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Middle-Class Mobilization and the Language of Orders in Urban Latin America

From Caste to Category in Early Twentieth-Century Lima

Queen’s University, Canada

Scholars have generally argued that the modern triumph of a language of class eclipsed collective identities rooted in older, more hierarchical conceptions of rank and estate. This article, drawing on the author’s previously published research on white-collar workers in twentieth-century Peru, comes to a radically different conclusion. Despite using what appeared to be an explicit and often combative discourse of class interest and class conflict, Peru’s white-collar workers justified their demands by emphasizing the difference between themselves and manual workers. Masquerading as class consciousness were many of the rhetorical tropes that had long legitimated the society of orders, including a presumption that social standing was an innate quality fixed at birth. Corporatist social legislation adopted in the 1920s reinforced the principle that white-collar and blue-collar workers were distinct species of human beings deserving of entirely different benefits. Unequal rights became enshrined in labor law.

Key Words: white-collar workers • class theory • estates • corporatism • labor law

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