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Mexico: ¡Vivan Las Madres! BY LAUREN VILLAGRAN Six days a week, María Felicitas Camacho Maya, 62, unlocks the door to Lilian Michel, a bright white salon in Mexico City’s upscale Condesa neighborhood. She slips a white smock over her blouse and checks her hair at an island of oval mirrors. América Luz Valencia, a 27-year-old manicurist, arrives an hour or so later, her stylish hair sleek as a black onyx blade. Once her first customer for a manicure walks in, she’ll clip, file and polish hands and feet for hours, sometimes without a break. Both the business owner and her younger employee are aspiring members of Mexico’s diverse and rapidly expanding middle class. They demonstrate the critical role working women now play in their families’ social mobility. The number of Mexican women working outside the home rose from just over 37 percent in 1980 to nearly 45 percent of Mexico’s workforce in 2008, according to the International Labour Organisation. At the same time, Mexico’s fertility rate plummeted from 5.7 to 2 children per mother between 1976 and 2012, according to Mexico’s statistics agency, INEGI. Although they belong to two different generations, the stories of María Felicitas and América share common threads: both left rural Mexico for the capital city as teenagers, and both have been instrumental in helping their families prosper financially. At the same time, both women have faced real, structural obstacles to “making it” in the middle class. María Felicitas left rural Michoacán at age 14 to attend beauty school and was taken in by a female cousin who had already made money working in Mexico City. After landing a job as an assistant in a prestigious salon, she paid for her mother and sister to come to the city, where they worked as maids and lived together in the servants’ quarters of a home in Colonia Roma. At 20, María Felicitas’ career took off when she got the opportunity to take over a failing beauty salon in Condesa with 100,000 pesos ($7,808) in credit from the building’s owners. It was the salon she used to admire on her way to classes, and it’s the salon she still runs today. Thanks to revenue from María Felicitas’ new business and income from a café her husband ran, the couple purchased a home in a gated community on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1979, where they raised a family and still live today. After surviving years of economic instability in Mexico by pinching pesos, they managed to put their three children— two daughters and a son—through private schools. That decision, which she describes as “importantísimo,” was rooted more in networking than in the quality of the education. All three children attended private universities on scholarship, one of them funded by the wealthy mother of a school friend. “We made a huge leap with our children,” she says. “I came from a rural place and my children are professionals!” Meanwhile, América hopes to someday reach the comfortable status of her employer. As a child growing up in an Indigenous community in southern Chiapas, she remembers her mother telling her, “You were born poor and you will always be poor.” Studies weren’t encouraged. At 16, faced with an imminent arranged marriage, América gambled on a suitor’s offer to come to Mexico City and build a new life. When she arrived in the city, América spoke only her native Zoque and taught herself Spanish while she attended beauty school. Today, the working mother has catapulted her family into the middle class. She and her husband, a waiter, now own a three-bedroom home in Texcoco with a yard where their children, ages 8 and 3, can play. América says that she and her husband “share everything, even the chores.” Six days a week, she wakes up before dawn to prepare breakfast for the family and accompany her son to public school before commuting at least two hours by pesero—the metropolitan area’s informal, rattletrap buses—to the salon in Condesa. América talks proudly of her son, who excels in public school and every day imagines anew what he wants to be when he grows up—the latest choices being “doctor” or “Olympian.” Though she laments not being able to spend more time with her children, América says she works hard so that her children will someday have the opportunity to go to college. “My son understands,” she says, explaining that 8-year-old Diego knows that his mother is working for his benefit. Despite what they have achieved, both women still worry about their future economic security. María Felicitas, who has no pension, expects to work long hours as long as she is healthy. América has little access to the kind of capital that could allow her to buy her own business. Yet the risks María Felicitas took in her youth, and the gambles América makes today, show the depth of their belief in their individual ability to provide a vastly improved life for their children. Although challenges remain, each, in her own way, has succeeded. “I would have liked to study something more or spend more time with my children,” says María Felicitas, tearing up as she considers her regrets. “But I am so thankful for my life.” Back to top Peru: Counting and Being Middle Class BY MITRA TAJ Olga Meza, 31, has a job that gives her an insider’s understanding of Lima’s growing middle class: she conducts surveys for Ipsos-Apoyo, going