Porfirian schools were more important in their production of middle-class talent for the post-revolutionary educational and cultural efforts than they were in transforming popular behavior and eradicating illiteracy.
Mary Kay Vaughan, 2006192
During the Porfiriato, the middle class included physicians, lawyers, engineers, midwives, pharmacists, petty merchants, rancho owners, journalists, politicians, the lower clergy, and junior military officers. Government employees also joined the middle class in increasing numbers. Between 1876 and 1910, the government payroll increased by 900 percent. In 1876, only 16 percent of the middle class worked for the government, while by 1910, 70 percent did. As in the colonial period, the private sector was not hiring the new generation of the educated.193
The 1907 depression closed the gates for social mobility and undercut the middle class, whose members disproportionally lived in the hard-hit northern states. Lawyers, physicians, engineers, and small merchants saw their dreams vanish in its wake. Foreign-owned corporations cut wages and jobs, and small merchants went out of business. Widespread bank failures occurred after growers failed to make mortgage payments. Unemployment, lower wages, and a sharp rise in the cost of living threatened to pull many down from middle class status.194
The middle class resented its inability to gain access to public offices held by Diaz’s cronies and to mid-level private-sector jobs held by foreigners. White-collar workers resented receiving wages only slightly above those of industrial workers. Modest middle-class incomes were heavily taxed, since the government kowtowed to the domestic oligarchy and foreign investors, leaving them virtually tax free. After 1907, the specter of downward mobility increased discontent. For these reasons, members of the middle class ultimately rebelled against the regime that had fathered them.195
World History
