Ordinary concerns: class, value, and mattering among lower-middle-class Santiaguinos

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of lower-middle-class households in Santiago, Chile. The emergence of the lower middle class is one crucial feature of late capitalism in this Latin American country. This class is one structural group created by the failure of neoliberal reforms to deliver social development and the segmentation of job markets to enhance capitalist accumulation. Despite permanent employment, working-class, low-level white-collar, and self-employed individuals cannot find a path to authentic financial stability and social recognition. Further, this class is often characterised by a second trait. Chilean scholars relate lower-middle-class adults to passive citizenship, political apathy, or false consciousness. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among seven different families, this dissertation explores how parents discern and pursue what matters to them, examining three ‘structures of mattering’—post-industrial domestic fantasies, the mood of sacrificial optimism, and a commitment to nurturing. These structures orient parents on their struggle for value in different spheres and encourage them to dedicate their lives to taking care of their families, despite neoliberal precarity. In this context, I argue that the interface between these structures and the capitalist promises of hard work, self-reliance, and social mobility is more complicated than mere compliance with neoliberal ideologies. By analysing parents’ perspectives on labour, housing, parenting and citizenship, the ethnography shows how neoliberal and liberal discourses blend with Catholicism, plebeian culture, and the historical legacy of the developmental state to create a distinct sense of citizenship. This insight contributes to understanding the last thirty years of the post-authoritarian citizenship regime in Chile and processes of class restructuration in urban Latin America.