In recent years there has been a growing interest among American academics to study the history of the middle classes. Parallel to this trend, cultural historians have begun to include economic issues in their studies, mostly in relation to the history of capitalism. Louise Walker’s book, Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968, contributes to these streams of scholarship by offering a cultural history of Mexico from 1968 to 1988. This twenty-year period was marked by profound economic changes resulting from both endogenous and exogenous factors, which, in turn, affected the evolution of the nation’s social structure. Walker’s book touches on these significant changes and their social and cultural significance.

The central questions of Waking from the Dream concern: What happened to the political relationship between the middle classes and the dominant, quasi-official PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party), when the period of sustained economic growth ended; and how did neoliberalism emerge at the end of this period? The book presents a chronological narrative divided in three sections. The first is devoted to the period 1971–1976. The two chapters of this section discuss the different groups within the middle classes and their reaction to the policies of the Echeverría presidential administration (1970–1976). Chapter One examines the trajectory of some of the activists whose activism originated in the 1968 student movement, including their adjustments to the attempts of the state to co-opt them. Chapter Two focuses on the conservatives who rejected governmental, populist policies they deemed were left-leaning and attacks against their Catholic morals; at the same time, they were worried about the decline in their purchasing power and standard of living.

The second section discusses the boom and bust of the oil economy experienced during the López Portillo presidential administration (1976–1982), how the country acquired a large public and private debt during this time period, and the incipient implications of these changes for the middle classes. One chapter describes the media and politicians’ narrative regarding how the discovery of large oil reserves should alter the nation’s path of economic development and modernization. The second chapter specifies further the actual policies and actions that the government launched to adapt to an economy that was clearly modernizing, and thus needed to revamp its financial services and tax system. This chapter observes how the middle classes gained greater access to credit from commercial banks as well as from government entities, as new consumer behaviors followed from economic growth and modernization. The chapter also shows how government campaigns aimed at explaining the introduction of the Value Added Tax (IVA) while extending consumer rights and protections.

The book’s third section, “Fault Lines of Neoliberalism,” looks at the policies of the De la Madrid presidential administration (1982–1988), a period in which there was a clear turn in policy from the populist programs of the previous two administrations. One chapter considers reactions to the new economic policies that emphasized less state intervention in the economy, less government spending, and a more open economy. The other chapter centers on the growing protests of the middle classes in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. This tragedy sheds light on the government’s inefficiency in coping with natural disasters, placed a heavier burden on the livelihoods of the Mexico City middle classes, and resulted in the emergence of a more politically active civil society.

The author uses a wide array of sources: newspapers, government promotional publications and official statistical reports, undergraduate theses, academic studies on the middle classes, television programs, journals discussing economic policy and business analysis, detective novels, and songs. The methodology with which this ample set of sources is analyzed is not made explicit in the monograph. Throughout the book, the interpretation of the sources comes with references to works of social and critical literary theory. Although the appendix has statistical evidence and there are references to it in the book, there is no systematic analysis of this evidence from any economic perspective.

By looking at the evolution of the middle class somewhat eclectically, Waking from the Dream implicitly challenges the emphasis of much of the historiography on Mexico that focuses on class formation as a class struggle between the elites and the working classes and peasantry. However, in Mexico, middle-class identity in an ideological or cultural sense has not been as hegemonic as in the United States since 1945. The economic miracle of the mid-twentieth century, then its demise ensuing from a lost decade of recessions, inflation, and outsized debt, for which neoliberalism was deemed the best cure, was not a story unique to Mexico. What was unique in this set of events for Mexico was the conjunction of its proximity to the United States, its massive oil reserves, and the large number of economists educated at elite U.S. universities, who became the architects of the new economic paradigm while associated with the PRI, which still embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of a bygone era.

The author does note that there is no consensus over what it means to be middle class in Mexico, and provides an appendix with data from different sources on different definitions of middle class. Still, in order to comprehend the history of this social class, it would be useful to have a reference of what it means to be middle class. In Mexico, although there are groups that could be labeled as middle class, and which could be analyzed through different metrics, culturally until recently most of the members of these groups have not identified as middle class, especially those who have had an affiliation of some sort with the PRI. Even today, politicians cannot come to an agreement on what it means to be middle class; trying to define or invoke this status has been detrimental during election seasons. People of lower-income strata have aspired to upward mobility without labeling this mobility as gaining middle-class status, but rather as “having the revolution do justice to them” (hacer justicia la revolución), as the popular phrase goes. Social and cultural values were changing in tandem with economic modernization, but middle-income Mexicans were far from becoming an homogeneous group. Indeed, the actual heterogeneity of social groups has mirrored Mexico’s historical diversity: some “middle-class” people were wedded to the idea of being heirs of the revolution with nationalist ideals of social change and equality; in contrast, there were the agringados (Americanized), who wanted to emulate the consumer habits of the American way of life.

The perspective of a cultural historian writing from the vantage point of American academia in the twenty-first century does offer a vast list of innovative assertions, which remains to be further substantiated with hard evidence that can contribute to a more complete understanding of Mexico’s recent history. This book, more than representing a definitive account of Mexico’s middle classes since 1968, poses an invitation for further research and reflection on the nation’s contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic history, and on the imperative of integrating these subfields into thorough narratives analyzing relevant sources systematically.