Yoga’s Dis/Union:

Class Relations, Social Mobility, and Self-Care in Mexico City

By Andrea Maldonado

B. A., Colgate University, 1997

A. M., Brown University, 2007

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2014

© Copyright 2014 by Andrea Maldonado

This dissertation by Andrea Maldonado is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Anthropology as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Daniel J. Smith, Advisor

Date______Matthew C. Gutmann, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Kay B. Warren, Reader

Date______Alyshia Gálvez, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

CURRICULUM VITAE

Andrea Maldonado Brown University, Department of Anthropology, Box 1921 Providence, Rhode Island 02912 [email protected]

EDUCATION

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Ph.D. in Anthropology May 2014 Dissertation: Yoga’s Dis/Union: Class Relations, Social Mobility, and Self-Care in Mexico City Preliminary Examination Fields: Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Consumption, and Anthropology of Urban Latin America Committee: Drs. Daniel J. Smith (co-chair); Matthew C. Gutmann (co-chair); Kay B. Warren; and Alyshia Gálvez (external reader)

A.M. in Anthropology May 2007 Thesis: A Members’ Only Community: Distinction and Performance of Self and Other within Social Clubs in Mexico City

Colgate University, Hamilton, New York B.A. in Sociology-Anthropology and Native American Studies; summa cum laude May 1997 High Honors Thesis: Native American Berdache: A Symbol of Identification and Power for Native and Non-Native Gay Men?

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Medical anthropology; global health; complementary and alternative medicine; politics of care Class theories and relations; social im/mobility; social inclusion and exclusion Globalization; consumption; anthropology of middle classes Urban studies, especially spatial organization, segregation, and inequality Mexico; Latin America Qualitative research methods; ethnography; ethnographic writing

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND GRANTS

Mellon Foundation, IIE Graduate Fellowship for International Study 2011-2012 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant 2011 Brown University International Affairs Conference Travel Grant 2011 Framework in Global Health Scholarship (U.S. National Institutes of Health) 2010 Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (Honorable Mention), Brown U. 2010 Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant 2009

iv

Professor R. Bruce Lindsay Graduate Fellowship, Brown University 2007-2008 Brown University Scholar Exchange Fellow in Mexico City 2007 Brown University Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies Travel Grant 2007 Brown University Research and Conference Travel Grants 2006-2008 Graduate Community Fellow, Brown University 2005-2007 AmeriCorps Multicultural Alliance Teacher Fellowship 1997-1999 Collegiate School Teaching Institute Fellow, New York, NY 1997 Phi Beta Kappa 1996 Charles A. Dana Scholar, Colgate University 1996, 1997

PUBLICATIONS

Maldonado, A. (2013). Cultivating the Collective through Practices of Self-Care. In Oliva López Sánchez (ed.), Cuerpo, salud, género y emociones: estudios diacrónicos y sincrónicos. Revista Electrónica de Psicología Iztacala 16(4): 1486-1515. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Maldonado, A. (2010). A Members’ Only Community: Re-making the Middle Class in Mexico City. Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing AG & Co. KG.

Maldonado, A. (2009-2011). “Una Nueva Forma de Vida”: Seeking “New Spiritualities” in Urban Mexico. Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 5.

Maldonado, A. (2007). A Members’ Only Fortressed Paradise: The Meaning of Space and Community within Social Clubs in Mexico City. International Affairs Journal 4 (1): 3-7.

Maldonado, A. (2007). Otra Perspectiva. Ichan Tecolotl 208: 12.

Maldonado, A. (1997). The Native American Berdache Tradition: Western Notions of Gender and Homosexuality Challenged. The Minerva Review XV: 23-36.

INVITED PRESENTATIONS, PANELS, AND CONFERENCES

Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C. June 2013 “Fee-for-Service Healing: New Prescriptions for Work in Mexico City.” Paper presented in a session on Cuerpos encadenados: Una perspectiva feminista de la persona inserta en cadenas globales de trabajo postfordista.

American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, CA November 2012 “Crafting the Collective through Practices of Self-Care in Mexico City.” Paper presented in a session on Health Practice, Disease Prevention.

CUNY – Graduate Center, New York, NY May 2012 “Therapeutic (Re-)Placements: Emergent Forms and Spaces of Care in Mexico City.” Paper presented at a conference organized by the Public Space Working Group (CUNY).

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-D.F. December 2011 “Cultural Medicine: The New Cure for Inequality in Mexico City.” Paper presented to an inter-disciplinary group of scholars.

v

American Anthropological Association, Montreal, QC, Canada November 2011 “Medical (Re-)Placements: Emergent Forms and Spaces of Care in Mexico City.” Paper presented in a session on Geographic Legacies, Embodied Futures: Tracing Place in Medical Anthropology.

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico City March 2011 “Seis meses en el campo.” Talk presented in a seminar on Transnational Communities.

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico City November 2010 “¿Quieres una beca? Tips para conseguir fondos para tu investigación del doctorado.” Grant-writing workshop presented to Mexican doctoral students.

Brown U., Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Providence, RI March 2010 “Culture: The New Drug of Choice in Mexico City. Circuitous States of Engagement.” Paper presented at the Politics, Culture, and Society in Latin America graduate student conference in a session on New Perspectives on the State in Latin America.

Brown U., Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Providence, RI October 2009 Violence in Mexico: Beyond Sensationalism. Organized a conference with Brown’s VP for International Affairs and leading U.S. and Mexican scholars to discuss the social, cultural, and political manifestations of and responses to violence in contemporary Mexico.

New England Council for Latin American Studies, Providence, Rhode Island October 2008 Comparative Perspectives on the Middle Class: Past, Present, and Future. Organized a panel for annual meeting.

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico City July 2008 “El consumo de la medicina ‘alternativa’ entre las clases medias en la Ciudad de México: una perspectiva antropológica.” Paper presented in a seminar on Transnational Studies.

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-Occidente June 2008 “El consumo de la medicina ‘alternativa’ entre las clases medias en la Ciudad de México: una perspectiva antropológica.” Paper presented in an inter-disciplinary research seminar on the Translocalization of Amerindian Religions.

Brown U., Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Providence, RI February 2008 “A Social Contextual Critique of the New Age Movement in Urban Mexico.” Paper presented at the Politics, Culture, and Society in Latin America graduate student conference.

Brown U., Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Providence, RI October 2006 “A Members’ Only ‘Fortressed’ Paradise: Meanings of Space and Community within Social Clubs in Mexico City.” Paper presented at the Politics, Culture, and Society in Latin America graduate student forum in a session on Comparative Perspectives on Middle Class Culture and Politics.

Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Canada September 2006 “A Members’ Only Community: Negotiating Status and Identity within Social Clubs in Mexico City.” Paper presented in a session on Elites, Networks, and Power in Mexico.

vi

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Brown University Teaching Assistant Positions: Led discussion sections, held office hours, and evaluated assignments for the following courses: Anthropology of Global Aid (Dr. Bianca Dahl) Spring 2010 Culture and Health (Dr. Daniel Smith) Fall 2009 International Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Dr. Daniel Smith) Spring 2007, 2009 Anthropology of Masculinity (Dr. Matthew Gutmann) Fall 2008 Cultural Anthropology: Understanding Human Societies (Dr. Daniel Smith) Spring 2008

Invited Lectures: Brown University, Providence, RI Spring 2013 “Self-Care in Mexico City.” Presented in International Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Dr. Daniel Smith).

CUNY-Lehman College, New York, NY Spring 2012 “Cultural Medicine: New Prescriptions for the Poor in Mexico City – Tales from the Field and Beyond.” Presented in a course on Health and Migration (Dr. Alyshia Gálvez).

Brown University, Providence, RI Spring 2011 “Cultural Medicine: New Prescriptions for the Poor in Mexico City – Tales from the Field.” Presented in courses on International Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Dr. Daniel Smith) and Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Dr. Bianca Dahl).

Brown University, Providence, RI Spring 2008 “‘Studying Up’ in Mexico City.” Presented in Cultural Anthropology: Understanding Human Societies (Dr. Daniel Smith).

SCHOLARLY EXCHANGE AND LANGUAGE STUDY

Visiting Scholar, Mexico City Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social 2011-2013 Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa 2010-2011

Doctoral Student Exchange, Mexico City July-December 2007 Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

Intensive Program in Spanish and Latin American Culture, Mexico City Spring 2004 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Intensive Spanish Language Program, Morelos, Mexico Fall 2003 Universidad Internacional

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown U. September 2006–May 2010 Served as a member of the Graduate Student Advisory Board Committee. Coordinated monthly colloquia on Politics, Culture and Society in Latin America. Brought lecture by Alyshia Gálvez, CUNY-Lehman College, to Brown U., March 2010.

vii

State of Morelos Human Rights Commission, Cuernavaca, Mexico August-October 2003 Assisted local leaders in the development of human rights protection programs in the state of Morelos. Translated documents and publication materials into English.

OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

National Student Leadership Conference, Chicago, IL (seasonal) Summer 2001-2014 Director of Admissions (Mexico); Director of Logistics; Assistant Program Director; Head Teaching Advisor; Teaching Advisor

National Conference for Community & Justice, Washington, D.C. May 2002-August 2003 Director of Youth Programs

University School, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida August 2000-June 2001 Guidance/College Placement Counselor

Lynn University, Boca Raton, Florida July 1999-August 2000 Admissions Counselor

St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Austin, Texas August 1997-July 1999 Co-Director of Community Outreach and Language Instructor

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

American Anthropological Association Latin American Studies Association

LANGUAGES

English (native) Spanish (near native)

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is a product of countless exchanges with and support from numerous groups and individuals – foundations, organizations, scholars, students, friends, and family – across the globe.

I feel fortunate to have worked at Brown with Dan Smith whose patience and generosity went far beyond the call of duty of any advisor. His commitment to his students is unparalleled and sometimes even super-human. He gave me the confidence to share my ideas with him—even when I had not yet clearly formulated them in my mind or on paper. Always providing me with clear, constructive, and helpful feedback, I hold

Dan largely responsible for the successful completion of this dissertation.

I have also had the pleasure of working with Matt Gutmann. As a renowned scholar of Mexico, his interest in my work and feedback meant a lot to me. His ideas about class in Mexico City inspired me to draw upon and extend them, as well as develop my own. Perhaps of all my professors at Brown, his candor, timely provocations, and critical eye pushed my ideas the furthest. Ultimately, I learned to trust myself and stand by my convictions because of his commitment to my success.

I am also grateful to Kay Warren whose unfailing enthusiasm has motivated me to believe in my work and in this research project. I found our conversations to be both refreshing and practical. Working with Alyshia Gálvez has also been immensely enjoyable. I thank her for providing me with comments on grant proposals, inviting me to

ix speak to her students at CUNY-Lehman College, and for offering me sound advice about my professional future. Her participation in my defense was remarkable; her constructive feedback will certainly help me turn the dissertation into a book manuscript.

My study also benefited from the wide network of relations I developed in

Mexico City. I am thankful to the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

(UAM-I) and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social

(CIESAS-DF) for providing me with institutional affiliations. Having an academic

“home” in Mexico City facilitated my fieldwork and provided me with many opportunities to gain insights from and share my findings with Mexican scholars. Some of the scholars I worked with at UAM-I include: Federico Besserer, Nestor García

Canclini, Valentina Glockner, Raúl Nieto, Eduardo Nivón, Daniela Oliver, Daniela

Reyes, Emanuel Rodríguez, Nancy Wence, and Margarita Zárate. I thank these individuals for offering me thoughtful comments, for welcoming me into their academic seminars and homes, and for demonstrating kindness and care.

At CIESAS-DF, Eduardo Menéndez served as my intellectual guide. As a mentor and advisor, he introduced me to the medical anthropology and public health worlds in

Mexico City. I especially appreciate the many in-country contacts he shared with me, and his invitation to participate in a monthly seminar on medical anthropology. There, I was able to exchange ideas with Mexican researchers of health and medicine, including

Anabella Barragán, Catalina Denman, Rosa María Osorio, and Witold Jacorzynski.

Through Eduardo, I also met Oliva López whose research and friendship I esteem and treasure dearly.

I am also indebted to Marisol Peréz-Lizaur, who recently retired from the

x

Universidad Iberoamericana. I enjoyed spending time with her and her family and hearing their thoughts about Mexican elites.

The two-year field research on which this dissertation is based was generously funded by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, an Institute of

International Education Graduate Fellowship for International Study, and a Framework in

Global Health Scholarship from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The funding I received made it possible for me to hire Mexican university students to assist me with my research. I thank Arturo Ambriz, Gerardo Buenrostro, Ximena Gutiérrez, Anahí Jiménez,

Rosario Mata, Jorge Alberto Méndez, Daniela Oliver, Mundo Ramírez, Daniela Reyes,

Raúl Vargas, Meyatzin Velasco, Laura Villalobos, and Teresa Villalobos for transcribing hundreds of interviews and meetings. Many of them were eager to share their perspectives with me about social class, mobility, and Mexicans. Our conversations aided my analysis.

Two scholars outside of Brown have been especially helpful to me and my academic career: Bianca Dahl and Rebecca Howes-Mischel. Offering thoughtful suggestions and encouragement, Bianca was instrumental in helping me secure funding and start my field study in 2010. She also read and edited drafts of two chapters. Through phone calls, emails, and text messages, Becca guided me during the write-up process. I often called upon her for good cheer, wisdom, understanding, and strength. Both Bianca and Becca fed me continuously with positive thoughts and energy, reminding me to maintain my focused intention, to be kind to myself, and to just breathe. Standing beside me through this journey, they provided gentle, yet firm, support.

Other academics that have helped me along my academic journeys include:

xi

Sandra Aguilar, Liza Bakewell, Padmini Biswas, Charles Briggs, Hugo Ceron-Anaya,

Peter Cahn, Carla Freeman, Dennis Gilbert, Arthur Kleinman, Setha Low, Mary Moran,

Sarah Muir, Michael Peletz, Valentina Napolitano, Maureen O’Dougherty, Gabriela

Torres, Anahi Viladrich, and Louise Walker. Many of them read and responded to proposals, abstracts, unpolished thoughts, emails, and papers. I appreciate their interest in my work and thank them for good conversations and research to think with. Their support inspired me to embark boldly and enthusiastically in my research endeavors.

Fortunate to have spent five years in residence at Brown, I have many people there to thank as well. First, I am grateful to the friendly and thoughtful staff in the

Department of Anthropology. Kathy Grimaldi, Mariesa DelSesto, Matilde Andrade, and

Marjorie Sugrue’s beaming smiles warmed the cold air of Providence during the winter months. They helped me to stay abreast of administrative deadlines; they forwarded my mail to me while I was away from Brown; and they never ceased to ask how they could assist me. Although Kathy Grimaldi retired in 2014, I will never forget her hugs or her magic wand, which she waved at every significant marker of my doctoral career.

Many of my peers in the Department were instrumental in my success as a doctoral student, including Jennifer Ashley, Bhawani Buswala, Chelsea Cormier

McSwiggin, Susan Ellison, Christy DeLair, Paula Dias, James Doyle, Kendra Fehrer,

Rebecca Galemba, Sohini Kar, Inna Leykin, Josh MacLeod, Maya Mesola, Andrea

Mazzarino, Yağmur Nuhrat, Katie Rhine, Stephanie Savell, Kristin Skrabut, Harris

Solomon, Yana Stainova, Stacey Vanderhurst, and Laura Vares. Several of them helped me to present my ideas more clearly in grant proposals; some helped me to proofread and edit chapters; and others offered me a place to stay during post-field visits to Providence.

xii

Many thanks to Harris for offering sound advice on grant writing. I do not know what I would have done without Yağmur during the preliminary examination process.

Her support during my write-up stage has also been extraordinary. I am so grateful to have met Jen whom I admire for her brilliance as a scholar and her kindness as a friend.

Even when she was in Chile conducting her own research, she did not hesitate to help me in moments when I felt “stuck.” I wish to emulate her ability to tell a good story, her dedication to her students, and her commitment to engaged scholarship. I appreciate

Andrea’s sincerity, scholarship, and meticulous attention to detail. She provided clarity when I needed it the most. I am grateful for all of our phone calls, our in-person visits, and our deep friendship. Kendra is another colleague who has become a close friend over the past year. Although we never exchanged chapter drafts with one another, we exchanged ideas and stories and developed a lot of trust through our weekly phone conversations. I always felt extra motivated after our chats to tackle challenges. I am confident that the emotional support and cheerleading we provided each other helped both of us reach the finish line. We did it, amiga!

I am grateful to the Graduate School for the financial support I received in the form of fellowships, tuition scholarships, research and travel grants, health insurance, and fee waivers. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Deans Brian Walton and

Jabbar Bennett, as well as Barbara Bennett, for always welcoming me into their offices when I returned to Brown for post-field visits.

I also want to thank the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies for providing me an intellectual space from 2006 to 2010 through the Politics, Culture, and

Society forum to discuss ideas with other graduate students. Through conferences and

xiii advisory board meetings, I had the pleasure of working with many doctoral students from diverse disciplines. Two people stand out in particular: Angelica Duran-Martinez and

Gabriela Sánchez-Soto. Both scholars always believed in my project, and I thank them for that. I am especially indebted to Angelica for accepting my invitation to be my roommate for eight months in Mexico City. She listened to many fieldwork dilemmas, stories, and adventures, and she offered a lot of insight and care. I did not know it at the time, but many of these conversations provided the initial foundation for chapter outlines.

I am also forever in her debt for teaching me how to cook.

I also want to thank Vice President Margaret Klawunn of Campus Life and

Student Services and the Offices of Student and Residential Life. Many special thanks to

Allen Ward for providing me with a productive, quiet work space at 20 Benevolent

Street.

I am also extremely grateful for the support I received from many friends all over the world: Paris Abell, Vital Akimana, René Bryce-Laporte, Sol Burgos, Camila Daza,

Maria del Mar Patrón, Rick Duffy, Catherine Esposito, Jeannine Esposito, Michel

Estefan, Judith Gallego, Cecilia Gúzman, Hawah, Claudine Hawthorne, Susan and John

Hirsch, Rocío Gil, Elizabeth Green, Santiago Guerrero, Julie Jack, Maria Katayama,

Cheryl Kravitz, Larry Langowski, Katy Leonard, Ana María Lesmes, Lynn Lambert,

Ignacio Madrazo, Alison Miller, Genevieve Nixon, Jennifer O’Donoghue, De Palazzo,

Teresa Ramírez, Igor Rodríguez, Joseph Rodríguez, Lili Samayoa, Dannaliz Segrera,

Kimberly Sigmund, Ronnit Stein, Kathleen Steffan, Laura Sullivan, Aaron Sutch,

Shannon Thorne, Luz Uribe, Mike Walsh, and Debra Wichser. Their unconditional love, compassion, and care have been invaluable to me.

xiv

I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my family in Florida and

Mexico whose home-cooked meals, emotional support, patience, laughter, and generosity have not gone unnoticed. I am especially grateful to my mother, father, and Nohora for always believing in me and providing me with everything I needed in life to accomplish my goals and desires. Thank you for teaching me to count my blessings, to listen to my heart, and to practice compassion. These teachings proved quite useful to me during the writing stage of this project. My nephews – Rocco, Enzo, Luca, and Taddeo – provided a lot of fun this year; I thank them for sharing their awe and zest for life with me.

Without the interest or care of the hundreds of yoga producers, promoters, and practitioners I encountered during my field study, this project would not have been possible. I extend special thanks to Rosi Ramírez and her chicas of Iztapalapa; Erik

Calderón; Śivakarī, Claudia Brindis, Leonardo Estrada, Pedro Hernández, and Yara

Miranda; Amado Cavazos, Jñana Dakini, Luís Colina, Jorge Espinosa, Ana Paula

Domínguez, Marisol González, Jai Hari Singh, and Oscar Velázquez. All of these individuals graciously invited me into their classes, homes, and circle of friends. I soon learned that the balance and equanimity that they strive for in their (personal) practice on the mat mirrored at times the balancing (class) acts they encountered and maneuvered off the mat. Through our interactions, I came to appreciate both the possibilities and constraints involved in transforming lives and communities.

Finally, I would like to thank Mexico’s Ministry of Health; Mexico City’s

Ministries of Health, Culture, Environment, and Public Safety; and Iztapalapa. The warmth and kindness I received in Mexico has inspired me to engage and complete this project with deep passion and care.

xv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CURRICULUM VITAE iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS xviii

INTRODUCTION: Class in Motion 1 Class Matters in Mexico 6 Class Relations 6 Modes and Meanings of Im/Mobility in Neoliberal Mexico 11 Mobility and the Middle Class: Consumption, Perception, and 17 Mexico’s “Classlessness” A Note about Education and Labor in 21st Century Mexico 27 Yoga in Focus 31 Yoga in Motion in Mexico City 35 Class in Motion 39 Fieldwork Setting and Methods 43 Moving through the Dissertation 49

CHAPTER 1: Yoga, the New Drug of Choice in Mexico 52 Introduction 52 Erik’s Secret Revealed: A Tale of Two Li(v)es 52 Yoga’s Debut on Television 60 Yoga: A Prisoner’s Cure 62 Yoga with the “Chosen Family” 70 Erik’s Yoga: A Cure for Mexico, or a Cure for Him? 75 Conclusion 84

CHAPTER 2: “Yoga is My Profession”: Entrepreneurial Aspirations, Anxieties, and Im/Mobility 87 Introduction 88 (Busted) Dreams 94 Respect: “Those who are most competent are the most competitive” 96 Recognition and Remuneration: “Ours is just as good as theirs” 103

xvi

Coda: A Student’s Story 107 Conclusion 109 A Reflexive Interlude 109

CHAPTER 3: Fee-for-Service Healing: New Prescriptions for Im/Mobility 114 Introduction 114 The Cultural Center: Work and Care 122 Rosi’s Crystals: Part One 122 Rosi’s Crystals: Part Two 130 Conclusion 134

CHAPTER 4: Crafting the Collective in Self-Care: Potentials and Constraints 136 Introduction 136 Cultivating Sisterhood 141 Lilia’s Self-Care 151 A Place to Care for Mexico, “Our Sister” 158 Scene 1: The Street 158 Scene 2: Yoga Class 158 Conclusion 163

CONCLUSION: Yoga’s Political Implications 166

APPENDIX A: 174 Notes on the Use and Representation of Class in the Study of Bodily Self-Care

APPENDIX B: 182 Notes on Mexico’s Middle Classes

APPENDIX C: 184 Defining Self-Care in Mexico

BIBLIOGRAPHY 186

xvii

LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Interno 64 Figure 2: Teaching yoga to prison inmates 66 Figure 3: Mexico City’s “Harmony and Yoga” classes in the Zócalo 70 Figures 4-6: Mexican celebrity participants of the “Harmony and Yoga” program 72 Figure 7: Donated yoga mat 74 Figure 8: Uniform bodily poses project photographed images of union 74 Figure 9: Erik in police uniform 75 Figures 10 and 11: Erik teaching yoga in city parks and plazas 77 Figures 12 and 13: Erik teaching yoga in city streets 81 Figure 14: Yoga diplomas, training certificates, and instructor recognition 117 Figures 15 and 16: Yoga practitioners learn alternative modes of healing in class 122 Figure 17: Monthly activity fees assessed to users of a municipal cultural center 125 Figure 18: Paper receipt given to author for payment of yoga user fees 127 Figure 19: Iztapalapa’s Casa de Cultura offers alternative healing services 130 Figures 20-25: Space and intimacy at the Youth Wellness Center in Iztapalapa 143 Figures 26-28: Off-the-mat socializing among yoga practitioners 146 Figures 29 and 30: Self-care in Iztapalapa 148 Figure 31: Prayer and meditation at the Youth Wellness Center 160 Figures 32 and 33: “They Invade Reforma with Yoga” 167

xviii

INTRODUCTION: CLASS IN MOTION

On Sunday, March 13, 2011, thirty-three-year-old yogi Erik Atamjeet Singh

Calderón1 convened about fifty people in Mexico City’s Zócalo, or central plaza, for a two-hour yoga and meditation class. Like the numerous other yoga classes he organized and led over the past two years as part of his weekly “Meditation for Peace in Mexico” gatherings held in public plazas, parks, universities, and city streets, this special event in the Zócalo was endorsed by Mexico City government officials. It was also promoted and supported by some distinguished instructors of the capital city, one of whom was Marisol

González. Just a few days before the event, in a message she posted on the “All about

Yoga” Facebook group page she created, she indicated her joy “to bring yoga to many hearts…of our beautiful city” and invited her friends to join her efforts to “fill [their] spirit with love, light, harmony, and awareness.”

Although this was the second time Erik had convened a group in the Zócalo since initiating his peace movement in 2009, this was the first time the space was occupied simultaneously by another group. The group consisted of members of a large union

(Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas) representing the thousands of unemployed Light and Power (Luz y Fuerza) electricity workers who had been laid off in 2009 when federal

1 Several yoga instructors requested that their birth and/or spiritual names be used in this text. Pseudonyms have been given to those persons who did not make this request, and to those who asked me not to use their real names. 1 officials shut down their operations. After executing several marches in the city with few results, the group decided to occupy the Zócalo—“for the dignity of our country and the working class” (as their signs read)—and literally make the pavement their home for several months. The many colorful banners that lined the tents they erected all around the plaza expressed anger, criticism, and frustration with President Calderón and his conservative political party’s neoliberal policies. Their posters shouted at the president for privatizing state-run industries in Mexico, for “selling the nation,” and for “stealing from the poor [el pueblo, literally, ‘the people’].” The disenfranchised workers asked the public to support the “struggle [lucha]” and “resistance” of the working class, for “we are not the reason for the economic crisis.” While union leaders encouraged the unemployed electricians to voice their plight, Erik and the other instructors encouraged their students to do just the opposite: Yogis were instructed to close their eyes, remain silent, block out the sounds around them, listen to their breath, and connect with their interior. Yoga was presented as a cure-all for Mexico’s social, political, and economic problems.

The contrasting images at play on that sunny day were indeed remarkable.

Beneath an enormous Mexican flag that flew wildly above him, Erik extended his gratitude to the Mexico City government for supporting his efforts to create peace in their troubled country. Just as he began to speak, about a dozen men walked out of their tents and positioned themselves around the practitioners who were assembled in several neat rows. Though somewhat curious about the practitioners, most of whom were dressed in white, the unemployed workers declined Marisol’s invitation to join the class. At the end of the event, practitioners were encouraged by their instructors to join hands and form a circle of prayer.

2

I remained on the edge of the circle and took note of a conversation between a father and daughter who stopped a few feet in front of me to observe the morning activities. As the father snapped a photo of the yogis, his young daughter tugged at his shirt to ask him a question.

“Daddy, what are [those people dressed in white] doing?”

“My daughter, they are praying for peace. There is a lot of insecurity in Mexico

today and they want our country to be peaceful.”

“And, those [people] over there?” the little girl asked her father, directing his

attention with her index finger towards the workers’ tents.

“They are rebels!” he responded with disgust.

In her study of the discursive production of a “middle-class public” in Mexico,

Mexican scholar Yeh (2012:195) argues that “the ascendance of the middle class as a figure of national potential necessitates the decline of another: the pueblo, ‘the people,’ marked as a lower-class entity, which achieved status as the national subject proper, thanks to the 1910 revolution.”2 In this way, the unemployed electricians who voice class distinctions and divisions represent (old) class struggles, poverty, and stagnancy (the past); their class-based protest constitutes “rebellious” activity in 21st century Mexico. In contrast to the workers, Erik and the yogi practitioners—who couch their mission of

“peace,” “harmony,” and “love” in non-threatening, depoliticized terms—are cast as heroic resistors (Heiman, Liechty, and Freeman 2012:19). Their focus on bodily self-care represents positive transformation (in-the-making) and aspiration (the future); their efforts to promote bodily union and dispel class tensions are thus celebrated. To teach

2 Yeh (2012:193) investigates interrelated sites, including academic discourse, mass media, and everyday talk, to understand the ways in which a middle-class public—as a “collective subjectivity”—is constituted, engaged, and reproduced in Mexico. 3

“the people” to enact controlled and patterned bodily responses and transitions is to stand in alignment with the Mexican middle class—that is, “the civic class, the law-abiding class, the class of the liberal democratic future” (Yeh 2012:194; see also Lomnitz

2003b)—and thus apart from the disenfranchised Other.3

Following the yoga class, Marisol’s family invited Erik, a few of his friends, and me to join them for breakfast at a local restaurant. One of his friends began to complain about the electricians’ protest and blamed their presence in the Zócalo for the low turnout of people at the yoga event. It was then that Erik disclosed to Marisol’s family that he, too, was poor, barely earning enough money each month to feed his family. The news came as a surprise to Marisol’s father, a successful businessman. Taking note of the man’s awe, Erik looked at him and said, “Yoga changed me. I learned to control my body.” His comment not only references the physical, but also the social and symbolic, manipulations he has enacted through his participation in the practice. Indeed, Erik was a cop from Ciudad Neza, a destitute area on the margins of Mexico City.

This opening anecdote raises questions about how social mobility and class relations are being reshaped in Mexico.4 That a working-class cop from a poor barrio can claim the national stage, teach alongside distinguished instructors, break bread with the elite, and distinguish himself from the so-called rebels who protest forced unemployment speaks to an embodied shift in Mexican class subjectivities. As a self-made man (or at least perceived by others as one), Erik not only embraced self-help philosophies; he embodied them through his yoga practice.

3 Heiman et al. (2012:17) remind us that “neoliberal states around the world typically delegitimize (or even actively suppress) class-based politics, with its revolutionary, Marxist implications…From the perspective of neoliberal statecraft, class is an idea—disruptive and destabilizing—whose time has (hopefully) passed.”

4 See Appendix A: Notes on the Use and Representation of Class in the Study of Bodily Self-Care. 4

From 2010 to 2012, I observed yoga as an individually responsible, socially desirable means to move on the mat, occupy city streets, and display aspiration. In Erik’s view, national transformation works most successfully through the care of the

(individual) body. By offering the masses a practice that had once been deemed largely an elite one, he envisioned a shift in the social (classed) body.

In my view, yoga was a perfect way to encourage self-improvement and self-care while keeping the masses in their place—with their eyes and mouths shut. Ingrained in the yoga philosophy is the notion that we are all one; the desire to be different can thus never be voiced. And, yet at the same time, yoga was changing Mexican social relations:

I found yoga’s promise for union affecting how Mexicans were interacting with each other, impacting people’s expectations of themselves and others, and sometimes shifting social life possibilities and impossibilities, albeit unevenly. Much like the reader who may have been surprised to learn that Erik was a poor cop, I, too, was surprised to find class relations and mobility playing out differently in 2010 from what my readings of urban Mexico5 and my previous research6 in Mexico City had led me to assume.

Studying yoga’s production, promotion, and practice provides a window onto the ways diverse groups of Mexicans are maneuvering relations of power, and are also being

5 When I refer to “urban Mexico” in this dissertation I am drawing from Low’s (1996b:384) concept of “the ‘urban’ as a process rather than as a type or category” and her view of “the city” as an historical site of “cultural and sociopolitical manifestations of urban lives and everyday practices.” I do not wish to reinstate social and ideological divides between lo rural and lo urbano that scholars have critiqued (Lynch 1994). While lo urbano encompasses my study’s central focus, I recognize that the events and experiences that take shape in my field site are related to those of lo rural. My work nods to these interrelations, but does not focus explicitly on them.

6 My 2006 study examined how Mexicans elaborate ideals of privilege and community through group affiliations. I found that middle-class Mexicans place great importance on costly memberships to private social clubs, even during economic crises, in order to preserve social and professional alliances, to socialize their children toward particular moralities, and to claim physical distance from groups they deem less desirable (Maldonado 2007; 2010). 5 maneuvered by them. Class, this dissertation argues, is not being unmade as some scholars and some of my interlocutors assume; it is being remade through inter- and intra- class engagements that reflect both the possibilities and limitations of mobility in 21st century Mexico City.



Class Matters in Mexico

Class Relations

Class relations are anything but static (Gutmann 2002:58), yet some scholars of

Latin America—particularly those who draw on rather rigid, mechanical materialist

(Marxist) frameworks to understand class positions—often suggest that they are in their writings. Sociologists, such as Portes and Hoffman (2003), for example, describe social stratification across Latin America in terms of “strategic relations of…conflict” that shape people’s “relative life chances” (43). In this view, classes are conceived as opposing bodies with conflicting economic interests. The underlying assumption here is that class relations entail divisiveness, struggle, and combat – despite the fact that “such class antagonisms seldom if ever take the form of two opposing armies, one of the rich and the other of the poor” (Gutmann 2002:118).7 Building on Gutmann’s insight, one of my aims in this dissertation is to demonstrate how Mexicans are blurring, challenging, and also reinforcing class boundaries and divisions through yoga.

Class analyses that treat the rich and the poor as dueling factions are promoted

7 Gutmann’s (2002) critique is in response to “a tendency [among some resistance theorists] to mistake class position for class relations, to confuse economics with ideology” (117). Their confusion emerges from a theoretical framework that attributes behaviors, attitudes, and actions to specific “people because of their income and wealth” (117). Many political analyses that espouse resistance theory, Gutmann argues, may relegate poor people’s politics “to the realm of the involuntary and unavoidable” (117), and miss “hidden and covert” forms of resistance (120). 6 widely among our Mexican interlocutors (Gutmann 2002:119). In his study of political participation and resistance in Mexico City, Gutmann critiques the stereotyping and value-ranking of classes that circulate in everyday conversations. He notes, for example, that there is a “perception on the part of the wealthy classes that men in the working class are animales [animals] and brutos [idiots]” (ibid: 119). Such class prejudice is grounded in “social divisions of labor—mental labor (for the wealthy) and manual labor (for the workers)” (ibid: 119). Commentaries like these that attribute behaviors and actions to specific class positions both homogenize and help “dichotomize the world of classes” in

Mexico City (ibid: 119). Such emic delineations may also foment misunderstandings among scholars. Cahn (2008), for example, adopted the intellectual /manual labor binary to distinguish between Mexican “middle” and “lower” classes, respectively. Assuming that “[t]he separation between proletariat and professionals” (Cahn 2008: 441) in Mexico is really so distinct—without placing such relations themselves under ethnographic scrutiny—can be problematic. Such assumptions and the accounts that emerge from them may ultimately reproduce polarized visions and understandings of class relations.

Gutmann (2002:141) questions the forms these class schisms are supposedly taking in Mexico City, suggesting that “[t]he rich and poor are not facing off in two tight- knit armies [there], because, among other reasons, the rich and the poor do not comprise homogeneous classes” of people who think and act in the same way. By treating class as a heterogeneous lived reality and attending to the diverse beliefs, views, experiences, and behaviors of his Mexican friends, his rich ethnographic analysis activates (inert) analytical categories—like “the working class.” We learn about intra-class politics and relations but far less about the cross-class dialogues and activities that emerge on the

7 ground there. While such interactions become visible in some of the conversations

Gutmann’s friends share with him about their involvement in marches (see page 131), we do not learn much beyond what their memories tell us. If feuds and struggles between the rich and the poor in Mexico City hardly resemble the antagonistic impressions that many rich and poor people have and allude to in their everyday talk, then how do classes there actually relate to each other? Buried in a footnote is Gutmann’s response: “[C]lass divisions in Mexico, if less often class conflicts there, have always seemed to me shockingly blatant” (238, note 21).

Other anthropologists share Gutmann’s assessment. Writing in the late 1950s,

Oscar Lewis (1959:2) first took note of the rigid class divisions existing in Mexico when he observed that “the hierarchical nature of [Mexican] society inhibits communication across class lines.”8 Much contemporary scholarship would have us believe that not much has improved over the past sixty years. It would seem that class divisions have become even more cemented and relations even more divisive ever since neoliberal economic reforms went into effect in the 1980s. These policy reforms significantly reduced government assistance and other safety nets among the most marginalized of Mexicans and increased already striking income disparities between the rich and the poor. Rising economic and social inequalities in the 1990s led some groups to segregate their domestic and social worlds from fellow citizens. Portes and Hoffman (2203:67) observe that privileged groups in Mexico City, for example, “isolate themselves from the rest of the

8 Lewis (1951, 1959, 1961, 1988 [1965]) engaged in long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study rural migrant households in cities. While his research in Mexico City helped to blur the categorical boundaries that Redfield’s (1941, 1953, 1956) ideal-typical model (the “folk-urban continuum”) created between rural and urban sociality, it did far less to illuminate the connections between his informants’ lives and those of other classes. Indeed, his descriptions of Mexican families, albeit thick, offered few details regarding the larger social contexts they inhabited (Bassols et al. 1988). And, thus, Lewis’ work did little to challenge the notion of the city as a site of (class) division. 8 urban population” by barricading themselves behind “fortress-like gated communities”

(see also Gilbert 2007, who finds middle-class families in Morelos doing the same).9

These observations, along with my own—garnered from research I conducted in private, walled social clubs in 2006 and 2007 in Mexico City—led me to initially assume that yoga, as a private consumer good, would further encourage class segmentation through the privatization of social life. In this way, I expected yoga consumption to involve similar kinds of social class bordering and patrolling mechanisms that club memberships entailed.

Yet, in 2009, I learned that yoga had become widely accessible through public television programs and state-endorsed initiatives in diverse neighborhoods and settings

(from public health clinics and universities to cultural civic centers and parks). It therefore seemed plausible to me that yoga did not operate in exactly the same divisive ways as a social club, for example, with its highly selective, costly memberships. Class divisions and privileges were certainly apparent to me when I returned to the field in

2010 to begin my long-term ethnographic study. Many of my more affluent yogi instructor friends, for example, had never set foot in the working-class neighborhoods I frequented daily; others were not even aware that the practice had become so popular10.

As important it was for me to recognize these lines of difference between classes, it was

9 Anthropologists of Latin America suggest that we know far less about privileged classes—as opposed to other less affluent groups—because of their emphasis on privacy and exclusivity (Cabrales Barajas and Canosa Zamora 2001; Caldeira 2000; Froud et al. 2006; Herzfeld 2000; Low 2003; Pina-Cabral and Lima 2000; Shore and Nugent 2002).

10 The term popular (“the popular”) is an historical and social construct (Lomnitz 1999). I use it here to refer to “the popular classes” of Mexican cities. Anthropologists of and in Mexico have employed this term since the 1980s to index “the social group that has been variously called the working class, the proletariat, the poor, the dispossessed, and the underdogs” (Gutmann 2002: xxvi). For insightful discussions of Mexican popular classes, peoples, and/or cultures, see Bonfil Batalla 1988; de la Peña and de la Torre 1994; García Canclini 1988, 1993b; Gutmann 2002; and Nivón 1998a. 9 also important for me not to ignore the cross-class dialogues and exchanges that I observed emerging across class lines in yoga’s production, promotion, and practice.

In their longitudinal study of social class in Mexico, Nutini and Isaac (2009) assert that class “frames every individual’s worldview and life chances” (3) and shapes how Mexicans relate to each other, yet the subject of these relations “remains poorly understood” (4). When different classes of Mexican society begin to engage in the same

(self-care) practice with aims to foster “union” and “transformation,” what kinds of interactions emerge between them? How do these relations shape class mobility? If we wish to debunk the myth of class wars between the “haves” and “have-nots” in 21st century Mexican cities, then it is important to activate the inertia of intra- and inter-class relations in the same way scholars have activated the inertia of class categories. To do this, this dissertation follows the call of Heiman et al. (2012: 27) to “include people from all class positionings in our anthropological studies” and investigate class relations ethnographically. By (re)focusing our attention from class positions (outside of relations) and towards class positioning (as an embodied action in relation), we can begin to better understand how social mobility is enacted and contested as an active practice.