door to door to find out what’s on her neighbors’ minds. Thanks to her work with the Brazilian-Peruvian survey firm, Olga knows exactly where her family fits in the the Peruvian economy. “We belong to socioeconomic level C,” she says proudly. “Middle class.” According to Ipsos-Apoyo, Group C has become the largest and fastest growing group in Lima, representing 35 percent of the city’s population. Another poll, by Arrellano Marketing, found that 57 percent of Peruvians identify themselves as middle class—twice as many as eight years ago. Meanwhile, Peru has posted one of the region’s most rapid growth rates over the past decade—reaching 9 percent before the global financial crisis. The emerging consumer class in Peru isn’t just a sign of the country’s growth; it’s now also a fundamental part of it. As a result, families like Olga’s are courted by politicians, banks and companies selling shiny new things like the 80-centimeter (32-inch) flat-screen TV hanging in Olga’s living room. Their next purchase will be a car, to help Olga’s husband, Milton, a taxi driver, earn more money on the job. Milton, 30, works 13 hours per day, six days a week, earning 1,300 soles ($500) per month. Still, his formal employment means he gets health insurance and social security and can qualify for credit cards and loans—benefits which Olga (a part-time worker) and some 80 percent of Peru’s middle-class population who work in the informal sector don’t have access to. But being a new member of the Peruvian middle class isn’t easy. Olga and Milton work exhausting schedules to support their two children—a toddler and a teenage daughter. They hope to save enough to buy a home one day—even as they are nagged by the knowledge that it could all slip away if Peru’s economic fortunes decline. “I can plan out the rest of our life, but really, no one knows what will happen tomorrow,” says Olga, who is now conducting a survey for a Peruvian beer company, which brings in an extra 700 soles ($270) per month. Sunday is one of the few days Olga and her husband can share a hot meal together. Stirring a lamb and cilantro stew to be served with beans and rice, Olga explains that her family usually eats chicken or fish, but enjoys red meat every 10 days or so. Upstairs, four of Olga’s adult brothers and sisters are busy tending to their own families. The five siblings live largely independent lives, but share the three-story, 10-bedroom house their mother built room-by-room in the 1970s when their neighborhood, Villa El Salvador, was still a dusty slum perched on the hills of Lima. With the growth of Lima’s middle class, Villa El Salvador itself has undergone a revival. After residents banded together to secure basic services like electricity, water and sewage, the former shantytown became an official district of metropolitan Lima, complete with a mall, an industrial park and office buildings. Now it’s one of about two dozen districts on the outskirts of the city where much of Peru’s new middle class grew up—often through the sacrifices of migrants like Olga’s mother, a domestic servant, and her father, a gardener. Her parents met in Lima after migrating to the capital, like many rural Peruvians longing to escape the intense poverty of life in the interior. And like thousands of others, they achieved upward mobility for their children and the shantytowns where they settled. “My mom saved and saved to make this possible,” Olga says. “She wasn’t just a maid; she also sold plants and foodstuffs. But almost everything she earned, she saved.” Olga and Milton say they are now outgrowing the house and the community they have long called home. The couple also wants to move away from Villa El Salvador to a safer neighborhood. Crime is one of their biggest concerns: they and their neighbors have fashioned metal gates at the end of the residential roads to block access to burglars. “It’s a gated community,” Olga’s brother, Arturo Meza, jokes in English. He’s visiting Peru for the first time since migrating illegally to the United States 13 years ago. Arturo was amazed by the changes he saw in his old neighborhood and in his country since he returned. He is now considering whether to join the estimated 80,000 Peruvian migrants who have moved back to Peru since the global financial crisis hit between 2008 and 2009. “I might come back in the future to start a business here,” he explains, noting that he makes $40 an hour as a foreman for a plumbing company in Fontana, California. “But it doesn’t make sense to try to get a job here in my field. Wages in Peru just can’t support the kind of lifestyle I’m used to now.” While Peru’s mineral wealth has traditionally powered its economy, making up 60 percent of export earnings and 20 percent of tax revenues, growing domestic demand is now driving the country’s solid growth rates. Thanks in part to the rising consumption of families like Olga’s, Peru’s economy is on track to expand around 6 percent in 2012. That has given many Peruvians who have struggled to achieve middle- class status the confidence to imagine a better future for their children. Olga and Milton often attend Lima job fairs in search of better earning opportunities that will provide the income to ensure that their 14-year-old daughter, Araceli, goes to university. “I want my daughter to be a professional. That’s my dream,” Olga says. That’s why