"We have everything and we have nothing": Empleados and Middle-Class Identities in Bogotá, Colombia: 1930-1955

Abstract

No class has created more controversy than the middle class and nowhere has it produced more controversy than in Latin America. No class has been so poorly understood. No class has been so weakly analyzed in historical terms. Moreover, no class has had so many preconceptions and "myths" attached to it. I try to fill this historiographic gap by looking at the construction of empleado identities, as a part of the middle class, between the 1930s and the 1950s in Bogotá, Colombia. By using a diversity of primary sources - diaries, empleado handbooks, manuals, employment forms, historical statistics, government publications, personal archives, oral history and a set of novels - this thesis attempts to look at how empleado identities were "made" by means of the combination of the historical structures and the experiences lived at the very center of daily life.