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Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Last Decades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Alejandro Portes
Alejandro Portes*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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This article will attempt to “map” the class structure of Latin American societies on the basis of several recent empirical studies and statistics provided by such organizations as the International Labour Office (ILO), the Regional Employment Program for Latin America (PREALC), and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). This formal exercise should help clarify existing class structures by reducing a large and complex list of designations to a manageable number. On the basis of this classification, changes in class composition and struggles during the last two decades will then be examined. The article is thus divided in two parts, one dealing with class structure and the other with class dynamics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , 1985 , pp. 7 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

Revised version of a paper presented at the Third U.S./USSR Conference on Latin America held in Yerevan, Soviet Armenia, in June 1983. The author acknowledges the helpful comments of conference participants, in particular James Malloy, Carmen Diana Deere, Bruce Bagley, Anatoly Shulgovsky, and Emil S. Dabaguian, as well as those of Stephen Bunker, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Andrew Cherlin, and A. Douglas Kincaid. None of them, however, bears responsibility for the contents of the essay.

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