she and Milton pay $75 per month to put Araceli in a private school. “I went to a public school and I know what they’re like,” she adds. “Sometimes, when I do surveys in wealthy neighborhoods like Miraflores and Surco and I see how people live there, I think, ‘How did they get there?’” Olga says. “I think a lot of them have inherited money from their parents, but I also think some of them got there by working hard. And I think we can do it, too.” Back to top Brazil: Moving Up and Moving Out BY TAYLOR BARNES On a breezy Saturday morning in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Gardênia Azul, the women in the dos Santos family rise early for a long day of baking cakes. They have a good reason to be industrious: the wedding of Luis Miller dos Santos, 24, and his fiancé, Mayara Azevedo, 23, is barely two months away. Luis’ mother’s 10-year-old family cake-baking business brings in hundreds of extra reais a week for her family. A four-tiered wedding cake can go for as much as 450 reais ($222), and a birthday cake goes for about 80 reais ($39). She sprinkles the dry cakes with Guaraná soda, a “secret ingredient” that makes them neighborhood favorites and a source of family pride. Thanks to his mother’s entrepreneurship, Luis will be assured a better future as he and Mayara start their married lives together. Luis’ mother left her home in the state of Minas Gerais during Brazil’s “great migration,” which brought thousands of Brazilians seeking opportunity to the economic hubs of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Her husband arrived from Bahia. Both came from large families of 10 siblings. “My parents were both workers. With difficulty, they were able to have all the things they need in a home, like food. But there wasn’t enough to spend on leisure or to plan to buy a home or cars,” says Luis. “They worked with their hands.” Luis’ parents raised him and a younger sister in Gardênia Azul, which is located in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Oeste, or western zone, over an hour from the city’s major tourist attractions. Luis does not refer to his community—where homes are legally constructed and residents pay taxes—as a favela. Still, like many favelas, the neighborhood continues to be threatened by mafia-type milicias who extort fees in exchange for “protection” and “tax” residents for basic services, like gas tank deliveries. Nonetheless, the dos Santos family has worked hard to make a home for themselves in Gardênia Azul, and Luis plans to stay. Unlike their migrant parents, Luis and Mayara are part of Brazil’s Internet generation. The couple met in their church youth group, but their romance blossomed when they started chatting by instant messenger after Mayara returned to her home state of Espírito Santo. Luis, who learned English as a child and is an avid fan of foreign TV, earned a scholarship to study at a prestigious private university. After a year as a translator in a business specializing in international legal documents, he was promoted to proofreader, bringing in 2,100 reais ($1,040) a month. Before moving to Rio to prepare for her wedding, Mayara left her job as an assistant manager in a furniture store, where she earned 1,500 reais ($742) a month. She now works as a secretary for a physical therapist who specializes in treating martial arts athletes and earns about 1,000 reais ($495) a month. While the couple’s salaries locate them well above Brazil’s minimum wage of 622 reais ($306) a month, Luis and Mayara will still struggle to keep pace with the rising cost of living in Brazil once they are married and on their own. The couple’s goal in their first year of marriage will simply be to get their feet solidly planted, Luis says—and that will mean balancing both living costs and future career plans. A two-bedroom apartment in or near Gardênia Azul will cost them around $1,100 reais a month (about $545, and nearly double Brazil’s monthly minimum wage). In addition, Luis needs to take a pricey driver’s education course before he can get his license and a car. Mayara is already thinking of how she can save enough to pay for college entrance exam preperation courses so she can study management within the next five years. There is one expense the couple won’t have to worry about. Like many Brazilians of their generation, Luis and Mayara say that they are uninterested in having children. Brazil’s latest census shows that the country’s fertility rate has fallen from 5.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.1. It’s one of the steepest declines in fertility globally. Instead, Luis and Mayara dream of traveling—something they have yet to do outside Brazil. For their honeymoon, Mayara wants to go to Gramado, in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. “It’s a place that, let’s say, is more European. It’s colder and has tourist attractions,” she says. Luis and Mayara are paying $880 reais ($345) for 100 elegant black-and-white invitations with custom inserts, the majority of which they’ll deliver on foot around Gardênia Azul—far less than the 16,000 reais ($7,883) spent for a modest but higher-end wedding. The cost of the reception and dinner will be split between Mayara, her mother, and Luis’ mother, while Luis is responsible for the clothing. The wedding ceremony itself, which will be held in Luis and Mayara’s community church