Investigating how working-class people, like Erik, interact with individuals and groups of various class positionings demonstrates modes of im/mobility that are emerging in Mexico City. Erik’s mode of relating to others in his yoga practice offers what I call constrained or manipulated potential to those who mobilize such mechanisms.

Prospects for social and economic mobility for working-class yogis may be limited, but their embodied and relational experiences nonetheless complicate our readings of class to allow for a richer analysis of how it is experienced. Modalities of self-care feel

10 empowering to Erik and other yoga practitioners at the same time that they offer a stark look at how structural inequalities in Mexico are being obscured by state-sponsored neoliberal discourses.11

Modes and Meanings of Im/Mobility in Neoliberal Mexico

Social im/mobility was a subject of wide concern and debate among Mexicans in

2010. Just one day after arriving in Mexico City, I recall having three different kinds of conversations on the subject. The first exchange took place in a taxi on my way from the airport to my cousin’s apartment, where I resided for nearly a month. After my fifty-year- old driver had asked me a few questions about myself, where I travelled from, and how long I would be staying in the infamous DeFectuoso,12 I asked him to tell me about his life. He looked embarrassed. Before beginning his story, he begged me not to look down on him for the choices he was, in his words, forced to make. He never thought it would be possible for someone like him, a graduate of the national university, to be driving a taxi. With a university degree he expected he would be earning a decent living and claiming “a good life” (which is what his mother and father, with only their primary and secondary school educations, had hoped for, too). “All of the sacrifices my parents made so that I could study were pointless,” he insisted. Although he was able to secure a state-

11 The subject of self-care is explored in Chapter 4. Yoga is just one of many practices that encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own health—that is, to self-care. The ethnographic study of self- care has been dominated by investigations into medical technologies (see Biehl and Moran-Thomas 2009 and Hogle 2005 for reviews). While these accounts problematize the universality of bioscience, their analytic gaze remains focused on biomedical care (e.g., Nguyen 2005; Whyte et al. 2002). Scholars of Mexico have moved beyond bioscientific hegemonies by analyzing the variety of ways citizens interact with the state’s promotion of self-care (e.g., Gálvez 2011; Howes-Michel 2012). My work also aims to understand diverse expressions of self-care and encourages us to move beyond the walls of the clinic to do so (see also Schneider 2010). Further investigations of the many spaces, institutions, and groups that shape definitions and practices of self-care and public health in Mexico are needed.

12 This is a common satirical wordplay that Mexico City residents use to refer to the imperfections or, literally, the “defects” of the Federal District (or Distrito Federal in Spanish). 11 funded job as an accountant soon after graduating from college, he lost it in the mid-

1990s following the peso devaluation crisis of 1994. This father of two explained to me that he was forced to drive taxis when he was unable to find office work in the private sector. When I asked him why he thought he had difficulty finding other employment, he blamed his age, suggesting to me that “no boss wanted to hire a forty-something year old when he could pay a twenty-five year old to do the same job for a lot less money.”

Just a few hours later I realized that my forty-six-year-old cousin Carlos was in somewhat of a similar predicament. Like the taxi driver, Carlos also held a university degree and lost his legal job in the public sector in 2008. He remained unemployed until

2012. A divorced father of two teenagers, Carlos seemed more concerned about his children’s future than his own. Afraid that his two children would join los ninis—a new generation of middle-class youth in Mexico City who neither worked nor studied (see

Avilés 2012 and del Val Blanco 2009)—he debated whether it was worthwhile for him to pay for a private university education when such credentials did not necessarily guarantee that his children would secure full-time professional employment. “Why should I pay all that lana [money] to send them to private school when they will probably have to compete against hundreds for a good job?” Being unemployed himself, Carlos had reason to doubt whether a university education remained a viable mode of social mobility. But, questioning the value of a private school education—considered by some scholars to be one of the most significant hallmarks of middle-class mobility and status in Mexico

(Gilbert 2005; Maldonado 2007, 2010; Nutini and Isaac 2009)—made his narrative even bleaker than that of the taxi driver. Unlike the driver, however, Carlos did not blame himself or his children for the economic and social uncertainties they faced and those

12 they might encounter in the future; he blamed wealthy politicians whom he assumed were more interested in protecting their own interests than in creating jobs for “the rest of us.”

My third encounter with social im/mobility took place the following day at a hair salon located just a few blocks from my cousin’s apartment. The hairdresser and I engaged in a lengthy discussion about organized crime in Mexico. She blamed the rampant drug violence in her country on the young dealers whose mutilated faces and bodies lined the front pages of local newspapers. I tried to convince her that it was unfair to blame these men for their involvement in a complex situation involving larger political and economic forces. It seemed to me that limited economic and social opportunities were factors likely contributing to criminal activities. Shaking her head back and forth and waving her scissors in the air, the thirty-five-year-old hairdresser made it obvious that she wanted to hear nothing of the sort. She insisted that all Mexicans have the ability to improve their situation. “Mexicans are miserable because they want to be. Poverty is an excuse for so many in this country. You have to be willing to do something different and to make better choices in life. Of course it is hard, but it is not impossible. Look at me! I am not ashamed to tell you that I am from a poor barrio [neighborhood]. When I started working in this hair salon I mopped the floor. Little by little I saved a bit of money, went to school, and learned from my teachers. Even to this day I believe in continuing my education.” She took pride in her work and beauty school training, the loyal clients who returned each week to see her, the meager tips she accumulated, and the fact that she was providing what she called “a good service” in a middle-class neighborhood. Even though she had far less formal education than both the taxi driver and my cousin, this hairdresser was much more optimistic about the future than either of

13 them. The woman did not own a car (like the driver) or an apartment (like my cousin), or have any savings, yet she was confident that her future would be secure. No longer mopping floors, she perceived her social and economic position in action (i.e., mobile), so much so that she was absolutely certain she would one day travel to Europe and learn how to perfect her labor. If her grandiose dream did not come to be, she said she would have no one to blame but herself.

These exchanges reflect three different lived experiences of social im/mobility in contemporary urban Mexico and warrant further attention. Each narrative reflects the

(upward, downward, and even sideways) directions towards which each person perceives his or her material and social life has moved, is moving, or will move. Such perceptions do not exist in a vacuum; among other things, they are shaped by those closest to the speaker – his or her family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. In order to unpack these experiences and see what each is suggesting about meanings and modes of mobility in contemporary Mexico City, it is important to first contextualize them in relation to the broader economic climate of the region and then to the subject of blame, which each individual highlights in his or her narrative.

Prominent sociological writings suggest that there are few (if any) means to become upwardly mobile in urban Latin America. They assert that “the present era registers a visible increase in income inequality, a persistent concentration of wealth in the top decile of the population, a rapid expansion of the class of micro-entrepreneurs, and a stagnation or increase of the informal proletariat” (Portes and Hoffman 2003:41).

The urban poor have been hit hard by reductions in government assistance, while many members of the urban middle classes, stripped of their jobs in the public sector, have

14 sunk deeper into poverty. In other words, it would seem that while the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. Public sector job losses across the region in the 1990s have “not [been] compensated by growth in formal private employment, forcing displaced former employees to create their own economic solutions through petty enterprise” (48), a situation Portes and Hoffman (2003) have labeled “invented self- employment” (66) and “forced entrepreneurship” (77). Nearly 60 percent of the new urban jobs that were created in Latin America in the 1990s were in micro-entrepreneurial enterprises and informal self-employment, a percentage considerably greater than that which was registered during the previous era of import-substitution industrialization

(1940 –1980) (ibid: 48; see also Escobar Latapí 2001). Although self-employment is the age-old dream of aspirants to the middle class, such work has “not generate[d] enough income…to surpass the poverty level” (Portes and Hoffman 2003:59). These authors and others therefore conclude that “it is not necessary to be unemployed in order to be poor;” to be a worker often entails poverty in Latin America (ibid: 65; Escobar Latapí and

González de la Rocha 1995:60).

Yet, even in this harsh economic context of generalized poverty, the social climate that exists is one of blame. Neoliberalism’s ideological push towards personal responsibility, self-reliance, individual initiative, and self-care fosters an environment in which the poor are too often blamed for their marginalization (Portes and Hoffman

2003:69; Gutmann 2002:58). These self-help ideologies are mobilized by people like the hairdresser to blame the poor for their supposed stagnancy – that is, for being poor.

Supporters of neoliberal economic policies that reduce public safety nets blame the immobile and downwardly mobile for not taking initiative to improve their life

15 circumstances and for not becoming entrepreneurs of their lives and livelihoods through self-employment, alternative educational outlets, and healthy lifestyles. Critics, however, not only suggest that there are other factors at play but also “recognize ‘entrepreneurship’ as part of a broader neoliberal ideology that helps mask middle-class privilege, legitimates middle-class ‘success,’ justifies cuts in social services, and blames the poor for their poverty” (Heiman et al. 2012:25).

Of course, neither the taxi driver nor my cousin, or the unemployed energy workers occupying the central plaza of Mexico City, should be blamed for their job losses; such worker disenfranchisement is not of anyone’s choosing. Gutmann (2002) is correct when he asserts that “[w]e cannot blame [the poor] for their predicament when they find themselves caught in webs not of their own spinning” (212). However, if we follow the logic of his critique, it would also seem to be unfair to hold those who are upwardly mobile responsible for their privilege, even though some scholars and laypersons do so on account of their belief that those who are (financially, socially, or even symbolically) mobile seem to have more control over their lives (see O’Dougherty

2013 for a convincing counter-argument). How much control does someone like the hairdresser have? The global, market-driven processes that shape all people’s lives today cannot possibly be under the control of any one person or group.

Yet, how does this structural perspective address those among the working and middle classes who experience social and material changes in life through new forms of education and labor? And, if the rich are not to be blamed for the problems of the poor, then how shall we come to understand those among them who offer the less affluent a number of social, educational, and work opportunities that sometimes contribute to the

16 latter’s mobility? Gutmann (2002) suggests that the beliefs and actions of all social classes must be contextualized “in relation to both larger social forces and to the experiences and understanding of others with whom they share their immediate lives”

(50). Blaming class positions or even class relations for complex social inequalities not only reproduces homogeneous categories of class (as Gutmann points out).13 It also tells us little about how Mexicans of all classes are mobilizing and manipulating some of these ideologies (like self-employment and self-care) to foster and sometimes challenge others’ perceptions of mobility. One of my goals in this dissertation is thus aimed at understanding both the successes and challenges that urban Mexicans encounter with mobility.

Mobility and the Middle Class: Consumption, Perception, and Mexico’s “Classlessness”

Much of what we know or think we know about social mobility is an outgrowth of our relatively recent focus on the rise and wane of the traditional liberal middle classes. The urban Mexican middle classes have historically been associated with nationalist discourses of progress and social mobility, given the various educational and employment opportunities offered to them in Mexico’s post-revolutionary industrializing context (Moreno 2003). In the 1950s, some intellectuals, professionals, and technical groups emerged from the ranks of the middle class and became the “new elites” of

13 Even Lewis, who questioned whether all residents of Mexico City in the 1950s and 1960s benefited equally from so-called urban development, remained reluctant to associate poverty with broader political- economic constraints. Instead, he employed a culturalist explanation. Lewis’ (1988[1966]) “culture of poverty” paradigm sought to humanize the lives of the Latin American urban poor by demonstrating the resiliency of their culture in the face of economic and social marginalization. The poor, he claimed, could offer each other a “sense of belonging, a sense of power” (251) by organizing themselves collectively across the region. Such acts, he wrote, would shed some of the “basic characteristics associated with the culture of poverty even if they [could] not…abolish poverty itself” (251). This overly homogeneous rendering of culture has since been used by leaders of social movements to promote liberal understandings of social change in contemporary Mexico (Nivón, personal communication, 2007). As a result, the problems of the poor are regarded largely as cultural matters for individuals to resolve. 17

Mexican society.14 Although the degree to which individuals were able to rise from middle to upper social class positions was indeed greater in Mexico than in any other

Latin American country in the mid-20th century (Beals 1953:333), similar mobility has been far less attainable in recent decades (Portes 1985).15 Scholars of Mexico and other countries across Latin America have studied how this downwardly mobile educated sector has responded to economic crises that have reshaped their material and social lives, preventing many of them from “increasing the ranks of the affluent middle class” (Nutini

2005:14). According to Lomnitz (1994b:67), the contemporary “problem…among the middle class…is the maintenance of a perpetually threatened economic status,” one that has been positioned so vulnerably in relation to the corporate state (see also Lomnitz

1982). Such instability was experienced among the university-educated professional classes (of attorneys, engineers, textile manufacturers, etc.) who grew increasingly frustrated and fearful in the 1980s when employment opportunities in the public sector began to decline (Nutini 2005:14). Economic insecurity and job competition among this sector today serve as stark reminders of their precarious state of privilege. Much like the educated taxi driver-accountant I discussed above, those aspiring social mobility through a university education often remain members of the working class. That is, as quickly as these groups “can ascend the social scale, they can descend [it] and be the first

14 These new elites, as Lomnitz, Mayer, and Rees (1983) note, “both cooperate[d] and compete[d] for control of the state apparatus” (24). Some held special government posts as technical-professional experts; others served as union leaders.

15 The greater potential for social mobility in Mexico during the mid-20th century was largely due to steady industrial and economic growth, urbanization, and the expansion of public services and government work (Gilbert 2007:20). This time period, lasting nearly thirty years (1940-1970), is referred to as the Mexican miracle. Some scholars claim that public education, in particular, became “a magic passport for social mobility” (Cline 1962:191), especially among those that bordered the middle class (Gilbert 2007:27). Lewis (1959), however, reminds us that despite the general prosperity of this era, “over 60 per cent of the population were still ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed in 1956, 40 per cent were illiterate, and 46 per cent of the nation’s children were not going to school” (9). 18 victims…of [political and economic] crises” (Von Mentz 2003b:18).16

In Mexico, studying the lives of those who belong (or try to belong) to the

Mexican middle classes—that sector of society comprised of neither the wealthiest nor the poorest segments of the population—is rather recent (Von Mentz 2003b:7). In the

1980s, Mexican anthropologists underscored the need for scholars of urban studies to include these groups in their research of and in cities (Fanny Quintal 1983; Sariego

Rodríguez 1988). Heeding this call, García Canclini and his colleagues embarked on an extensive study in the late 1980s that surveyed the cultural consumption practices of more than 1500 households of diverse classes in Mexico City (see García Canclini 1993a,

1996a, 1996b, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c; García Canclini and Piccini 1993; García Canclini and Mantécon 1996; Nieto 1998; Nivón 1998b; Vernik 1998).17 Their work analyzes the ways consumption (and access to it) has become an important means to negotiate class status and display mobility during the neoliberal era.

This scholarship suggests that an underlying social logic drives groups to purchase specific items, frequent specific places, and take part in specific activities

(García Canclini 2001). García Canclini understands consumption as “something more than the exercise of tastes” (2001:46). All acts of consumption, according to him,

16 Historians of Mexico understand social mobility among the middle classes “as the entirety of economic and social changes that occur in the life of one person or over the span of two or three generations of a family” (Von Mentz 2003b:8). These changes are impacted by wealth (including inheritance), social prestige, political importance, labor, education, family and social alliances, and lifestyle (ibid: 8). Anthropologists, however, distinguish between the “traditional middle classes” of liberal professionals, linked ideologically to “relatively collectivist, national modernization paradigms”, and the “new middles classes” that emerged out of “the post-1980 global neoliberal turn…around ideologies of global ‘free trade,’ individual entrepreneurial success,…private property[,]…and ‘personal responsibility’ (read ‘personal accumulation and self-optimization’; Ong 2006)” (Heiman et al. 2012:14-15). This insight not only suggests that “middle-class history is ongoing,” but also implies that the lived reality of all classes “continu[es] to evolve as its conditions of possibility continue to change across time and space” (ibid:15).

17 For other studies about Mexico’s middle class, see: Gamboa Ojeda 2003; Gilbert 2007; Lomnitz 1994b; Mayer and Lomnitz 1988; Olive Negrete and de Piña Chan 1960; Uribe Salas 2003; Von Mentz 2003a. 19 represent the utilization of shared systems of meaning to communicate “relations of solidarity with and distinction from others” (ibid: 46). Asserting a similar point,

O’Dougherty (2002) argues that “consumption provides a fairly comprehensive, stable, and flexible means of renewing, ameliorating, proving, and challenging one’s standing materially and symbolically” (128). In accordance with this view, I observed many of the middle-class professionals included in my 2006 study of social clubs visibly consuming specific goods and services in an effort to purchase a particular lifestyle. This included driving a certain model and make of an automobile, donning brand-named apparel, attending “the best” private schools, living in an exclusive neighborhood, traveling both domestically and internationally, and even becoming members of private (as opposed to government-sponsored) clubs. At the time, buying membership into a club seemed to me to allow one to buy some of the material, social, and symbolic goods associated with membership to a particular social group or class.18

While much has been written to suggest how the middle classes rely on consumption practices to retain a privileged status in difficult economic times, other works remind us that economic status and social status are “far from being the same thing” in Mexico (Beals 1953:330). Some have suggested that it is not necessarily consumption, but rather cultural and social resources (like school networks, marriage, and social labeling) that shape mobility (see Gilbert 2005, 2007).19 Lomnitz (1977; 1982;

1988) has written extensively about friendship circles and other informal “horizontal bonds” (e.g., kinship, household, neighborhood, and professional relations).

Compadrazgo, a key element of popular Catholicism, continues to have much

18 See also: Cahn 2008; Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur 1987; Nutini 1995, 2004; and Whetten 1984.

19 Consuming certain products (like a private school education) might grant access to these resources, too. 20 significance among the working classes in contemporary urban Mexico (Gutmann 1996;

Brandes 2002).20 Once formalized, compadrazgo relations, such as those between godparents and godchildren, involve new obligations and entitlements for the parties involved. Lomnitz (1994) has also shown that the urban middle classes (in Chile) use these reciprocal ties as a means to exchange professional, social, and political favors among “close friends.” She and others have argued that individuals from all social classes rely on these kinds of networks to “survive or to gain access to social mobility” (Lomnitz and Díaz 1992:187; see also Bourdieu 1978; Camp 2003).21

In her study of downwardly mobile middle-class peoples in 1990s Brazil,

O’Dougherty (2002) finds that “discursive claims of ‘cultural’ and ‘moral’ superiority

[are also] foundational to the attainment, maintenance, and performance of middle-class identity” (3-4). According to Parker, “every time people attach social labels, they place one another in an imagined hierarchy, and in so doing they negotiate the criteria by which some people…attemp[t] to move into ‘better’ circles or…enforce the exclusion of

‘undesirables’” (2012: 336, emphasis added). Thus, one of the challenges that many middle-class educated peoples face is that of trying to convert their social / economic / cultural capital (in the form of friends, work, and education) into symbolic capital (in the form of social status).22

20 Compadrazgo encompasses ritualistic, often lifelong, reciprocal relations that are established and strengthened at various occasions in a person’s life (e.g., baptism, confirmation, marriage, graduations).

21 See Mayer and Lomnitz (1988) and Lomnitz et al. (1983) for a discussion of how such processes operate among technical-professional groups in Mexico City, and Lomnitz (1994a) and Lomnitz and Pérez Lizaur (1994) for related analyses among the city’s marginalized and affluent populations, respectively.

22 Gilbert and Cahn’s perspectives of the Mexican middle classes differ considerably. The struggling middle-class workers that Cahn (2008) studies engage in consumption to negotiate “their tenuous hold on respectability” (431) and claim some semblance of “separate status from the lower classes” (440), while the 21

Recognizing the important roles perception and performance play in the construction of social group identities and relations, Bourdieu (1985) contends that individuals struggle with one another “at every moment of ordinary existence…over the meaning of the social world[,]…of their position within it, [and of] the meaning of their social identity” (729). In short, people clash constantly over the “categories of perception” (ibid: 730) they use to define and legitimize social group differences—so that in Mexico City, for example, one might be classified as working, middle, or upper class.23 Moreover, as Bourdieu (1985:729) maintains,

Socially known and recognized differences only exist for a subject capable not only of perceiving differences but of recognizing them as significant, interesting, i.e., only for a subject endowed with the capacity and inclination to make the distinctions that are regarded as significant in the social universe in question.

This statement implies that while knowing the “rules of the game” is an important element in performing “the game” successfully, it should not be considered an end in and of itself. To be successful also entails having a “feeling for the game…that is, a feeling for how to operate within the established norms of the social field” (Butler 1999:117, emphasis added).

Nutini (1995, 2004, 2005) has written extensively on the subject of social mobility in Mexico among all classes. In his most recent book, co-authored with Isaac, these authors also characterize social mobility as a “game” (Nutini and Isaac 2009:115-

116; 220). This game involves socially aspiring individuals and families displaying specific non-instrumental behaviors of a (higher) class of people they esteem (139-140;

downwardly mobile families that participate in Gilbert’s (2005, 2007) study reduce consumer spending following periods of economic crisis.

23 For more on “the perception of class,” see Cahn 2008:440; Gutmann 2002:104; and Nutini 2005:28. 22

212). Nutini (2005) identifies any such practice that emulates the “behavior of the higher class” as a “vicarious expression” of “upward mobility from one class to another” (20).24

Much in line with Bourdieu (1984), Nutini and Isaac (2009) conclude that “upward mobility entails both actually belonging, in terms of displaying the material and behavioral accoutrements, and being perceived as belonging to the higher social class”

(221). Drawing on this logic in my previous study in Mexico City, I, too, assumed that certain practices, like joining a private club, were an effective (though costly)

“expressive” strategy that middle-class Mexican families utilized to “confer the security, sense of superiority, and natural demeanor that distinguishes those superordinately placed” in the social class hierarchy (Nutini 1995:345).

Speaking in unequivocal terms about Mexicans who “play [this] upward mobility game[,]” Nutini and Isaac (2009:220) put forth the idea that all Mexicans subscribe to and follow a class playbook of sorts to plan and strategize their mobility moves. Social mobility among the middle classes is reduced to behavioral expressions or performances, such as home furnishings or club memberships, which are associated with some taken- for-granted desire to move into a higher class position. Upward mobility is likened to an act of intention carried out by people supposedly motivated by the same kinds of aspirations their class positions dictate. This viewpoint promotes a rather mechanical way of conceptualizing mobility in Mexico.25 It assumes that classes are homogeneous entities comprised of men and women who think and act in accordance with their class position

24 See also Whetten’s (1984:70-71, 85-87) historical and sociological account of social and symbolic emulation among the rising middle classes of the Mexican post-revolutionary era.

25 My study of social clubs might have furthered this perspective, too. I now recognize that club membership did not guarantee “buy in” to a specific class grouping. Rather, it provided a space where people could negotiate class. 23 and gender. If one of our goals as anthropologists is to deessentialize both class and culture in our analyses, then it is necessary to question this underlying assumption.

Analyzing social stratification in central Mexico, these authors assert that structural variables such as wealth, formal education, and occupation have become “the main determinants of class membership” (Nutini and Isaac 2009:14). They also argue that

“mass formal education, mass production, mass communications, [and] mass geographic mobility…have led to an unprecedented extent of cultural blending that buffs out the once-visible boundaries of classes” (ibid: 14) that specific expressive acts (like voice inflection, gestures, manner of walking) previously articulated in Mexican society (see also García Canclini 1995). In their perspective, this blending translates to “substantial social mobility” in central Mexico—so much so that these authors describe its contemporary system of stratification in terms of “classlessness” (Nutini and Isaac 2009:

14; see also Goldschmidt 1999 and Kingston 2000 for a similar rendering in the U.S.).

In his discussion of modern consumption practices in Mexico City, Nutini (2004)

– unlike others I cite above – does not consider consumption to be representative of social status. As an index of social mobility, it is representative of social sameness and even inclusion. Having, in his words, “[e]asy access” to things that were once deemed as luxuries but “have [now] become necessities of urban existence” is identified by him as

“a great [social] equalizer” (ibid: 121). While it may indeed be true that “undifferentiated consumption” among classes makes it somewhat more challenging today to “sort people out and discretely categorize them[,]” I find his perspective to be rather problematic, particularly in its failure to reflect some of the intricate meanings that consumers of all classes attribute to this so-called easy access (ibid: 121).

24

Even though Nutini and Isaac (2009:24) may be right to suggest that “there are no official legal barriers to overcome or formal permissions necessary for [class] transition” in 21st century central Mexico, I do not subscribe to their notion of classlessness.

Reducing class membership to consumerism and social mobility to (mass) consumption of goods and services may be too facile. Even though diverse urban sectors of Mexican society are now more readily consuming the same products and practices, they may have different reasons for doing so and the meanings such things engender in their lives may be remarkably distinct.26

It is not helpful to assume that all socially privileged peoples in Mexico consume yoga to reproduce their privilege.27 Some of my early fieldwork interviews with and observations of elite middle-aged Mexican women engaging in the practice and other

“life-cultivation” activities (Farquhar and Zhang 2005; Heelas 2006) do so as a means to reclaim control of their bodies, given that the control they once claimed over their homes has been wrested abruptly from them by their stay-at-home husbands. Many of these recently retired men, who previously spent weeks away from their homes on business, are now taking over the domestic sphere. This proves unsettling to their wives who were accustomed to managing the home and all of its social dimensions. Thus, while there may be some truth to the assertion that holds yoga in relation to privilege, we must be careful

26 Social critics complicate links between globalization, mass consumption, and social sameness (homogeneity) (Guano 2002; Kirsch 2006; Sassen 2006; Werbner 1999). No class is made by consumption alone. Yoga does not necessarily mean the same thing to all Mexicans (rich, poor, etc.), because these groups are not homogeneous and their interactions with yoga are not always similar.

27 Consumption does not necessarily nor automatically drive social mobility (Heiman et al. 2012). Treating consumption as “the invisible hand, or the Gucci-gloved fist, that animates the…social forms…of capitalism in its neoliberal, global manifestation” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:294) limits analysts from observing how other processes (along with consumption) shape class relations and mobility today. As Heiman et al. (2012:14) argue “[a]ny system of interclass socioeconomic relations” involves not only consumers but also producers. 25 not to let it mask the political underpinnings of privileged peoples’ life practices. With this in mind, it is also not helpful to assume that all other (less privileged) Mexicans consume elite practices to gain social mobility. This would ignore their limited employment opportunities (see Chapters 2 and 3), the social bonds that their self-care practices entail (see Chapter 4), and their ability to construct diverse and meaningful interpretations of these practices (see Chapters 1, 3, and 4).

To understand how social relations intersect and inform modes and meanings of mobility, anthropologists need to employ a multi-relational approach in their class analyses. Edmonds (2007, 2010) follows accordingly in his investigation of the growth of state-subsidized medical beauty practices (i.e., cosmetic surgery) among Brazilian poor women. Specifically, he analyzes the intersections between the demands incited by new labor, sexual, and medical markets, the expectations provoked by nationalist aesthetic and racialized ideals, and the local (embodied) dreams and meanings of the poor themselves.

With this approach he comes to realize that “for workers and consumers on the margins of the market economy, beauty…does not simply encode social hierarchies, it can also threaten to upset them…[having] a kind of democratic appeal, perhaps especially during a time when authoritarian structures are losing their legitimacy [and] opportunities for social mobility remain limited” (2007:377).

In short, social mobility must be analyzed in both historical and relational terms28 if we wish to understand the many interrelated, intricate transitions taking place today. In an effort to further contextualize these shifts in Mexico, let us turn now to mobility’s relationship to education and labor.

28 See note 16 above. 26

A Note about Education and Labor in 21st Century Mexico

Higher education is considered by many scholars of Mexico to be an important pathway to social mobility, particularly among the working classes. Nutini and Isaac

(2009:25-26; 124) suggest that those in central Mexico with university degrees “face far different occupational prospects than do their age peers who lack such credentials or who d[o] not finish high school.” Gilbert (2007:28), however, is correct to point out that with credential inflation, “a university degree no longer guaranteed a professional-level job” in the 1990s. Mexican families responding to economic losses in the mid-1990s in

Cuernavaca, Morelos, enrolled their children in private schools and colleges, hoping that these institutions would provide the social and cultural capital needed (desirable networks, institutional prestige) to positively impact students’ occupational prospects

(Gilbert 2005:141). Yet, in 2010, when those with bachelor’s degrees are driving taxis and those with master’s degrees cannot find work, it is easy to understand why some middle-class and aspiring middle-class Mexicans begin to question whether these kinds of educational pursuits can still provide social advantage or “privilege” as they might have in earlier decades. It may be too rash to assume that education today no longer guarantees social mobility in Mexico. This layperson’s view, in part promulgated by scholarly writings on the subject, largely equates education to specific (formal or traditional) forms of training taking shape in particular settings.

Educación, however, takes shape in diverse forms and settings in Mexico City.

Mexicans often use the concept as a filter to evaluate social positions and determine whether to exclude or include others in their intimate, trusted circles. Such distinctions, according to Carlisle (1996), help “minimiz[e] uncertainty about friends and enemies and

27 about where people fit in” (53). Gutmann (2002) provides a discussion of how the term educación is used among some of his working-class friends in Mexico City. When community organizers talk to him about education they are referring not only to what people formally learn in school, but also to “a larger concept of how people understand the world” and their social relations (ibid: 224). Becoming educated means waking up to the social conditions that one faces in life. Community leaders who try to instill social consciousness among their neighbors believe that such awareness is needed for people to change their lives and, even more broadly, their country (ibid: xxvi; 170; 174).

Educación is also tied to positive transformation among other classes in Mexico.

Like Gutmann’s friends, the middle-class Mexicans included in my earlier study of social clubs did not necessarily acquire an education in any formal institution. Consisting of the values, traditions, manners, lifestyles, and standards of behavior taught in the home and passed down over several generations, educación in that context reflected on one’s family upbringing—how one was raised as a child. Families are responsible for inculcating this education and providing children with the knowledge they need to behave “properly” and

“fit in” as members of a certain class. In this process, individuals may become aware of their social relations, including the social circles from which they are excluded. Given that club communities were viewed by members as extensions of their families and homes, the club served as another site where children could receive an education. In this broad sense of the term, educación “determines the individual’s type and level of cultural capital—his or her effective fund of knowledge, skills… that can be expected to open certain social doors” (Nutini and Isaac 2009:25).29

29 According to Wollebark and Selle (2002), voluntary associations, such as social clubs, offer social and educational benefits, insofar as they teach members “the right ‘habits of the heart’” (35). 28

How scholars make sense of the diverse educational outlets existing in urban

Mexico is closely related to how they understand diverse avenues of service labor emerging alongside them. In 2000, more than half of Mexico’s workforce labored in the tertiary, service-oriented sector (INEGI 2003). Scholars of Mexico studying social mobility suggest that many working-class households were able to rise to middle-class status between the 1940s and 1970s with this sectorial expansion, given that such growth

“was (and is) the generator of most middle-class employment, including jobs for millions of teachers, lawyers, physicians, government bureaucrats, managers, and merchants”

(Gilbert 2007:26). Underlying this view, however, is an assumption that because these

(traditional, liberal) professions required some form of post-secondary or technical education, they provided entry to professional jobs. What might Gilbert’s assessment suggest about other types of labor (requiring far less education than, for instance, a doctor)? Is that work somehow associated with other classes? As we observe in Chapter

2, professional work status is not necessarily or automatically conferred to people on the basis of formal education, especially when they cannot find work in the fields they studied. Research in other contexts has in fact demonstrated “a blurry boundary between what we once described as mental, white-collar work and manual, blue-collar work”

(Freeman 2000: 229). According to Heiman et al. (2012:22), there may be space to expand these boundaries and distinctions even further, given the increasing “variety of services, white- and pink-collar office work, and [the] widening field of entrepreneurial enterprises” that proliferate across all classes in many contemporary societies.

Investigations such as Freeman’s (2000) ethnography of pink-collar informatics workers in Barbados and Cahn’s (2006, 2008) work with self-employed direct sales

29 workers in Guadalajara reveal how workers use space/place, global symbols, consumer goods, and their bodies to negotiate middle classness.30 By attending to immaterial and affective labor—work that is less about manipulating things and more about manipulating people and symbols—both of these authors aim to “keep labor in focus at a time when many have been inclined to see consumption as having trumped production and when

‘lifestyle’ usurps ‘class’ in the post-Fordist era” (Heiman et al. 2012:23).

I found Mexicans across all social sectors exploring non-traditional forms of schooling and labor, specifically around bodily care (e.g., massage, beauty, yoga). These alternative outlets provide some people new kinds of credentials, labor options, and social status, as well as expand networks of mutual assistance and patron-client exchanges.31

But, as we see in the chapters that follow, they do not provide these benefits to everyone.

The potential for mobility that yoga granted some Mexicans was remarkable, but it involved new challenges, too; for some, in terms of its upkeep and, for others, its concealment. Here, social mobility may be characterized by transition and even precarity, but it is nonetheless experienced as a relational transformation. With yoga’s emphasis on aspiration (to be a “better” person), people who subscribe to this practice of bodily care may be attempting to accumulate and exercise the kind of capital self-help neoliberal ideologies promote—human capital—rather than the cultural capital that traditional or liberal educational practices have been said to provide (see Feher 2009; Gilbert 2005;

30 Bridging her analytical approach between political economic and cultural studies, Freeman (2000:36) demonstrates how “professional-looking” pink-collar workers in Barbados are not “passive pawns of multinational capital.” Nor are they in control of all that much either. While their quasi-clerical status offers these laborers benefits, it also places new demands on them; namely, “worker self-fashioning” (ibid: 63).

31 Through patron-client relations that sometimes emerge in kin and friendship networks in Latin America, people are prone to “locate someone in a higher position, who can redistribute resources; in exchange, the one who is higher will expect loyalty and support” (Lomnitz and Díaz 1992:187; see also Lomnitz 1988). 30

Nutini and Isaac 2009).32

This dissertation narrates a story about social class relations and mobility through the lens of yoga production, promotion, and engagement from the fall of 2010 to the fall of 2012 in Mexico City. The practice of yoga, I argue, is both a reaction towards rising social and economic inequalities (unequal chances to live “the good life” in Mexico), the kind that ordinary Mexicans deal with every day, and emblematic of those inequalities, too: of the inability to secure work with stable pay and benefits or access affordable, quality health care. I now turn to a more in-depth discussion of yoga in order to clarify how and why it complicates our readings of contemporary class dynamics in Mexico.33



Yoga in Focus

My ethnographic research focuses on what some scholars call “new forms of enchantment,” which flourish predominantly in metropolitan centers in the context of a post-industrial economy, a state-promoted discourse of self-care, and a social and economic climate fraught with uncertainty and insecurity (Comaroff and Comaroff

2000:293; Lomnitz 2003b). Freeman considers yoga to be one example of the many non- conventional “new age”34 practices that circulate around the globe “to salve the stresses

32 Related to this is Bourdieu’s (1978) reflection on the “moral virtues” (834) that elite sports instill in their players, including “energy, courage, willpower,…and perhaps above all personal initiative” (825).

33 Yoga may constitute a peculiar case, but the story needs to be told because it complicates some of the ways we have thus far come to understand and represent class relations and mobility in Mexico.

34 Yoga’s current manifestations around the world exceed and elude analytic categorization, not unlike new age spirituality. See, for example: Albanese 2007; Dawson 2007; Gil and Nistal 1994; Heelas 2006; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Hervieu-Léger 1996; Masferrer Kan 2000; Schmidt 2005.

31 and struggles of contemporary neoliberal life” (2007:261).35 Given the multiple, crisscrossing paths and means of connection within the world today, it is not difficult to fathom the possibility that ideas, practices, tastes, and desires flow in as many, if not more, directions from which they have originated.36

Indeed, from Guadalajara to Mexico City, Mexican urban dwellers have been engaging in an amalgam of imported bodily practices and cultural healing traditions, ranging from yoga and tai chi to reiki energy healing and qigong. Yoga is seemingly just one of many global bodily expressions that has been reinvented and remade by

Mexicans—in the forms of self-care, education, labor, socialization, healing, spirituality, etc.—to confront the contradictions of contemporary life in Mexico.37 In Mexico City, yoga practitioners often refer to their embodied practice as an opportunity to evaluate who they are, to envision who they wish to be, and to enact, in their words, a “new way of life.”

Yoga has exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry influencing millions worldwide (Aldred 2002; Carrette and King 2005; Gregoire 2013; Ramstedt 2007).

35 Some scholars have described the global proliferation of new age practices as the “spiritual revolution” of late-modern times (Brown 2007). This “new revivalist religious impulse” first emerged on U.S. college campuses in the early 1970s, drawing largely from the Human Potential and counterculture (hippie) movements of the 1950s and 1960s (Melton 1992:18). Around this time, new age literature and music began to pour into Mexico alongside other U.S. alternative cultural expressions (Zolov 1999). Mexican ethnographers indicate that some of Mexico’s first new age groups were in fact founded by Americans whose teachings provided Mexicans with a personalized means to create spiritual fulfillment in their lives (de la Torre 2006:33). In her study of such groups in Guadalajara, Gutiérrez Zúñiga (1996) observed that the majority of those who engaged with this “do-it-yourself” doctrine (28) were like their U.S. counterparts: university-educated. Their class privilege, she argues, allowed these Mexicans to distance themselves from an unstable political and economic climate and “insert themselves in a global and cosmopolitan culture, or, at least, [a] multicultural [one]” (ibid: 12; see also Alvarado Rodríguez and Hernández Madrid 2003).

36 Ethnographers, Gutmann (2002) notes, “are often made aware of a myriad of ways by which ideas and cultural goods can be re-appropriated and reconfigured daily, regardless of their national origins or their original meanings” (94).

37 Mexican yoga leaders do not view yoga as a sport or leisure activity, and openly criticize such claims. For this reason, I avoid comparing it to activities like soccer or bicycling. I do, however, compare it briefly to boxing as a way to situate and represent class as an embodied relational movement (see Appendix A). 32

Though such practices have gained global attention through mass-mediated technologies and social networks, their presence has gone virtually undetected in official statistics at the local level (de la Torre and Gutiérrez Zúñiga 2007). Recent scholarship suggests that as many as 62 percent of Mexico City’s self-identified Catholics pursue concomitantly these bodily practices and other non-conventional forms of knowledge (Gutiérrez

Martínez 2005, 2008).38 Through word of mouth, the Internet, public and cable television, the radio, and magazines such as El Buscador (The Seeker) and En Tiempo

Presente (In Present Time), people learn about costly yoga classes, workshops, and retreats held in privately-funded venues that dot middle-class and affluent neighborhoods throughout the city. In recent years, however, weekly programs in tai chi, qigong, yoga, and reiki have become available for a nominal fee in most of the state-subsidized

“Cultural Houses” (Casas de Cultura) located throughout the city’s sixteen boroughs.

In a statement issued in October 2008, commemorating the completion of an approximately $200,000USD facility renovation of one of his borough’s Casas de

Cultura, the Iztacalco leftist government head, Erasto Ensástiga Santiago, asserted that such spaces offered people “dignified” and “appropriate” forums for social and cultural development, which in this Casa involved English and French language study, violin playing, and lessons in ballet, capoeira, origami, and yoga. Public officials like him, he argued, were responsible for offering these opportunities to their constituents.39 In his view, this type of so-called cultural initiative was needed to enrich the surrounding urban area, counter drug addiction and crime, improve neighbor relations, and promote higher standards of living among borough residents. Perhaps not coincidentally, during that

38 See also Sánchez Hernández 2005; Gutiérrez Zúñiga 2000; Fortuny Loret de Mola 2000.

39 http://www.iztacalco.df.gob.mx/search.aspx?search=yoga&remarcar=yoga, accessed 24 January 2009. 33 same year, Iztacalco led all other boroughs in the Federal District in incidents of auto theft (Román 2009).

