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Roderic Ai Camp, Louise E. Walker. Waking from the Dream: Mexico's Middle Classes After 1968., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1570–1571, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1570
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In this revealing analysis of the Mexican middle class, Louise E. Walker argues that the most important political struggles that took place in Mexico since the 1960s— shaping numerous economic and social themes that dominated the closing decades of the twentieth century—occurred among the middle classes, not just among participants in the student movement. The author defines the middle class as a “set of material conditions, a state of mind, and a political discourse” (p. 2), thus allowing her to present multiple facets of middle-class behavior ranging from more traditional demographic statistics to subtle descriptions of their lifestyle and identify. The author has spent a decade accumulating an extraordinarily broad range of resources, including excellent archival sources, documented in some fifty plus pages of notes, which incorporate additional insights worth perusing. She has discovered useful interpretations about government agents, as well as their revealing observations over time. Many of her examples include direct quotes from middle class Mexicans who are presented in a variety of contexts during this period, adding color and veracity to her arguments.