in Gardênia Azul, is free. “My parents did not have the financial support of their parents,” says Luis when asked if the bride’s or groom’s family traditionally pays for the wedding. “Here, we do whatever works.” Back to top Argentina: The Insecure BY HALEY COHEN Is there an Argentine middle-class dream?” When they’re asked that question, Guillermo Iacoboni, 36, and his wife Raquel, 38, look at each other quizzically across the kitchen table as their daughters Julieta, 7, and Guillermina, 11, sit in their room playing on their computer. “I guess it would be owning your own house,” Guillermo answers. “We both grew up middle class,” Raquel says. “Even though my dad had 10 children, and Guillermo’s mother was widowed, when Guillermo was one year old, our parents could afford their own houses. Now? Impossible.” The couple met in college in La Plata, a small city 70 kilometers (43 miles) from Buenos Aires, where they still live. When their youngest child, Julieta, was born, the couple was financially secure enough from Guillermo’s earnings as a banker to buy their own house—a key indicator of their continued middle-class status. But can they weather the storms in Argentina’s economy well enough to stay there? Over the past decade, the fortune of Argentina’s middle class has been in flux. This year, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported that while Latin America’s middle class has collectively increased by 56 million people since 1999, Argentina’s middle class dropped from 56 to 52 percent of the country’s total population. Declining levels of homeowners—from 70 to 66 percent between 1999 and 2009, according to the Inter-American Development Bank—help explain why. Guillermo’s monthly salary at the Caja de Ahorro y Seguro, where he’s worked for the past 15 years, is 8,200 pesos ($1,700). That puts the Iacoboni household earnings (Raquel is a homemaker) at about 3,000 pesos ($640) above Argentina’s per capita GDP. The trappings of the Iacoboni home befit the family’s middle-class aspirations. The kitchen boasts an oven and a large refrigerator. All four rooms have televisions, where Raquel watches reruns of the popular U.S. sitcom Sex and the City and the girls devour reality shows such as What Not to Wear and The Biggest Loser. Achieving financial security has not been easy against the backdrop of Argentina’s economic instability. Skyrocketing inflation in the 1970s and 1980s was followed by the economic crisis of 2001, when the government unpegged the peso from the dollar and Argentines suddenly found their savings slashed by two-thirds. Guillermina, the Iacoboni’s eldest daughter, was born during the 2001 crisis. At the time, Guillermo was earning the equivalent of just $900 a month—which left only $50 for savings and extra expenses after bills were paid. Diapers, baby formula and medicines seemed out of reach. By 2003, the economy had recovered significantly. The election of the late President Néstor Kirchner ushered in four years of impressive export-led growth, averaging 9 percent a year. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Nestor’s widow and successor as president, has continued such growth—but at the cost of sky-high inflation, estimated between 25 and 35 percent. As investor confidence has flagged, Fernández de Kirchner has implemented drastic policies to stem capital flight, many of which have enraged the middle class, sending some Argentines to the streets to protest. The Iacobonis count themselves lucky to have purchased their house when they did. With the current inflation-pumped home prices, they believe they couldn’t have afforded a house or qualified for a mortgage today. Since 2001, mortgage lending has shrunk markedly; last year, just 6.6 percent of home purchases were funded by mortgages.1 But inflation and currency controls have forced the Iacobonis to give up or postpone some of the “luxuries” of middle-class status, like international travel and car ownership—and inflation has prevented them from contributing to a savings account. Unfortunately, there’s no immediate end in sight. While the Argentine government insists inflation is steady at 10 percent, the Centro de Investigación en Finanzas at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella puts inflation at 30 percent. Argentines have privately mocked a report recently produced by the government statistics agency INDEC, claiming that an Argentine family could eat for the equivalent of 6 pesos ($1.30) a day per person. The average carton of six eggs alone costs about 5.50 pesos and a loaf of bread costs at least 10 pesos. “Where do Kirchner’s officials buy their food? I’d like to live in the same country they do,” Guillermo recently posted on his Facebook profile. The Iacobonis fear that until another candidate occupies the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s middle class will continue to contract and their living standards will continue to decline. While they no longer worry about making ends meet, Guillermo and Raquel fret that someday Julieta and Guillermina might have to. The girls have big dreams. Guillermina wants to decamp to Paris and become a fashion designer like those she sees on Project Runway. Julieta wants to become a sculptor. Their parents are just hoping that by the time their daughters grow up, the “Argentine middle-class dream” won’t be out of reach.