Narratives that blame social ills such as crime on individuals offer insight into the logics public actors such as Ensástiga deploy in perceiving and co-creating the social worlds in which they live (García Canclini 1996a:108).40 Such logics often ignore the broader conditions that shape people’s behavior, such as poverty, low wages, and unemployment (Arteaga and Yutzil González 2009; Encinas 2009). Yet, what makes

Ensástiga’s commentary remarkable is not so much the fact that he recognizes the state’s role in mediating social inequalities through some investment in social services, but that he considers the presence (or absence) of “new” bodily practices, like yoga and tai chi, indicative of whether residents had, in his words, “adequate” access to the cultural and social resources needed to develop and lead dignified lives.41 The fact that these non-

Mexican practices are being mobilized to function as Mexican instruments of progress, whereby lower-classed subjects emerge as culturally reformed and therefore “fully human,” speaks powerfully to the social, political, and moral significance they have come to occupy in Mexico.



40 In a country that has promoted the “cultural logics” (Foucault 1991; Jameson 1991) of late capitalism since the early 1980s, it is not uncommon to hear people of diverse social and political positions locate the reasons and solutions for social ills in the individual.

41 None of these practices are, in fact, “new” to Mexico. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, young male intellectuals convened and criticized the ruling dictator, Porfirio Díaz, for “lacking humanistic…values” and for maintaining “metaphysical concerns” at the margins of public discourse (Monsiváis 1976:323). In 1909, they founded “the first public center of culture,” which aimed to cultivate “a new age of thought…[and] new knowledge” (323). Monsiváis indicates that this elite male organization “introduced distinct criteria” in its approach to understanding diverse meanings of culture—indeed, these young men “were the first to approach Buddha and oriental mysticism” (323). It is possible that these early 20th century formulations served as precursory models for contemporary Casas de Cultura. If anything is new today it is the greater degree to which Mexican men and women of relatively modest means have access to practices that were once relegated to the elite. See Krauze 1987. 34

Yoga in Motion in Mexico City

Collective representations of yoga as an “oasis,” “refuge,” and “tool to create a new and better life” may illustrate a response to the existing “tension…between the everyday reality and the imaginary” that García Canclini claims has become an all too common characteristic of the lived urban experience of Mexico City metropolitan area residents (1996b:13; 1998a, 1998b).42 According to this scholar of Mexican urban studies, the capital city is best understood by what it “gives or does not give, by what the subjects can do with their lives…, and by what they imagine about themselves and others” (2001:52). Middle-class professionals and students included in García Canclini and Mantécon’s (1996) study construct images of the city in similar ways to many of my informants—by idealizing the past and problematizing the present.43 The subjects of their investigation hold specific groups (e.g., rural migrants) responsible for urban problems, such as crime and insecurity (ibid: 90).44 Urban issues (or anything for that matter) should not be explained (away) so simply (Novelli 1990).

Scholars recognize the challenges involved in gauging levels of insecurity and violence in Mexico City, but they do not dismiss the feelings of anxiety that were circulating among all residents (of various classes) during the late 1990s (Nivón

1998a:150-151; Gutmann 2002:137-141; Alvarado Mendoza 2007). Gutmann suggests

42 See García Canclini and Piccini (1993:75) for an insightful view that helps account for the disorderly image of Mexico City. Utilizing information they receive from thousands of households, they discover a regimented logic to inhabitants’ daily activities. Such routines, however, remain largely “invisible” to statistical registers of order. As a result, stereotypes about different social groups proliferate widely and are used by residents (and others) to explain a variety of “urban dramas” (García Canclini 1996b:30).

43 An idealization of the past, according to García Canclini (1995), “often appears as a resource for enduring the contradictions of contemporary life. In this epoch in which we doubt the benefits of modernity, temptations mount for a return to some past that we imagine to be more tolerant” (113).

44 These authors recognize that their informants’ perceptions are not comprehensive, but they do little to dispel their erroneous logic. Instead, the city itself is projected as an agentive force that fuels middle-class residents’ behaviors. In this way, the study risks corroborating subjects’ classed sentiments. 35 that “feelings of isolation and frustration” among his working-class friends did not necessarily speak to official statistics, but rather to their “perceived ability to control social events of any kind in their lives” (2002:140; 137). García Canclini (1998a:23) recognizes the powerful role the media played in heightening the general climate of fear and suspicion in Mexico City. With the creation of special sections in newspapers or special programs on television devoted specifically to “urban themes” like insecurity, the media has given people permission and space to “talk” about these issues.45 Often couched in essentialized images and polarizing language that divide city boundaries between good/innocent victims and evil/dangerous perpetrators, such talk often leaves

Mexico City residents feeling further unsettled (García Canclini 1998b; Lomnitz 2003a).

Feelings of insecurity rose significantly after Present Calderón launched a massive campaign against drug cartels and drug trafficking in 2006; his infamous drug war has claimed tens of thousands of lives all across the country. Although Mexico City has not experienced as much drug violence as other areas of the nation, it certainly has not been isolated from its effects.

In 2009 fears among Mexico City residents were further heightened when Mayor

Ebrard was ordered by federal officials to shut down the city’s operations for a week due to the outbreak of the H1N1 virus that swept through the megalopolis. Jokes and cartoons circulated feverishly on the Internet and around the globe. Both within and outside

Mexico, voices criticized the federal government for its slow response to the needs of its citizens and implicated it in shaping a global health crisis. Some observers went so far as to condemn the country as a “failed state” (estado fallido), incapable of establishing order

45 Which issues get discussed as crime and which get silenced are important socio-political matters that contribute to the dis/connections of the urban landscape. 36 and meeting its citizens’ basic needs. National criticism grew and incited a formal reproach by President Calderón, who blamed his own citizens for projecting negative images of the nation to the world (Jiménez and Lombera 2009).

When I arrived in the country in 2010 to begin my field study, local and international media continued to portray Mexico quite unfavorably. Those attentive to these portrayals were led to believe that the country was unsafe, unhealthy, and on the edge of collapse. Indeed, from bus drivers to bureaucrats, market vendors to college professors, hairdressers to yogis, most of the people I encountered over the two-plus years I lived in the capital city described their country in catastrophic terms. From their perspectives, Mexico seemed to be moving in a perpetual downward spiral as inept leaders failed to fulfill the promises they made to citizens in 2000 with the “democratic transition” (Yeh 2012:196). Many complained about drug-related violence, which appeared out of control, with photos of mass graves and murdered bodies appearing regularly on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Others were frustrated by the deep recession that struck their country, some finding it increasingly difficult to pay for the rising costs of health care, public transportation, utilities, and food. In this context of widespread economic hardship and mounting social unrest, Mexico also became the center of domestic and international discussions regarding steep rises in chronic illnesses and health care reform (Laurell 2007; Friedman 2008; Zermeño 2009).46 Calling into question the physical, social, and economic health of the nation led critics to also call into question the state’s efficacy and authority to govern.

46 Despite the fact that more than half of Mexico’s population faces increased difficulty accessing biomedical services in the public sector, the Mexican government has been applauded in recent years by the Latin American Parliament and the World Health Organization for its efforts to promote complementary, alternative, and traditional forms of medicine as a low-cost public health resource (SS 2008b). 37

Contextualizing this historical moment helps us understand why Mexican officials became involved in yoga’s promotion. Moving the practice out of homes, neighborhood cultural centers, studios, social clubs, health clinics, and gyms and bringing it alive in public space was, in my perspective, politically motivated. In making yoga accessible to citizens in the most important public space in the country (the Zócalo), the Mexican government was able to display to both the nation and the world (through diverse media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Reforma, El Universal, Facebook, Twitter) that

Mexico was not as violent, uncivilized, or corrupt as many imagined it to be. The first mass-level yoga event held in the Zócalo was organized by Erik Calderón in 2009. This was followed by a series of programs organized by elite yoga instructors in 2010, and in

2011 and 2012 by Erik and a handful of other groups. With these events, mobile, lively

Mexican bodies emerged as public spectacles. Engaging citizens together in sun salutations and exotic chants in the midst of crisis was an attempt to project Mexico as a healthy, safe, and undivided country, with a government that cared about the well-being of its people. Mexico could overcome violence and insecurity through cultural enrichment and bodily care; this was the image the state wanted its people and the world to embrace. In this way, “[n]ot only individuals but also governments orient to…representations of the middle class as the emblem of modernity; if individuals aspire to middle-class status, nation-states aspire to join the ranks of the world’s ‘middle-class societies’” (Yeh 2012:194).47



47 Here, the nation- and person-in-transformation trope is revealing, because while Mexico may not be rising out of its spiral of crime and chaos with yoga’s presence in public streets, prisons, police stations, drug rehab centers, etc., there is some evidence of change among individual (classed) lives. 38

Class in Motion

Yoga is thus promoted in Mexico as an enactment of care directed towards the body (individual, social, national), with the ultimate aim of transforming it. With each directed breath inhalation and exhalation and each patterned postural manipulation enacted in place and in unison, bodies are instructed to move in ways that encourage flexibility, order, and coherence. Others may shape the particular sequence of bodily movements, but each individual is encouraged to care for, manage, and be responsible for his or her own. Transitioning movements out of sequence is generally discouraged in this practice because ingrained in the yoga philosophy is the notion that “we are one.” Each body is instructed to be focused on the present moment, to not get too ahead of itself (or others), and yet also to be open to experimenting with new experiences, sensations, and positions. Bodily transformation is therefore conceived as potential; a rather gentle, natural process that will happen on its own. Transformation should not be forced.48

This bodily practice has social effects. Ironically, the present-oriented practice offers Mexicans – from the rich to the poor to those in between – an embodied space to envision and enact a different kind of future for themselves, others, and the nation. Yoga becomes an expression of self-help ideologies, a sign of potential or aspiration, and an idealized pathway toward social mobility in Mexico. It allows some Mexicans to justify

48 Heiman et al. (2012) remind us that “states have long been deeply invested in creating spaces that (aim to) foster particular kinds of social relations, subjectivities, and practices” (18; see Sharma and Gupta 2006). Let us recall the opening anecdote. Controlled movements in public space are encouraged by the Mexican state, as opposed to the so-called rebellion perpetrated by classed Others (see note 3). By regulating people’s movements in orderly fashion—keeping individuals calm and quiet—yoga depoliticizes class struggles and further promotes representations of the middle class as the (new) national subject of Mexican modernity. It is “by shifting the desires of marginalized groups away from liberatory politics (which would threaten the state’s capitalist and, in some instances, repressive underpinnings) and toward relatively depoliticized aspiration for middle-class goods and lifestyles, [that] states can contain discontent (including demands for public education, health care…) within the confines of never-ending private quests for the…‘good life’” (Heiman et al. 2012:19). 39 their privilege; some to build cross-class alliances and friendships; and some to acquire new work and educational opportunities. For others it offers a space to exercise self- employment, cultivate (entrepreneurial) dreams of professional success, and engage in socially desirable practices of bodily self-care. However, all of these potentials for mobility that yoga promises must be negotiated constantly by practitioners, given that such manifestations come in tension with the parallel ideals of collectivity that yoga also proclaims: that we are one / we are the same / we are united. Just as sequenced movements are regulated on the mat, social desires should be patterned accordingly off the mat; radical moves are not encouraged. Class difference must therefore be blurred, rather than blatantly exposed.

Public attention accorded to yoga by government officials, private institutions, and citizens alike has been overwhelming in recent years. In less than a decade yoga has become increasingly accessible to lower-income populations in Mexican cities through state-sponsored initiatives that are executed in public spaces (parks, plazas, streets), low- income neighborhoods, and state-operated venues (cultural institutes, prisons, health centers). These efforts, my ethnographic research suggests, are refashioning yoga’s status in the public imaginary. Once circulating predominantly in the private sector as an imported esoteric practice and luxury good, yoga has transformed into a modern Mexican public health service.49 This shift is driven by the state’s commitment to invest in programs that encourage self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-care, and also by citizens who pressure state institutions to respond to contemporary problems that plague the country (e.g., chronic illness, job insecurity, drug-related violence). In spite of its appeal, Mexico’s promotion of yoga locates solutions to complex social and economic

49 The popularization of yoga in Mexico is a classed story and is explored in further detail in Chapter 1. 40 problems in the individual.

The production, promotion, and practice of yoga as a public good is therefore intended to conceal, obscure, deny, and even undo class (by depoliticizing it).50 “Any individual can do yoga in Mexico” was a common refrain that yoga leaders and their supporters circulated.51 Perhaps anyone can do yoga in Mexico City today, but not everyone can materialize the same kinds of social and economic benefits. In other words, while social standing should (in theory) not matter all that much on the mat, its prickly thorns are exposed by what takes place off the mat. Indeed, it was not hard for me to recognize class differences in Mexico when I observed them as lived social realities and when they revealed themselves in the practice. Yet, it was also just as difficult for me to deny some of the transformative social potentials that yoga cultivated.

Twenty-four months of ethnographic research across diverse spaces and among diverse social sectors in Mexico City helped me to uncover an underlying tension between the ways Mexican yoga promoters and practitioners idealize social sameness and how they aspire for bodily (personal, social, national) transformation. It is in this space of tension where I see social class differences being simultaneously clouded and reinforced.52 The dissertation presents various case studies53 that illustrate how Mexicans

50 Mexican yoga leaders expect social transformations to emerge by providing yoga for free to “the poor.” (This broad term is used by my informants to refer to groups of people that represent social and cultural impoverishment in urban Mexico, e.g., cops, drug addicts, prisoners.) Such transformation occurs only insofar as the poor are willing to refashion themselves in the image of middle-class subjects (who supposedly take “better” care of themselves).

51 This sentiment is itself classed—to obscure, for example, class privilege. Even though diverse social sectors have access to the same health practice (yoga), and even the same spaces to engage it, it is important to recognize that access does not necessarily or automatically cultivate inclusion or equality.

52 Here, I am drawing on the assertion of Heiman et al. (2012) that “[s]paces are critical for subject making” (26; see Lefebvre 1991[1974]). If yoga in Mexico is considered a space to fashion neoliberal subjects, then “it is in those very spaces that classed subjects are [being] made” (ibid: 26). 41 across the capital city enact, negotiate, and contest the processes involved in becoming socially mobile (and in turn socially differentiated) on one hand, and in promoting ideals of social sameness and union on the other. In their enactments, negotiations, and contestations is where, I argue, class is being remade. Yoga as a class act is both a reaction to the increasing social differentials that neoliberalism engenders and also emblematic of them, offering Mexicans a kind of mobility or transformation that I identify as manipulated or constrained potential.

The yoga practitioners and leaders who allowed me to enter their homes, kin and friendship circles, and intimate yoga practice from August 2010 to August 2012 turn to yoga with earnest faith, believing that it can heal and transform the chaos in their country.

Yoga offered the rich, the poor, and those in between, swelling with grief and disillusions, a way to envision a more orderly and vibrant future for Mexico. Sometimes, it also allowed them to enact a “better” future for themselves. The stories I narrate in the following pages are thus about social transition. They are stories about some people who experience gradual but marked changes through yoga; others who desire to actualize some kind of transformation—a move, a job, professional recognition, self-employment; and still others who contest the lived transitions they experience. These personal and interpersonal exchanges emerge in relation to larger social and economic ruptures that are taking shape in Mexico (as discussed above). It is in the care of the body—personal, social, and national—to mediate these transitions that I see class itself in motion.54



53 I draw here on the work of social historian Von Mentz (2003b), who argues that “there are no clear criteria or statistics to measure social mobility and because of this the phenomenon must be analyzed through case studies” (8).

54 Again, I refer readers to Appendix A, which explains and clarifies some of these points in more detail. 42

Fieldwork Setting and Methods

To introduce this section I offer the reader a few (slightly edited) excerpts from my field notes. Like the majority of Mexico City residents, I spent a lot of time each day on public transportation. Given my long commutes across the congested megalopolis I tried to maximize my time by typing field note outlines in my smart phone. I scribbled the passage below during my hour-long commute home at the end of a long day of fieldwork. It details some of the people I observed and interacted with during the course of a day in early December, 2011. Although I may not have seen the same individuals every day, the day is somewhat typical insofar as my movements across the city and yoga spaces are concerned. Following the passage, I offer some reflections to better situate my field methods55 and researcher position.

8:30 p.m. I had just boarded the metro at the Constitución de 1917 station in the poor borough of Iztapalapa. It was rush hour, but since I was traveling in the opposite direction of traffic, there were not too many people on the train with me.56 As I type field notes on my phone, there are a few passengers around me napping, typing messages on their cell phones, and reading. A barefoot man wearing a straw hat and carrying a walking stick walked slowly down the aisle while a small boy followed behind him, also barefoot. The boy placed a small piece of paper on the lap of each passenger. The paper indicated that the boy and his grandfather were from la provincia, specifically the southern state of Oaxaca. They were hungry and in need of money; the Virgin Mary would bless me if I offered them a peso. I gave the boy a few coins and the bag of peanuts I had just purchased outside of the metro station. Most of the yoga practitioners I had just left at the Youth Wellness Center (YWC) were not as poor as the man and his grandson, though a few of them were scraping by to survive.

My day started out the same way – on public transportation – but in a very different part of the city. I spent the morning with Marcos, an affluent Mexican yoga instructor, in Lomas de Chapultepec, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in

55 Being both a participant of yoga and an observer of yoga practitioners was sometimes challenging. Instructed by teachers to fixate my gaze on my breath and body was difficult to do when I knew I also needed to focus my attention on the people around me. I negotiated this tension by observing some classes as a non-practitioner and tape recording those that I engaged as an active participant.

56 I was traveling from the southeastern part of the city towards its center; most people using the subway at that time are traveling away from the center of the city. 43

Mexico City. It was not that easy or quick to get to Lomas. There were no metro stations there. In order to arrive on time to his studio I left my apartment in the centrally located neighborhood of Narvarte at 9:00 a.m., about an hour and a half in advance of my appointment with the U.S.-trained and certified yoga teacher. I boarded the first bus directly in front of my home. It led me west to a metrobus station, where I boarded another bus. That bus dropped me off on the beautiful, historic street of Paseo de la Reforma. There, I had to board yet another bus, on which I traveled for about 45 minutes. After passing the immense Bosque de Chapultepec park, the bus entered the wealthy neighborhood of Lomas, where enormous homes and mansions lined the street. Some of the homes displayed beautifully manicured landscape creations, while others displayed metal gates, concrete walls, and security guards. Sitting next to me was a woman who lived (in another state) about 2.5 hours outside of the metropolitan area and made the daily commute into the city to clean offices in a medical building. Pointing to the large homes, she told me that “that’s where the rich live.”

After getting off the bus I walked nearly 15 minutes uphill until I found the street on which the yoga studio was located. It was not an actual yoga studio, but a dance school. Marcos used one of the large rooms in the multi-story building for private classes and the teacher training programs he led. I followed five slim women (between the ages of 27 and 40) inside the studio. They arrived by themselves or with their chauffeurs in luxury automobiles, wearing Adidas and Nike yoga pants and carrying expensive brand-name yoga mats on their shoulders in special travel bags. The women greeted one another at the door but hardly said another word to each other. Their gaze was focused intently on Marcos who modeled each asana [yoga position] with much precision, control, and care. I was a novice to the practice, which became obvious to him as he helped me to adjust each of my poses. After fumbling through the class, I invited Marcos to an outdoor café next to the dance studio. There, we sipped on chai lattes and ate an assortment of berries. Our time together was interrupted by multiple calls he received on his phone, “urgent” text messages he had to send, and at least three former students (all women) who stopped to talk to him.

After leaving Marcos I headed back towards the center of the city using the same route I had used to get there. The metrobus was quite crowded mid-day; at each stop passengers pushed and shoved others, including me, out of the way as they hurried to get off and on the bus. I got off at the Chilpancingo stop on the busy Avenue of Insurgentes in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma. Restaurants, businesses, and vendors selling calendars, books, sunglasses, toys, stuffed animals, and clothing lined the street. Whereas Lomas was eerily quiet, Roma was bustling with cars and bodies moving in all directions. I walked about two blocks to meet a group of instructors at Śivakarī’s yoga school located in a five-story glass building. I was the first person to arrive to the weekly gathering, where yoga instructors from around the city convened in hopes of professionalizing the discipline (and themselves) through the creation of Mexico’s first official certification standard for instructors. Śivakarī’s school was bustling with at least

44

25 students who were engrossed in a relaxation exercise. I walked around the still, corpse-like bodies to get to the other side of the studio (where the meeting was held). Śivakarī sat at the head of the conference table; she greeted me with candy and a bottle of water. Although Marcos sent his assistant to represent him, a few elite instructors with studios in affluent neighborhoods, like Lomas, Polanco, and Condesa, attended. The majority of the participants were entrepreneurs who, like Śivakarī, were trained in Mexico, rented small studios in middle-class neighborhoods, and looked to their start-up yoga businesses as potential gateways to success—the type of success their university degrees had not provided them.

After the meeting, I traveled an hour by metro to one of the Iztapalapa stations, where my yoga instructor, Rosi, was waiting to take me to her home for comida (lunch). After about a 15-minute walk, we arrived at her small two-bedroom apartment (which was smaller than Śivakarī’s studio). Rosi apologized that there was no running water in the bathroom and that her husband could not join us for our chat; he was overseeing the small makeshift stationery store he operated on the street outside their apartment complex. Every inch of Rosi’s home was occupied: family photos lined the walls; a hodgepodge of old furniture filled the dining and living spaces; and spiritual regalia from at least four religious traditions I recognized (Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Judaism) were scattered throughout the space. We ate a spicy vegetarian meal at her small dining room table, which I found out was also used by her as a massage table. Not only did she teach yoga as a contract worker in several state-funded institutions, she also offered therapeutic massages and alternative healings to people in their homes and her own. Amidst incense and candles, there was a large 40-inch flat screen television that seemed too big for the living space. It might have even been larger than the table we were eating at and much newer than the torn couch situated in front of it. Rosi must have noticed me staring at the television because she interrupted my gaze to tell me that it was a gift from her daughter.

After our meal I accompanied her to the YWC, where she taught a 90-minute yoga class to a group of twenty women, many of whose sons and daughters participated in alcohol and drug rehabilitative services at the center. Trained by Śivakarī, Rosi taught yoga to the youth during the day at the YWC and to their mothers and their mothers’ friends and neighbors in the early evening. The chatter and laughter of the women could be heard down the hallway. Their “salon”—as they called the space—was no larger than Rosi’s living room, and yet nearly twenty bodies managed to fit inside it…

My research goals never entailed studying class in a specific neighborhood (much like a traditional community study might do). Studying a practice that takes shape all across the city encouraged me to immerse myself in multiple communities. When I wrote these notes I had been engrossed in my field “site” for over a year. In that time, I found

45 myself zigzagging across the city, often starting my days in one place – like Lomas – and ending them in a completely different one – like Iztapalapa. I originally assumed it was my privileged status alone—as an outsider, gringa, academic—that allowed me to move easily from one community to another: to share a meal in the morning with my Iztapalapa friends and in the evening with my friends in Condesa. I found myself crossing social, economic, and geographic lines all day, and I understood these movements as a privilege that few had or even cared to have.

Reflecting on my own movements across the city led me, however, to question how I viewed my field site. At the time, I understood the city as a socially and spatially divided place where class differences manifest overtly in the built and social landscape.

To some degree, it still entails this (as the passage above illustrates). Yet my interlocutors encouraged me to interrogate my previous notions of rupture and division. Probing and tracking (the relational) zigzagging that takes shape in yoga’s production and practice led me to also question my ideas about where spaces and classes begin and end in Mexico

City. Spaces are connected by the people who occupy and move across them; their

(classed) lives intersect in these spaces through the social imaginaries, relations, and engagements constituted therein.

For example, Erik (the yogi-cop) initiated the group Śivakarī assembled in her studio. Śivakarī was one of Rosi’s teachers. The certificate Rosi received from Śivakarī’s school allowed her to teach yoga to her working-class neighbors at the local YWC, cultural center, and public hospital. Many of these women knew Erik and participated in his public yoga events across the city. Erik befriended elite instructors. Many of them avoided places they deemed dangerous, yet through their own teachings and mentorships

46 several of them were engaging Other (classed) spaces and people. Some, like Marisol, formed friendships with marginalized people, taught alongside them, offered them assistance to attend elite programs, and were generally quite supportive of their efforts and desires to engage in bodily practices of self-care (i.e., yoga). In a city as populous as

Mexico City, I never imagined that so many individuals spread across the terrain (in spaces I once conceived as separate) could have been connected as they were. All kinds of bodies (not just mine) zigzag to some degree across the urban landscape, with relationships emerging in the process.

This dissertation emerges from countless exchanges with hundreds of people from all over the city. I moved across it with yoga producers, promoters, and practitioners and accompanied them to countless activities and programs held in bookstores, restaurants, universities, cultural institutes, parks, plazas, health centers, and homes. Traversing their circuitous paths, I observed an expansive, yet uneven, landscape of images, practices, goods, and places in which private and state-subsidized yoga are configured in urban

Mexico. Mexicans seem to see yoga as a way to blur class differences, but in this attempted blurring they actually reveal a great deal about what class is. I see yoga in

Mexico comprising of multiple, intersecting (class) communities. Class relations and mobility are constantly at work and in motion in Mexico City, largely because people are constantly at work enacting, negotiating, and contesting social differences and social boundaries. Explored in these pages are some of the class encounters, entanglements, aspirations, and disruptions that together encompass yoga’s moving terrain of connection

47 and disconnection.57

Today, I view Mexico City, like yoga and class, as a structured, yet porous, site of constrained potential. It constitutes a landscape of power, where power is understood as control of space, movement, and time (both imagined and lived). Napolitano (2002) offers a useful concept and strategy for urban scholars, like me, who desire to capture the social landscape of cities as a site of both rupture and connection. She suggests that through the concept of “prisms of belonging,” we can begin to explore how urban experiences “emerg[e] through,” as opposed to in, or being representative of, the city (3, my emphasis). This process recognizes that all perceptions (even those of class) that emerge through the city are intrinsically partial—even our own (182). By relinquishing one-dimensional narratives, we can begin to hold heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible prisms of belonging in tension, and, in Giglia’s words, “comprehend and translate the performance of real human beings within historical frames and social specificities” (2007: 235, my emphasis).

What I hope is gleaned from this ethnographic and visual narrative is that writing about class as theoretically real is not necessarily the same as writing about the lived experiences and engagements through which class is made and perceived as real (Ortner

1998). The former sometimes renders class as an object of study that pre-exists ethnography, while the latter investigates through ethnography how class emerges through real bodies that move relationally across the city. Again, realizing how yoga is constituted in Mexico City—as an interconnected network of interests, bodies, and spaces—I was compelled to situate myself in and across multiple sites—e.g., public city

57 I am not suggesting that yoga engenders some kind of classless collective in Mexico City. Class differences may become murky in yoga, but they are not entirely trumped by the practice, the relations that emerge therein, or the spaces in which it takes shape (even though some people suggest otherwise). 48 space (Chapter 1); private yoga training schools and studios (Chapter 2); neighborhood cultural centers (Chapter 3); and public health facilities (Chapter 4). Following people’s movements through the city as they engaged both themselves and others in the practice—

I came to understand social class life as being shaped by something real (e.g., unemployment, illnesses), and also being reshaped at times and in uneven ways by creative acts.58 Maneuvering the reader through the material, spatial, social, and symbolic relations that have emerged in yoga’s production and practice allows us, moreover, to grasp the collective constraints and potentials of bodily self-care in Mexico City.59



Moving through the Dissertation

State-endorsed practices of self-care constitute a contested site of social and spatial engagement in Mexico City. Through an historical and ethnographic analysis of yoga’s rise in popularity in Mexico, Chapter 1, Yoga, the New Drug of Choice in Mexico, examines inter-class configurations of power in tandem with representations of individual and collective agency. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which producers and promoters of yoga manipulate and are also being manipulated by spatial, symbolic, and social relations of power that emerge in its production and circulation to “the masses.”

This process, I suggest, both blurs and reinforces class boundaries.

58 My study considers both the expected and unexpected practices and movements that give class a contingent “surface” (reality) of sorts—one that is “made but never in a static or permanent form” (Taylor 2005: 747).

59 As an embodied “matrix for subject formation” (Butler 2008:13), yoga must be charted in accordance with the ways it is engaged in Mexico. Towards this end, I follow what Comaroff and Comaroff (2003) denote as “ethnography on an awkward scale” (154). Working across yoga’s axes of production, promotion, and practice, my analytic gaze attends to situated (class) contexts that are understood in relation to each other. Immersing myself in the same people’s lives for multiple years allowed me to observe the embodied and social transitions that shape class in motion. 49

Chapter 2, “Yoga is my Profession”: Entrepreneurial Aspirations, Anxieties, and

Im/Mobility, and Chapter 3, Fee-for-Service Healing: New Prescriptions for Im/Mobility, explore the inter- and intra-class politics that unfold in a burgeoning industry of bodily self-care that relies on the services of self-employed instructors who teach at multiple sites for precarious wages, receive no employee benefits, and have little or no job security. Even though these workers contend with unstable labor conditions, those who teach in working-class neighborhoods receive some benefits. Middle-class stakeholders involved in their training criticize these workers for accepting these conditions, arguing that unpaid or underpaid yoga instruction devalues what they have come to identify as a profession. Both chapters raise questions about the anxieties and aspirations Mexican entrepreneurs experience as they struggle to define and redefine their work status in this nascent context of care. Yoga services, I argue, generate new material and social opportunities for some people, even as they also engender new sites of social differentiation.

Chapter 4, Crafting the Collective in Self-Care: Potentials and Constraints, expands and complicates a thin narrative of self-care that saturates Mexican public health with autocuidado (self-care). Although practices like yoga are promoted by Mexican authorities and others as a means to help individuals manage or take “better” care of their bodies, they are refashioned by working-class Mexican women involved in state- subsidized yoga services as a collective act of care. Learning to care for themselves and each other, these practitioners, I argue, promote a type of self-care that embraces both the individual and collective classed self simultaneously. Self-care practices, my analysis suggests, necessarily (but not always successfully) become care of the collective based on

50 both intention and context.

Finally, the Conclusion ties these narratives together by discussing yoga’s political implications in Mexico City.

51

CHAPTER 1: YOGA, THE NEW DRUG OF CHOICE IN MEXICO

Introduction

Erik’s Secret Revealed: A Tale of Two Li(v)es

Dressed in his white linen yoga uniform, Erik had just completed teaching an hour-long evening yoga and meditation class to a group of 50 people in one of the main plazas of the Historical Center of Mexico City. He was getting ready to pack up his belongings when a woman in her forties raised her hand. “Teacher, what is spirituality?” she asked him. Without any hesitation, he expounded on the subject for several minutes:

Holding the physical, mental, and emotional in balance is spirituality. It means to have awareness over our environment and everything around us. It means consuming appropriately. Spiritual people don’t consume greasy foods, drugs, or alcohol. It is impossible to be in balance that way; it’s impossible to be spiritual. The body will function at an optimum level when it is healthy.

At the same time the mind should be calm and focused. This kind of mind chooses to read and meditate on appropriate words and thoughts. A stressed mind is not a spiritual one.

Those who say groserías [profanities] are not spiritual either. Groserías are negative mantras. When we speak in this manner we are basically attracting negativity into our lives. We should not listen to negative music either. When we listen to music with negative lyrics we are asking for violence to come into our lives. Spiritual people listen to beautiful music. They listen to classical music; they attend operas and ballets.

“Teacher, what should we do to increase our spirituality?” another person interjected.

Read about history, culture, and art. Go to the opera and ballet; these are

52

activities that will shape you as a human being. Learn your own camino [way] and create your own path. You are here listening to me [today] for a reason. Your life can begin to change as you begin to adopt these new ways of life. Wealth is not in money; it is inside of you. Our book says this and it’s available to the public. I also speak about the spiritual body on our website. You are all welcome to join our class next Saturday on Reforma [Avenue].

Leave your name and information with our staff so we can keep you informed about our events. Staff! Staff! Where is the staff?

Erik’s ten-year-old daughter and her mother—his staff—were sitting by me on the edge of the stage. They were huddled together, nearly fast asleep. After the event I ran up to Erik and hoped we would have a chance to talk about the sermon he had just preached.

As usual, I had dozens of questions. I wanted to know how he thought particular styles of dance and genres of music were related to his “Meditation for Peace in Mexico” initiative. I wanted to find out when the last time he attended an opera or ballet, given that his police work barely allowed him to make ends meet each month. And, because his classes were endorsed by the Mexico City government as part of its initiative to “create a new civic culture” in the city,60 I wanted to discuss with him his thoughts on “civility” and the morally-inflected ideas he was presenting about healthy bodies, personal responsibility, and consumption. Unfortunately, the session did not end until 11 that evening and Erik had to drive almost an hour to return home to Ciudad Neza. We arranged to meet the following morning.

Erik picked me up in his used car outside the metro station. He was wearing his police uniform. Eager to delve into the list of questions I had prepared, I pulled out my

60 Mexico City’s Ministry of Environment promotes outdoor activities (like yoga and bike riding) in an effort to “recuperat[e] public space, [facilitate] integration and social inclusion, [and]...foment habits of good health” (http://www.sma.df.gob.mx/mueveteenbici/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid= 34, accessed 5 January 2014). 53 notebook from my purse. Before I could say anything, Erik blurted out: “I’ve been manipulating everyone, and I’ve been manipulating you.”

“I don’t understand. What are you talking about, Erik?” I asked.

“I invented everything. What I’ve told you about yoga is all a lie. I never had a teacher when I was six years old [as he indicated in his book and on his website]. There was no one. I learned yoga from watching it on television. I have no [formal] training.

The entire [Meditation for Peace in Mexico] movement emerged from a lie, with the aim to seek the truth. I want you to know the truth now.”61 As he shared these words with me, he removed his police jacket.

I asked him why he was compelled to lie about his identity. He told me he had no other choice. “This is Mexico; it’s my reality. No one listens to the police here. Before the Zócalo, people were afraid of me.62 They thought I wanted to steal from them and molest their children. After the Zócalo, I became Mexico’s superhero – Yogi-Cop63. It’s just a game.”

“Who’s winning?” I asked him.

“The people [el pueblo]! Look, Andrea, we now have powerful people offering

[yoga] for free. They are volunteering their time, studios, and teachings to the public.

Perhaps I’m not really manipulating people; it’s more like I’m moving them.”

“Why is this ‘move’ so important to you?”

61 As anthropologists, we know our interlocutors lie to us, but they usually do not inform us when they are lying. I asked Erik what he wanted me to do with his secret, and he told me I would know when to share it. It is possible that he revealed it to me so early in our friendship as a way to test my loyalty. I might have lost his trust had I disclosed his “lie” too soon.

62 Erik is referring here to the first mass-level yoga event he organized in the main public square in 2009.

63 “Yogi-Cop” is Erik’s phrase, not my translation. He spent a few years in the United States as an undocumented worker and took pride in the broken English he learned. 54

Growing impatient with all of my questions, Erik responded directly, “Because I used to think I was barbaric and didn’t deserve to spend time with people so cultured and educated. Now, I am learning to coexist [convivir] with them. Maybe I will have a rich girlfriend one day.”

Bodily transformation is inherent in the practice of yoga. As Erik removed his police jacket and disclosed his secret to me, he exposed his desire to transform his own personal body and the social body – or socioeconomic class – in which he was situated.

This series of statements symbolically indicated to me that he no longer saw himself as someone in transition (from cop to yogi); he had, in fact, assumed a new, blended identity that he labeled as ‘Yogi-Cop.’ His metamorphosis, however, involved much more than just a change in uniforms. By telling me “the truth” about his identity, I think he was attempting to justify his legitimacy as a formidable spiritual authority in Mexico in a class of other educated and couth (elite) yogis. Just as Erik lectured to his students,

“Your life can begin to change as you begin to adopt these new ways of life. Wealth is not in money; it is inside of you,” he felt he needed to undergo and display his spiritual—and physical—transformation, in order to assume a position in this higher class. A few days later, he exhibited this change (of shirts) publicly while teaching yoga and meditation in the Zócalo (for the second time); this time, however, with elite64 instructors by his side and their friends and families in the audience (see Introduction).



Erik’s story, on which I will elaborate further below, reveals how social relations between the elite and poor are not as straightforwardly divided (or conflictive) as studies

64 I use this term to signify wealth, power, and social privilege. Some of the instructors I refer to as “elite” do not identify with “the elite” of Mexico, though others do. All of them, however, associate their practice, teachings, and businesses with the “elite of yoga” in Mexico. 55 of spatial and social fragmentation in Latin American cities would have us infer.

While all urban spaces, both public and private, are selective to some degree in terms of the people they attract and contain, certain built environments and material borders spatially distinguish those groups who are “in” from those who are “out” (Low

1996a). These divisions signify not only people’s location in space, but also relations of power. In her study of urban segregation in São Paolo, Brazil, Caldeira (1999, 2000) identifies such exclusive spaces as “fortified enclaves.”65 These “privatized, enclosed, and monitored space[s]” offer inhabitants a fully functional (private) city space, sealed off from the larger (public) city that encloses it (Caldeira 2000:4). Surrounded by walls, fences, gates, and guards, the enclosures allow those inside to lose sight of the “other” city that exists outside. Even though different forms of social organization exist within both spaces, inhabitants discursively position themselves in opposition to each other, with one city symbolizing safety and order and the other indexing danger and disorder. Thus, these fortified enclaves create divisions between privileged “insiders” and marginal

“outsiders,” who are perceived by the former as belonging to an undesirable social world and therefore unworthy of gaining (permanent) access to theirs.66 In this way, Pellow

(1996) argues, spatial “enclaves are built to separate social classes, and boundaries are created to prevent class-based disorder by controlling interaction” (217).

As I mentioned in the Introduction, several studies conducted in Mexico City revealed that massive urbanization brought with it a growing desire to engage in practices

65 Scholars studying residential privatization in Buenos Aires (Suárez 1997), Bogotá (Silva 1992), and Mexico City (Safa 1999) associate urban seclusion with spikes in poverty and fear of crime. Such accounts, others argue, reduce city life to a “crisis over public space” and often dismiss the social coherency that abounds therein (Giglia 2007:233).

66 Researching gated housing complexes in the U.S. and Mexico, Low (2003) observes how residents justify the daily presence of outside groups, such as custodial and pool staff. While their access is limited and monitored, the services they provide are viewed as benefiting the community as a whole. 56 of seclusion. As the city engulfed outlying territories, as population levels rose swiftly, and as daily activities occurred in spatially differentiated locales, residents began to expend more time in their journeys across the city. Their movements from one activity and space to another often distanced Mexican commuters from the familiar (families, homes, neighbors, friends) and brought them closer to the unfamiliar (traffic, noise, new populations), further inciting their withdrawal from the public life of the city (García

Canclini 1996b, 2001).

