformist ideology ”. The characteristics of their ideology arises from the lack of assertiveness in human relationships, from what they will say, from religious and racial prejudices; of hypocrisy and appearance.
During the regime of Miguel Alemán, the mentality colonized by the United States appeared in the middle class; It seems to him “amazing and admirable the efficiency, the cleanliness, the wealth of that country, without ever wondering what that wealth is due to, and why we are poor and they are rich. The middle class does not know their history and ours, hence their easy and irresponsible generalizations between the United States and Mexico ”.
In the second half of the 20th century, Mexican middle-class families, persuaded by the media, began to live the fantasy that life is a beautiful commercial. They care more about having to be. They are ignorant and apathetic to political events and, despite that, they expect everything from the government. Faced with this attitude, that of the enlightened middle class, who knows of their historical responsibility and does not want to live under the yoke of authoritarianism, takes precedence; the one that wants a democratic, fair, safe and humanitarian country.
Space is pressing without being able to fully refute the contempt with which, in my perception, President López Obrador has treated the ineffable middle class in recent months: the result of a social-historical process that the president should know and understand and do not disdain it and call it aspirational in a pejorative way.
If AMLO is congruent and has lived in the proclaimed “just mediocrity”, it means that he belongs to the middle class and, if he has been a candidate for the presidency of the Republic three times, is he not an aspirationist?
Writer and television scriptwriter
The Privilege of Opinion
Mexican television scriptwriter. Known for having made the scripts for programs such as Salad de Locos, La carabina de Ambrosio, La Güereja and something else, El privilegio de command, among others.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx