Hunting for the elusive, often falsely dubbed middle class

It wasn’t, isn’t, won’t be (any time soon) an “economic version of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” a Time magazine reporter wrote March 8.  And for the corps of such long time on-the-ground observers of Mexico’s puzzling and certainly surreal government, the Niagra of north-of-the-border stories gushing about the booming Mexican middle class prompted bemused puzzlement.

This flood began with brio early in 2012, flourishing such headlines as “Middle class booming in a changing Mexico.”   The usually reliable Washington Post kicked off a series called “The New Mexicans” aimed at examining “the dramatic changes occurring in Mexico, where the middle class is becoming a majority.” Others called Mexico “the New China,” “the Aztec Tiger.”

Looking around, querying Mexican friends and acquaintances, watching families shopping at street-side and public market puestos, fanning through the Walmarts did not substantiate such headlines.  Instead, they sent the hunt for the new middle class into Guadalajara’s upscale glitter outlets, chic shops, uberfashionable showrooms.  Even there, one didn’t see the described freshly minted enlistees to the middle class spending headily.   Merely the elites being elites.  So when the UK’s Economist magazine October 12 parsed the efforts by politicians and statisticians trying to find and define Mexico’s middle class (which the government has not been able to do), that display of realism was refreshing.

January gifted Peña Nieto with predicted growth for 2013 placed at 3.5 percent.  It’s now placed by Finance Secretary Luis Videgaray at less than half of that: 1.7 percent.  And though some journalists  say Mexico will escape a “storm recession,” most economists don’t believe that any more than they believe that Mexico could have sleekly survived a U.S. debt default.  In other words, because Peña Nieto believes that because he voices things widely seen as substantive as fog, they will magically become as sturdy as the reality that 99 percent of Mexican kidnappings were unreported last year.

The middle class is a mystery segment of the Republic’s population, one which the people’s representatives doggedly believe earn over 500,000 pesos a year.  That is what the slushy debate among legislators recently established.  (Reasons for this odd skewed conclusion apparently issues from the fact that those politicians receive upwards of one million pesos a year.)  This and other middle-class myths have been boosted by a book that’s being gradually discredited. “Mexico: A Middle Class Society, Poor No More, Developed Not Yet,” authored by two pie-in-the-sky pundits, Luis de la Calle and Luis Rubio, who claim that more than half of Mexico’s population has become “bourgeoisie.”

Result of this thesis and the president’s much-questioned perception:  The “booming middle class” debate has grown tangled and scathing.  This has tempted government’s National Statistics Institute (INEGI), known by some analysts as The Gang That Can’t Count Straight, to remarkably step in to wrestle with reality (also remarkably).  Its findings, while not totally free of potholes, are much closer to reality that the fantasy originating in the well-heeled legislature, as one political veteran recently noted.  The INEGI believed the book came to conclusions that were too “slippery.”  Several critics of “Poor No More” used the easily misread gardener who pauses to receive a call on his cell phone as a prime example of flawed evidence.  As the price of mobile phone service has dropped, families of most of campesinos have dropped land lines for cell phones, not a step up the economic ladder, simply because it’s easier on their thin incomes.

The INEGI examined spending rather than income, because it was a question prompting more accurate responses.  People are less apt to free-shape spending than they are to mold incomes to fit a wishful image.  Household spending paints irregular images also.  Protracted illnesses, a daughter living at home but soon to marry and move away to her husband’s family home.  Households of the elderly versus those of child-producing younger families sharply skew economic surveys.  The income per person, family member’s education, age, future plans ... these critical variables make calculations difficult.  So do discretionary spending, food-producing seasons for families tending large gardens, communities that celebrate numerous fiestas.  Heed the old tale of the mayor who laments, “We are poor, Señor, because we have so many saints.”

But for those who have long-term wide experience, with both urban and rural, rich and poor Mexico, the INEGI’s results appear nearer reality than Rubio and de la Calle.  INEGI’s conclusion: 39 percent of Mexico’s population qualifies as middle class.  Which is “in keeping with the estimates of institutions such as the World Bank,” says the Economist, adding that the middle class is “not nearly as affluent” as politicians imagine.  Average annual income is about 120,000 pesos a year.  Few such families have children in private schools, and experience has taught most of them to avoid mortgages.

The trek toward middle class life can be difficult.   Two friends have in recent years found circumstances in which they could make their way into a level of near security.  Both live on Lake Chapala’s north shore.  Generally invisible to the foreign community, they’ve learned to do well.  Both were born to large, poor, campesino families, in nearby pueblos.  Their names here will be Memo and Neto.

Memo has no education.  He was taken into the mountain fields his family sharecropped when he was an infant bound in his mother’s rebozo (long shawl). He worked in his family’s milpas until foreigners dominated the area.  Memo is 60 years old, and has a permanent job with people who value him, assist him and his family at difficult moments.  He earns 78,000 pesos a year, plus useful perks.  

These are the same people Memo worked for in the 1960s, when he was young and trying to reconcile himself to the limitations he faced.  Alcohol was the medicine one took for despair. Once he decided to get married and his wife became pregnant, his inability to read or write hit him like a mason’s hammer. He became irascible and bounced from job-to-job.  His older brother became a good, but increasingly undependable albanil (mason), and an angry alcoholic.  Both brothers now have alcohol under control and  their lives are less fraught.  Memo has eight children, and is taking care of the young son of one of his other brothers now lost in the bleak jungle of drug addiction.

Memo and his formerly alcoholic brother live in homes they built themselves on land inherited from their father.  Memo continues to improve his home and his property.  He is never late to his job, and, in addition, works for two other people late in the afternoon.  He is more reliable than most of his other siblings, and more confident with the life he has fashioned for himself despite his literacy handicap. 

Neto was working as a handyman in 2007 when he and his cousin, Victor, repaired a large stone wall and a horse-lot barbed wire-stone and -huisache fence for a North American.  When the job was finished, the North American took Neto aside and gave him the address of an Ajijic business where he could find either day work or a full-time job.  The next day he showed up, seeking a full-time job. 

Neto also has eight children, and takes care of his widowed mother. He, too, lives on property inherited from his father.  Part of that land is used for raising chayote, corn and other crops.  As a child he received six years of education.  He seems to naturally possesses initiative and his schooling put his quick mind on the path of learning new tasks quickly.  As a result, he now is the jefe of a small crew of workmen who are multi-taskers capable of switching from gardening, to roofing, to plumbing, to electrical repair, among other property-maintenance tasks.  He is a careful, licensed driver, and always thinks before he acts.  As a consequence, he earns 156,000 per year.  Theoretically he is middle class, but reality aces myth.  Even though he and his family are thrifty, he is, for example, unable to buy a vehicle.