These analyses highlight inter-class relational disconnections and suggest that different classes inhabit completely distinct social worlds in Latin American cities. One prominent Mexican scholar asserts the following:

In cities like ours, the conflict is diffuse…from fights over land…; [to] the violent closing of streets or their reopening, equally violent; [to] struggles over space among street vendors; to street protests…that use urban space as a site or object of dispute. …What these conflicts have in common is the impossibility of recognizing few shared rules among socially distinct subjects. Seen like that, the metropolis represents an immense scene of incipient or potential conflict (Giglia 2007:233).

These images of conflict and division lead both her and me to ask: “What shared values, or informal arrangements, allow for subjects so culturally distinct to live together in [the] city, as we ultimately do every day?” (ibid: 233). To address this broader question, this chapter has two specific aims: (1) to explore how yoga offers an emerging symbolic and physical space in the city to articulate values of union and disunion; and (2) to investigate the relations that emerge in this space among seemingly distinct classes.

Conceptually, I not only consider the social constraints and separations that manifest in urban space (as some of these scholars do). I also account for some of the social potentials and fusions that exceed its borders. Let us turn now to a second body of

57 literature that addresses the subject of these relations more provocatively than the first.

In the 1980s, Latin Americanists underscored the need to “study up” in urban contexts (Fanny Quintal 1983; Sariego Rodríguez 1988). Gledhill (2002:40) applauded

Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur (1987;1994) for studying Mexican “elite families and their networks in their own right.” Both Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur (1987) and Nutini (2005) approach the study of the urban elite by focusing on their daily cultural and ritualistic expressions of wealth, ideology, and power.67 These works emphasize kinship and social networks as key mediums to manifest privileged lifestyles, ideologies, and status. Such research offers important insights into the social and cultural production of class and elite power, but tends to render class relations in somewhat flat, uniform terms.

Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur (1994:210) understand these relations as encompassing a “stratified system of solidarity” that is supported by a wide network of people engaged in reciprocal exchanges of goods, services, and resources (social, economic, etc.).68

Nutini (2005) focuses on “expressive attributes of class” (e.g., lineage, heredity, local prominence) that structure social behavior in terms of patron-client and other “traditional patterns of interaction” (ibid: 15, 16).69 Such relations are characterized predominantly by dependence, which implies “that there are individuals who are inherently to be regarded as superordinately placed, to whom the subordinately placed must attach themselves in

67 Whereas Nutini offers a detailed, historical overview of the development and influence of the Mexican elite on the macro level, Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur provide a micro-analysis of several generations of one elite family in Mexico to underscore similar points.

68 The concept of class, these authors conclude, should not be defined according to socioeconomic variables, but instead should account for social networks, “which include a whole spectrum of people from poor to rich” (Lomnitz and Pérez-Lizaur 1994: 210).

69 Patron-client relations involve “a strong attachment to a leader as a patron and as a source of economic well-being” among those subordinately positioned (Nutini 2005:8). Such relations date to the colonial era with caciquismo. 58 order to get on in the world” (ibid: 15-16). Defined in this way, class relations structure people’s actions cohesively, and interactions among different classes occur with “no one stand[ing] to either lose or gain” status (Nutini and Isaac 2009:232).

This chapter, by contrast, considers class relations as both a collective and singular project where the social and personal intertwine—that is, “where structure and agency come together” (Phillips 1998:197). It argues that people act in ways that may contradict ideal “expressions” of class and that class relations are characterized by relations of interdependence. In other words, both the poor and rich depend on each other

“to get on in the world.”

Class operates in relational motion in Mexico, though perhaps in uneven ways.

While a myriad of spatial and social structures continue to mark class distinctions in

Mexico City, new forms of connection and exchange have also emerged. This chapter presents and analyzes three ethnographic vignettes that illustrate the ways in which disenfranchised individuals have assumed some degree of social mobility by either inserting themselves or being inserted by others (namely elite yogis) in the physical and mediated spaces in which state-sponsored yoga is produced and promoted in Mexico

City. These stories suggest that elites depend on non-elites to maneuver (or to use Erik’s word, “manipulate”) their own social standing. In this way, I argue that both rich and poor alike benefit from the reciprocal relations (friendships, business partnerships, mentorships) that develop in yoga’s production, even though these benefits are not evenly distributed. To better contextualize the stories I present below, we must first understand how yoga’s recent popularization evolved in Mexico.70

70 The life histories I collected of multiple generations of Mexican yoga practitioners inform my perspective. 59



Yoga’s Debut on Television

As I briefly mentioned in the Introduction, yoga occupied an occult status in the public imaginary prior to the 1980s and 1990s, because of its association with the Gran

Fraternidad Universal (GFU) [Universal Great Brotherhood]. This quasi-religious organization first introduced Mexicans to Hatha yoga at no charge as early as the 1950s

(see Jacobo Rojas 2005 and Moreno Fernández 2005). In the late 1960s, a small Buddhist community was founded in an exclusive neighborhood in Mexico City, offering yoga and meditation to its supporters. Some of the first centers of Ashtanga, Iyengar, and

Kundalini yoga were later founded in the 1980s and 1990s by wealthy Mexicans who returned to Mexico City after spending a year or more with internationally-renowned yoga leaders and their communities in India and the United States. In the 1990s, yoga began to flourish as a commercial enterprise in Mexico City and other large urban centers, but continued to circulate predominantly among populations that had the ability to pay for classes and teacher training programs.

When yoga first aired on television in 2006 with Alejandro Maldonado’s daily morning show, few in the industry imagined that the program would last for more than a month. Yet, it did. Trained in New York City and Miami Beach, the attractive thirty- something-year-old yogi shared his beloved practice with millions of viewers across the nation for nearly four years on Televisa’s popular morning show, Hoy [Today].

Maldonado offered his viewers a weekly inspirational message (e.g., “Pain is an inevitable fact; suffering is optional”), which he connected daily to a two-minute remark about a specific theme (e.g., meditation, integrative health, serenity), followed by three or

60 four minutes of yoga poses and breathing exercises. He promoted the idea that both physical and mental wellness could be easily attained by incorporating a self-care regimen (like yoga) that would enable people to better manage their own bodies, thoughts, and emotions. Popularizing yoga through a mass-mediated space of this kind and on this scale had never been done before in Mexico.

In an interview I conducted with Maldonado at a posh hotel in Mexico City, he told me that he was not originally in favor of popularizing71 what he considered to be a highly personal and private practice among elites; to do so would be, in his words,

“vulgar.” He preferred to teach yoga to the wealthy—mostly models, actors, singers, and politicians’ wives—who, as he says, “have the power to transform all the other sectors.”

Building on this point, his friends at Televisa reminded him of his responsibility—as a person of privilege—to reveal the “nice, simple” message of yoga, which seemed to be kept “hidden or secret[,]…to a sector [in Mexico] that is, well, a little forgotten.”

Maldonado’s body turned out to be a significant aspect of that “nice, simple” message he and his producers wanted to expose to those so-called forgotten Mexicans. Removing his shirt each day on stage and wearing tight black leggings that accentuated his muscular build, he became a sex symbol overnight and the show became an instant success. When the show went off the air in 2009, the term yoga had gained household status.72

Nevertheless, the majority of Mexicans were unable to afford the classes that these elite instructors offered in their private salons in affluent urban neighborhoods.

71 See note 10 above.

72 The show was pulled off the air quite abruptly. When I asked Maldonado about his departure, he told me that “no one really knows what happened and it’s best to leave it like that.” Rumors circulating among other elite instructors indicated that he was involved in a torrid love affair with a high-ranking producer at the network; when the relationship ended, so did Maldonado’s career on Televisa (so the rumor went). In 2013, almost two years following our first interview, “Yoga with Alejandro” returned to the popular morning show. 61

The next section offers an analysis of the ways social standing is being negotiated through the mediated and physical spaces yoga has come to inhabit in Mexico.

Examining how different actors insert themselves into these spaces and/or are inserted by others into them offers a window onto inter-class relations in Mexico City. While it is true that the Mexican elite has historically assumed authority of the national stage, I will demonstrate how both yoga and the relations forming therein have allowed traditionally marginalized peoples to access that stage, too, yet sometimes at a cost to both themselves and others.



Yoga: A Prisoner’s Cure

As discussed above, yoga was imagined as a predominantly white, private elite activity in the 1980s and 1990s. Yoga’s associations with the elite of Mexico City, with non-Mexican regions, and with a healthy lifestyle made yoga a socially acceptable practice in the public imagination – something that the poor “needed.” By the mid-2000s, television, film, and print media (produced largely, if not entirely, by elites) helped reposition yoga’s image as a magic pill that could bring salvation to poor Mexicans, drug addicts, and even criminals. Here, I document the ways elite yogis (re)produced this curative image of yoga among prisoners. The section that follows details how they use public space to propagate those cures to “the public.” Despite the fact that these efforts are initiated by the elite, the relationships that emerge in these spaces have a transformative effect on all subjects, perhaps as much as the practice of yoga itself.



The woman sitting next to me in the theater turned towards me and chuckled as she whispered the following in my ear: “I didn’t know a cure for those people existed.” I 62 was not fazed at all by her pejorative tone. In fact, I had grown accustomed to hearing and fielding similar disparaging remarks about the poor and other marginalized

Mexicans. A former roommate of mine once spent two hours warning me about the so- called uncultured and uneducated “riff-raff [la chusma]”73 I was supposedly interacting with in Iztapalapa, one of Mexico City’s poorest boroughs. Even though she herself had never stepped foot in that place or met any of my friends, she was convinced that they would follow me home one day to rob, rape, and kill me (us). The last thing I wanted to do was to engage in another long, uncomfortable conversation with the stranger seated to my right. So, in response to her comment I called her attention to Jesús, one of the four prison inmates featured in the film we had just watched, who viewed his incarceration and life-long battle with drugs and poverty as a reflection of a broader social illness

(enfermedad social) in Mexico.74 Then, while looking down at the notes I had scribbled in my notebook during the film screening, I repeated verbatim what Jesús had said: “I am a reflection of a fucking society that is sicker than I, and [yet] they are afraid of me.”

Rolling her eyes at me in disgust, the woman immediately stood up and left the auditorium. I remained in my seat thinking about yoga’s recent popularization in Mexico and the ways this documentary, Interno [Within] (2010), had contributed to this phenomenon by crafting yoga as a panacea for a variety of national problems, including poverty, violence, and drug addictions.

73 The educación/cultura [education/culture] construct, as I call it (Maldonado 2010), is often invoked in Mexico City among persons of privilege (and those aspiring such status) to identify social Others. Some describe the poor as “indecent” and “uncultured,” given their supposedly “improper” upbringing.

74 Jesus’s view of illness resonates with medical anthropological perspectives, which suggest that “illness in an individual body may be a manifestation of social and political illness” (McGuire 2002:410). 63

Figure 1: Directed by an elite instructor of yoga in Mexico City, Interno (Within) documents the stories of four Mexican inmates whose lives transform through yoga.

Circulating across the nation through public television (Canal Once), the National

Film Archive (Cineteca Nacional), private theaters, and conferences sponsored by state governments in 2011 and 2012, Interno documents the charitable work of Ann Moxey, a blue-eyed, grey-haired Argentine psychologist and reputable yoga instructor in Mexico, who has been teaching yoga since 2003 to incarcerated men and women in a state prison in Atlacholoaya, Morelos, located approximately 70 miles south of Mexico City

(Delfabro 2011). Directed by one of Moxey’s friends in Mexico City, the film highlights

64 the stories of four male prisoners who were, as one of them puts it, “tangled up with drugs” when they entered prison. They viewed their convictions (for rape, homicide, domestic abuse, drug trafficking, theft) as illnesses (not crimes) and referred to themselves in turn as ill (not criminals). Unlike Jesús, however, Moxey did not speak much in the film about the larger social inequalities and injustices that may have shaped her students’ conditions. Instead, she focused on the psychological aspects of their impoverishment (e.g., “dysfunctional families” and “learned violence”) in order to explain their lot in life. According to her, these men simply did not “have access to the necessary resources to change” (cited in González 2010: 59). Moxey’s medicine is yoga, which she claims offers prisoners “the key to freedom” both inside and outside the prison. Volunteering her time and financial resources to the prison project, she navigated the state bureaucracy successfully and convinced officials to import this cultural practice as a means to manage inmate stress and in-house violence. In the film, Moxey argues that using yoga will help prisoners change “from darkness to light.”

As the light of dawn breaks through the dark clouds that represent the inmates’ hostile pasts, one scene in the film ends and another begins, dramatizing the arrival of not only a new day but also a new way of life for the prisoners. Moxey teaches inmates to manipulate their bodies through a series of strenuous physical routines and to engage their minds in deep, thoughtful meditations that invite the men to question who they are and “the type of person [they] want to become.” She instructs prisoners to explore their bodies, voices, and thoughts and to develop new interests, goals, and activities off the mat. In this way, she says, the men are able to “regain power, power over [themselves].”

For Moxey, self-control is one of “the necessary resources” they must be taught in order

65 to be cleansed from what one inmate identifies as the “evil, destruction, and drugs” that plagued his (their) past. We bear witness to yoga’s therapeutic conversion as the stories of each prisoner’s transformation unfold before our eyes. The documentary thus portrays yoga as a powerful technology that the elite employ to engender both individual and collective change among the marginalized.

Figure 2: Freddy teaches yoga to other inmates after he is released from prison. Source: http://www.revistaantidoto.com/cine.php?ed=23, accessed 24 February 2013.

Freddy’s story is especially noteworthy. Originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, one of

Mexico’s poorest states, Freddy began to sell drugs at a young age and was sentenced to ten years in prison for drug trafficking. He spent his first few years there, as he says,

“fucking other people up and getting fucked up.” Moxey encourages him to combine his practice of yoga with other so-called cultural programs offered in the prison, including poetry writing, reading, and acting. In the film we see Freddy giving motivational speeches to his peers, acquiring leading roles in plays, and later (outside of prison)

66 securing a relationship with a woman. These so-called cultural achievements earn him a nearly four-year reduction in his prison sentence. Following his release from prison,

Moxey provides him with a scholarship to complete her five-year yoga teacher certification program, which ultimately allows him to find employment as a yoga instructor. The film ends with Freddy returning to the prison, though this time not as a prisoner but as a member of Moxey’s group of affluent volunteer yoga teachers.

In 2010, one of Moxey’s friends featured Freddy in an eight-page article in a national health and fitness magazine, where she served as an editor. Much like the film, the article describes Freddy’s transformation—“[f]rom prisoner to yogi” (as indicated in one of its sub-headings). Elites are imagined in both of these mass-mediated spaces as generous, privileged crusaders that have the so-called education and culture to turn prisoners into yogis (that is, to convert “darkness to light”). Rewarded by the state for overcoming their “dysfunctional family” and “learned violence” (the supposed psychological roots of their so-called illnesses), prisoners like Freddy express much gratitude to Moxey and the other elite volunteers. In his view, they are “people that do not ask for anything in return, but only come [to prison] to share” their knowledge.

Learning this privileged, supposedly “better” way of life offers some of the inmates much potential to improve their lives. However, in my view, neither one group’s generosity nor the gains of another are limitless or unrestricted.

Indeed, one of Moxey’s aims, as she describes it in both the film and article, is to create a self-sufficient prison program, in which “we can produce more yoga teachers from inside.” The teacher training scholarship she generously offered Freddy is conditional on his service to the program. Moxey expects him to return her favor by

67 returning to the community from which he emerged (prison) to offer other inmates what she offered him. By transforming prisoners into “well-trained, very aware [conscientes]” yogis who are able to inject other inmates with the same “free” medicine that she offered him, she and the other elite instructors would no longer need to enter these marginalized spaces as often as they did when the program was in its infancy. Former inmates, like

Freddy, would become responsible for teaching the sick (prisoners, addicts) how to become healthy (yogis). First, they learn from us to manipulate body-mind and then they teach them to manipulate theirs; in this way, they become like us.

Freddy was considered a success story by elite practitioners I interacted with in

Mexico City, many of whom supported the initiative of their friend, Ann Moxey, by volunteering their time to teach yoga to the inmates in a place located nearly two hours away from their homes. The upper-middle-class and upper-class audience of Balance magazine learn about Freddy’s positive transformations, the elite’s generous efforts to share their education with him, and his own willingness to help himself. In this way, yoga’s prescription for self-improvement turns problems like drug addiction, which are shaped by broader social illnesses, into matters for individuals to resolve. Freddy’s success, in my view, becomes a mediated story that the wealthy create and use to minimize the effects of social inequality and blur the privileges of their own social position. This was perhaps best reflected in an interview I had with the editor of the magazine article. She insisted to me that Freddy’s story proved that “of course it is easier

[to be healthy] in a privileged world, but that does not mean that it is not possible in a poor world.” Even though yoga alone does not “cure” health problems (like drug addictions) that have underlying social causes, it is still important to recognize that yoga

68 did offer a poor man from Oaxaca a new lineage of elite yogis with whom to identify and interact, a job as a yoga instructor, national fame, and even romance. Literally becoming his “key to freedom,” yoga turned out to be an even better drug of choice for Freddy than the ones he used to consume. Yet, at the same time, it had also become a potent drug that state institutions (prisons) employed to manipulate the poor (prisoners) into believing that they need to “achieve culture [realizar cultura]” (González 2010: 62) and self-care in order to gain civic freedoms.75

In the next section I continue our study of elite instructors and the mechanisms they use to reposition themselves socially; specifically, through their efforts to propagate these so-called cultural cures among the masses of Mexico City. Despite their intentions, this seemingly benevolent provision of yoga services to the poor reinforces (rather than blurs) class differences. Following this discussion I focus my analysis on the spatial maneuverings of Erik Calderón, the working-class yogi-cop we encountered at the beginning of this chapter. Like Freddy, Erik also gained access to the national stage through yoga. Unlike Freddy, however, Erik did not have any elite lineage (“culture”) to claim and consequently had a more difficult time maintaining his place on that stage.



75 Yoga in prisons mirrors some of the social crusading tactics promoted by elites to “civilize” and “modernize” rural peasant migrants in Mexican cities in the early 20th century (González Navarro 1974; Parker 2013:14). 69

Yoga with the “Chosen Family”

Figure 3: Mexico City’s “Harmony and Yoga in the Streets of Your City” program (Zócalo, 2010). Photo courtesy of David.

In 2010, a wealthy entrepreneur whom I call David contacted people he knew in the Mexico City government offices and requested the most important public plaza in the city, the Zócalo, to offer residents six free two-hour-long massive yoga classes. In his proposal to government leaders, David expressed concerns regarding the use of public spaces to conduct criminal activities and emphasized the need to offer a healthier option

(like yoga) to vulnerable groups who, in his estimation, might otherwise be tempted to sell and/or use drugs and alcohol in such spaces.76 David’s assistant used several media

76 The everyday “talk of crime” (Caldeira 2000) is often couched in polarizing images that divide urban boundaries between innocent victims and dangerous perpetrators. These narratives explain (away) violence by reducing it to a rampant virus or “contagion” of the city that needs immediate resolve through “proper precautions,” thus further legitimizing measures of containment and surveillance (Goldstein 2005; Lomnitz 2003a: 61). In this way, as Caldeira (2008:64) writes, talk of crime “feeds a circle in which fear is both dealt with and reproduced, and…violence is both counteracted and magnified”—all the while obscuring its broader social roots (e.g., poor urban housing, unemployment, low wages). In framing city crime as something “natural and interpretable,” this talk works as a “technique of erasure” (Briggs 2004), turning social inequities into matters for individuals to manage. 70 outlets to promote the “Harmony and Yoga in the Streets of Your City” [Armonía y yoga en las calles de su ciudad] program,77 which, in her words, was designed to “invite the public to take back public spaces and, above all, [regain] trust to go out to these types of places, to be together again.”78 The total costs incurred to produce the event surpassed

$150,000USD (approximately 2 million pesos), half of which was paid by the city,79 the other half by David, who obtained a personal tax relief for doing so.

Between 400 and 2000 people participated in each Sunday morning yoga class, which I would characterize as nothing short of a Hollywood production. Practitioners’ movements were sectioned off by steel barricades in an effort to ensure order among the hundreds of spectators who observed the classes. Musicians were hired to perform on an elaborate stage alongside the lead yoga instructor. Other instructors wearing “I ♥ YOGA”

T-shirts stood amidst the audience to assist individuals who had difficulty coordinating their bodies. A high tech sound system allowed people to follow the lead instructor’s voice while large LED panels displayed her movements. In an effort to ensure that the program received media coverage, David invited famous Mexican models and actors whom he referred to as “the people of Mexican society” – in order to, as he told me in

English, “watch them do yoga with [ordinary] people.”

77 Although my fieldwork began shortly after the six-week program had concluded in Mexico City, I researched media coverage of the event and interviewed the key figures responsible for organizing each class – from the financial sponsor to the public spokesperson to the lead yoga instructors. I also asked questions about the program in interviews with others who may or may not have participated in and/or contributed to the program.

78 http://www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?id_nota=525768, accessed 1 October 2011.

79 In accordance with Mayor Ebrard’s Red Ángel social policy initiative, the yoga event was one of many cultural and social enrichment programs sponsored by Mexico City in 2010 (Pantoja 2010). 71

Figures 4-6: Mexican models and actors participate in the “Harmony and Yoga” program (Zócalo, 2010). Photos courtesy of David.

Journalists referred to the teachers guiding each class as “yoga instructors of the highest level,”80 “the experts,” and “the best teachers of Mexico.”81 To locate these instructors, David contracted Ana, the granddaughter of former Mexican President

Echevarría.82 Ana did not need to search long; she turned to her friends, who were in fact many of the same individuals Ann Moxey recruited to facilitate the prison project in

Morelos. Members of a tight-knit group that self-identifies as “the chosen family” (la familia escogida), this elite community of yoga instructors are, as one member disclosed to me in English, “people with money, with possibilities to travel to India, to bring that knowledge [to Mexico], to live without working, maybe a year, two, or three.” They are teachers who hold yoga certifications from schools in the United States, own financially lucrative yoga studios in affluent Mexico City neighborhoods, and charge expensive fees

80 http://foros.eluniversal.com.mx/entrevistas/detalles/16537.html, accessed 1 October 2011.

81 http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/columnas/84918.html, accessed 1 October 2011.

82 David hired Ana because he had heard from his assistant, her good friend, that she brought yoga to Mexico twenty years prior to the event. While Ana may have introduced (Ashtanga) yoga to wealthy Mexicans, the GFU introduced yoga to Mexico in the 1950s (Jacobo Rojas 2005). Some instructors received as much as 10,000 pesos ($750USD) to teach one of the summer classes in the Zócalo. 72 for their classes.83

The first 200 people who arrived to their class in the Zócalo received a colorful yoga mat that displayed a large imprinted logo of a hotel David owns in the city. As a tool, the mat is used by David not only to position his business interests effectively vis-à- vis free publicity but also to strategically position the public image of the social elite. The donated item obscures class profit and privilege, portraying instead good will and charity.

But, the mat replaced the cheaper towel or blanket that supported other bodies on the rigid and dirty concrete surface. In this way, the donated mat is also a sign of poverty, indexing the material scarcity and need that justify gifting it to certain program participants in the first place. Of course, most mat recipients could not afford a night’s stay at David’s hotel. In this way, the mat also demarcates social exclusion. While David insisted that the event he executed was inclusive, we simply cannot ignore the facts that only a few can maneuver deals with bureaucrats and put on a production of this magnitude in public spaces like the Zócalo. Only a few are offered tax breaks, only a few are invited to share an authoritative space on stage with the chosen family, and only a few will leave the event with a mat. These underlying differences were obscured by journalists whose photographs depicted celebrity and non-celebrity, family and non- family, rich and poor momentarily united as a collective, engaging in the same yoga pose on the same kind of mat and in the same public space.

83 Many of their students hold powerful positions in government and corporate sectors, giving members of this group access to political and economic power that most yoga instructors in Mexico City do not have. Oscar Velázquez, who calls himself the padrino [godfather] of the chosen family, secured a sponsorship in early 2011 from Adidas, which granted him 120,000 pesos ($9000USD) worth of Adidas-brand clothing; the woman who approved the sponsorship was his former student. In 2011 and 2012, Oscar taught two hours of yoga each week to athletes at the National Center for the Development of Athletic Talent and High Achievement (CNAR) at a rate of 650 pesos per hour ($50USD). Oscar’s close childhood friend was the director of CNAR. 73

Figure 7: Donated yoga mat. Photo courtesy of David.

Figure 8: Photographs that capture uniform bodily poses help position city dwellers as a united (rather than divided) front to combat violence. Photo courtesy of David.

Space is thus a key element to understanding how social elites negotiate their interests and exert their authority over the production and circulation of knowledge about yoga in Mexico. Elites of Mexico City recognize the positive health impact that yoga can contribute to Mexicans, but some neither acknowledge nor question the uneven spaces in which its promotion and activities operate, and certainly not those uneven spaces in which the burden of poverty differentially affects health outcomes in the first place.

David, for example, seems quick to dismiss the social value that other (less affluent) yoga

74 teachers in Mexico contribute with their time, bodies, and (mostly unpaid or precariously paid) labor. He insists to me that only expensive projects like his should receive political support: “To do all this and to be successful, you need to have the experts, the good people…If not, it won’t turn out well; it won’t cause an impact.” State-level decisions that permit (or thwart) the presence of specific yoga instructors in important public spaces are therefore informed by and reinforce elitist standards of expertise that legitimize certain knowledge about yoga and certain practitioners who have access to it.

To understand why this is so, we need to return to the spatial maneuverings of the working-class cop who convened the first-ever free yoga event in the Zócalo in 2009.



Erik’s Yoga: A Cure for Mexico, or a Cure for Him?

Figure 9: Erik in police uniform. Photo courtesy of Erik Calderón.

Similar to Freddy, the former inmate I introduced above, Erik grew up in a poor, violent Mexican household. Unlike Freddy, who received extensive yoga training from

75 members of the elite chosen family, Erik learned about yoga through books, DVDs, the

Internet, and Alejandro Maldonado’s television morning show. In late 2008, well before

David’s event had been imagined, this energetic, tenacious Mexico City cop approached the city’s government offices to request the use of the Zócalo to launch a national peace and health initiative. Offering free yoga and meditation classes to the masses in large public spaces would, in his words, not only “generate a sense of social unity” among

Mexicans, but also “improve their health conditions.”84 Dressed in police gear with his handgun and baton tied securely to his belt, Erik attempted to convince city officials that his was the perfect project to transform the public image of the country (see

Introduction). Unfortunately, because he was unable to provide authorities with any references or affiliations that might legitimize his expertise, his proposal was turned down. A few months later, however, he returned to their offices with proof that he was, as he says, “someone who is worth the effort.”

Dressed in his white linen yoga suit and driving a used car he purchased with a loan, Erik presented officials with a copy of his recently self-published book about yoga, legal documentation for the non-profit International Yoga Council he founded, and a business card with his name and website address. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Erik claims he was compelled to invent and project this professional image in order to acquire the social credibility needed to persuade public authorities to lend him – a poor cop from Neza – the Zócalo. His tactic worked.85 In early 2009, Erik received word that his event would be endorsed by the Government of Mexico City. Publicity

84 http://www.farfalas.net/farfalas/index.php/espiritual-topmenu-30/29-ayuda-social/781-gira-meditacion- por-la-paz-en-la-cd-de-mexico, accessed 22 May 2010.

85 Images, narratives, and practices that legitimize yoga expertise circulate in, across, and beyond Mexico City, and are often negotiated in everyday life by “users who are not [their] makers” (de Certeau 1984:xiii). 76 through social media and government websites attracted hundreds of people to the first free massive yoga class held in the Zócalo.

Figures 10 and 11: Erik teaches yoga in city parks and plazas. Photos courtesy of Erik Calderón.

“You have to manipulate these people [in the government], you have to tell them lies to get what you want,” he blurted out to me one day as we sat parked in his car, eating lunch, and waiting for the afternoon city traffic to ease up. We had just left the

77 police station in the south of the city where he worked, so he was still wearing his police uniform. When he removed his jacket, I could see that the black T-shirt he wore underneath it displayed various images of semi-automatic weapons. Although his own firearm was locked in the trunk of his car, he proudly displayed a police stick, a few bullets, and a knife near the center console. When I first met Erik it was difficult for me to understand how someone could promote peace and non-violence through public yoga classes while also carrying around items that could potentially hurt people. As I listened to him talk about how he fashioned this complex policeman-yogi image, he grabbed the knife from the console, played with it nervously for a while, and then used it like dental floss, picking away at the creases between each of his teeth. “Andrea, no one knew who I was. I was just a humble policeman. I did not have any influential connections

[palancas]; I did not have friends with important last names; I did not have anything here.

What else could I do?”

What Erik did (or aimed to do) in 2009 was create a new identity for himself, which he called “Yogi-Cop.” By replacing his dark-colored police uniform with white linen and a police-owned motorcycle with a used car, he hoped to demonstrate to bureaucrats that yoga had cured him from (police) corruption and turned him into, in his words, an “honest yogi-cop.” I often heard him tell authorities in different institutions we frequented that “if yoga can save a cop, just imagine what it can do for all of Mexico.”

Erik believed that this yogi-cop persona would not only offer Mexico a “better” (moral, ethical) culture to which to aspire, but it would also offer him a means to escape his humble past and the socially and financially stagnant place he occupied in Mexico as a low-ranking traffic cop. This cultural invention, however, was haunted by and depended

78 on his (low-class) police identity, which made it rather difficult for him to flee from it completely—even with yoga. And, indeed, even though he rendered yoga as his cultural salvation, it became to some extent his cultural prison. The higher-classed image he crafted required constant maintenance, which could only be supported by further manipulation. Instead of using television to popularize yoga (like Alejandro Maldonado),

Erik used Mexico City itself.

Acquiring state support vis-à-vis his occupation of the Zócalo allowed a working- class man without any formal training in yoga to claim a (new) place in its production and circulation in Mexico – a place that had heretofore been largely dominated by the wealthy and upper middle class (as documented above). Erik no longer needed a diploma from the United States or India to certify his knowledge of yoga or establish relations with the elite. He obtained credibility and authority by organizing hundreds of bodies in one of the most important public spaces in Mexico – a remarkable accomplishment given the economic, social, and political barriers in place.

When I met Erik in September of 2010, he was still employed by the city police force, though now he labored in that space as an instructor, specifically training officers in yoga, meditation, conflict resolution, and leadership development. He spent about 10 hours each day teaching yoga. As his “Meditation for Peace in Mexico” program grew in popularity, his debts unfortunately did, too. Erik never had any credit on his cell phone and he barely had enough money to eat or buy gas to transport himself and 150 yoga mats from one venue to another. The monthly salary86 he earned in the police force could not sustain his volunteer endeavors or his family. He expressed much concern about his economic welfare, but insisted that the limited government support he received was “the

86 Approximately 11,000 pesos ($850USD). 79 only way to show that yoga is for everyone – not just for rich people – and that it is a very useful tool to construct a healthy society.” Such support was also the only way he thought he could leave Mexico legally and make a better life for himself and his family.87

He dreamed that someone would learn of his public yoga initiatives and invite him to export them overseas, which would ultimately grant him a ticket out of a place he criticized constantly. When we first met, he had hopes that this person would be me.88

Erik’s promotion of yoga to “the masses” in public space is a reaction to class exclusions (both perceived and lived). Public authorities that allowed him to promote his mass-level yoga project not only widened exposure to the practice among diverse social sectors, but also created new spaces for its circulation. While such support helped reshape the social barriers that at one time may have discouraged people, like Erik, to claim authoritative space in this arena of knowledge and practice, it did not necessarily eliminate them. This became clear to me as I observed the many challenges Erik faced while teaching free yoga classes each Sunday morning on a busy street in Mexico City.89

City officials gave him a small stage, one speaker and a microphone, a piece of sidewalk, and a free lunch in exchange for four hours of unpaid labor. Erik provided the mats.

Week after week I was struck by how various bystanders treated Erik and his 20 students.

Usually, several chatty men and women claimed a portion of space on the stage, leaning against or sitting on it. Others rode their bikes across it and sometimes nearly collided

87 I remind readers that Erik spent a few years living in the U.S. as an undocumented worker.

88 Even four years after our first encounter in 2010, Erik continues to petition me to help him find studio space in the U.S. to teach yoga.

89 Erik offered free yoga classes each Sunday in conjunction with the Muévete en bici (Move Yourself by Bike) state-funded program. Coordinated by the city’s Ministry of Environment, this initiative provides citizens 14 miles along the Paseo de la Reforma Avenue and across the historical center to walk, bicycle, exercise, and socialize. Educational, health, social, and cultural activities are incorporated regularly into the program. Its annual budget in 2010 was 3.5 million pesos ($270,000USD). 80 into Erik. Some did not hesitate to walk in front of the class (instead of around it) and to step on the unused mats with the dirty soles of their shoes. Erik often ignored these disturbing behaviors in order to preserve some semblance of tranquility during the class.

He told me that “the people who try to step on me think I am taking up their space. They are bothered that we are here, using their sidewalk.” Erik’s comment speaks to the broader struggles of claiming a place in yoga’s production in Mexico City.

Figures 12 and 13: Erik teaches yoga in city streets amidst noise and distractions.90

90 All photographs are taken by the author unless otherwise noted. 81

Securing space was essential for Erik to attract public support for his yoga initiative. Unlike Freddy who taught yoga in prisons, Erik was not content to teach yoga only in low-income boroughs or to low-income police officers (his space). Rather, he claimed important political spaces in the city, like the Zócalo. Supposedly he was exposing yoga only to the masses –“the poor,” as he referred to them – but in actuality, those frequenting his events and learning about yoga also included middle-class

Mexicans.91 By transforming the public face of yoga in Mexico City, Erik helped to redefine and reposition seemingly rigid boundaries of expertise. For this reason, his presence in and use of public space threatened to undermine the authority of elite

Mexican yoga communities like the “chosen family;” hence, the latter’s need to transform what was his space (the Zócalo) in 2009 into their space in 2010. Erik’s spatial manipulations were eventually perceived by state authorities as an intrusion. These figures thwarted his movements in 2010 by denying him access to large public spaces like the Zócalo. It was not until he met Marisol in early 2011 that he was able to regain entry into that space (see Introduction).

Student-instructor relations in yoga are very important. Although Erik was not trained by elite instructors (like Freddy), his public notoriety in Mexico City enabled him to eventually secure meetings with many of them, even people like Ana (who invited him into her living room to have a conversation with her about his yoga program). In 2010, one elite instructor took him under his tutelage, invited him to attend yoga classes and retreats outside of Mexico City, and introduced him to some of his friends and students,

91 The Ministry of Environment of Mexico City conducted a survey of citizens participating in the “Move Yourself by Bike” program. Most participants were employed and lived in middle-class boroughs. I conducted my own surveys with Erik’s street yoga participants and found that most were professionals who lived in middle-class neighborhoods. No one from Iztapalapa ever participated, not even my friends whom I invited to join me each weekend. They claimed the location was too far for them. 82 including Marisol. With his mentor’s assistance (and Erik’s articulated desire to learn from him and, in his words, “change”), Erik tried to transform into the image of other elite instructors and began to preach the kinds of aspirational, self-help messages they had taught him (similar to the ones documented in the opening anecdote of this chapter).

His compulsion to (re)invent and (re)craft himself (his name and life story) is therefore in part a response to the widening wealth differentials that have emerged in recent years.

Erik would not possibly have been able to pay for the overseas elite credentials Marisol or his mentor more easily obtained. Yet, the fact that Erik was able to teach an elite practice alongside an elite instructor on the national stage is also reflective of new potentials – the potential, for example, to at least blur (some) social barriers.

Yoga’s push for self-improvement offered Erik some social mobility, though it also engendered new challenges. His work in Mexico City was eventually halted altogether in 2011 when he accepted a well-paid job to teach yoga to police officers in the state of Guerrero. Though securing this job brought some material benefits, he had to leave behind not only his daughter, but also the elite friendships he had just begun to cultivate in Mexico City. Pushed out of our place (Mexico City), and relegated to theirs,92 Erik might have been mistaken when he informed me that “Mexico City is big enough for everyone.” His strategic use of yoga as an economic, social, and symbolic mode of mobility allowed him to transition from a demoralized class identity in Mexico

(cop) to a more socially desirable one (yogi). Although this transition involved significant sacrifices on his part (leaving family, friends, and home), it continues to evolve. In 2012,

92 The public image of Guerrero was not positive in 2010 and 2011. National news media documented a significant rise in murders and other drug-related violence (Arteaga 2011; Muédano 2011), while international media warned of kidnappings and brutal violence in Acapulco, a once famous tourist destination (Archibold 2011; Malkin 2010). 83 after losing his job in Guerrero and not finding work in Mexico City, Erik moved back to his mother’s home in Guadalajara. There, he currently operates a small private yoga studio he built himself, offers teacher trainings, and organizes free yoga events in public space.



Conclusion

Various stakeholders in Mexico fashion yoga as a new prescription for social problems by providing citizens with a “better” culture of self-care. This chapter has analyzed configurations of power in tandem with various practices of individual agency to understand the ways in which some have managed (and/or have been managed by others) to negotiate a place in yoga’s production and circulation. Their activities encompass a contested site of spatial, social, and mediated engagement. Yoga leaders’ efforts to promote social union and social sameness (through uniform bodily postures, mediated images, and vocalized messages) are in reaction to, as well as a representation of, widening social differentials and exclusions that have emerged over the past couple of decades. While popularizing yoga as the new (self-help) drug of choice among prisoners, police officers, and ordinary Mexicans represents an effort to deny social privilege and undo class distinctions, it ultimately ends up exposing them.

All of the stories I present illustrate images of “self-made men.” It is important to recognize that this “self” is a relational one: that is, it is crafted in relation to those around it. Freddy’s social standing is shaped directly by elite instructors who insert not only yoga but also themselves into his world, while Erik, by contrast, strategically inserts himself into elite spaces. Elite social standing is also being maneuvered through these exchanges

84 and practices. For example, by providing yoga services to marginalized populations and then creating and circulating positive representations of these activities in various mass- mediated spaces they oversee and control, elite investors, entrepreneurs, and instructors are able to promote themselves in terms of charity, generosity, and professionalism.

Some, like Marisol, have begun to acknowledge their social privilege and even to question their philosophy of social sameness (that “we are all one”), but struggle to respond fairly and effectively to this problem. Marisol does what she is able to do: she teaches alongside Erik in his public events and offers Freddy editorial space to tell his story in a national health magazine. Elite privilege is by no means an a priori given; it is worked at, reimaged, and in motion, too.

Challenges to control public space and, in turn, knowledge production about yoga also illuminate complex issues regarding social class relations in Mexico City.

Recognizing how different social actors manipulate and/or are being manipulated by these relations in their claims to authority, expertise, and space, we have come to understand how class relations are at once constraining and enabling, marginalizing and inclusive. Elites with social and economic power often shape what types of self-care practices and experts are legitimate in city spaces, but they are also being shaped by social “others” (like Erik and Freddy) to relocate to “other” spaces (albeit temporarily).93

Similarly, even though state-endorsed yoga initiatives involve much sacrifice on the part of both affluent and non-affluent volunteers, the institutional legitimacy they accord their leaders offers them benefits, including fame, work, friendships, and public image make-

93 I am not suggesting that class distinctions are being undone through yoga’s production and circulation in Mexico City. Such distinctions reveal themselves through conversations, social interactions, and media outlets. Elite instructors are certainly not (always) inviting people like Freddy on their stage with them, but sometimes they do. 85 overs. It is in this way that “individual lives are defined by context, but…are also generative of new contexts” (Das 2007:64). In fact, as this chapter has demonstrated, yoga even offers the traditionally marginalized access to the national stage.

