Waking from the Dream: Mexico's Middle Classes after 1968

When the postwar boom began to dissipate in the late 1960s Mexicos middle classes awoke to a new economically terrifying world. And following massacres of students at peaceful protests in 1968 and 1971 one-party control of Mexican politics dissipated as well. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party struggled to recover its legitimacy but instead saw its support begin to erode. In the following decades Mexicos middle classes ended up shaping the history of economic and political crisis facilitating the emergence of neo-liberalism and the transition to democracy. Waking from the Dream tells the story of this profound change from state-led development to neo-liberalism and from a one-party state to electoral democracy. It describes the fraught history of these tectonic shifts as politicians and citizens experimented with different strategies to end a series of crises. In the first study to dig deeply into the drama of the middle classes in this period Walker shows how the most consequential struggles over Mexicos economy and political system occurred between the middle classes and the ruling party.