As a collective effort, this volume locates the formation of the middle classes at the core of the histories of Latin America in the last two centuries. Featuring scholars from different places across the Americas, it is an interdisciplinary contribution to the world histories of the middle classes, histories of Latin America, and intersectional studies. It also engages a larger audience about the importance of the middle classes to understand modernity, democracy, neoliberalism, and decoloniality. By including research produced from a variety of Latin American, North American, and other audiences, the volume incorporates trends in social history, cultural studies and discursive theory. It situates analytical categories of race and gender at the core of class formation. This volume seeks to initiate a critical and global conversation concerning the ways in which the analysis of the middle classes provides crucial re-readings of how Latin America, as a region, has historically been understood.

Mario Barbosa Cruz is Professor in the Humanities Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.

A. Ricardo López-Pedreros is Professor of History at Western Washington University

Claudia Stern is Research Associate at The Latin American Centre for the History of Housing CEIHVAL and lecturer at the MEUVAL at the Architecture, Design and Urban Studies Faculty at Universidad de Buenos Aires, FADU-UBA.