86

CHAPTER 2: “YOGA IS MY PROFESSION”: ENTREPRENEURIAL ASPIRATIONS, ANXIETIES, AND IM/MOBILITY

In the last chapter we learned of various people in Mexico engaged in the production, promotion, and practice of yoga. These individuals encouraged others (and/or were being encouraged by others) to transform their bodies and behaviors “to fit the ideal of a new kind of person” (Cahn 2008:433) – a socially desirable one. These efforts proved to be beneficial for some people, offering them opportunities to establish new kinds of relational exchanges with other classes and in turn some potential for social mobility. This chapter focuses on another group of individuals for whom yoga does not offer the same kinds of social benefits. Unlike Freddy and Erik, the persons described here hold university degrees (or at least advanced technical training beyond secondary school). None of them, however, are earning a living from the professions they studied.

Instead, they have tried to turn their yoga practice into an entrepreneurial one by training others in yoga instruction. They are in the business of education. Yet, given that what these self-employed teachers do for a living is not yet considered a legitimate profession, the social position they inhabit as entrepreneurs is precarious. Economic insecurity and job competition serve as stark reminders of the instability of middle-class privilege.94

Aspiring to be recognized as professionals of their (yoga) trade, they use each other, other

94 Given my lengthy discussion of the middle class in the Introduction, individual citations are more likely to appear there than here. It is through that scholarship that this analysis takes shape. 87 social groups, and the state as markers against which to define, evaluate, and position themselves as professionals. Let us turn now to these social actors whom I identify in this chapter as aspiring middle-class professionals.95



Introduction

“Yoga is my profession.” I heard this statement articulated by each of the five founding members of the Mexican Yoga Committee [MYC] (Comité Mexicano de Yoga), an ad-hoc group of teachers that met monthly for nearly three years, with hopes of creating Mexico’s first national standard of competency for yoga instructors. Claiming professional status, however, did not necessarily make it so. Unable to claim any kind of fixed salaried income, worker benefits (like health insurance and pensions), job security, or savings, these instructors hardly represented the public ideal of professional labor in

Mexico City. Similarly to other entrepreneurial endeavors in Mexico, theirs required “no previous experience, no formal education, and little startup capital” (Cahn 2008:430). All of them owned their own yoga schools, studios, and healing centers in middle-class neighborhoods, but many of these businesses were operating clandestinely – out of their homes, for example.96 While none of these instructors were poor, most of them struggled to pay their bills and keep their schools open for business. Self-employment, I posit, offered them little social, cultural, or economic ground on which to claim membership in

95 I refer to these people as aspiring middle-class professionals because: (1) their economic precarity shapes the social anxieties they experience as entrepreneurs; (2) they seek prestige through their efforts to renegotiate their professional status in Mexico; and (3) they aspire to create a sense of professional identity by distinguishing themselves from amateurs. MYC yogi-entrepreneurs are sandwiched in between two classes: elite instructors (whom they envy and resent) and “other” amateurs (whom they reject and fear).

96 This is intended to reduce overhead costs and avoid payment of taxes. Palacios (1990:124-125) describes tax evasion as an “underground” economic strategy mobilized by self-employed professionals in Mexico and elsewhere. 88

Mexico’s professional classes. For many of them, it did not “represen[t] a new promise of upward mobility and social esteem” (Freeman 2007:257), as it did in other contexts. In many ways, being an entrepreneur had given these yoga teachers no more than what some identify as an “informal” work status.97

Unfortunately, this story has become an all too common one for downwardly mobile middle-class Mexicans who have observed “their buying power reduced, their jobs wiped out, their debt magnified or their businesses weakened” since the 1980s

(Moreno 2002).98 Newspaper headlines such as “Poverty Steps on the Middle Class” and

“Free-Market Upheaval Grinds Mexico’s Middle Class” index some of the negative effects that neoliberal economic reforms have brought to this social group.99 Deregulating trade markets and opening borders did not deliver the decent jobs, salaries, or affordable consumer goods that Mexican politicians promised middle-class citizens in the latter part of the 20th century. Instead of shrinking the gap between the haves and have-nots of

Mexico, free-market policies like NAFTA have more often than not benefitted the

97 Mexican scholar de la Peña (2000) considers any activity that “escapes official norms” and is involved in the production of goods and services as constituting informality. The kind of work yoga teachers engage in could be considered informal – in the sense that their labor is not officially recognized as a profession and does not require specific studies or advanced training, degrees, certifications, etc. Anyone could virtually call him/herself a yoga instructor after only reading about the practice and watching techniques performed by others (see Chapter 1). See Escobar Latapí and de la Peña (1990) and Palacios (1990) for further analyses of informal economic activities in Mexico.

98 The Mexican middle classes constitute a heterogeneous grouping that spans diverse income levels, educational backgrounds, occupations, and neighborhoods. Perception largely dictates whether people define themselves and others as middle class (Cahn 2008:440). Parker (2013) suggests that it is not so crucial “to define the middle class as [it is] to uncover the shifting standards by which people imagined themselves and others as middle class” (12).

99 Gilbert (2007) would likely disagree with these assessments. His work in Morelos indicates that the middle classes fared well in the late 1990s and early 2000s despite his informants’ contrasting perceptions. His findings are based largely on consumer surveys, which track certain annual purchases (e.g., automobiles). Because there are more cars in circulation during the time of his study, he concludes that the middle classes are strong. This analysis does not consider the possibility that car sales might correlate with increased credit options (and in turn increased debt), which was made widely available to Mexicans of varying classes during that time period. 89 privileged few. While the wealthy have grown even wealthier and the poor have slumped further into abject poverty, “the middle class [has] meandered somewhere in between…

[and is] still [not] earning much more money” (Moreno 2002) than before the nation embraced “the economic tenets of globalization as gospel” (Thompson 2002).

When I arrived in Mexico City in 2010, many of the yoga teachers I met in middle-class neighborhoods were living quite precariously, much like others in Mexico who “find themselves swinging above and below the poverty line with the rise and fall of the peso, interest rates, and the unemployment rate” (Thompson 2002).100 Although some middle-class Mexicans have fled to the United States in search of the “good life” there

(Thompson 2002), the majority of them remained in Mexico, where they had to weather a series of economic recessions beginning in the 1970s.101 The middle classes have been gravely affected by these financial crises, as well as by economic policy reforms that dismantled public safety nets and slashed government spending in health care, education, and social security—once hailed as the foundation of middle-class mobility in Mexico

(Eineigel 2012; Walker 2013). Despite these devastating circumstances, not all Mexicans are, as Mexican journalist Encinas writes (2009), “losing hope” or “losing patience.”

While entrepreneurship may not have provided the founding members of the

MYC with the economic, social, or cultural capital needed to claim or maintain a privileged class status or distinction (Bourdieu 1984), they have remained quite

100 Mexican cities were especially impacted by soaring unemployment rates following the global economic crisis of 2008 (Morales 2009; González and Jiménez 2009). In 2009, more than a quarter of a million jobs were lost in the formal labor sector (Encinas 2009). Those fortunate enough to keep their jobs in that sector usually had to manage with temporary or contractual ones that offered few, if any, benefits and no job security (González 2008). These underemployed workers often have no other choice but to seek additional income in the informal labor market.

101 1 in 17 Mexican professionals migrated to the U.S. between 1980 and 2000 (Thompson 2002). 90 optimistic about the future.102 Yet, unlike other middle-class Mexicans whose hopefulness has stemmed largely from practices of consumption (Cahn 2008), work and private education (Gilbert 2005, 2007), and memberships in exclusive social clubs

(Maldonado 2010), middle-class yoga instructors insisted on putting their faith in what seemed to me one of the most unusual places during the neoliberal era: the state. If the

Mexican state had failed to expand the middle class and in fact “left [it] worse off than before” (Thompson 2002) economic policy reforms went into effect in the 1980s, then it seemed odd to me that downwardly mobile Mexican entrepreneurs would look to it in

2010 for (social) security and even (social) advancement – that is, as a pathway to the so- called good life of middle-class Mexico.

In fact, Cahn’s (2008) study of multilevel marketers in Guadalajara indicates that of all classes, “Mexico’s middle class”103 (ibid: 440) has unabashedly “welcome[d] the radical reshaping of their relationship with the state” (ibid: 429).104 Despite their struggles,105 this population, his work suggests, celebrates “the possibilities of entrepreneurship” (ibid: 448) to salvage its “tenuous hold on [middle-class] respectability” (ibid: 431).106 His interlocutors work long hours while earning few profits

102 Here, I am referring to the kind of social status and mobility liberal professions (of education, medicine, law, etc.) granted the middle classes during the so-called Mexican miracle (1940-1970).

103 See Appendix B: Notes on Mexico’s Middle Classes.

104 In similar fashion, Gilbert (2007) attributes “the democratic turn” in 2000 to middle-class voters who supported the highly conservative fiscal policies of the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional).

105 The Mexican middle classes have experienced daily social life in terms of perpetual, if not impending, struggle or crisis during the neoliberal era (Lomnitz 2003b).

106 See also Freeman (2007) for a similar rendering of entrepreneurship in Barbados. O’Dougherty (2002) also makes a similar point in her ethnography of middle-class Brazilians’ responses to the economic debacle of the 1990s. As I discussed in the Introduction, many anthropological analyses focus on the relationship between the middle class and the marketplace (namely, consumption). Theorizing the middle 91 as direct sellers, yet they seem to prefer late capitalism’s “promise of increased purchasing power [to those] who dedicate themselves to playing by the market rules” rather than rely on state-sponsored assistance (ibid:447). According to Cahn, “seek[ing] a government handout…would be incongruent with [their] middle-class self-image” (ibid:

442).

Nevertheless, the state apparatus became precisely the mechanism that a group of struggling middle-class yogi entrepreneurs in Mexico City engaged with for nearly three years.107 Specifically, state certification became a strategy the founding members of the

MYC mobilized to professionalize their labor. Under the flagship of Mexico’s Ministry of Education’s CONOCER108 apparatus (Consejo Nacional de Normalización y

Certificación de Competencias Laborales), these teachers sought to create a Competence

Management Committee (Comité de Gestión de Competencia) that would oversee not only the design and promotion of Mexico’s first standard of competency in yoga instruction, but also the evaluation and certification mechanisms that would be used to determine the competency (and incompetency) of other Mexican instructors. They

class in terms of consumption has led some scholars to predict its eventual demise with the rise of mass consumption (e.g., Nutini and Isaac 2009).

107 Historians note that a “reciprocal relationship between the [Mexican] middle classes and the state emerged” in the 1920s (Walker 2013:6). In that era, the educated middle classes turned to the post- revolutionary state “to protect their interests from the conflicts between workers and capital and from the ravages of an open market. In doing so, they, in turn, helped to propagate and legitimate the state” (ibid: 220). Moreover, as Eineigel’s (2013) historiography of post-revolutionary Mexico City demonstrates, “requesting government help did not threaten their class position” (263).

108 Yoga instructors attempt to organize themselves as a professional group—the Mexican Yoga Committee—through the auspices of the Education Ministry’s National Board of Labor Competency Standardization and Certification (CONOCER). This federal department establishes professional standards for specific job functions that do not require any formal education in Mexico. Associations, businesses, and other groups seek to create these standards for different industries (e.g., construction, tourism, security). Doing so grants these groups the authority to not only evaluate and certify people’s work performance according to the standards they create, but also to distinguish between competent (professional) and incompetent (amateur) workers. 92 expected that more (rather than less) government regulation in their businesses would grant them professional social standing, financial advancement, and worker protections.

While Cahn’s multilevel marketers did not care about whether they received government benefits for their self-employed labor, the yoga instructors I encountered in Mexico City could not stop talking about the state-supported jobs and protections they desired. This is not to suggest that these teachers rejected entrepreneurship or the free market; after all, they, too, were self-employed. Much like others who lived in recessionary states in Latin

America, they had few options but to look for employment outside the formal salaried sector (Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha 1995; O’Dougherty 2002). Yet, the challenges and frustrations the instructors experienced in the marketplace led many of them to believe that it had failed them. Thus, their aspirational ethic embraced self- employment not necessarily over, but in addition to, “a long-standing official valuation of bureaucratic security” (Freeman 2007:257).

This chapter provides an analysis of the social context and logic shaping MYC instructors’ efforts to clarify social standing and stake a claim on social mobility.

Educated middle-class yoga instructors’ (entrepreneurial) prospects of upward social and economic mobility deflated as others began to compete against them in the marketplace and reap large profits from their own entrepreneurial endeavors. Relegated largely to the realm of “informality,” their labor occupied an unsettling place from which to derive the professional work status needed to gain the respect of those teachers they envied and distinction from “others” they feared and despised. Neither self-employment nor consumption provided the MYC yoga teachers middle-class respectability. Their education did not offer them any social recourse either, given that they were not

93 exercising the professions they had studied at the post-secondary or university level. In sum, none of these status markers offered my interlocutors the reputation or prestige needed in this specific context to formalize their work and thus emerge out of their

“precarious positioning as professionals” (Patico 2008:16). They are aspiring professionals whom, I argue, turn to the state apparatus in an effort to refashion yoga as a respectable (middle-class) profession and refashion themselves as legitimate professionals.109



(Busted) Dreams

Most of the yoga entrepreneurs that assembled together each month to professionalize yoga instruction in Mexico had at one time pursued study at the university level – in finance, accounting, communications, psychology, anthropology, etc. – but were not employed in any of these fields when I met them. One woman, for example, had completed her university degree in architecture but could not find any work in her field. Others who were able to secure employment found themselves laboring long hours for low pay and could still barely afford to live in the middle-class neighborhoods where they or their parents resided in Mexico City.110 Most of them complained of difficulties they encountered with paying their bills on time each month. They hoped that

109 I observed and participated in more than 35 MYC meetings, in which members raised a number of questions, such as: Why are national standards in yoga instruction necessary in Mexico? Who should (and should not) be given the authority to create and evaluate such standards for Mexican instructors? What is at stake in developing state-level certification in Mexico? How MYC teachers talked about other classes in these meetings became a window onto how they perceived their own social standing and im/mobility. This chapter uses their discussions to expose middle-class anxieties and aspirations emerging in efforts to professionalize yoga instruction in Mexico.

110 After being laid off from her office job and breaking up with her partner, one instructor I interviewed returned to her parent’s home at the age of forty. Embarrassed by this life transition, she did not allow me to meet her at her home. Instead, she preferred to pick me up in her car and show me office spaces where she hoped to establish a business of her own. 94 self-employment (through yoga instruction) would offer them a “better” pathway to upward mobility than their education had provided.111

Despite the fact that yoga was a booming commercial industry in 2010, most of the MYC yoga entrepreneurs, along with the students they taught, were profiting very little from that boom. Some rented cheaper salon spaces in working-class neighborhoods, while others taught small classes in their homes to neighbors and friends who offered them a small donation for their services. When neither their university studies nor the job market offered them any possibility for social mobility, my interlocutors turned to their yoga businesses, to each other, and to the state apparatus.

Middle-class aspirations – about what the state could and could not offer them, what they could provide (and receive from) citizens, and what they no longer wanted to provide others – became the central focus of the MYC meetings. As I explain below, the

MYC members criticized (elite) Mexican yoga instructors’ preferences to consume

(imported, mainly U.S.) knowledge about yoga. Middle-class instructors, unlike elite ones, could only accrue limited economic, social, and cultural capital vis-à-vis their entrepreneurial pursuits. Taking refuge in the state, they hoped that state-level certification would grant them (and others like them) future employment opportunities in the public sector, decent wages, social security benefits, and professional legitimacy. This celebratory attitude harkens back to Mexico’s protectionist era when the post- revolutionary Mexican state provided the impetus for middle-class expansion (especially

111 The MYC yoga instructors ranged in age from their early thirties to their early sixties. The eldest members were exposed to the practice through their involvement in spiritual groups. A couple of the younger teachers combined yoga instruction with other temporary contract-based work (e.g., web design).

95 from 1940 to 1970 through the growth of public-sector work).112 State-level certification and support, the group argued, would formalize (i.e., legitimize) their labor. It would enable them as well to promote that labor (i.e., their business) to other disgruntled

Mexicans who also desired a “better” way of life in Mexico. In this way, the state would essentially provide them with a new market of consumers to whom they could appeal and from whom they could potentially profit both socially and economically.

The MYC’s efforts to legitimize their yoga practice as a professional enterprise reveal aspirations for social mobility as well as the anxieties, struggles, and failures involved in achieving it. The two stories that follow provide insight into the aspiration- anxiety dynamics that underlie the precarious position of aspiring middle-class yoga professionals in Mexico City.

Respect: “Those who are most competent are the most competitive”

To appreciate the anxieties that these middle-class instructors experienced in their working lives, it is important to explore how they identify and distinguish themselves from those they perceived as (lower-class) amateurs, as well as those they perceived as

(higher-class) instructors whom they desired to compete against for business. This section highlights the story of Śivakarī, the president of the MYC.

Śivakarī spearheaded each of the monthly meetings. She was joined by her daughter, Yara; her good friend Leonardo; and two other instructors, Claudia and

Pedro.113 In their meetings members talked a lot about creating a standard of competency

112 See Appendix B: Notes on Mexico’s Middle Classes.

113 In 2010, Erik Calderón convened these individuals and others, including his elite mentor-friend (see Chapter 1). A conflict erupted between Erik and several other members in February of 2011; the committee 96 for yoga instruction. In Spanish the word competencia can be understood in at least two ways. One meaning relates to the concept of competency, or the ability to perform one’s job well. Evaluating and certifying yoga instructors in standards the group created would give members the power to determine and distinguish between competent (professional) and incompetent (amateur) instructors in Mexico; thus, providing them with an exclusionary means to limit competition.114 Holding such power, they posited, would allow them, and potentially others like them, to become more competitive in the marketplace (in this case constituting a means of inclusion).115 Competition encompasses the second meaning of the word competencia. “Those who are most competent are the most competitive,” was an expression I heard repeated in several of the meetings, revealing aspiring yoga professionals’ desires to limit the effects of their current competition as well as expand their ability to compete with those from whom they craved respect (specifically, elite Mexican instructors). Crafting and maintaining the standards that would garner federal recognition of yoga as a (legitimate) profession and of instructors as professionals would, in Śivakarī’s view, enable her and her peers to compete for students more successfully.

Although Śivakarī was past Mexico’s retirement age she had no savings or pension that could offer her the security to retire. What she did have was her business and fell apart soon thereafter. In May of 2011, Śivakarī reassembled the group. This chapter describes events that took place after Erik’s departure.

114 Escobar Latapí and Roberts (1991) note that prior to the 1982 economic crisis, “[t]he function of professional associations in Mexico [was] less to restrict entry or maintain standards (and thus raise levels of income) than to defend the professions [e.g., law, medicine] through state regulation and to place their members in positions from which they [could] attain significant public office” (103). See also Mayer and Lomnitz (1988).

115 However, according to Escobar Latapí and Roberts (1991), professional groups’ previous dependence on the state for “the defense of the profession’s position and for social and political promotion...weakened the capacity of these professions for independent maneuvering and for setting the conditions under which their labor is sold” (103). 97 her dreams. With more than forty years of yoga training and practice,116 and various diploma programs she offered at her school, she attempted to carve out some space in

Mexico’s history of yoga instruction. Even though her programs attracted numerous students from all over the city she was unable to accrue much, if any, financial profit.

Given that her school was located in a working-class neighborhood, the majority of her student-clientele hailed from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds and could not afford to pay expensive fees. The fees she charged were so affordable that my own teacher of the low-income borough of Iztapalapa (see Chapters 3 and 4) was able to partake in several of Śivakarī’s short-term diploma programs.

Moving out of the working-class neighborhood where she operated her business was a major priority of hers. I realized this the first time I visited the space she rented in the neighborhood of Doctores, an area in Mexico City notorious for crime. Śivakarī’s school was not maintained well at all. It only had one large activity room, which she divided into three separate smaller spaces with makeshift curtains and plywood. The floors were covered with a faded yellow linoleum lining, much of it stained and torn. The school smelled of old rubber yoga mats and stale body odor.

Śivakarī had wanted to leave that location for some time. She complained about the security, the desolate streets, and the lack of public lighting at night. She was renting the space and had thought about making her landlord an offer to buy it, but she admitted to me over lunch one day that she desired a “better place in a location a little more elegant, one could say…just a little better [than this place].” She had dreams of not only opening up a larger school in the centrally located, middle-class neighborhood of Roma

116 Śivakarī’s first exposure to yoga was in the 1970s through her activities with the Gran Fraternidad Universal, a quasi-religious organization that offered free yoga classes to participants. 98 where she could cater to a more affluent market and raise her fees. She also dreamed of owning the actual space. As a property owner she said she would feel more “at ease,” knowing that both her school and she were, in her words, “established.” Despite the years of experience she had dedicated to the practice and instruction of yoga, her social standing was not well established. In many ways, she was not much better off economically or socially than her students.

In my second year of fieldwork Śivakarī moved her school to the Roma neighborhood, but she had to forgo her dreams of becoming a property owner. With the move, she had to labor even longer hours each day in order to afford the marked increase in rent in that area. The new location made the sacrifice worth it to her. With two large salons, a private office and meditation room, and restroom facilities, her school now occupied a spacious area on the top floor of a building located on a heavily-trafficked avenue. Investing quite a bit of money (mostly on credit) to remodel the space as well as to create new promotional materials and signage, she did not hesitate to raise her program fees. (As a result, many of her training courses exceeded the financial reach of some of her former students, including my teacher Rosi.) While the move and new facility allowed Śivakarī to reposition her social standing to some degree, it did not by any means provide her with more economic stability or comfort. On the contrary, the new location put added financial pressure on Śivakarī to sustain her newly fashioned image of

“professional success”. Each time I saw her at the MYC meetings, which she now volunteered to host, she appeared even more anxious and overworked than she did prior to the move, complaining constantly about the extraordinary expenses and debts she

99 accrued in the process.117 She might now be working in Roma alongside other middle- class yoga instructors, but she still lacked the cultural and social capital needed to acquire prestige and respect as a professional in her field.



In the MYC meetings Śivakarī and her peers spent a great deal of time trying to convince each other that their businesses were legitimate compared to those established by “other” instructors whom they perceived as having no business whatsoever teaching yoga in Mexico. Understanding their perceptions of and relations with these social others provides a window onto the immense anxiety they experienced in relation to their precarious social standing as Mexican entrepreneurs. Their efforts to distinguish their labor as “professional” and the labor of these others as “unprofessional” (or amateur) also revealed their desires to stake a claim in a market they had difficulty negotiating on their own.

The group had many negative things to say about these “other” instructors, their character, and their businesses. MYC members identified their schools as patito, a common Mexican expression used to refer to poor, cheap, or unregulated products, services, and institutions. Much of their criticism was directed towards people whom they feared would steal their program materials and open their own schools. Some of them, for example, had had several encounters with students who “come to take our courses [in order] to leave with our manuals.” These students would enroll in their teacher training courses, attend the first meeting, and never return after receiving their course materials.

Śivakarī learned on a few occasions that her manuals were being used without her

117 On several occasions I found Śivakarī sleeping in her private office, indicating how overworked she was in Roma. 100 permission “to teach classes in their neighborhood, borough, and schools.” One of her peers protected herself from those whom she identified as “crooks” by distributing her manuals selectively to students whom she “know[s] will put the manual to good use.”

These protective and discriminatory strategies are grasped more fully when they are understood in relation to instructors’ broader struggles to establish a reputation that is not only “different” from, but also “better” than, that of the patito yoga entrepreneur.

Śivakarī criticized these patito instructors for having very little, if any, formal training or preparation in yoga instruction—certainly not the forty years of experience she discussed in each MYC meeting. She never once referred to these instructors as

“teachers” [maestros], as she did with her MYC peers. Doing so would have paid them respect that, in her view, they did not deserve. Instead, she referred to them as “yoga technicians” and “imitators,” thus devaluing their labor as informal and unethical. In this way, she aimed to distinguish their work from her profession. Because they did not produce their own teacher training programs, they were not “serious” instructors; they merely consumed others’ routines so that they could “teach a technique.” (In the section that follows I explore in detail the distinction between mechanisms of production and consumption that these entrepreneurs attempt to negotiate.) Yet, Śivakarī also noted that these “other” instructors were teaching in gyms, spas, hotels, and other commercial settings. In other words, while she and her peers struggled each month to attract enough students to pay for studio space in middle-class neighborhoods, these so-called amateurs were still profiting from yoga, despite their minimal training and experience. Given that her business was not as profitable as she desired, it became important for her to distinguish her training, experience, and education – her professional credentials – from

101 theirs. The sad reality, however, was that despite devoting the better half of her life to yoga instruction, she was actually competing for students with these so-called imitators and remained rather uncompetitive. She therefore resented these “other” instructors for threatening her social standing as an entrepreneur. Concurrently, she feared that her own failures to compete adequately with them marked her stagnancy and social otherness.

Not only did Śivakarī and her peers work in the shadows of these “other” instructors whom they resented, feared, and despised; they also worked in the shadows of another group –the Mexican elite yogis. This became evident during my second year of fieldwork when Śivakarī asked me to invite some of the affluent yogis I knew to the

MYC meetings. It was during those meetings when I began to recognize the precarity of their social position in relation to Mexican instructors they esteemed.

MYC members generally admired the elite of Mexico City for carving a profitable niche in this blossoming industry, but they also resented them for generating and flaunting their successes on the national stage (see Chapter 1), through costly online business registries they controlled, and at expensive annual national yoga practitioner conferences they organized; all the while the aspiring middle-class professionals struggled to pay their rent on time. Unlike elite yogis, middle-class instructors did not have the same economic, social, and cultural resources that allowed the former to live abroad and acquire yoga training and experience from renowned leaders in the field, or to open their schools and studios in some of Mexico City’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Middle-class yogis were convinced that their own (largely domestic) training qualified them as “competent” instructors who could in turn compete with their elite counterparts and attain comparable financial and social recognition. “Those who are

102 competent,” MYC members insisted, “have the capacity to compete [with others] in terms of instruction and employment.” State certification would simply legitimize their training by providing them with the institutional credibility needed to deliver the respect they perceived was long overdue to them. Thus, in one way, efforts to distinguish their businesses from the shady ones of the “other” (incompetent/amateur) entrepreneur were aimed at preventing competition. Yet, in another way, efforts to gain the respect of the elite (competent/professional) entrepreneur encouraged free-market competition. Crafting a profession through state certification is thus better understood in the context of this somewhat contradictory, yet complementary, class dynamic. It reveals not only the struggles associated with self-employment, but also the dreams that drive middle-class instructors’ relentless entrepreneurial spirit.



Recognition and Remuneration: “Ours is just as good as theirs”

In this section, I analyze middle-class instructors’ experiences with and discussions about (imported) standards for professional yoga training and practice to better understand their tenuous social position as potential consumers of imported (U.S.) education. While laboring in the shadows of elite Mexican yogis with their U.S. credentials and training, middle-class teachers complained about having to consume another country’s professional standards and certificates when such training did not necessarily guarantee their students work or decent pay in Mexico. The nationalist (even anti-American) discourse they circulated in these discussions reveals an underlying desire to be recognized not as consumers of another nation’s professional standards but as producers of their own, particularly when such consumption does not necessarily or

103 automatically lead to the social or economic profits they desire. Being producers (rather than consumers) of Mexican credentialing standards would hopefully reposition the value of their labor (and businesses) so that more Mexicans would stay in Mexico and consume teacher training programs there instead of traveling abroad to consume someone else’s.

“Their papeles (papers) don’t help Mexicans,” was a common refrain I heard from the MYC founding members. Much of their talk centered on an organization in the

U.S. known as the Yoga Alliance (YA). With more than 37,000 yoga teachers and 2,500 schools around the world registered with the YA, this organization currently holds a command over the criteria established and used to formally recognize yoga instructors and training programs worldwide as professional (Gallman 2012). Through its online registry, the YA provides a list of those teachers and schools that have complied with its minimum standards, registration fees (between $80 and $700USD), and/or annual renewal fees (between $55 and $400USD).

Only one of the founding members of the MYC had purchased this imported credential for himself and his school. Educated in finance and business administration,

Pedro recognized the prestige of holding a U.S. certificate and therefore saw his purchase as an investment that would potentially attract customers and yield a lofty financial return. Unfortunately, he had seen neither thus far. Although he had been in business since 2003, he confessed to his colleagues and me during the meetings that he had difficulty attracting students to his school over the years. Although the YA name and logo are prominently displayed on his website and other marketing materials, they have done little to attract the clientele he expected would be knocking on his door. In fact, enrollments in his training programs, retreats, workshops, and classes remain consistently

104 low, and most of the rooms in his school remain unoccupied during the day.

Most of Pedro’s students who register as YA teachers upon their completion of his YA-registered training program seem to fare even worse than he. Those unable to find paid employment in Mexico City are sometimes inclined to move to tourist destinations or leave Mexico altogether in search of better job opportunities. He spoke of several students teaching yoga classes in U.S. cities, such as Miami. There, he claims, with their

YA credentials, “they are able to demonstrate that they are yoga teachers, despite that they were trained by me in Mexico. Here, what will Yoga Alliance do for you? Nothing.

It won’t do a thing for you in Mexico.”

While the other aspiring middle-class professionals I met could not afford the YA registration fees, they shared Pedro’s concerns and frustrations. They could not afford to fly back and forth to be trained for 200 or more hours by instructors in the U.S., yet they often found themselves having to contract teachers with U.S. training (e.g., non-Mexican teachers, elite Mexicans) in order to offer their students the international training they requested. In other words, instead of promoting her own (domestic) expertise and training, Śivakarī found herself having to not only encourage but also validate the very

(imported) programs in Mexico that she herself could not access abroad or teach at home.

Having to share the small profits they earned with the gringo instructor only added insult to injury. The marketplace encouraged these entrepreneurs to be consumers of others’

(U.S.) knowledge, goods, training, and expertise – a position that caused them much anxiety and strife.

Based on renderings of the middle classes in Latin America (which I described at length in the Introduction), I would have expected a different reaction among my

105 informants. Consumption, especially imported consumption, is often described as a liberating experience among the middle classes – a way to in fact “consume” class (Cahn

2008). Middle-class Latin Americans are often characterized by social scientists as a sector who not only gush over foreign (read American) consumption but actually use it to negotiate their precarious social status in their respective countries (Freeman 2000;

Guano 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). According to these writers’ descriptions, traveling to the U.S. to shop in malls and visit tourist destinations (like Disney World) is equated with middle-class aspirations. Yet, all of the disgruntled talk about consuming American-made yoga that the MYC instructors circulated in their meetings (to each other, bureaucrats, and to me) suggests that some other dynamic motivates these Mexicans to pursue a somewhat different path to gain social mobility.

These entrepreneurs resented the fact that they operated in the shadows of the

U.S. (as consumers), yet they also envied the successes of organizations like the Yoga

Alliance. Middle-class yoga entrepreneurs were not interested in losing potential clients

(or profits) to organizations and instructors from other nations that offered credentialing services at hefty prices. On the contrary, they sought to create, promote, and sell their own. Perhaps Śivakarī said it best when she shared these motivating words with her peers:

I believe that we Mexicans have the capacity to offer our students what they need [to find work]. Our [training] is just as good as [that of] the gringos…We do not need to go to the United States to certify ourselves. We do not need foreign organizations or teachers to certify us. We Mexicans are quite intelligent and have worked so hard to be able to represent our teachers in Mexico. We can be self- sufficient. The Yoga Alliance does not serve us in Mexico, because who is able to pay $200USD to get a worthless paper? It’s better that we form our own movement in Mexico, and that we do it.

In their attempt to create a professional organization of yoga instructors in Mexico, the

106

MYC leaders hoped to transform themselves from consumers of others’ knowledge to producers of our own knowledge—knowledge that our people need to find work. This nationalist push to create and evaluate Mexico’s standards of competency for yoga instruction revealed the precarious social position instructors occupied while laboring in the shadows of U.S. yoga and those Mexican elite yogis with U.S. training.

In this way, their efforts to promote and profit from yoga revealed not only the frustrations incited by their current entrepreneurial (consumer) position, but also their aspirations to be recognized as professionals (producers) whose expertise could later be marketed for consumption to other Mexicans just as anxiously aspirational as they.



Coda: A Student’s Story

“I now realize that it’s indeed possible to take advantage of this [yoga] journey we are learning and be able to have a dignified life – to eat well, pay rent, and above all enjoy life,” exclaimed Carolina, a charismatic woman in her late twenties who sat across from me on the floor of the school Śivakarī owned and operated with her daughter, Yara.

Carolina was the first among the group of yoga instructors to share her experience of the professional development course they had just completed. Like the other university- educated Mexican instructors I discuss in this chapter, Carolina suddenly found herself without full-time professional employment and benefits when the company she worked for downsized its staff. Although she had been unemployed for over six months she told me she no longer wanted to work behind a desk for twelve hours, accumulate profits for somebody else, or be deprived of sleep and rest, which she had grown accustomed to doing in her previous office job. She dreamed of teaching yoga full time ever since she

107 completed the teacher training diploma program at Śivakarī’s school over a year and a half ago.

Carolina continued her story: “Thanks to this course I now realize that all of the knowledge I have acquired at this school has a value, an important value; it has a price.”

This awareness encouraged her to join efforts with two of her peers and create a small enterprise that marketed yoga classes to corporations. They created business cards, a website, uniforms, and a marketing portfolio that outlined their training and experience and included copies of their diplomas. Their business, Carolina explained to the group, would provide her the financial security she desired by offering a much needed service to people whose overworked corporate lifestyles she knew well. Although their nascent enterprise had yet to yield any financial profit and Carolina was still working long hours, she found pleasure from her newly acquired self-employment status.

Pursuing yoga as a full-time, paid endeavor was precisely what Yara and Śivakarī wanted Carolina and the other students to gain from the course. While all of them had received their teacher training diplomas well over a year ago, most of them were only dabbling in teaching. Apparently, they were not alone. In 2010, Yara conducted a phone survey among several hundred former graduates of the school and discovered that only

50 percent of them were teaching yoga full time and of these full-time instructors only 40 percent were receiving what she identified as adequate pay for yoga instruction in

Mexico City (200 pesos per class, $16USD). Like Carolina, the majority of those surveyed were teaching yoga as a leisure activity or as a volunteer, receiving little, if any, pay. Most of the time, they simply could not find full-time work.

Yara explained her mother’s motives for seeking state certification for instructors:

108

“We had to do something so that our graduates find work after they leave the school and enter the labor market [campo laboral].” Both mother and daughter expected that state certification would provide employers a way to evaluate levels of competency among candidates seeking work. A yoga teacher (with no credentials) desiring to stand out from her peers would in turn be encouraged to certify herself as a “competent” (professional) instructor in this competitive market.

Carolina and her peers are similar to many university-educated Mexicans who struggle to secure full-time work in their professions and seek self-employment as one of the only available work options to pursue. With their class status teetering on unstable social and economic footing, it becomes important for middle-class yoga instructors to re-secure their professional social standing. By promoting state certification as a pathway to both financial security and social legitimacy, Yara and Śivakarī offered their teachers- in-training a means to maintain their dreams of desirable pay, prestige, and social mobility—what Carolina specifically referred to as “a dignified life.” While Carolina is sure to experience more challenges than successes in her entrepreneurial pursuits, as we learned from Śivakarī and Pedro’s stories, the possibility that she might one day realize her dream of living a dignified life maintains her stamina to continue to work towards achieving it.



Conclusion

A Reflexive Interlude

As Alexander Edmonds (2010) writes of his own experience crafting his manuscript, I, too, must confess that I was only able to write this chapter “when I stopped

109 trying to write a different one” (23). Being immersed each week among these instructors was often quite unpleasant. They were usually absorbed by their own self-interests, sometimes deceived each other to attain them, and frequently blamed others when their efforts failed. Rarely reflecting collectively on individual displays of arrogance, the group seemed to accept it as fact when someone spoke of her instruction and teacher training services as the “best” and most “serious” in all of Mexico.

It was difficult to observe behavior that I found not only radically contradictory, but also insincere. It was not at all uncommon to witness in one meeting harsh criticisms directed towards particular Mexican instructors, the events they organized, and their teachings, followed by praise for those same instructors and activities in another. I was uncomfortable watching individuals lie to each other, use each other, and talk behind each other’s backs, and then mask these behaviors under the discursive guise of professionalism and collective solidarity. Although I, like Edmonds, “cannot in the end resolve all the contradictions of the field” (ibid: 23), it became important for me to resolve my own discomfort and distaste, which first arose in the field and then surfaced while writing and re-writing the ethnographic vignettes I presented.

The social imaginaries these instructors perceive as unquestionably objective help them make sense of the world in which they live. Although it can sometimes be overstated that individuals behave as individuals—that is, by behaving uniquely—I had to remind myself that these instructors’ beliefs and actions were informed by other social fictions not of their own making. From the messages we all receive in our lives, we learn to envision the world as a relational dichotomy between Self and Other. We learn to perceive difference, as well as all of the boundaries that constitute and preserve that

110 difference; moreover, in distinguishing Other from Self, we also solidify notions of Self.

Perceptions of Self and Other guided these instructors’ individual and collective experiences with and responses to social im/mobility.118

Writing this story made me became attentive to my informants’ criticisms with concern and care instead of with the same kind of moral judgment for which I had initially faulted them. Through a lens of compassion I have chosen to present the frustrations and aspirations that underlie many of their judgments, and use their birth or spiritual names, as they requested. I hope that my account lends them the recognition and respect they desperately longed for but never received through their efforts to create the first professional standard of competency for yoga instructors in Mexico.



This chapter offered a window into the frustrations and challenges that a group of middle-class entrepreneurs in Mexico City experience as they embark collectively on a journey to professionalize their labor. It was a rather difficult story to tell, given that it is about people who are highly educated, yet economically and socially stagnant. The anxieties they experience through self-employment are offset, however, by their desires for professional recognition, respect, and social mobility.

The chapter reveals the precarious positioning of aspiring middle-class professionals who criticize the failures and inequities of the free market, even as they also celebrate its potential. Ultimately, Śivakarī’s dreams ruptured (again) when the MYC failed to establish the national standards used to evaluate instructor competency and the group she presided over dissolved in the late fall of 2012. With neither institutional nor

118 See Bateson 1970; Elias and Scotson 1994; and Fischer 1977 for further explanation of Self-Other formations. 111 social legitimacy, her status remains rather precarious.

In the dissertation’s Introduction, I explored at length the anthropology of middle classes. Much of this literature portrays these groups—and those aspiring to such status— as consumers of products and practices that offer them the ability to negotiate their class identities in society. The Latin American middle-class subject is often depicted as one who consumes class through travel, leisure, entrepreneurship, and superior education. It is through their consumption of goods and services that middle-class Latin Americans have been able to (re)secure their tenuous social position – one which slides down as fast as it rises in the face of economic recessions, corporate layoffs, and job instability. Being middle-class in Latin America, these authors suggest, is largely tied to (foreign) consumption.

According to this logic one might mistakenly assume that yoga consumption – with its long-time association with the exotic, the elite (U.S.), and leisure – is yet another means by which individuals in Mexico City consume social wealth. While I do not dispute this view entirely in this chapter, I do suggest that it is necessary to move beyond static fabrications of consumption to define middle-class membership in Mexico City.

