![Social Stratification in Ce Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500 2000 [review]](http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Social-Stratification-in-Ce.jpg "Social-Stratification-in-Ce")
Class is oftentimes as much about self-identification as it is about actual ceremony and recognition from others. How one sees oneself in the class order is intoxicating for some people. Working class people perceiving themselves to be middle class presents itself in phenomena such as workers fighting against organizations to represent their interests, or in poor people supporting healthcare initiatives that exclude them. Call it twisted irony or a derivation of the double consciousness forecast by W. E. B. Du Bois, but self-selection to class is a commanding voice in the minds of people everywhere.
In Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000, authors Hugo Nutini and Barry Isaac dive into the power of class over five centuries. Though writers like John Ross have brilliantly presented the energy of revolutionary Mexico, Nutini and Issac present the years of history at led to the rebellion of the early 1900s and what has become of Mexico and its class structure in the wake of agrarian reform, globalization and democracy.
The rich, related and connected have always enjoyed a special reverence as they have ridicule in Mexico. The pride some have as progeny of Conquistadors of centuries past or because of their money, the authors remark, created a tradition in which the elite’s hegemony always was spoken of with a lilt of loathing on the lips of the people. Much of that disrespect was due to how the aristocracy often brutally meted out dominance on lower classes. The memories of Mexico’s proletariat are nothing if not long.
The plutocracy, once unquestioned in its authority, faced the literal and figurative bayonet as never before during and after the Mexican Revolution. Though executions and mob actions against the elite were scattered and unorganized generally, those actions, like the selective violence that cowed the underclass into complicity, forced those defined by antiquity and lineage into a self-imposed isolation from which they would never return. And though regency remains theirs in some ways, the elite of Mexico have been pushed aside into a place where its members’ own self-conception as patricians is their last vestige of regard.
The 1910 Revolution counted among its scores of achievements the death of the hacienda system and the breaking of massive provincial power brokering of the period. Yet, for all the agrarian reforms did to scar the mindset and holdings of the once untouchable upper class, the democratization of Mexican society did far more to smash the aristocracy’s confidence in its ability to lead and control. Here, Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 is simply winning, because it goes beyond the class skirmishes that led to untold wars and intrigue to the outcome: an upper class that is widely a footnote to much of the population and ceremonially important only to itself.
While much is presented of the elite, Nutini and Issac scrutinize middle and lower classes as well as gender and racial dynamics. How all these intersections reveal themselves is equally compelling. Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 makes a valuable case study in the power of people to change their world.
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