My research calls for future studies of middle classes to consider projects of production and consumption simultaneously. Contributing to this body of literature, this chapter has argued that: (1) Mexico’s middle classes seek social mobility through local, as well as global, productions and consumptions; and (2) they turn to the state in addition to the marketplace to legitimize their labor and social position as professionals. MYC yogis attempt to exert themselves as producers of Mexican standards of expertise, rather than consumers of ones from the U.S.; they need their expertise to stand out to potential

112 clients as professional in order for their labor to stand out from that of others.

The ethnographic stories I presented in this chapter revealed middle-class preoccupations regarding social positioning and aspirations for social mobility.

Entrepreneurial desires for professionalization exposed anxieties of exclusion and desires for inclusion that are negotiated among many educated people in Mexico City who find self-employment attractive when other work is unavailable or unappealing. Middle-class yoga entrepreneurs live in the shadows of elite yogis (both domestically and abroad) and aspire for professional standing through state certification in order to re-secure their sinking status. At the same time, their efforts to form a professional entity reveal members’ deep economic and social insecurities that arise in an unstable and seemingly unpredictable marketplace. Despite the time and money they invest in their businesses, other entrepreneurs threaten their professional work status. It was not so much the

Mexican state certificate that Pedro, Śivakarī, and the other MYC members desired, but the authority to create and control the credentialing structures that determine its

(re)production and consumption among other Mexicans. Ironically, even in this era of neoliberalism the state is still needed to legitimize educational pursuits not yet formalized or regulated as professions.

113

CHAPTER 3: FEE-FOR-SERVICE HEALING: NEW PRESCRIPTIONS FOR IM/MOBILITY

Introduction

We begin this chapter where we ended the previous one. Chapter 2 examined the aspirations, anxieties, and professionalizing activities of struggling middle-class entrepreneurs. Occupying an uncomfortable position in the social hierarchy, teachers like

Śivakarī and Yara encourage instructors-in-training to associate the quality of their instruction with monetary remuneration. In this context, service is rendered as a product that can be exchanged for payment. In this way, yoga instruction becomes a fee-for- service entrepreneurial enterprise and a source of paid labor and self-worth. According to this logic, a “better” yoga instructor would value herself enough to assess (higher) fees for her services.

This idea – that yoga could be used to generate social and economic profit – was not received well by Rosi, an instructor in her early fifties whom I followed around the low-income borough of Iztapalapa for two years and write at length about in this dissertation. With only a secondary-school education but more than twelve years of experience practicing and studying yoga (and other alternative healing therapies) in diverse venues in Mexico City, including public health institutes, public universities, and

114 private schools, Rosi began teaching her own classes in 2002.119 Although yoga had become my friend’s primary mode of subsistence, she was so uncomfortable discussing the interwoven connections between it, work, and money that she generally avoided the subject in our exchanges. (We will understand why below.) I was therefore surprised when she initiated the topic in a phone conversation in early March of 2012. It was during that call that I first learned about Yara’s professionalization course. Rosi talked about the class with much disgust. Unwilling (though not unable) to pay nearly 500 pesos

($45USD) per class for entrepreneurial training and disinclined to adopt the material and social aspirations of her peers, Rosi only attended the first two sessions of the course.

A former student and graduate of Śivakarī’s yoga school, Rosi sought new pedagogical skills and techniques that would help her become a “better” teacher (not a

“better” entrepreneur). Unlike the other students enrolled in the course, Rosi was teaching seventeen classes each week (about 25.5 hours per week in total) in five separate venues

– a municipal cultural center, a publicly funded hospital and health institute, and two private homes – which were all located in Iztapalapa. During the first session of the course she was criticized by one of the instructors for teaching in a place where “they do not pay well.” “They tried to convince me,” she told me, “that I am devaluing yoga, that I am in fact denigrating the discipline, because I receive what they say is ‘bad pay’ [mal pago]. The people of Iztapalapa cannot pay more.” She was correct; most of her students could not afford to pay more than 10 or 20 pesos per class (.80cents - $1.50USD).

Rosi did not care to identify her practice of teaching as a job. Reluctant to

119 Rosi was able to participate in inexpensive yoga classes throughout Iztapalapa (as a consumer). In order to teach the practice to others (as a producer), she was encouraged by her own instructors to leave the low- income borough for (formal) training. To date there are no teacher training yoga institutes located in Iztapalapa, reflecting the elitist history of yoga’s development in Mexico (see Introduction and Chapter 1). 115 acknowledge her daily activity as a form of (paid) labor, she preferred instead to use the ambiguous status of service to describe it.120 Yet, it was through this so-called service that she was able to accrue nearly 7000 pesos per month ($562USD) in donations and user fees121 in 2011, which was quite substantial considering the fact that the daily minimum wage in Mexico City was 59.82 pesos ($4.80USD) in 2011 and 69.33 pesos

($5.20USD) in 2012.122 Her work certainly did not provide her with any financial security or state employee benefits despite it taking shape in government institutions,123 but it did offer her the means to finance monthly courses in yoga, meditation, and alternative healing therapies, which helped further her teaching practice. Unlike her middle-class yogi counterparts in the Roma neighborhood who fashioned yoga instruction as a professional service for hire by actively marketing their expertise and knowledge to prospective clients, Rosi felt compelled to do just the opposite in the lower-

120 Cahn’s (2008:441) multilevel marketers in Guadalajara also spoke of their work as a service, but did so in an effort to seek social mobility. Rosi, on the other hand, does so in order to negotiate the social differences that begin to emerge as her own working-class transitional status is revealed to her low-income students.

121 Rosi delivered a total of seven yoga classes each week as part of a health promotion program offered to employees and patients in a state-funded hospital and addiction rehabilitation institute in Iztapalapa. These programs relied on the instruction provided by volunteers, who received donations from participants. The municipal cultural center, which I discuss in this chapter, charged a nominal monthly fee to yoga users, of which Rosi received approximately 75 percent. The center’s administrators controlled the collection and distribution of these fees.

122 See: http://www.misalario.org/main/imagen/MEXICO.pdf for 2011 reports and http://www.sat.gob.mx/sitio_Internet/asistencia_contribuyente/informacion_frecuente/salarios_minimos/ for 2012, accessed 11 April 2013.

123 Rosi labored approximately 15 hours each week as a yoga teacher in government-operated venues but was ineligible to receive state employee benefits through ISSSTE (Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado). In this way, her work constitutes what some scholars refer to as “unprotected labour” (Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha 1995:72). Such work is often “casual”, temporary, offers no job security and few, if any, worker benefits, and is “mainly located in service occupations” (Escobar Latapí and Roberts 1991: 109). The use of such labor by both private firms and public sector agencies began in Mexico in 1982 (ibid: 72). Rosi also worked for donations as a volunteer at an IMSS (Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social) hospital. Ironically, if she herself were to fall ill, she would not be able to access the publicly funded hospital as a patient, given that she did not earn social security benefits. These are most often granted to salaried employees of private firms. IMSS reimbursed Rosi only sporadically for her bus fare. 116 income venues where she taught. Not only did she conceal the material gains she accrued each month, but she also downplayed her yoga training and education. Whereas aspiring middle-class professionals were relentless in their search for some “official” recognition from the state that might legitimate their professional work status, Rosi did not openly express this desire. Not once, for example, did I see Rosi show anyone else but me all of the teaching diplomas and certificates of recognition she had received over the years (see

Figure 14).124

Figure 14: These diplomas and certificates recognize Rosi’s training and experience in yoga instruction and other alternative healing modalities.

This chapter is aimed at understanding why Rosi’s perspectives and practices contrasted so significantly with those articulated by her trainers and peers (as described

124 Rosi sometimes needs these documents to secure work at some of the state-run institutions where she provides yoga instruction. The logos printed on them offer Rosi’s (alternative) educational training some symbolic cache and institutional legitimacy. In this respect, it is understandable why Śivakarī and the other aspiring middle-class professionals would seek to create a nationally recognized credentialing standard for yoga instruction (see Chapter 2). 117 above and in the previous chapter). We already know what middle-class entrepreneurs have at stake in rendering their labor as a profession. Here, we explore the other side of the problem to understand what Rosi has at stake in rendering her labor as service

(instead of work).

Since the turn of the 21st century, Mexico’s Health Ministry has encouraged its citizens to engage in practices of self-care, like yoga, that emphasize health promotion and wellness. However, it has not allocated the economic or human resources needed to dictate how these interventions should be implemented and regulated, or by whom.125 In fact, most of the programs I observed in Mexico City during my field study were sponsored by other Ministries, despite ostensibly being in place to ensure population health. Taking shape in non-clinical settings, including cultural centers, these measures relied chiefly on the freelance labor of non-medical providers who, like Rosi, worked at multiple sites for precarious wages, received no benefits, and had no job security. Yet, far from experiencing these conditions as victims or outsourced subjects, whose work is not respected or valued (which is what aspiring middle-class professionals claim), they have come to celebrate their newly acquired posts.126

This chapter investigates how meanings of work and class are fashioned in a state-endorsed yoga program in Iztapalapa where Rosi teaches four classes each week to

125 During my research there were no state-mandated guidelines specifying how or where yoga instruction should be carried out, or what training was needed to teach it. Śivakarī and the other aspiring middle-class professionals discussed in Chapter 2 organized themselves in an effort to change this, but their efforts were unsuccessful. In 2012, Mexico’s Education Ministry authorized a different (non-yogi) group to create the first national standard of competency in yoga instruction. Mexico is currently one of the first countries in the world to hold a state certification in yoga instruction. Though it is too early to tell what may arise from all of this, there are rumors circulating among aspiring middle-class professionals that a university degree in Yoga Studies will soon follow.

126 With no single discourse dictating how yoga should be delivered or how its provision should be evaluated, diverse notions and practices have circulated throughout Mexico. These conditions provide instructors some creative freedom to fashion their classes more or less as they desired and deemed appropriate. 118 working-class practitioners who pay a nominal fee for her service. I examine the (intra- class) social differences that emerge in this fee-for-service setting, specifically between the instructor and her students. Rosi represents what I identify as a “working-class transitioner”: someone who is transitioning between social positions. Some of her students, in contrast to her, are unemployed or underemployed. As Rosi’s material and social mobility are revealed to her students, her relations with them become strained. The criticisms they target against her highlight her use of yoga as a livelihood (instead of a service). These complaints, however, must be analyzed in relation to shifts in Rosi’s social position from “teacher” to “entrepreneur” and theirs from “students” to “clients”.

The relational reciprocity and confianza (trust) that “gro[w] out of interactions framed by mutual acknowledgment of a shared [class] condition” (Nutini and Isaac 2009:165) in

Mexico are essentially disturbed by this precarious state of im/mobility—where some become mobile and others do not. In this fee-for-service economy one person’s mobility is supported by another’s labor (in this case, the labor of doing yoga and attending [i.e., paying for] class each month). In this setting (as opposed to others), Rosi is not perceived by her students as their friend or neighbor. Instead, they perceive her as an entrepreneur.

She attempts to manage and negotiate these differences (given that her social and material profits are at stake) by providing her students with additional healing services that are aimed to sustain their interest in the program (and in turn her own limited mobility). Sharing some of the knowledge she learns through the alternative educational programs she participates in is an attempt on her part to contest her social transition and obscure the class differences that emerge between her and her students. Instead, however, these strategies expose her changing status even further. In sum, I argue that fee-for-

119 service health programs constituted in this popular urban context reveal some opportunities for social mobility among some Mexicans, even as they also expose new sites of social differentiation.



Much of this chapter emerges out of concerns I have for the ways that scholars have defined and valorized the status of entrepreneurial pursuits, which proliferate in service-oriented economies. Some sociologists, as I mentioned in the Introduction, recognize that poverty has become a generalized “condition of people who work” in

Mexico and other Latin American countries due to low wages, job insecurity, and few (if any) worker benefits (Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha 1995:60). In this way, they recognize that “self-employment” and “entrepreneurship” are not necessarily last options when other, more stable, work cannot be obtained; for the overwhelming majority, as in Rosi’s case, they are the only option. This scholarship has also noted some of the benefits that the working classes, in particular, have been able to accrue through service-oriented entrepreneurial endeavors, including “public esteem” and “better conditions of work” (Escobar Latapí and Roberts 1991: 91,109). These benefits, I argue, are unevenly distributed across the working classes. Given that the site of these analyses is the household, these authors are only able to observe social differences, conflicts, tensions arising in that domain and therefore do not observe intra-class differences emerging more broadly. As a result, they maintain their contention that the “Mexican urban working-classes are…homogenous” (Escobar Latapí and González de la Rocha

1995:72-73; González de la Rocha 1988:210).

Although Cahn’s (2008) ethnographic analysis productively moves us beyond the

120 household unit to examine entrepreneurial pursuits in Guadalajara, he does not do much to complicate these claims of homogeneity. Analyzing multilevel marketers’ relations with the products they sell (and the products they desire to consume) more so than their relations with each other or with those to whom they offer their services renders both “the middle class” and “the entrepreneur” in rather homogeneous terms. Social class is not the focus of Schneider’s (2010) study of community health workers and groups in Morelos.

However, she observes, as I, that as low-income health promoters begin to engage in fee- for-service relationships, they begin to be viewed by their peers with suspicion and

“charged with ‘robbing the community’” (ibid:164). By focusing on the social dynamics and relational transitions that emerge in fee-for-service exchanges at a neighborhood civic center in Iztapalapa, I will extend our understandings of intra-class relations among the working classes. Moreover, if the perceptions and practices of the people I write about in Chapter 2 are viewed in relation to those in this chapter, then it also becomes evident that entrepreneurial social positions take on diverse meanings among distinct, but interconnected, classes.127



127 See the Introduction for a discussion of other studies that have contributed to my analysis of work-class relations. 121

The Cultural Center: Work and Care

Rosi’s Crystals: Part One

I looked over to my right at the large window at the far end of the room and noticed a few people, including Sr. Ramírez, peering through it. He served as one of the administrators of the cultural civic center in Iztapalapa, where I observed and participated in weekly yoga sessions for nearly ten months in 2010 and 2011. This was the first and only time I had seen a bureaucrat take interest in Rosi’s class.

Sr. Ramírez observed the twenty of us in attendance scattered in pairs across the room. Each dyad consisted of two women. One woman rested on her mat with her eyes closed while the other burned incense, lit a candle, and placed different-colored crystals along her partner’s body. For several weeks under Rosi’s direction, participants had been engaging in a healing practice called crystal therapy. As I watched Sr. Ramírez observe our behavior and ritualistic movements from behind the large window, I wondered if he knew that what we were doing inside the room was not yoga—even though that was the activity he promoted to residents at the municipal center.

Figures 15 and 16: Students learn alternative healing practices in their yoga classes at the cultural center in Iztapalapa.

122

A few days later I accompanied Rosi to Sr. Ramírez’ office and overheard their brief exchange:

Ramírez: What are you teaching your students? Rosi: Why? Ramírez: The other day I passed by [your class] and saw you. What you were doing did not look like yoga. Rosi: It is not yoga. What you saw was another type of therapy. I teach the women how to align their energy with crystals. This way they do not get bored with the [yoga] poses. Is there going to be a problem? Ramírez: No, no, no, no. I just wanted to know. Have a good day.

Even though this was the first time that an authority figure at the center had questioned Rosi about her teaching since she started working there in 2006, she was hardly fazed by the situation. She later explained to me that she did not work for the center or the municipality, and that none of the civil servants could thus dictate how or what she taught. According to Rosi, her students were the only persons to whom she held herself accountable. While there is some truth to her perception (as I explain below), I could not overlook the fact that she was hired by a bureaucrat to perform a specific task for which she received a check each month from the borough. Despite Rosi’s apparent unconcern, those with the power to hire and disburse funds can also fire and withhold them, and thus surely inform the types of services their workers render. “The authorities usually do not say anything to me,” she explained, “as long as the people are content and continue to go [to class].”



123

Founded in 1979, this cultural center, or Casa de Cultura, is the oldest of thirty such venues that exist in Iztapalapa and one of nearly 100 that are scattered across the sixteen boroughs of Mexico City. Each center is governed by the borough in which it is located and offers a wide range of programs, including theater, ballet, English, and yoga.

It was not necessary to be a resident of Iztapalapa (or even the city) to enroll in yoga or any other class. What participants need is cash. In 2010, I paid an annual registration fee of 73 pesos ($5.50USD) and a monthly user fee of 127 pesos ($9.50USD) to participate in eight yoga classes each month.128 For some of my friends, who earned only the monthly minimum wage of approximately1200 pesos ($100USD), finding sufficient funds each month to pay these fees was somewhat of a struggle.129 I was reminded of this one morning when one woman, Carla, asked me to lend her some money because, as she explained, “the money I have isn’t enough [el dinero no me alcanza]” to pay the monthly fee. In 2001, it would have cost Carla or any other student only 50 pesos per month to participate in the center’s classes.130 In 2012, Carla spent nearly three times that much for yoga but earned only 1.5 times more than what she made in 2001.131

128 User fees can sometimes exceed 100 pesos ($8.00USD) per class in cultural centers located in middle- class neighborhoods. These fees are established by the center and approved by the borough. At the end of my fieldwork period in 2012 the monthly user fee for yoga in Iztapalapa was 10 pesos (less than $1USD) more than it was when I started my research there in 2010, while the annual registration fee had increased by 4 pesos.

129 The daily minimum wage in Mexico City was 59.82 pesos ($4.80USD) in 2011. See: http://www.misalario.org/main/imagen/MEXICO.pdf, accessed 11 April 2013.

130 Fifty pesos in 2001 would be worth approximately 83 pesos in 2012 (see: http://0cmb.atwebpages.com/calce.cgi). When the cultural center first opened in the late 1970s, residents paid only 1.5 pesos per month to participate in art, music, dance, and literature workshops (worth approximately 3 pesos in 2012, see: http://0cmb.atwebpages.com/calce.cgi)

131 The daily minimum wage in Mexico City was 40 pesos ($4.15USD) in 2001. See: http://www.sat.gob.mx/sitio_internet/asistencia_contribuyente/informacion_frecuente/salarios_minimos/45 _782.html, accessed 25 April 2013. 124

Figure 17: Monthly fees residents paid in 2012 to partake in activities held at the cultural center.

In July of 2012, I conducted my first formal interview with the center’s director,

Sr. Gómez, who began his tenure there in 2001. Amidst office clutter, noise, and interruptions from staff members, instructors, and a local shoe shiner, I learned that the borough of Iztapalapa retained 100 percent of the registration fees and 25 percent of the user fees that citizens paid the center each year and month, respectively.132 The instructors that Sr. Gómez contracted to teach between two and four classes each week

(3-6 hours per week) received 75 percent of the monthly fees their students paid. Reading from a dot matrix computer printout he pulled out of the drawer of his desk, he provided me with a monthly breakdown of Rosi’s earnings in 2011; she averaged approximately

132 Sr. Gómez proudly informed me that although it was one of the smallest centers in Iztapalapa (in terms of physical size), the Casa he directed was open thirteen hours each day and generated more annual revenue than any other center in the borough through its provision of 24 different activities available each week.

125

3500 pesos ($300USD) for teaching a total of 24 hours of yoga each month.133 I was stunned to discover that for every hour Rosi worked at the center she earned 146 pesos, while it took some of her students, like Carla, more than two 8-hour work days to earn the same amount.

Although the borough established and increased these charges annually it rendered its role in this fee-for-service exchange as relatively passive compared to that of the more active instructor and student practitioner. This became evident each month I paid my user fee at the center. The civil servant who collected my monthly payment would instruct me to give the carbon copy receipt (see Figure 18) to Rosi who would return it to me the following month after receiving her check from the borough. This paperwork ritual gave Rosi’s students the impression that it was she (not the borough) who charged them a fee for her services, and it gave Rosi the impression that it was her students (not the borough) that paid her wages each month. In other words, they dictated the fee-for-service exchange, not the borough. Students pay fees to instructors whose

(economic) mobility is seemingly conditioned on how well they can attract students to their classes and maintain their attendance. In this fashion, students become clients and instructors become entrepreneurs. The state in effect operated much like a third-party broker promoting services to the student-client, collecting payment on behalf of the instructor-entrepreneur, and retaining 25 percent of the latter’s earnings for the use

(rental) of space.

133 I was interested in obtaining Rosi’s monthly earnings for 2010 and 2012 to complete my data set for the time period of the study and use the information for comparative purposes. Unfortunately, Sr. Gómez refused to provide these figures to me during our second meeting, stating that, “I do not have to give this information to you. I am doing this as a favor to you because I am nice; to give you an idea of what the Maestra earns each year, more or less.” His comment surprised me, as he had promised me during our first interview (only a few days prior to our second) that he would provide me with what he referred to as “public information,” claiming that “we have nothing to hide.” Although I am uncertain why he changed his mind his tone suggested that the issue was not open for discussion. 126

Figure 18: Paper receipt provided to the author upon payment of the yoga user fee at Iztapalapa’s cultural center in October of 2010.

It was therefore important for the state134 to conceal its role in perpetuating a system that involved students who paid higher fees each year for the same service and teachers whose livelihood depended on their students’ ability to pay these fees (instead of on a stable salary from the state). The decision to augment user costs and by extension instructors’ wages by nearly threefold in 2001 was understood (and justified) by the center’s director as a way to improve the “quality of service” delivered by instructors.

According to Sr. Gómez, it allowed him to “balance the service [we provide students] with the payment that we give the teacher.” In my perspective, however, it served as a way for the state to contract (inexpensive) freelance workers whom it had no obligation towards other than to “pay [them] on time.” Indeed, while these workers had flexible hours, which would enable them, as Sr. Gómez suggested, to “work in another place and

134 Fee-for-service neoliberal economic policies were adopted and implemented in Iztapalapa, which was governed by left-wing officials between 2009 and 2012. 127 earn a little more,” the burden of finding such work was the responsibility of each individual instructor, not the state.

Moreover, in exchange for receiving relatively “decent” pay for only a few hours of work each week at the center, teachers had to accept the state’s terms of employment, which did not entail any stable salary, job security, or state employee benefits. In fact, given that their monthly earnings depended entirely on whether their classes were full each month, instructors were burdened further by the pressure to maintain steady enrollments. As a teacher, Sr. Gómez explained to me, “your obligation…is to hook

[your students] [pescarlos] and that has a lot to do with your capacity to convince the users that you are the teacher that they are looking for… Because if [the teachers] do not sell there is no audience and they do not earn” (emphasis added). In this way, an instructor’s work and wages were essentially contingent on his or her (sales) performance each month.

Thus, being a skillful yoga instructor in this context had more to do with Rosi’s ability to “hook” her students enough so that they return (and pay for) the service she offered than with her knowledge, training, or ability to promote the health of her students.

Her entrepreneurial proficiency (reflected in her monthly enrollment figures) often resulted in rewards from the state. She earned additional classes and the quasi- professional title of Maestra (teacher), which Sr. Gómez utilized to evaluate her work and validate her authority to perform it. Distinguishing this special status from that of others who did not last long at the center, he noted that “they [did] not have the capacity of the Maestra…They are only yoga teachers because they sit [in the lotus position], but they do not pull [jalar] people” to their classes.

128

Pressured to teach her students, in Rosi’s words, “something new” because “they get bored with the same routine,” it was not uncommon for the fifty-three-year-old

Maestra to engage them in an eclectic array of healing practices during yoga class.135

When I first started my field study at the center, she was teaching a technique called mandala therapy in class. A few months later in 2011, she began to teach crystal therapy.136 These healing modalities encouraged participants to work together in pairs and alternate between specific roles—healer and patient. The perceived need to provide interactive, new, and even spiritually-oriented techniques to pique student interest overrode the ostensible intentions of the program. Through this lens, the power dynamic between Sr. Ramírez and Rosi (to which I alluded at the beginning of this section) becomes more comprehensible. Civil servants like Sr. Ramírez and Sr. Gómez recognized that it was not their responsibility to provide these therapeutic services at a municipal cultural center, but, as Sr. Gómez explained to me, “given that the rooms are empty in the mornings we are going to give them some use, and if the use is beneficial for people, even better; besides in some way [the class] generates income for the borough and is a source of employment for the Maestra.” In other words, it did not matter too much to him what Rosi had to do to “pull” her students into class as long as she continued to funnel pesos into the borough. In the next sub-section, I suggest that the healing practices that I observed emerging at the center reveal not only new (material and social) opportunities for mobility, but also new demands that arise in this context and which workers like Rosi must negotiate.

135 Similarly, in her study of urban curanderos (healers) in Ecuador, Miles (2003) identifies these healers as entrepreneurs, who “incorporate symbols and practices from diverse medical traditions in an effort to draw attention to, validate and ‘sell’ their practices in a very competitive marketplace” (109).

136 These practices are among those that the Health Ministry declares are in use in Mexico (SS 2009). 129

Rosi’s Crystals: Part Two

Figure 19: The Casa de Cultura in Iztapalapa was not officially designated as a place where healing services were provided.

When Rosi first introduced the crystal therapeutic practice to the class, she explained that healing involved a harmonious exchange and union between healer and patient. Her emphasis on mutual caretaking in the classes she imparted at the cultural center was not unique to that venue (as I demonstrate in the next chapter). However, in no other state-funded setting did she incorporate different healing practices in her pedagogy as she did so repeatedly at the center. She was simply not compelled to do so. Outside the center Rosi taught yoga as a volunteer (not a paid worker). Those to whom she provided this service were not obligated by the state to pay any user fees. Her students in effect were not her clients. Indeed, aside from being a yoga teacher, there was virtually nothing that distinguished Rosi’s social standing as a working-class Iztapalapan from that of her students. In those venues, it was thus altruism and charitable service that defined her

130 labor and its value (not her quasi-professional status, economic gain, or registration quotas).

At the cultural center, however, the fee-for-service payment system operating there fashioned students as clients and instructors as entrepreneurs. In this space, Rosi’s quasi-professional Maestra status (along with the decent pay it entailed) redefined her working-class social position. Here, her entrepreneurial position defined her social class, rather than, for example, her uninsured health standing or Iztapalapa residency. Rosi’s social status thus (re)fashioned separated her further from her student-clients, making it rather difficult for her to form the same kind of peer-like relationships she created with her students in other settings.

Despite being enmeshed in a municipal state discourse of yoga as a cultural service associated with altruism, community betterment, and even charity (which in some ways posited yoga lessons as almost anti-neoliberal), as a form of paid labor at the Casas de Cultura, yoga instruction did not necessarily reflect altruism or good will like it did in other venues. In fact, in many ways it revealed just the opposite: social mobility for some

(instructor-entrepreneur) and social inertia (student-client) for others. All of Rosi’s students, as I have already noted, experienced these social differentials firsthand when their fees (and her profits) increased each year. None, however, vocalized their frustrations or concerns about these disparities with any civil servant. Instead, they complained to each other and to Rosi, and often made her work and economic gain the focal point of their criticisms (despite the fact that I do not believe even they realized just how much she earned as a contracted laborer). Daniela, a good friend of Carla’s, was perhaps the most critical of all the women. Even though she attended Rosi’s class each

131 week, she complained frequently about her teacher’s supposed unwillingness to offer her students “more things: extra courses, conferences, talks.” When I pointed out to her that

Rosi actually provided instruction in many healing techniques that she did not impart in other venues, Daniela explained to me that she only did so because “it is her job; she lives off of the class.” Questioning Rosi’s financial motivations for teaching yoga at the center revealed the intra-class tensions that have emerged around work, care, and profit in this fee-for-service context.

Although Rosi’s social position as an entrepreneur (a working-class transitioner) was rather tenuous, she was aware of its unsettling effects. She once told me that, “when we begin to have prosperity, we begin to have power, because money gives you power.”

She did not want to be compared to teachers, like Yara or Śivakarī, who taught in private studios in middle-class neighborhoods because, according to her, “those teachers are losing their way in yoga, becoming more materialistic; they are only interested in making money, money, money, money.”137 Distinguishing her service as one that is spiritually- motivated (rather than materialistically-guided) is similar to the spiritual (Christian) lens

Mexican itinerant sellers in Guadalajara use to interpret their entrepreneurial endeavors

(Cahn 2008). There, bestowing the products they sell with sacred characteristics lifts them “out of the realm of crass materialism” and “dishonest flimflam artists” and into the realm of “religious respectability” (ibid:433). Here, in Mexico City, however, endowing

Rosi’s labor with spiritual qualities did not always produce the results she desired.138 In

137 Rosi’s criticism not only serves as a way for her to distinguish her trainers’ motivations to teach yoga from her own. It is also an attempt to establish connections (social sameness) between her and her students, and thus obfuscate the few material and social benefits (social difference) she gains through her freelance work at the cultural center.

138 Multilevel marketers sell tangible products (health powders) to client-patients in Guadalajara, whereas Rosi sells a non-tangible service (yoga instruction) to student-clients in Mexico City. This service becomes 132 fact, some of her students accused her of the same kinds of materialistic behaviors that were reflected in her own criticisms of middle-class entrepreneurs. Concerned by these complaints and pressured to sustain student interest each month at the center, it became necessary for Rosi to reconstitute the value of her work there, perhaps ironically leading her to provide extra services that were less in line with her primary training, skills, and the health mandate under which yoga continues to become increasingly popular in

Mexico City.

The (extra) healing services Rosi implemented in her classes were intended to offer her students “something new” to disrupt the monotony of their yoga routine, but this

(extra) care and charitable service did not conceal the economic and social profits of her labor (as she may have desired). It had the opposite effect. Most of these techniques she learned through various courses she attended in private schools located sometimes two hours away from her home in Iztapalapa. Acquiring this knowledge thus involved a significant investment of time and money on Rosi’s part. Yet, rather than revealing care, sacrifice, or generosity, these practices more often revealed her ability to pay for and devote time to such education, thus reinforcing (instead of eclipsing) the social differences that separated instructor-entrepreneur from student-client in this setting.

Rosi’s rhetorical insistence on focusing on mutual care and aid in the healing practices she rendered was an attempt to redefine herself (from Maestra-entrepreneur to caretaker), her students (from user-client to patients/healers), and her job (from a mode of subsistence to a divine-oriented responsibility). While yoga at the center had become in many ways a health service, the value of that service and its instruction remained closely objectified through the fee-for-service exchange that takes shape at the center. It seems difficult for entrepreneurs in both cities to remove all traces of materialism in the system, given that it functions as a result of structural forces beyond their control. 133 connected to cost and social difference, not care or social sameness. Unfortunately for

Rosi, fashioning students as healers and patients could not completely refashion the entrepreneur-client relationship that had become so deeply entrenched in the center over the last decade.



Conclusion

This chapter and the last explored the class-entrenched politics that unfold in a burgeoning industry of self-care that enables and demands new economic and social exchanges among Mexicans. Both state-endorsed and privately-funded yoga rely on the temporary contracting of such services to providers who often work at multiple sites for precarious wages, receive no employee benefits, and have little or no job security. Even though these workers contend with unstable and precarious labor conditions, some embrace their posts, often referring to their work as a service to their communities.

Middle-class stakeholders involved in their training criticize the so-called service that those laboring in working-class neighborhoods provide, suggesting that unpaid and even underpaid yoga instruction devalues what they have come to identify as their profession.

These two chapters have raised questions about what Mexicans have at stake as they struggle to define and redefine their social standing, relations, and mobility in this nascent context of care.

In the last chapter, we observed the ways some aspiring middle-class professionals embrace yoga instruction as a form of entrepreneurship and a potential pathway towards social recognition and mobility (despite how little it actually offers them). Although still operating as a fee-for-service endeavor in the state-run context I

134 focused on in this chapter, yoga instruction takes on different meanings. Here, those who might be considered by observers as socially mobile resist the notion that they are. This contestation, I posit, is motivated by the uneven transformations taking shape among the working classes in this emergent health context.139 Taken together, these chapters have demonstrated how self-care services can generate new exchanges in Mexico City, even as they also engender new sites of social differentiation.

139 Chapter 4 explores more specifically the contemporary neoliberal health care context in Mexico, in which health and wellness are framed as a consequence of an individual’s participation in practices of self- care (autocuidado). 135

CHAPTER 4: CRAFTING THE COLLECTIVE IN SELF-CARE: POTENTIALS AND CONSTRAINTS140

Earlier chapters of this dissertation analyzed how class matters in the production, circulation, and practice of state-sponsored self-care in Mexico City. This chapter suggests why it should matter to those who study and promote its engagement. To do this we must unpack the concept and practice of self-care itself.141



Introduction

As an underlying principle of neoliberal structural adjustments, self-care is typically conceptualized by academics as individuals “being responsible for their own health and well-being through staying fit and healthy, physically, mentally and where desired, spiritually” (Wilkinson and Whitehead 2009:1145).142 Mexico’s Ministry of

Health has mobilized self-care as a discourse and strategy since the 1990s (Laurell 2001,

2007). Multiple references to autocuidado (self-care) in Mexico’s 2007-2012 National

Health Program (SS 2007c) reveal it as a cost-effective intervention directed towards the individual to prevent illness and promote improved health through better lifestyle choices

140 An earlier version of this chapter was published (see Maldonado 2013).

141 See Appendix C: Notes on Defining Self-Care in Mexico.

142 This concept of health stems from a biomedical perspective that locates illness in the individual and effective treatment and prevention of illness in the individual body (McGuire 2002:410). 136

(see also: President Calderon’s “National Strategy for Promotion and Prevention of

Better Health” [SS2007b]). Such rhetoric fashions individuals as autonomous agents that can “control the determinants of their health” by “choosing healthy lifestyles,” despite the social conditions that may shape their lives towards less healthy outcomes (SS 2007c:17).

In this way, as some have argued, autocuidado “further institutionalizes the powerful rhetoric of ‘responsibilization’ that engenders blame” (Schneider 2010:72; see also

Cardaci 1999:404).

In the pages that follow I expand and complicate a somewhat thin narrative of self-care that circulates in the academe and saturates Mexican public health with autocuidado (Leal F. 2010:109; Menéndez 2009).143 Research investigating alternative healing practices of self-care (such as yoga) has been conducted predominantly in developed countries like the United States, England, and Australia, where these techniques generally operate in the private health sector and provide a predominantly educated white professional urban class with an alternate self-help approach to biomedical care144 (Badone 2008; Baer 2001, 2004, 2008; McGuire 1988; Sointu 2006a,

2006b).145 As a result, social scientists have come to regard this particular sphere of care

143 The ethnographic study of self-care has been dominated by investigations into biomedical technologies, interventions, and gadgets (e.g., Biehl and Moran-Thomas 2009; Guell 2012; Hogle 2005; Nguyen 2005; Whyte et al. 2002). Overlooking extra-medical practices (like yoga) may risk unintentionally reducing health issues to bioscientific hegemonies, thus reproducing what many of these accounts ultimately seek to critique.

144 Menéndez (2009:26-27) attributes the current popularity of alternative healing in the global North only in part to the rise in public criticism towards biomedicine. He suggests that other social processes, such as the global expansion of mass media and the upsurge of migrants in and across nations, be considered as well.

145 Some studies investigating the rise of alternative medicine in the global South have put forth similar propositions (Haro Encinas 2000; Luz 1999). Other scholars argue differently. Research has indicated that most Mexicans, for example, piece together their care and treatment from a variety of health sources rather than depending upon any one as uniquely authoritative (Gálvez 2011; Menéndez 1984, 1990; Napolitano 2002; Nigenda et al. 2001). 137 as an extraordinary privilege sought by those with the “social, cultural and economic capital needed” to position and engage the self as the primary object of care (Sointu

2006c:333; see also Skeggs 1997). Socially disenfranchised individuals who may on occasion engage in these lavish quests only do so to disengage from denigrated class and gender identities (for emerging exceptions, see Biswas 2012; Delfabro 2011; Kern 2012).

Hans Baer (2001, 2002), a prominent critical medical anthropologist, has gone so far as to suggest that by promoting individual responsibility for health, self-care minimizes the importance of community service and collective aims.146 Others remind us, however, not to “take for granted the relative significance of the individual…or the collective when we examine the ways in which ‘techniques of the self’ might travel” across the globe

(Marsland and Prince 2012: 464).

Indeed, my exchanges with and observations of a group of low-income Mexican yoga practitioners147 in Iztapalapa permit me to put forward a slightly different perspective regarding the social implications of self-care as it flourishes in this under- resourced context.148 While providing yoga services as a cheap health care alternative

146 Baer (2002:405) observes the mind-body-spirit connections that alternative forms of self-care espouse but faults their supposed failure to cultivate mind-body-spirit-society connections needed to address health issues from a critical perspective. Such views locate effective health solutions (including prevention) “at the level of the larger social group” and in political change, instead of in the individual body (McGuire 2002:410). Other studies, however, are helping to redefine these relations by finding that participation in alternative health groups can “move people from personal to political deliberation” (Schneider 2010:162; Schneirov and Geezik 2003).

147 Chapter 3 discussed the intra-class differences that emerge between those involved in yoga’s delivery and practice in Iztapalapa. This chapter focuses on another group taught by the same instructor in the same borough, and highlights the relations that emerge among the practitioners themselves. Maintaining the dissertation’s overarching aim, it calls attention to the importance of class in the study, promotion, and practice of self-care.

148 Recent studies of care are helping to reposition individual experience itself as a social and political agent—a site of historical, embodied, and existential engagement (Farquhar and Zhang 2012; Han 2012). In this way, self-care is not necessarily rooted in monadic individualism or institutional indifference, but in relations that reflect the recognition of shared vulnerability (Garcia 2010). My research contributes to this body of literature. 138 does not manipulate the social or political roots of illness in an individual body, it does not just manipulate this one body either.

As I noted in the Introduction both federal and local Mexican authorities have begun to identify, regulate, and promote specific activities, like yoga, as supposedly modern, efficacious modes of self-care. This imported cultural practice, which at one time circulated primarily in the private health sector among the middle class and wealthy, has become increasingly accessible to lower-income peoples, like those in Iztapalapa, through diverse government initiatives. Public health officials in Mexico City claim that these activities are needed to prevent and treat what they refer to as culturally transmitted diseases: illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, and drug addictions that are tied to lifestyle factors.149 One public health worker described these illnesses to me as the “self- inflicted wounds” that those deficient in culture and consciousness (consciencia) impose on themselves.150 “They have no more excuses [for their illnesses],” he insisted, “because today anyone can do yoga in Mexico City!” In his view, activities like yoga motivate individuals to become more aware of and responsible for their well-being—that is, to

149 The Mexican Health Ministry’s Office of Traditional Medicine and Intercultural Development, in conjunction with its 2007-2012 public health plan (SS 2007c), has sought to incorporate a variety of non- conventional modes of healing currently in use throughout urban Mexico into the National Health System (SS 2008b). These practices are associated with neither traditional (i.e., indigenous) medicine nor other legally decreed medical knowledge (e.g., biomedicine, acupuncture, homeopathy) in Mexico. Despite the professionalization of traditional medicine in 2001 (Gutmann 2007; Whiteford 1999), the Health Ministry has not touted local practices as a major health benefit, a low-cost solution, or a long-term investment, as it does with imported traditions (Nigenda et al. 2001). Instead, authorities encourage citizens to seek so-called intercultural systems of care to counter the effects and prevalence of non-infectious “culturally transmitted” illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, and drug and alcohol addictions, which they associate with poor lifestyle choices, irresponsibility, and ignorance (SS 2007a, 2007c, 2007d; 2008a).

150 Cultural difference has long been invoked by public officials across Latin America to account for health disparities among marginalized communities (Farmer 1999; Carrillo 2002; Briggs 2003). This explanation has been used to justify reducing public health expenditures (as a waste of resources for illnesses rooted in culture and hence incurable), and to privilege biomedicine over the traditional, so-called backward practices of the poor (Maternowska 2006; Trumper and Phillips 1995). According to Farmer, these “cultural misreadings” conceal the politics surrounding various “assaults on dignity,” such as poor health and poor health care (Farmer 1996: 278). 139 autocuidar.

In this chapter, I examine how low-income Mexican women involved in a state- subsidized yoga program in Iztapalapa negotiate condemning messages like these that link health status to a desire or willingness to care for self (in this case, to do yoga). Such messages fashion the body (self) as something produced outside of relations, attention

(care) outside the realm of social difference (e.g., gender, class, age), and health as an outcome of personal choice and responsibility. Even though yoga practitioners may at times appropriate this rhetoric, it is in their embodied engagements both on and off the mat where we observe selves moving in relation to others and self-care as a social (not just personal) practice. Although Mexican authorities and others promote imported cultural practices like yoga as a means to help individuals manage or take “better” care of their own bodies and minds, they are refashioned in the popular sector as a collective therapeutic project with wider aims. Learning to care for both themselves and each other, low-income Mexican yoga practitioners, my analysis suggests, promote a form of self- care that embraces both the individual and collective simultaneously; thus, enacting a self that is collective. In this way, self-care practices necessarily become care of the collective based on context and intention.

The collective that these yoga practitioners enact and shape is neither inclusive nor cohesive, or affecting change on a structural level.151 Self-care’s potential for broader social-structural transformation is limited, much like the constrained potentials for social mobility described in other chapters. In this way, as I have demonstrated throughout this

151 Self-care in Mexico City functions similarly to community health care in the state of Morelos (Schneider 2010). Despite offering a space for participants to experiment collectively with “new forms of organization [and] new ideas” (ibid: 162), community health groups are limited in their capacity to address institutional frameworks that maintain gender and social inequities (ibid: 152). Thus, they “may help to massage and manage life’s lesions, but [they do] not necessarily resolve the forces that cause people pain” (153). 140 dissertation, yoga in Mexico City is not only a reaction to, but also a reflection of, mainstream neoliberal values that obscure the lived effects of social inequities and the everyday frustrations with immobility. The chapter’s conclusion suggests that these matters be addressed by those who research and promote self-care in Mexico.



Cultivating Sisterhood

The start of any ordinary evening was the same at the Youth Wellness Center

(YWC) in Iztapalapa, where I spent more than a year participating in and observing state- sanctioned yoga offered to family and friends of youth with chemical and drug addictions. I tried to arrive early to help my friends prepare the space we occupied for 90 minutes every Monday and Wednesday night. We would often find the small room in complete disorder, with thirty rusty metal chairs scattered across it, garbage thrown on top of a table in the corner, and dirt, dust, and gum residue stuck to the floor. Without any hesitation Maria and I stacked the chairs and placed them, along with the table, in the hallway, while Sandra swept and mopped the broken-tiled floor. Victoria removed the trash, lit incense and candles, and plugged the CD player she had brought from home into the only working electrical socket in the room. Usually by the start of each class we had managed to successfully transform the filthy multi-purpose room into a clean, comfortable space where twenty low-income women, between the ages of thirty five and seventy, learned to focus intently on their bodies, movements, and breath, despite all of the potentially distracting thoughts—of sick mothers, hungry husbands, and unfinished chores—that streamed through their minds. Caring for this room was a mere reflection of the care these women extended towards the bodies and lives that occupied it.

141

Before entering the space, each woman removed her shoes at the door and left her belongings outside the room. Then, she greeted her peers with a smile, a hug, and a kiss on the cheek. Those who arrived early to clean had first choice in selecting a spot in the room to position their mats, while the others who trickled in shortly thereafter placed theirs in any of the remaining open spaces. The room accommodated ten to twelve comfortably, but seventeen to twenty women participated in the class on any given day, which required some of them to fold their mats in half so that each would have enough space to maneuver her body during practice. Even so, it was not at all uncommon to touch someone’s sweaty arms with yours during poses, to feel the feet of another brush against your head during the relaxation phase of practice, or to even share your mat with a partner. Here, in this hot, cramped space, as bodies sweat, voices moan, tears fall, and hands touch, a physical connection to both self and other is engendered.152

152 In her theoretical and ethnographic analysis of how the self is experienced and configured in the practice of Iyengar yoga, human geographer Jennifer Lea (2009) asserts that this form of subjective engagement is “always contextual” (87) and relational (75). I push her argument slightly further in my work by suggesting that it is the very context (understood as physical, social, and embodied space), which yoga practitioners at the YWC in Iztapalapa engage with so intimately, that shapes their practice in and beyond that particular setting and in turn their relations with selves, bodies, and others. In this way, care of the self, as it fashioned on and off the mat in Iztapalapa, entails both subjective and intersubjective processes that ultimately foment “a form of living that not only embodies a mode of attending to the self, but also a mode of attending to others” (ibid: 74). 142

Figures 20-25: Yoga practitioners transform the small room at the YWC in Iztapalapa to accommodate their practice of self-care, which is in turn transformed by this space to encourage intimacy among the women. Several of these photos are courtesy of Alejandra Márquez-Arias.

The last person to arrive was Rosi, our soft-spoken, serious, and thoughtful instructor who volunteered her time at the YWC. She, too, like many of her peers, lived in Iztapalapa. Rosi positioned herself somewhere towards the front of the room, except on those days when all of her “girls” (chicas), as she called them, were present, and she

143 stood in the doorway, partially outside of the room, to ensure that they were more or less comfortable inside. Even though they had to squeeze together like sardines in order for everyone to fit inside the room neither Rosi nor her girls were dissuaded from welcoming new friends, like me, to join their practice and enter their space. In fact, when Rosi first introduced me to the group, Sandra, the most vocal of the women, exclaimed to me with pride (while others nodded in agreement) that “there is always space here; there is always a place for those who arrive. Here, we make room for our sisters, even the new ones.”

Then, she handed me a piece of paper with each woman’s name, phone number, birthday, and head shot printed on it. Shouting with joy, she boasted, “Let me introduce you to your new family!”

Certain individuals, namely men, were not overly welcome to participate in the class and join this so-called family, some of whose members had been practicing yoga with each other and Rosi for as many as seven years. Men often walked past the tiny room, which was located in a highly trafficked hallway of the YWC, but they barely took any interest in the women or their movements. During the fourteen months I observed the class only one man was bold enough to inquire about the practice and meeting times, though neither he nor any of his brethren dared to enter the tiny room. “They cannot tolerate [aguantar] all of us,” Sandra explained to me. “This is our time, our space.” The family that Sandra and her friends fashioned did indeed resemble a support group (grupo de ayuda), premised on values of trust, intimacy, and confidentiality. Yet, had these women not made a conscious effort to exclude men from participating in it, the group would not have been able to operate as a fictive kin group of sorts; specifically, a sisterhood. I am therefore not entirely convinced that it was the men, as Sandra says, who

144 did not tolerate the women, but rather the women who did not wish to have strange men joining them in this small space where they touched each other’s bodies, felt each other’s sweat and breath, and revealed tearful stories that often involved other men. To do so in this particular context would have been considered culturally inappropriate.

My interlocutors, however, were also just as reluctant to invite men to the social gatherings that took place each month outside of the Center. These birthday and holiday potluck luncheons were usually hosted by a different woman who volunteered her home for the event. Eating, chatting, joking, meditating, and dancing were common activities at these reunions. When I suggested to the women early on in my fieldwork that they invite their partners to these events, one woman offered me a direct retort to deflect the discomfort my foolish question had incited in her: “Andrea, why would we want them here? We are with them all the time.” Sandra informed me later that the dynamic of the group would change significantly if they invited their male partners to these celebrations because, as she explained, “this is the only time we feel free [libre].” Indeed, the one time

I observed a husband present at a social gathering, his wife devoted her attention to his

(rather than to her friends’) needs. This took place during a birthday celebration when the hostess’s husband interrupted the event with live music and the husband of another arrived early to drive his wife home. While the two men conversed with each other for about an hour, the wives, who would otherwise be exchanging stories and jokes with their girlfriends, prepared their husbands a plate of food from the buffet, served them drinks, and then sat beside them to join their conversation. This unexpected turn of events proved to be rather awkward for the hostess who had to run back and forth between her guests and husband in an effort to be attentive to both.

145

Figures 26-28: Practitioners of yoga socialize outside class to celebrate birthdays, commemorate national holidays, and participate in health conferences.

For many of these women it is not always feasible to engage in practices of self- care, or what Mexican authorities refer to as autocuidado, which is premised on the assumption that individuals are at liberty to make space for and by themselves to manage their health. Some are managing a variety of complex situations at home, including abusive and unfaithful partners, sick parents, teens with drug problems, and financial instability.153 Others wrestle with bouts of depression and anxiety, and chronic illnesses

153 Much scholarship points to the largely uncontested assertion that women are by and large the primary caretakers of both the sick and healthy in the Mexican home (Módena 1990; Osorio 1995; Robles-Silva 2010-2011). 146 like diabetes. Still others face criticisms from spouses who described their yoga practice to me as foolish. In the face of these challenges and competing demands, these women must often exert much effort to engage in self-care. For this reason there is an implicit understanding among them that those who practice yoga are motivated by a particular

(self-driven) desire and willingness to improve their lives. While their ideas of self-care echo the (individualistic) discourse promoted by state authorities, their practice does not necessarily reproduce it. Indeed, what self-care offers them is not only a personal outlet to cope with the daily struggles they confront, but also a social resource and framework to imagine this struggle as part of a larger collective of low-income Mexican women who identify themselves as sisters.

As students of yoga, their task, according to Rosi, is to “heal their bodies and harmonize their emotions.” So that no one woman is tempted to compare her body, posture, or pace with that of her peer, Rosi asks each of them to close her eyes and attend entirely to her own bodily sensations, breathing, emotions, and thoughts throughout the session. Although their movements are never synchronized, they remain connected to each other through the familial identity they craft and come to embrace in this intimate space. As sisters their objective is to support each other. Sometimes the women use the yoga class to discuss domestic problems and offer each other advice instead of engaging in physical activities. When a member of the group falls ill, Rosi instructs the women to communicate with that person and to visualize her healthy in their meditations. Taking care of your sisters thus becomes an integral component and condition to taking care of oneself among low-income yoga practitioners in this context.154

154 Robles-Silva’s (2004, 2007, 2010-2011) research among the urban poor of Guadalajara, Mexico, outlines the important role the family (specifically, the domestic unit) plays in configuring and mobilizing 147

Figures 29 and 30: Yoga in Iztapalapa encourages practitioners to care for themselves and each other.

The importance of fashioning yoga as both a practice of self-care and a collective care practice became unmistakably clear as interpersonal conflicts arose among the women. This is exemplified well by an incident that became a source of conversation among the yoga practitioners for months to come and, even after a year following its occurrence, could still bring tears to Rosario’s eyes. Rosario is a short, heavy-set woman in her mid-fifties with long, curly grey hair. Because she lives in a small shanty-like town on the outskirts of Iztapalapa, where public transportation is limited, it takes her more than 45 minutes and two bus rides to arrive at the YWC. On a brisk November evening,

Rosario walked into the room a bit out of breath and noticed an empty space next to

Victoria who had arrived early to help clean the room. Just as Rosario leaned over to place her bath mat on the floor, Victoria informed her in a matter-of-fact manner that,

“that is Estele’s place.” Not welcome to occupy that particular space on the floor, Rosario bowed her head in disappointment and looked for another one. She never mentioned the

practices of self-care at home. By attending to this entity (often consisting of multiple generations living together), her work contributes to scholarly discussions in Mexico that conceptualize self-care as a collective practice (e.g., Menéndez 1990). The author’s decision to focus primarily on marriage and blood relations (in the home) limits the extent to which we are able to fully grasp how families inform and are being informed by self-care in under-resourced settings in urban Mexico. My research thus attends to the familial articulations that emerge through informal relations of trust and friendship, which are cultivated in practices of self-care that take place outside the domestic locale. 148 incident to anyone and I even forgot that it had occurred until a couple of weeks later when another woman, Adele, told Rosario in a similarly curt fashion that the empty space next to her was saved for someone else. This time Rosario’s eyes grew watery, yet once again she remained silent and retreated quietly to another area in the room. Heaviness and tension filled the space. Although Rosi conducted class as she did any other day, she told me later that she sensed something was amiss the moment she walked into the room.

Feeling rejected by those who referred to themselves as her sisters was too painful for Rosario to bear alone. After class she approached Rosi and shared what had transpired prior to her arrival, expressing sadness, anger, and shock while describing in detail her version of the incident. “Rosi, what do they have against me that they do not want me to sit next to them? With all of the problems I have at home I never expected this to happen here. I don’t understand how they could do this, especially here. Aren’t we supposed to be family?” Rosi listened with interest and compassion. Just before bidding farewell to

Rosario, Rosi gave her a hug and whispered in her ear: “We are family, Rosario, and we need to take care of each other.”

Rosi arrived early the following class. She folded her blue mat in a small square, placed it on the floor against the center of the front wall, and sat patiently on it as she waited for each of her girls to arrive. Once everyone was in the room, Rosi motioned us to cease our chatter and recited the following words calmly and firmly:

Today, we need to discuss something that happened last week to one of our sisters. We treated our sister very badly. Why do we do that? That only divides us. We have done so much in this space and outside it to create a place where it is safe to come together and share, and we are ruining this. We have said before that in this space, no one has a place. It belongs to all of us, not just one or two of us. We destroy this when we hurt each other. There are no places in this space because we are not just any group. We are family. Why do we disrespect members of our family by not allowing them to sit next to us or by telling them to sit

149

somewhere else? Each of us needs to be responsible for getting to class on time. If we want to sit in a specific place, then we have to arrive early. We cannot ask another sister to save us a place if we are late. We need to be responsible for ourselves. Those of us who observed what happened and said nothing are just as culpable as those of us who created this conflictive environment. I am ashamed of our behavior.

The women listened attentively to their teacher, though Sandra eventually broke the silence by apologizing to Rosi for the group’s behavior. No one looked at Rosario or apologized to her.

The way in which space is organized and contested by yoga practitioners occupies a prominent role in how they make meaning of their practice of self-care. The type of self-care Rosi promotes and aims to cultivate – on and off the mat – embraces both the self and community. It is received as a shared responsibility among women. Her use of the plural pronoun (“we”), instead of its singular form (“you”), is intentional. Speaking as a unit throughout the reproach indicates to the women that the group, of which she, too, is a part, is responsible for the transgression. Given that “we” – as sisters, as family – created the conflict, it is “ours” to correct. No one person in particular should be held accountable for what took place, yet Rosi maintains that each woman “needs to be responsible” for securing her own place to prevent future unrest. In her view, taking care of the self (to arrive early) may ultimately serve to strengthen or unite the community, which she clearly idealizes. In my view, self-care may not necessarily produce a conflict- free, cohesive, or inclusive community (Rosario continues to feel excluded), so much as it validates the role of community relations in its practice. Rosi’s lesson teaches her students that the collective is not only relevant, but also essential, to their craft. In the next section, I analyze further the relational aspects of self-care to better understand both the possibilities and limitations of the collective in this context.

150

 Lilia’s Self-Care

“I didn’t come Monday because my mother is very sick and I have to take care of her,” Lilia explained to Sandra who expressed concern regarding her friend’s absence from class. This was my first encounter with the rather obese forty-year-old market vendor whose face was flushed from both exhaustion and sadness. As she spoke to

Sandra, she was pulling at her hair with one hand and wiping the beads of sweat that were accumulating on her forehead with the other. Only a few seconds passed by when Sandra got up from where she was sitting and walked over to Lilia’s rug, which was next to my mat, and gently put her arm around her troubled friend. Elena, Maria, and Catarina were immersed in their own conversation, but immediately directed their attention to Lilia when they saw Sandra move to the other side of the room. Catarina encouraged Lilia to share with the others what was troubling her: “We do not want to see you sad. Talking will help you let it go [soltarlo].”

As soon as I noticed a stream of tears roll down Lilia’s cheeks I grabbed a tissue from my pocket and handed it to her. She looked at me for a few seconds and nodded her head in gratitude, but she was slightly puzzled by both my presence and that of the digital recorder, which I had placed in front of me and only a few inches from her. Sandra put her friend at ease by introducing me as “our new sister” and “the teacher’s good friend.”

Patting her eyes and forehead with the tissue, Lilia proceeded to explain to the other women and me that her aging mother with Alzheimer’s disease had fallen off a step ladder in their kitchen while Lilia was at work selling fruits and vegetables at a nearby market. “She did not hurt herself very badly, but the fall scared her and she is now more disoriented than I have ever seen her…I’m so worried because she needs a lot of attention

151 now and no one will help me. I have to take care of her. I don’t know what to do.”

Maria gently interrupted Lilia and asked her if her relatives might be willing to assist her with any of the caretaking responsibilities. Although the mood was somber,

Sandra found Maria’s question encouraging and with her typical enthusiasm boasted, “Oh yes! You do have siblings. They will surely help you!” Lilia, however, shook her head and explained with much despair in her voice that she did not have any help; her two brothers had refused to assist her with the daily caretaking activities of their ailing mother. She was now very concerned about how she would be able to devote the necessary time and care that her mother needed while also tending to her duties at the market and maintaining her home for her children and husband.155 “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” she cried out. As Lilia’s voice swelled with anxiety she tugged more nervously at her hair and rubbed her forehead more briskly back and forth with the palm of her hand, as if these rough, steady movements could pull out her frustration and wipe away her angst. Sandra remained close to her tearful friend and tried to comfort her with her embrace, while Maria praised Lilia for returning to class, “because, you know mana [sister], the teacher will help you to relax.”

Rosi arrived a few moments later, received a summary of what had transpired from Sandra, and modified the class accordingly.156 In this session, each of our

(individual) bodies remained stationery as we sat in a semi-circle on the floor and devoted our time and attention to Lilia, with the hope that our supportive presence (as a

155 Laurell (2001) suggests that “[t]his burden on women should be viewed in the general context of impoverishment” and “the lack of minimal public arrangements to alleviate everyday child care and domestic work” (314-315).

156 No one ever openly expressed any criticism or displeasure when our yoga practice was diverted for the sake of talk. 152 collective) might relieve some of the anguish incited in her by the lack of support she was receiving at home from her family. While the collective is certainly enacted in these off- the-mat conversations that Rosi encourages in her yoga class, the individual also remains a potent force in her philosophy and discourse. She, along with her students, must negotiate these confounding messages of (self- and other-oriented) care alongside the realities of their social lives, a process which proves to be rather challenging for Lilia (as

I demonstrate below).

When Rosi asked Lilia how she was feeling Lilia did not initially discuss the emotional angst she had relayed to the others and me earlier, but instead complained about a throbbing pressure she had been experiencing for several days in her neck, back, and head. She turned towards me, as I was seated next to her, and placed considerable pressure on the back of my head and then instructed me to lift it, which was nearly impossible to do with the weight of her body holding me down. This intense pressure, she told the group, was the type of pain she felt throughout the day. Despite Lilia’s move to include me in her story Rosi’s attention remained completely focused on her. “It’s obvious,” said Rosi, “that you are holding anxiety and fear and anger in your body. You need to give yourself some time to rest and think of nothing. Listen to your body and give it what it needs. Listen to your breath. That is yoga.” She then reminded Lilia that engaging in yoga would help her “to be more gentle and kind” to herself. “Remember if you only talk about how neurotic you are, you can only receive that same negative energy you send out to the world. What you are doing is self-punishing [autocastigando].”

Catarina then raised her hand and asked Rosi if she could say something. “I identify very much with Lilia’s sadness. Teacher, it is not easy. I’ve been coming here for more than

153 three years and of course I feel calmer after class, but I still feel guilty because there is so much to do at home. I have to prepare and warm my family’s meals. If I am not there to serve my husband and children, they won’t eat.” Many of the other women nodded in agreement, suggesting that they, too, identified with Lilia and Catarina’s struggle to navigate between their (personal) need to self-care and their (social) obligations to care for their families.

Rosi herself shoulders many of the same responsibilities that Lilia assumes in her daily life and therefore understands how difficult it might be for Lilia to “think of nothing” or find time “to rest” when her senile mother needs to be accompanied to hospital visits that often last several hours, her husband expects her to prepare home- cooked meals, her children must be tended to after school, her house must be kept clean, and she must report to work in the market so she can pay for the medications both she and her mother require. Although Rosi’s advice to Lilia (to be more mindful of her body) does not immediately address these lived social realities that contribute to her depression and anxiety, it does not necessarily discount their effects either. Rosi clearly acknowledges the severity of the situation given the time she devotes to it in class and the alternative therapies she offers Lilia during subsequent sessions, but she perceives the deleterious effects it has on her health as something which Lilia must ultimately manage.

Rather than become a victim of her life circumstances, Lilia has no other choice, according to her teacher, but to take care of herself. Otherwise, Rosi explains further, her mother and loved ones will suffer. “There is nothing left to do but accept the situation…Do not let yourself get sick. You need to be strong, you need to be well. [Your family] needs you.” Rosi does not therefore favor self-care at the expense of those around

154 her. On the contrary, she is instructing Lilia to not neglect her obligations towards her family, which will depend on whether Lilia herself is healthy; that is, if she also takes care of herself. In other words, Lilia should self-care not only in spite of but also as a way to better manage the challenges that await her at home. By interpreting care of the self as that which can ultimately aid another, Rosi offers her students a culturally appropriate lens to filter and accept some of the self-oriented messages that they find unpleasant and alienating.

As Catarina and I walked out of the room together I thanked her for sharing so openly about her own struggle to overcome the guilt she has encountered through her participation in yoga. She claimed that, “it’s worth it [vale la pena]. We all arrive like

Lilia—with much pain and sadness. What I found here are friends. This is a space where you can release everything and leave it there.” While such relational understandings of self-care enable many of the women to negotiate the emotional discomfort their practice sometimes incites, others like Lilia are challenged significantly by their social realities and are unfortunately unable to simply “release everything and leave it there.”

Recognizing these diverse experiences allows us to grasp the limitations of the collective that emerge in this context.157

Lilia remained absent from class for two months following my first encounter with her. Sandra mentioned to me that she had contacted Lilia several times but no one ever answered the phone at her house. When Lilia showed up to class one evening she looked very much like the first day I met her – tired and sad. Not much had improved. In fact, it seemed as if the situation at home with her mother had worsened and her own

157 Rosario and Lilia’s stories indicate that multiple (heterogeneous) groups or collectives emerge and operate within this space. 155 emotional stability had continued to deteriorate. Lilia was suffering from insomnia, depression and anxiety, taking psychotropic medications, and had been admitted overnight to a state psychiatric hospital for a nervous breakdown (un ataque de nervios).

One week prior to Lilia’s hospitalization her mother, who was also being medicated for depression, had mistakenly taken a small overdose of pills. The incident provoked much anger in her husband, who was at home when it occurred. He reminded Lilia that she

(rather than he) needed to take better care of her mother. Even her mother’s doctor, Lilia informed us, added to her anguish when he warned her that she would be incarcerated if

“something terrible happens” and her negligence was proven to be at fault.

Lilia attended class on a regular basis for a few weeks after her two-month recess by lying to her husband about her whereabouts. He would stay home with her mother while she was supposedly consulting a therapist at the YWC for her depression. In many ways, yoga did indeed become her weekly “medicine,” as she called it, and she became

Rosi’s patient. During the relaxation portion of each class Rosi massaged Lilia’s body to alleviate her anxiety (albeit temporarily), and on a couple of occasions she even traveled to Lilia’s house and provided her with hour-long therapies.158 In class Rosi pleaded with

Lilia to find “tranquility and peace,” which I would argue she found while resting her sleep-deprived body on the floor.

Her friends and I dedicated many hours over several weeks listening to her painful stories, watching her cry out of fear and desperation, comforting her with words of reassurance, and embracing her. We blamed the doctors for their ignorance and disrespectful behavior, the state institutions for their inadequate facilities and care, and

158 In her study of community health groups in Morelos, Schneider (2010:149) found that massages “provide a hands-on connection that is reassuring and soothing for [female participants] in crisis.” 156 the pharmaceuticals for their side effects. At the end of each class Lilia expressed her gratitude to us for helping her, in her words, “come back to life [volver a nacer].”

Although each of us offered our friend some form of social support that relieved her anguish temporarily, it was obvious to me when she suddenly ceased coming to class that we were limited in what we could do for and how we could care about her. Rosi, however, thought otherwise and took Lilia’s departure to be a promising indication that she had finally chosen to take care of herself. She explained to us that “it is easier sometimes to remain sick; people feel sorry for you and you receive attention. When you choose to be healthy you must resume your role in society: you must work, you must feed your husband, and you must take care of your children. Once in a while it is easier to be sick and have people take care of you.” For Rosi, Lilia’s engagement in self-care (as well as our engagement in her care) helped her gain the physical and emotional strength to resume her care for others. By no means did yoga give birth to new social conditions in

Lilia’s life. However, it did offer her a temporary respite from those realities and a group of fictive kin (sisters) who identified with her and showed her they cared about her physical pain and emotional sorrow.

In the last section of this chapter I turn to the ways these women extend care to something even greater than each other: their country. Leading the practitioners in a special prayer and meditation a few days prior to the presidential election of 2012, Rosi encouraged her girls to take care of their country’s health by voting. This experience, I suggest, reinforces yoga (and by extension self-care) as not only a socially but also culturally relevant practice to low-income Mexican women in Iztapalapa.



157

A Place to Care for Mexico, “Our Sister”

Scene 1: The Street

I had just completed an interview with Maria, a very friendly housewife in her early sixties who had been participating in yoga at the YWC for almost six years. She had a reputation for spreading laughter, particularly with the sexually provocative stories and jokes she shared with her friends. As we walked from her home to the Center, making our way across a large pedestrian concrete bridge that crossed one of the main avenues in

Iztapalapa, Maria suddenly called out to me to halt my movement. Had she not bellowed,

“Watch out! [¡Aguas!], I would have stepped directly into a pile of potato chips that were drenched in chili sauce. I took a large step over the mess and expected that we would immediately resume our pace. Maria had a different plan. She pulled out a small package of tissues from her handbag, hunched herself over the pile of chips on the concrete walkway, and cleaned up the mess. When she stood up, she shook her head in frustration and told me, “Andrea, this is what I do not like about my country. There are so many dirty people who do not take care of themselves [no se cuidan].”

Scene 2: Yoga Class

The room in the Center was steamier than usual one evening in late June of 2012, which was somewhat unusual given that only twelve of us were in attendance and Rosi ended our physical activities about fifteen minutes early to engage us in what she called a

“very special meditation.” I normally joined these meditations as a participant, but as soon as I heard Rosi utter the words, “Mexican Republic,” I opened my eyes as an observer and reached for my pen and notebook. I scribbled furiously, trying to remain focused on her words rather than on the darkness in the room, which made it terribly

158 difficult to see what I was writing. I include below a complete transcript of this meditative prayer, followed by my analysis, in order for readers to gain a better understanding of both Rosi’s message and mine.

Close your eyes and concentrate. Inhale deeply and exhale. Be conscious of how you breathe.

Visualize your Mexican Republic. Remember that it is in the shape of a cornucopia of abundance. Visualize this cornucopia of abundance that is Mexico. Now visualize your Federal District. Ask the Father to shower his gold light completely around the Republic and then ask that light to concentrate itself in this city and from there spread to all of the other states. Visualize that cornucopia of abundance that is Mexico. Visualize yourself taking the love you hold in your heart and sending it to your Republic, to your governing leaders, and towards your brothers who live in all of those states.

Now visualize those people who are competing to gain power, those people who want power. Ask the divine Father to send his light to the minds of those people. Ask the divine teacher to fill their hearts with light and love. Ask the Father to give them wisdom so that they may love their bodies and themselves.

Now ask the Father to give you the wisdom to be able to make a decision this weekend, that those decisions be good for you and for humanity. Visualize in this moment your Mexican Republic, that she is full of light. Visualize this light removing her darkness and that of your mind. Ask the Father to illuminate you in the moment you have to make a decision this weekend. Ask him to bring light to your mind, love to your heart, to your brothers, and to humanity. Do not only think of your well-being. Think of the well-being of all. Visualize the Mexican Republic completely full of light, peace, and love. Send this light to people, to humanity. May there be peace, harmony, and light for all of humanity.

And we say [together in unison]: One thought of peace every day. In me there is peace. I feel peace. The peace of the spirit is the peace of the land; the peace of the individual will be the peace of the world. Light in the mind, peace in the soul.

Be conscious of the words you are saying. They are a declaration. Your words manifest reality.

[Together in unison]: May there be light, that it may be God. Whomever it may be, may it manifest in each of my thoughts, in each of my words, in each of my deeds. May there be light, that it may be God. Whomever it may be, may it be and be for all of eternity, for my well-being, and that of my sister and humanity.

Inhale deeply, exhale and say [together in unison]: Peace.

Send light to our sister, the Mexican Republic, our country. Send this light, harmony and peace as well to our sister, Victoria. Let’s send this positive energy, love, forgiveness,

159 and harmony to our sister, our Victoria—that it illuminates her path and that of her family, that it illuminates our homes, that it calms her and her family.

Figure 31: Yoga practitioners engage in prayerful meditations at the Youth Wellness Center.

Rosi and her girls were quite concerned about Mexico’s future. They did not have to watch the evening news on television or listen to the radio to know that Mexico’s health was being jeopardized by rampant and brutal (drug war) violence taking place throughout the country (but mostly outside of the capital city). At almost every social gathering one of the women shared a story about some episode of violence and crime

(assaults, muggings, emotional abuse) that she or a friend (outside the group) had encountered. The woman Rosi identified in this prayer – Victoria – had herself become a victim of a home break-in and robbery only a few days prior to the class and had become quite afraid to leave her house. By incorporating group prayer and meditation regularly into their yoga practice, Rosi encourages her students to acknowledge their concerns and

160 address their fears collectively.

Many of the women recognized the fear, insecurity, and distrust they experienced from time to time as symptoms of a larger social disease, the roots of which they located in the (im)moral fabric of their nation’s leaders. These leaders, they claimed, did not care about the people (el pueblo), but only about power and the wealth they acquired from assuming it. In the weeks leading up to the 2012 presidential election several women mentioned to each other that they received phone calls and visits to their homes from representatives of political parties who offered them money, tortillas, and supermarket gift cards in exchange for their support. Most were openly critical of these interactions, but one woman commented to her friends that she had no choice but to accept the 500- peso ($45USD) gift card because, as she says, “sometimes you just need help.” Such acts of political corruption made many of the women so pessimistic about the prospects of the election that several of them had begun to question whether they would vote.

The only individual I heard speak in favor of voting was Rosi. She was supportive of her girls participating in their country’s electoral process (so as not to become victims of it), and she encouraged them to think carefully about the potential impact their decision to vote (or not) would have on the nation. Overwhelmed by the aggression she observed on television and in student protests across the city and dissatisfied with her own students’ growing indifference, she offered these women a tranquil moment to reflect on their responsibility to care for their country – that is, to “[t]hink of the well- being of all.” This guided meditation does not necessarily alter Mexico’s social realities, but it helps inspire many of these women to envision those realities differently and vote.

In this meditation Rosi urges her girls to embrace Mexico as one of them—a

161 sister—and visualize “her” well (that is, full of light, abundance, love, and peace).

Personifying and feminizing their country allows these women to identify it in terms of (a healthy) Self rather than (a sick) Other. In this way Mexico becomes part of the collective self (sisterhood) that Rosi crafts and reinforces in class through visualizations, meditative words, and prayerful recitations spoken in unison. Here, Rosi serves in many ways as a spiritual leader inspiring her congregation of sisters to follow a supposedly divine-driven mandate to “make a decision [to vote] this weekend.” They should do so not necessarily because they are citizens of Mexico but because they have adopted Mexico as their sister and “her” well-being relies on their care. We now can begin to understand the meaning of care that Maria (in the first scene above) alludes to after cleaning the dirty ground on which she and I walked. Taking care of Mexico implies taking care of the collective self

(articulated as a sisterhood), which these women cultivate through their practice of yoga both on and off the mat.

Enacting a self that is collective motivates these low-income yoga practitioners to offer support to others, which I have demonstrated in this chapter. However, it may also reinforce certain class distinctions that help them differentiate their character, values, and social standing from others in Iztapalapa and beyond. Indeed, many of the women consider themselves to be a select group of Mexicans who are, in their words, “pretty,”

“educated,” and “civilized” [gente bonita, educada, civilizada]. They arrive at this notion not because they do yoga per se, but because their yoga teaches them to care enough about each other, their families, and even their country to want to engage in self-care. In contrast to their overwhelmingly positive rendering of us is Maria’s criticism of them, those (Other) “dirty people [in Iztapalapa] who do not take care of themselves.” While

162

Maria and her friends welcome Mexico as their sister, the ethnographic vignettes I presented indicate that they do not always embrace every Mexican or every sister as “one of us” [gente como uno].



Conclusion

In this chapter, I heeded Guell’s (2012) call to broaden the analytical lens of ethnographic studies of self-care by investigating “self-care at the margins.” I situated self-care within wider public health narratives of autocuidado to highlight the importance of unpacking the concept of self-care and understanding how low-income yoga practitioners in Mexico City mobilize it. Even though many of the women in my study consider yoga a means for self-betterment and self-awareness, the self their care engages is fashioned as a social entity. In their practice, care of the self becomes care of the collective through efforts to cultivate (a clean, conflict-free) space, (a supportive, inclusive) sisterhood, and (a peaceful) nation. In this way, self-care is not just a personal exercise, but also a social one.

I have explained how a supposedly individual bodily practice entails a shared sense of responsibility among low-income women in Iztapalapa; the episodes of conflict I elaborated on in the first two sections showed how the collective (as shared space and a fictive familial group) is mobilized in self-care. Social relations foreground their practice, such that how well one cares for an other becomes a standard by which how well one ultimately cares for her self. Lilia’s story helped us to understand the uncomfortable tensions that many of these women must maneuver both on and off the mat. Self-care, I suggest, is necessarily fashioned as collective care in this space, though what this

163 collective can accomplish beyond it is considerably limited. Such limitations leave the women feeling helpless at times. In this way, yoga care is illustrative of both the

(collective) limitations and (individual) potentials of autocuidado.

State authorities I spoke to do not always understand that it is not feasible for women, like Rosario and Lilia, to “be responsible for their health” and “take care of themselves,” given that they often have other pressing concerns for which to care. By invoking the collective in their practice, however, low-income Mexican women are able to negotiate some of the guilt surrounding their engagement with self. Going to yoga class, when leaving a sick grandchild at home or defying a husband’s wishes, becomes more personally and socially acceptable if, as one woman notes of her participation, “My sisters need me.” In other words, care of the self is justified by and enacted in relation to collective care. Self-care in Iztapalapa does not therefore simply involve the collective; it in fact depends on it.

This chapter is intended to offer public health officials in Mexico a more complex rendering of self-care. Informal conversations with Mexican public health workers suggest that some of them recognize (at least off-the-record) the collective nature of self- care, yet they often struggle to promote it as such in practice. The larger neoliberal discourse of autocuidado that structures their work unfortunately continues to reinforce the (erroneous) notion that health, illness, and care are matters that all individuals in contemporary Mexico—regardless of social difference—can manage on their own.

Future ethnographic research that works towards unpacking other government health reform concepts (like choice and lifestyle) through the lens of inequality may provide us with additional insight into how particular groups manage their vulnerable life

164 circumstances as best as they can.

165

CONCLUSION: YOGA’S POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

When I first arrived to Mexico City in 2010, a friend of mine took me out to lunch to welcome me to the city. He was a high-ranking public servant and was quite surprised to learn that I had chosen to study yoga in Mexico and that I had received external funding to do so. I told him that I believed yoga was more than just a private bodily exercise. He laughed. He admitted to me that he did not know much about the practice, but tried to convince me that it was “just a fad and [would] go out of style soon.” Like others before him, he was convinced that my project was neither socially nor politically significant. Fortunately, I did not pay attention to these naysayers. What we glean from this dissertation is that yoga is not only a personal exercise; it is also a social and political one, with both individual and collective effects. Today, I am even more convinced of this.

When I left Mexico City to return to the United States in late November 2012,

President Calderón and Mayor Ebrard were preparing to leave their posts in public service. I was particularly concerned about Ebrard’s departure. He had been especially committed to promoting programs that supported his “Capital in Motion [Capital en

Movimiento] campaign, which he launched in 2007 to improve the city’s image through public investments in recovering public space (Quintero 2007). I asked Rosi and some of my other friends in Iztapalapa if they were at all concerned about the future of their practice, given the new leaders who would be coming into power soon. My friends

166 laughed at me for asking such a silly question. With her usual bravado, Sandra explained to me that, “if they know what’s best for them, [the new officials] will keep yoga,” which insinuated that she would not vote for the same political party in the next election.

Both federal and local officials have not let Sandra down. In fact, yoga’s presence in Mexico City parks, streets, and city plazas seems to be flourishing even more today than it was when I lived there. Recently, on January 26, 2014, an elite group convened the largest public yoga class in Mexico City’s history. No one is certain just how many people attended the class on the famous Reforma Avenue at the Angel of Independence statue, but some estimates suggest that between 10,000 and 20,000 Mexicans participated

(Sarabia 2014).159 The numbers of people in attendance did not nearly grab as much of my attention as a headline that appeared in a local newspaper the day after the yoga class:

“They Invade Reforma with Yoga” (Sarabia 2014).

Figures 32 and 33: “They Invade Reforma with Yoga” on January 26, 2014.160

159 See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuJ1ZHxdtaA, accessed 1 March 2014.

160 These photographs were posted on social media sites; accessed 24 March 2014. 167

Reforma Avenue has been the site of many organized marches and other so-called invasions in Mexico’s history. Teachers and their union leaders recently marched along the avenue near the Monument of Revolution to openly protest new education reforms that President Peña Nieto instituted. My friends who live nearby in middle-class neighborhoods complain incessantly about the inconveniences that those invasions and those invaders provoke with street closings, for example. The yoga invasion entailed a different story.

Indeed, this was the first time I had ever observed the media reference yoga leaders and their practitioners as an invasive (political?) force. In a public announcement that aired prior to the event, yoga leaders invited people to join their efforts “to improve health and wellbeing on all levels.” Theirs, they explained, was an “event dedicated to peace, community[,] and the healing of Mexico.”161 These goals were similar to those expressed by most of the federal and local bureaucrats I spoke to in my field study. In a light-hearted manner, one civil servant shared his belief with me that yoga would “help avoid a revolution in Mexico.” The organizers of this massive yoga class would probably not disagree with his assessment. In many ways, theirs was an outward protest of the insecurity and violence in their country, but one that was directed inward through body movements, laughter, chanting, and prayer. In other words, they located solutions to social problems in individual bodies. While I take issue with this approach for many reasons, which I articulate below, I have come to understand through this study that individuals and communities are constituted in relation to and with other persons and groups. Are these yoga leaders simply trying to help others help themselves, or are they trying to accomplish something greater?

161 See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjca-gmYvzY, accessed 1 March 2014. 168

In many ways, what transpired during and after the yoga class was an invasion of body and mind. It began in 2010 when the same elite group convened its first mass-level event in the Zócalo, followed by others in each of the years that followed. The 2014 class on Reforma was led by the yoga group’s principal founder and teacher who flew in from the United States where he resides. International and national media represented the event as an inclusive activity, with men and women of all ages “uniting to bring light…and good energy to the City and its residents.” With the exception of a few cyclists who were annoyed that their early Sunday morning ride along Reforma had been interrupted by the practitioners, journalists reported that residents were unequivocally impressed by what they experienced. Some openly expressed their surprise “to see so many people willing to dedicate themselves to be better people and above all in the City.” A man from Ciudad

Neza, the same destitute area where Erik previously resided, said that he and his family participated in an effort “to move energy in the sense of improving [ourselves] as persons, being more positive, and transmitting happiness [to others].”162 Just a few days following the yoga invasion on Reforma, Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera announced that there would be free yoga classes offered every Sunday morning at the Angel of

Independence as part of a new weekly “Yoga-Mexico City” program—because, as he put it, “the citizens are asking for it.”163

Politicians and bureaucrats are seeking yoga, too, using it to circulate particular representations of the city (as peaceful), of its people (as tranquil and self-sufficient), and

162 These quotes appear in Sarabia (2014).

163 See: http://www.agu.df.gob.mx/sintesis/index.php/habra-yoga-en-reforma-todos-los-domingos/, accessed 1 March 2014. 169 even of themselves.164 Many high-ranking Mexico City officials participate in the classes each Sunday, expressing to journalists their own desires to lose weight and relieve stress.

Photographs of them wearing T-shirts, sweatpants, and sometimes struggling with poses appear in Mexican newspapers the following day. This kind of publicity provides these leaders with an opportunity to be seen as any other ordinary citizen whose body moves next to theirs. In Chapter 1, we observed wealthy Mexican business leaders and celebrities mobilizing similar strategies to conceal social difference and privilege. Images that broadcast social sameness and union are fashioned effectively by political leaders who line Reforma Avenue each Sunday with colorful yoga mats that prominently display

Mexico City’s government logo.

Like all of the characters in the stories I narrated in this dissertation, these politicians mobilize yoga and its all-inclusive rhetoric to move bodies in a socially desirable fashion. Classes are taught each week by elite instructors.165 In a recent city government publication that provides general information about yoga and the “Yoga-

Mexico City” program, one group’s approach and philosophies are highlighted. One of the group’s leaders makes a claim in the brochure that “between 70 and 80 percent of an individual’s health is due to the way [s/he] breathes, which is why yoga can have a very important role for those who practice it.”166 This statement frames illness/health as a personal responsibility—one that is grounded in that which sustains our very life (our breath). By endorsing this statement, local government authorities are promoting self-care

164 See: http://indeporte.mx/clase-de-yoga/, accessed 1 March 2014.

165 These networks of elite instructors are not the same ones I discussed in Chapter 1.

166 These quotes are taken from a government booklet, “Yoga CDMX: espacio de armonía en tu ciudad.” Photographs of each page of the publication were posted on social media sites; accessed 24 March 2014. 170 not only as a means to be a better person, but also as the very foundation on which life rests. Further, in its effort to cultivate “tranquility and peace” in Mexico, the very life of the nation becomes a pressing concern for state-sponsored self-care.167 After reading this analysis and perhaps attending a class, I doubt that my high-ranking official-friend will still be able to say that yoga is just a fad. Its presence in city streets, state prisons, health institutes, cultural centers, schools, on television, and so on, is politically motivated.168

Here, what is personal becomes political, and what is political becomes personal.

The organizers of the “Yoga-Mexico City” yoga classes, the politicians who support them, and those citizens who desire free yoga classes may have won the invasion on Reforma. Their program seems to be having a tremendous impact on the population, as thousands continue to participate each Sunday. Yet, not everyone who would like to participate can do so. My teacher Rosi, for example, will not be able to partake in any of these free (elite-directed) classes; she has to work on Sunday mornings. Providing “the citizens” access to yoga by making it available for free does not necessarily guarantee social inclusion.

Practitioner testimonials that appear in government publications speak to the physical, emotional, and even spiritual benefits of the classes. While it is important to recognize these gains, we should not assume that some ideal health outcome will be achieved by everyone who engages in the practice of yoga (self-care). Cures for social illness are not so simple. It would be important, for example, to find out whether practitioners doing yoga in the street also have access to medicines, quality health care,

167 See: http://indeporte.mx/clase-de-yoga/, accessed 1 March 2014.

168 Whether yoga is mobilized as a form of “hidden or covert” resistance (Gutmann 2002) is outside the scope of this dissertation, but provides analytical fodder for future studies. 171 affordable housing, and so on. Given that most people do not live in complete isolation from others, it would also be helpful to know how other people (friends, family, co- workers, etc.) in practitioners’ lives shape how they attend to or care for their own and others’ bodies.

To better understand the social and political implications of yoga care in Mexico, my study encourages Mexico City politicians and yoga leaders to recognize that state- sponsored programs in self-care often obscure the structural inequalities

(un/underemployment; poor health care, living conditions, education; U.S.-Mexico relations; and so on) that undergird much of the malaise in Mexico (and many of the problems my interlocutors encounter in their lives). Yoga’s state-endorsed popularity is not necessarily on the rise because “the people” want yoga (though some may), as Mayor

Mancera claims, but because it is a cheap, quick-fix alternative to providing quality education, health care, job security, etc. When that which is personal is not readily recognized as political among politicians and yoga leaders, it may be easier for governments (and others) to overlook the effects of power relations and continue to frame solutions to social problems, exclusions, and inequities in terms of the personal.

Likewise, when scholars and laypersons are reticent to consider the political in the realm of the personal, it may be easier for some to dismiss the social and political impact of policies and programs that supposedly only impact the individual. State-sponsored yoga, as my study has demonstrated, both blurs and reinforces class distinctions and boundaries among Mexicans. This dynamic, in turn, exposes the constrained or manipulated potentials for social mobility in Mexico. By exposing yoga’s uneven spaces, relations,

172 and constrained motions, in addition to revealing its social possibilities, the intersections between the political and the personal emerge.

In sum, my analysis of yoga’s production, promotion, and practice has demonstrated how Mexicans’ efforts to manage their own bodies (and those of others) offer limited, though potentially transformative, effects on the social body (as it is enacted in public and mediated spaces, professionalizing activities, precarious labor pursuits, health services, etc.). These enactments are shaped by, as well as shaping, the wider body politic. This dissertation makes clear that self-care is not only a personal exercise, but also a social and political one. The ways in which diverse actors engage and attend to the body (in its multiple forms) are ways they articulate support for and/or contestations of different forms of power (see Patico 2008:9). Yoga is mobilized on the mat by people hoping to transform their lives, their relations with others, and sometimes even Mexico itself. The challenges they face while trying to realize these transformations off the mat remind them, however, that change encompasses uneven, constrained, and conditional dynamics. Yoga therefore does not undo class, as some of my interlocutors may claim. On the contrary, it reveals the transient dimensions of class I discuss throughout this work, offering relational possibilities in one moment and exposing their limitations in another. In this way, yoga consolidates as well as differentiates; it includes as well as excludes.

I cannot predict the future for yoga in Mexico. However, I am quite certain that as long as Mexicans are struggling with the effects of social and economic inequalities and crises, and as long as yoga is promoted by its supporters as cheap(er) self-care, it will continue to flourish for quite some time.

173

APPENDIX A: Notes on the Use and Representation of Class in the Study of Bodily Self-Care

The histories, spaces, persons, struggles, triumphs, aspirations, and activities that I write about in this dissertation complicate our understandings of social mobility, class relations, and bodily self-care as they are (re)shaped through yoga services in Mexico

City. Below, I present some of the theoretical strands of knowledge that have contributed to my analysis and shaped my use and representation of class more broadly.

First, however, I will need to take a quick detour and discuss the body, specifically an encounter I had with my own body’s immobility. In my second year of fieldwork I lost complete mobility in my right foot. It happened without warning in early

2012 inside one of the metro stations in Mexico City. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sharp sensation of pain that penetrated my foot and traveled up my calf. It was so unbearable that I collapsed to the ground and had to be helped outside by strangers. I was eventually diagnosed with a severe case of tendinitis and plantar fasciitis and instructed by my doctors to cease all fieldwork activities and movements throughout the city for at least six weeks. Being confined to my apartment for so long (while knowing I had people to talk to and things to do) left me feeling helpless and vulnerable. I felt stifled by my own body’s immobility. My body became my prison.

Experiencing my body as something that my life had become subject to reminds me of how class has sometimes been conceptualized and represented by scholars who

174 subscribe to materialist-oriented frameworks. Paul Farmer (1992; 1999; 2005), for example, reduces class to an asymmetrical relation of power that conditions people’s lives. Those who specifically “occup[y] the bottom rung of the social ladder” (Farmer

1996:263) are thus limited in their agentive capacity to overcome the effects of poverty and other forms of structural violence.169 Poverty is what Farmer identifies as the “social machinery of oppression” (ibid:263), both generating and being generated by inequities, exclusions, and invidious social relations among those he refers broadly to as “the poor.”

In short, poverty makes the poor socially and sometimes physically immobile. Despite his intentions to “bear witness” to these victims’ afflictions, readers may well question whether his accounts capture the heterogeneity of a (singular) life experience of poverty, given that what is largely absent from “their stories” are their own understandings of their suffering (ibid:271). It is ironic that studies which aim to denaturalize and therefore politicize class often render it as something inevitable (much as I had envisioned my own physical body).

Chapters 3 and 4 of this dissertation hone in on the diversity of “the poor,” or those whom I refer to as the popular or working classes. Other chapters discuss other classes and/or relations between classes (see Chapters 1 and 2). I do not discount the importance of materialist-oriented visions of class; I simply do not prioritize structural or objective variables (e.g., income, occupation) to the detriment of others when defining any class. Instead, I draw in part on Bourdieu’s notion that classes “do not exist as real

[i.e., material] groups,” but rather as “practical groups, in families…[and] associations”—what he identifies specifically as “space[s] of relationships” (1985: 725).

169 Latin American liberation theology movements in the 1960s coined the term to refer broadly to social structures of poverty, gender and ethnic inequalities, and other forms of institutionalized marginalization. 175

Classes as relational spaces with relational boundaries consist of individuals who have similar values, interests, material conditions, and status, and therefore “have every likelihood of…producing similar practices and adopting similar stances” (ibid:725).

However, as my work demonstrates, social sameness is based largely on perception and must be constantly (re)negotiated; when similarities are questioned and differences are exposed, conflicts between and among classes can and do arise. In this way, my study also follows Butler’s call to convey the “temporality of positions themselves” and the performances that, according to her, are central to the production and reproduction of

“class positions” (1999:124).170

From these perspectives, social classes (as an analytical construct) are therefore neither stable nor given. They are “relationally constituted[,]…defin[ing] themselves always in implicit reference to the other[s]” (Ortner 1991:172). Constructed and reconstructed spatially, temporally, and relationally, classes do not constitute real positions to occupy, places on which to stand, statuses to perform, or expressions to behave (a la Nutini). Yet people talk about, experience, and enact them in real relations and interactions. Social class (along with other related concepts) is therefore born into social existence as a lived experience and relation.

In this dissertation I elucidate the limits and potentials of social mobility as it surfaces in lived relations and acts associated with the production, promotion, and practice of bodily self-care. For many yoga practitioners, their engagements with the body (both theirs and others) encompass aspirations for, frustrations with, and/or contestations of mobility or transition. Gilbert (2007:15) gestures subtly towards this idea

170 Leaving the past analytically unattended when studying class (or any social form) can unintentionally reduce social positions to seemingly fixed identities with no history (see Csordas 1994; Jackson 1996). 176 of transition when he makes reference to a “transitional class” among the urban popular sectors of Mexico. He observes that this group “may well have middle-class backgrounds and middle-class ambitions,” but because they earn “less than middle-class incomes,” he leaves these households out of his analysis of “the middle class.” Instead of dismissing people’s life experiences and histories when they do not fit neatly into our lifeless categories, it might be more productive to reshape our concepts according to real lives

(Gutmann 2002: xxvii). Heiman et al. (2012) echo this sentiment in their work when they encourage scholars to “maintain a constant balance between the heuristic idea of class, as expressed in our theoretical conceptions, and the lived experience of class, as documented ethnographically in all of its multiplicity” (12).

One way of getting beyond the inertia of class as an analytical abstraction is to explore it at the site of bodily engagements with self-care. In this way, my study is attentive to both the structural inequities that shape class relations and mobility, and subjects’ perceptions, narratives, and lived experiences of these conditions. Instructors and practitioners of yoga services in Mexico are manipulating bodies and impacting lives, albeit in uneven ways. Many of their activities, which I discuss in each chapter, involve efforts to reposition social boundaries, obscure social difference, and reshape social relations; hence, manipulate the social (class) body.171 Some of these efforts are more successful than others. In this context, social mobility (or what I refer to here as social

171 The body, as Scheper-Hughes (1992) elucidates, crosses over multiple boundaries of the material, symbolic, existential, moral, and political. Using the concept of the “mindful body” to understand how social and cultural interactions shape people’s experience, she explores the intersections between the existential body personal (i.e., women’s perceptions of their own bodies/ those of their babies) and the representational body social (i.e., the symbolic meanings and images of assigning personhood to infants). She recognizes that this “mindful body” is inscribed by power (“the body politics”) in the Foucauldian sense (see also Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Thus, the (re)production of particular sentiments “down to the feel of one’s body” (ibid: 185)—conceptualized in both personal and interpersonal terms—ultimately supports the “hidden political agendas” (ibid:412) that underlie the use (and abuse) of bodies as a technique to discipline and manage individuals (Foucault 1977, 1979). 177 transitioning) is experienced as a lived relational shift. While some people’s personal, interpersonal, and work lives are being reshaped by the social exchanges that emerge in yoga’s production, promotion, and practice, they are also being reshaped by wider relations that exceed their control.172 Terms like “aspiring middle-class professional” (see

Chapter 2) and “working-class transitioner” (see Chapter 3) are thus meant to index the lived motions and transitions that some of these interactions entail. Thinking of class in terms of embodied relations and lived transitions allows us to think of it as a potentially transformative social experience. Thus, “[c]lass lies neither in structures nor in agency alone but in their relationship as it is historically produced, reproduced, and transformed”

(Wacquant 1991:51; see also Heiman et al. 2012: 9).



Another way to activate the motions of class is through writing. One book in particular offers us direction in terms of capturing (classed) bodies and practices effectively through “carnal” ethnographic forms of representation. In Body & Soul,

Wacquant (2004) draws on phenomenological and aesthetic language to capture the felt expression of being immersed physically and socially in an inner-city Chicago boxing gym for three years. We are drawn into the rhythm and space of boxing with his use of vivid descriptors and photographs positioned throughout the book. His ultimate aim is not just to “display and demonstrate” the practice of this “bodily craft,” but to suggest “in the same move the social and sensual logic that informs [it]” (ibid: 7). Indeed, he reveals the body itself as a physical and social agent that contributes to the environment that envelops and sustains it. I try to emulate his style when writing about yoga participants’

172 My analysis accounts for relations of power, but recognizes that power is not necessarily stable or unidirectional. 178 experiences of the practice (see Chapter 4).173

Wacquant’s theories and methodologies inform my analysis of class and bodily practice of self-care. Much like boxers who use their bodies as sensual instruments of labor in the ring, ethnographers like me who explore practices like yoga must learn to engage our bodies fully, “surrender[ing] to the exigencies of the field” (ibid:11) of practice, yet also remain, in Scheper-Hughes’ words, “respectfully distanced”

(1992:343).174 Wacquant (2004: viii) suggests that “deploying the body as [a] tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge” is valuable to our ethnographic tasks and understandings. Interestingly, it was when my body became immobile that I began to even notice it and deploy it as a tool. In the same way that “it is not possible to learn how to box on paper,” (ibid: 100), it is difficult to get a handle on class if it is only considered in objective or material form. Much like yoga and boxing, class, too, exists in lived desires, frustrations, relations, and movement.

By positioning narratives and photographs strategically throughout the dissertation, I invite readers to engage closely with yoga’s bodily manipulations and yoga leaders and practitioners’ efforts to obfuscate and/or reveal social difference in Mexico.

At other times, I engage in a “more experience-distant investigation” (Biehl 2007: 3) to draw us towards some of the power dynamics that move and manipulate my subjects and others. By holding diverse truths and perspectives in tension, my study illuminates the structural, social, and embodied processes by which class—as a relational, political,

173 One of my intentions in Chapter 4 is to produce a moving piece that renders the women whom I write about as real human beings who do their best to make do amid the conditions of possibility in which they live. On one hand their lives are shaped by their social conditions. Yet, on the other hand, the corporeal movements that arise in what feels like a “natural” domain of being and becoming offer these practitioners some, albeit fleeting, sense of agency over their bodies and lives. In many ways, yogis, like boxers, exist “only in action, and in the traces that this action leaves within (and upon) [the body]” (Wacquant 2004: 59).

174 I discussed the challenges of being a participant-observer of yoga in note 55 above. 179 historical, and transformative dynamic—is (re)made.



By way of conclusion, I reflect on some insights offered to us by a number of influential social theorists. In “The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris

Workshop),” Bourdieu argues that one of the most significant, yet largely overlooked, aspects of social scientific research is “the construction of the object”—a process whereby “the most ‘empirical’ technical choices cannot be disentangled from the most

‘theoretical’ choices” (1992: 224, 225, 248). He suggests that scientists have created an illusion that new knowledge is produced, when only modified models of thinking are actually generated, passed down from one generation of scholars to the next. He thus encourages his students to be aware of the theoretical paradigms they use to frame their views and to be mindful that they do not “mistake scientific rigidity…for scientific rigor”

(ibid: 227). Such intellectual inflexibility stifles creativity and inhibits us from challenging assumptions and refining concepts that have become overly “fetishized” in our science and detached from the very practice of the activities we analyze (ibid: 227-

228).

Practice, Bourdieu argues, offers us the potential to transform our traditional roles in the field as detached observers and also become, somewhat like his student, Wacquant, a “new person” with a “whole [new] vision of the social world” (ibid: 251). Wacquant calls this radical practice of sociology (and anthropology) a lived experience. The product of such practice, for Bourdieu, is “to render acceptable the gap between the objective truth of the world and the lived truth of what we are and what we do in it” (ibid: 255).

Indeed, “the whole truth of the social world” is a “double truth, objective and subjective”

(ibid: 255). This dissertation considers both the object/objectivity and subject/subjectivity 180 of class and embodied self-care. In doing so, it makes some strides to complicate our understandings of both.

Examining social truths from an historical perspective, Taussig (1987), like

Foucault, recognizes that power is located in organizational structures of authority that control the production of discursive hegemonies, but he goes one step further to explore the ways agents within such structures can exercise their power to create counter discourses—which he identifies as spaces of “illumination” and “transformation” (ibid: 4,

7). I would thus argue that social scientists have a responsibility to engage critically and reflexively with the representational forms they employ in their writing. For example, in

“writing effectively against [the objectification of] terror,” Taussig suggests we match our “form of expression…[with] the forms expressed,” and challenge “soulless” totalizing logic that explains them (away) (ibid: 3, 30, 19).175 Such logic would imply that

“people become like things” and “things become agents of terror,” erasing people’s individual agency and subjectivity (ibid: 6). In an effort to avoid presenting monolithic explanations and representations of class and self-care, I, too, attempt to move beyond reified and packaged concepts. In this way, the reader comes to feel how diverse individuals and groups in Mexico City are actively involved in the “making…and endless unraveling and remaking” of class (Walker 2013: 4). Regardless of the approach to which scholars subscribe, it seems all too clear that the ways in which we represent class (and self-care) will contribute to how we grasp its movements in the future.

175 Even with Taussig’s (1987) desire to write against totalizing discourses of terror, he does not help us move beyond abstractions that render Indians as a powerless collective body of victims. This may be precisely the point he needs to make in order to sustain his fearsome vision of the “culture of terror” and “space of death,” and to elaborate on the importance of counter narratives, which do not so much contradict this vision as they do complicate it. 181

APPENDIX B: Notes on Mexico’s Middle Classes

Historical research of Mexico indicates that it is no longer useful to speak of “the middle class” as a singular entity. A more fruitful approach “to convey the array of indicators, identities, and ideas that define this protean group of people” in Mexico uses the plural, “middle classes” (Walker 2013: 3).176 In this way, scholars distinguish between “old” and “new” middle classes, which coexist today (albeit uneasily) (Heiman et al. 2012: 13). As I mentioned in the Introduction, the older middle classes consolidated in many countries across Latin America after WWII in response to a number of government reforms aimed at expanding the state’s role as both an employer and subsidizer of urban development (Escobar Latapí and Roberts 1991: 97). Educated, employed, and protected by the state, these “traditional middle classes,” as Harvey (2005:

62) calls them, fell victim to successive economic crises that began in the 1970s. Their dreams of upward mobility ruptured as job security in the public sector waned and economic instability threatened their sense of social privilege as university-educated professionals (Walker 2013:13-14; 201).177 In the post-1980 neoliberal turn, “they now became the ‘old,’ declining middle class[es], supplanted by...[the] ‘new’ middle class[es]

176 See Heiman et al. 2012; López and Weinstein 2012; and Shakow (in press) for similar views in other contexts.

177 University education, according to Walker, “was no longer a guarantee of upward mobility [in the 1970s,] as the likelihood of a secure [middle-income] job in the state bureaucracies diminished” (2013:13). 182 of self-employed entrepreneurs large and small,” particularly in the area of services

(Parker 2013:13). These “dual (dueling) middle classes represent different visions of the state” (Heiman et al. 2012: 14), helping us to understand why the middle classes in contemporary Mexico may relate differently to the state apparatus.178

178 Cahn (2008) and I both studied groups that represent these “new middle classes,” given the type of entrepreneurial work each group engaged. Lived experiences, however, do not always map neatly onto analytical categories, which, in this case, delineate old middle classes “by education and stable employment in the public sector” and new middle classes by “their income and possessions” (Parker 2013:13). 183

APPENDIX C: Defining Self-Care in Mexico

Although self-care as a public health strategy in Mexico generally holds individuals responsible for managing their own health, local scholars indicate that the individual is only one actor among many involved in its practice. This scholarship distinguishes between two models of self-care: autocuidado and autoatención (literally, self-attention) (Menéndez 2009: 52-54; Haro Encinas 2000). Autoatención encompasses the everyday preventive, therapeutic, and palliative practices that particular groups (e.g., the domestic unit) employ to respond to members’ health concerns, without any direct intervention of professional healers (Menéndez 2009: 52). Oriented toward “collective health,” autoatención takes into account the social experiences, relations, and processes that inform health and illness (ibid: 54). Autocuidado, on the other hand, frames health / illness / care as a lifestyle choice fashioned solely by the individual. For Menéndez, autocuidado represents a component of, rather than an equivalent to, the collective practice of autoatención (ibid: 54).

Other Mexican scholars have delineated these two pillars of self-care differently.

Haro Encinas (2000:105), for example, employs “the concept of autocuidado/autoatención” to suggest that each term is co-constitutive of and synonymous with the other. In his schema, autocuidado encompasses the practices used by individuals and households to promote health and prevent illness, while autoatención

184 refers to the collective activities that are enacted in and beyond the domestic sphere (ibid:

114). Public health researchers in Mexico City, citing Haro Encinas (2000), use both terms in their study, but do so interchangeably to refer to a variety of home remedies, physical activities, informal networks, and self-medication practices that individuals mobilize in response to their illnesses (Berenzon Gorn et al. 2009). Practices of self- care—whether identified in the study as autocuidado or autoatención—are considered to be constituted by and for a solitary self (ibid: 114). To eliminate some of the confusion that has arisen over the use of such terminology, I do not make reference to the concept of autoatención in this dissertation. When I write about autocuidado, I am referring specifically to how the concept of self-care is employed by public health in contemporary

Mexico (similar to how Menéndez [2009] frames it) and refashioned by yoga practitioners in Iztapalapa (see Chapter 4).

185

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albanese, Catherine 2007 Introduction: Awash in a Sea of Metaphysics. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75(3):582-588.

Aldred, Lisa 2002 “Money Is Just Spiritual Energy”: Incorporating the New Age. Journal of Popular Culture 35(4):61-74.

Alvarado Mendoza, Arturo 2007 Estimating Crime in Mexico City. Lecture presented at The Urban Studies DUG Conference. Brown University, Providence, 9 March, 2007.

Alvarado Rodríguez, Pilar, and Miguel J. Hernández Madrid 2003 Manos que sanan, corazones encendidos: creencias y prácticas terapéuticas del Reiki en una sociedad del occidente de México. In Miguel J. Hernández Madrid and Elizabeth Juárez Cerdi (eds.), Religión y Cultura: Crisol de Transformaciones. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán / Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología.

Archibold, Randal C. 2011 Bodies Found Beheaded in Assaults in Acapulco. New York Times, January 9: A8.

Arteaga, José Manuel 2011 Crece riesgo de ser asesinado, alertan. El Universal, 31 October. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/primera/38050.html (accessed December 28, 2012).

Arteaga, José Manuel, and Ixel Yutzil González 2009 Pobreza pisa a clase media. El Universal, 26 February. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/finanzas/69399.html (accessed March 1, 2009).

Avilés, Karina 2012 México, segundo lugar de la OCDE en ninis, con 7 millones 820 mil. La Jornada, 12 March. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/03/12/sociedad/042n1soc (accessed February 17, 2014).

186

Badone, Ellen 2008 Illness, Biomedicine, and Alternative Healing in Brittany, France. Medical Anthropology 27(2):190-218.

Baer, Hans 2001 Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2002 The Growing Interest of Biomedicine in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: A Critical Perspective. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16(4):403- 405. 2004 Toward an Integrative Medicine: Merging Alternative Therapies with Biomedicine. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. 2008 The Emergence of Integrative Medicine in Australia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(1):52-66.

Bassols, Mario, Roberto Donoso, Alejandra Massolo, and Alejandra Méndez, eds. 1988 Antología de Sociología Urbana. Mexico: UNAM.

Bateson, Gregory 1970 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.

Beals, Ralph L. 1953 Social Stratification in Latin America. The American Journal of Sociology 58(4): 327-339.

Berenzon Gorn, Shoshana, Alanís Navarro, Sarahí, and Saavedra Solano, Nayelhi 2009 El uso de las terapias alternativas y complementarias en población mexicana con trastornos depresivos y de ansiedad. Resultados de una encuesta en la Ciudad de México. Salud Mental 32(2):107-115.

Biehl, João 2007 Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Biehl, João, and Amy Moran-Thomas 2009 Symptom: Subjectivities, Social Ills, Technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 267-88.

Biswas, Padmini 2012 Social Sutra: Yoga, Identity, and Health in New York’s Changing Neighborhoods. Health, Culture and Society 3(1):96-111.

Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo 1988 Los conceptos de diferencia y subordinación en el estudio de las culturas populares. In Teoría e investigación en la antropología social mexicana. [Ed. not noted.] Pp. 97-108. Mexico City: CIESAS.

187

Bourdieu, Pierre 1978 Sport and Social Class. Social Science Information 17(6):819-840. 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1985 The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 14(6): 723-744. 1992 The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris Workshop). In P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant (eds.), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Pp. 217-260. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Brandes, Stanley 2002 Staying Sober in Mexico City. Austin: The University of Texas Press.

Briggs, Charles (with Clara Mantini-Briggs) 2003 Stories in the Time of Cholera. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004 Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic. American Ethnologist 31(2): 164-187.

Brown, Callum 2007 Secularization, the Growth of Militancy and the Spiritual Revolution: Religious Change and Gender Power in Britain, 1901-2001. Historical Research 80(209): 393-418.

Butler, Judith 1999 Performativity’s Social Magic. In Richard Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Pp. 113-128. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 2008 Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time. The British Journal of Sociology 59:1- 23.

Cabrales Barajas, Luis Felipe and Elia Canosa Zamora 2001 Segregación residencial y fragmentación urbana: los fraccionamientos cerrados en Guadalajara.” Espiral, Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad. Vol. VII (20):223-253.

Cahn, Peter S. 2006 Building Down and Dreaming Up: Finding Faith in a Mexican Multilevel Marketer. American Ethnologist 33(1): 126-142. 2008 Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico. Cultural Anthropology 23(3): 429-452.

Caldeira, Teresa 1999 Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation. In J. Holston (ed.), Cities and Citizenship. Pp.114-38. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

188

2008 From Modernism to Neoliberalism in São Paulo: Reconfiguring the City and its Citizens. In A. Huyssen (ed.), Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Pp. 51-77. Durham: Duke University Press.

Camp, Roderic A. 2003 Informal and Formal Networking among Elite Mexican Capitalists and Politicians. In Mattei Dogan (ed.), Elite Configuration at the Apex of Power. Pp. 136-154. Leiden: Brill.

Cardaci, Dora 1999 Promoción de la salud: ¿cambio cultural o nueva retórica? In M. Bronfman and R. Castro (eds.), Salud, cambio social y política. Perspectivas desde América Latina. Pp. 403-413. México: Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública y Foro Internacional de Ciencias Sociales y Salud.

Carlisle, Susan 1996 Boundaries in France. In Deborah Pellow (ed.), Setting Boundaries: The Anthropology of Spatial and Social Organization. Pp. 37-54. Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

Carrette, Jeremy, and Richard King 2005 Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge.

Carrillo, Héctor 2002 The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cline, Howard F. 1962 Mexico: Revolution to Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12(2): 291-343. 2003 Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction. Ethnography 4(2):147-179.

Csordas, Thomas J., ed. 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Das, Veena 2007 Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

189

Dawson, Andrew 2007 New Era – New Religions: Religious Transformation in Contemporary Brazil. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited. de Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. de la Peña, Guillermo 2000 Corrupción e informalidad. In Claudio Lomnitz (ed.), Vicios públicos, virtudes privadas: la corrupción en México. Pp. 113-128. México, D.F.: CIESAS / Miguel Ángel Porrúa. de la Peña, Guillermo, and Renée de la Torre 1994 Identidades urbanas al final del milenio. CIUDADES 22:24-31. de la Torre, Renée 2006 Circuitos mass mediáticos de la oferta neoesotérica: new age y neomagia popular en Guadalajara. Alteridades 16(32):29-41. de la Torre, Renée, and Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga, eds. 2007 Atlas de la diversidad religiosa en México. Zapopan: El Colegio de Jalisco / El Colegio de la Frontera Norte A.C. / CIESAS-DF / El Colegio de Michoacán / Secretaría de Gobernación / Universidad de Quintana Roo.

Delfabro, María 2011 El yoga como elemento de identidad y recurso adaptativo en la cárcel de Atlacholoaya, Estado de Morelos, México. Tesis de Licenciatura. México, D.F.: Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. del Val Blanco, Enrique 2009 Generación “ni-ni”. El Universal, 18 August. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/editoriales/45283.html (accessed January 5, 2011).

Edmonds, Alexander 2007 “The Poor Have the Right to Be Beautiful”: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13: 363-381. 2010 Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.

Eineigel, Susanne 2012 Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City’s Middle Class, 1915-1928. In Ricardo A. López and Barbara Weinstein (eds.), The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Pp.253-266. Durham: Duke University Press.

190

Elias, Norbert, and John L. Scotson 1994 The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems. London: Sage.

Encinas, Alejandro 2009 Ni empleo ni salarios. El Universal, 31 January. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/editoriales/vi_42786.html (accessed February 1, 2009).

Escobar Latapí, Agustín 2001 Nuevos modelos económicos: ¿nuevos sistemas de movilidad social? CEPAL- SERIE Políticas sociales, No. 50. Naciones Unidas.

Escobar Latapí, Agustín, and Bryan R. Roberts 1991 Urban Stratification, the Middle Classes, and Economic Change in Mexico. In Mercedes González de la Rocha and Agustín Escobar Latapí (eds.), Social Responses to Mexico’s Economic Crisis of the 1980s. Pp. 91-113. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

Escobar Latapí, Agustín, and Guillermo de la Peña 1990 Introducción. In G. de la Peña, J. M. Durán, A. Escobar, J. García de Alba (eds.), Crisis, conflicto y sobrevivencia: estudios sobre la sociedad urbana en México. Pp. 9-22. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/CIESAS.

Escobar Latapí, Agustín, and Mercedes González de la Rocha 1995 Crisis, Restructuring and Urban Poverty in Mexico. Environment and Urbanization 7(1):57-75.

Fanny Quintal, Ella 1983 La antropología urbana en México: balance y perspectivas. Boletín de la Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán 10(60):3-16.

Farmer, Paul 1992 AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996 On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below. Daedalus 125(1): 261-283. 1999 Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005 Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Farquhar, Judith, and Qicheng Zhang 2005 Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-Cultivation in China’s Capital. Cultural Anthropology 20(3): 303-327.

191

2012 Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing. New York: Zone Press.

Feher, Michel 2009 Self-Appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital. Public Culture 21(1): 21-41.

Fischer, Claude 1977 Perspectives on Community and Personal Relations. In Claude Fischer (ed.), Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting. Pp. 1-16. New York: The Free Press.

Fortuny Loret de Mola, Patricia 2000 Lo religioso, núcleo de la identidad en los conversos. In Elio Masferrer Kan (ed.), Sectas o iglesias: viejas y nuevas religiones. Pp. 123-154. Mexico: Plaza y Valdes Editores/ALER.

Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. 1979 The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. 1991 Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Pp. 87-104. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Freeman, Carla 2000 High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink- Collar Identities in the Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press. 2007 The ‘reputation’ of neoliberalism. American Ethnologist 34(2): 252-267.

Friedman, George 2008 “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?” STRATFOR. 13 May. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/mexico_road_failed_state (accessed February 1, 2009).

Froud, Julie, Mike Savage, Gindo Tampubolon, and Karel Williams 2006 Rethinking Elite Research. CRESC Working Paper Series: The University of Manchester 12:1-20.

Gallman, Stephanie 2012 ¿Quién debe estar autorizado para enseñar yoga? CNN. 8 February. Electronic document. http://mexico.cnn.com/salud/2012/02/06/quien-debe-estar-autorizado- para-ensenar-yoga (accessed February 16, 2012).

192

Gálvez, Alyshia 2011 Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth-Weight Paradox. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Gamboa Ojeda, Leticia 2003 Alsacianos en el estampado textil en México. In B. Von Mentz (ed.), Movilidad social de sectores medios en México: una retrospectiva histórica (siglos XVII al XX), pp. 71-101. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social.

Garcia, Angela 2010 The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press.

García Canclini, Néstor 1988 La crisis teórica en la investigación sobre cultura popular. In Teoría e investigación en la antropología social mexicana. [Ed. not noted.] Pp. 67-96. Mexico City: CIESAS. 1993a El consumo cultural y su estudio en México: una propuesta teórica. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), El consumo cultural en México. Pp. 15-42. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. 1993b Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico. Trans. Lidia Lozano. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1995 Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappary and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1996a Conclusión: imaginar la ciudadanía en una ciudad posapocalíptica. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), La ciudad de los viajeros: travesías e imaginarios urbanos: México, 1940- 2000. Pp. 107-117. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo. 1996b Introducción: los viajes metropolitanos. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), La ciudad de los viajeros: travesías e imaginarios urbanos: México, 1940-2000. Pp. 11-42. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo. 1998a La ciudad y los medios: imaginarios del espectáculo y la participación. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol. 2. Pp. 19-25. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo. 1998b Las cuatro ciudades de México. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol.1. Pp. 19-39. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo. 1998c Presentación. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol.1. Pp. 15-17. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo. 2001 Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. George Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

193

García Canclini, Néstor, and Ana Rosa Mantécon 1996 Las múltiples ciudades de los viajeros. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), La ciudad de los viajeros: travesías e imaginarios urbanos: México, 1940-2000. Pp. 61-106. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo.

García Canclini, Néstor, and Mabel Piccini 1993 Culturas de la ciudad de México: símbolos colectivos y usos del espacio urbano. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), El consumo cultural en México. Pp. 43-85. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Giglia, Angela 2007 La antropología y el estudio de las metrópolis. In A. Giglia, C. Garma, and A.P. de Teresa (eds.), ¿Adónde va la antropología? Pp. 219-239. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.

Gil, Juan Carlos, and José Ángel Nistal 1994 New Age: una religiosidad desconcertante. Barcelona: Editorial Herder.

Gilbert, Dennis 2005 Magicians: The Response of Middle-Class Mexican Households to Economic Crisis. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 10(1): 126-150. 2007 Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Gledhill, John 2002 The Powers Behind the Masks: Mexico’s Political Class and Social Elites at the End of the Millennium. In C. Shore and S. Nugent (eds.), Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives. Pp. 39-60. London: Routledge.

Goldschmidt, Walter 1999 Dynamics of Status in America. Anthropology Newsletter 40(5): 62, 64.

Goldstein, Daniel M. 2005 Flexible Justice: Neoliberal Violence and Self-help Security in Bolivia. Critique of Anthropology 25(4): 389-411.

González, Ixel Yutzil 2008 Ven opción en segundo empleo. El Universal, 21 August. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/finanzas/66115.html (accessed July 4, 2009.)

González, Ixel, and Sergio Jiménez 2009 Crecen desempleo y subocupación. El Universal, 25 June. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/finanzas/71805.html (accessed July 4, 2009.)

194

González, Marisol 2010 Parinama yoga: un programa que se practica en las cárceles de México. Balance, December: 56-61.

González de la Rocha, Mercedes 1988 Economic Crisis, Domestic Reorganisation and Women’s Work in Guadalajara, Mexico. Bulletin of Latin American Research 7(2): 207-223.

González Navarro, Moisés 1974 Población y sociedad en México (1900-1970). México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Gregoire, Carolyn 2013 How Yoga Became A $27 Billion Industry -- And Reinvented American Spirituality. The Huffington Post, 16 December. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/how-the-yoga-industry- los_n_4441767.html (accessed December 20, 2013).

Guano, Emanuela 2002 Spectacles of Modernity: Transnational Imagination and Local Hegemonies in Neoliberal Buenos Aires. Cultural Anthropology 17(2):181-209.

Guell, Cornelia 2012 Self-Care at the Margins: Meals and Meters in Migrants’ Diabetes Tactics. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(4): 518-533.

Gutiérrez Martínez, Daniel 2005 Mutireligiosidad en la Ciudad de México. Economía, sociedad y territorio V (19): 617-657. 2008 Notes on Urban Multireligiosity in Mexico. Paper presented at the 2008 International Conference, London, United Kingdom. April 16-20. http://www.cesnur.org/2008/london_martinez.htm (accessed May 8, 2008).

Gutiérrez Zúñiga, Cristina 1996 Nuevos movimientos religiosos: la Nueva Era en Guadalajara. Zapopan: El Colegio de Jalisco. 2000 Más allá de la pertenencia religiosa: católicos en la era de Acuario. In Elio Masferrer Kan (ed.), Sectas o iglesias: viejas y nuevas religiones. Pp. 331-353. Mexico: Plaza y Valdes Editores/ALER.

Gutmann, Matthew 1996 The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2002 The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

195

2007 Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Han, Clara 2012 Life in Debt Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Haro Encinas, Jesús Armando 2000 Cuidados profanes: una dimensión ambigua en la atención de la salud. In E. Perdiguero and J. M. Comelles (eds.), Medicina y cultura. Estudios entre la antropología y la medicina. Pp. 101-161. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra.

Harvey, David 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heelas, Paul 2006 The Infirmity Debate: On the Viability of New Age Spiritualities of Life. Journal of Contemporary Religion 21(2):223-240.

Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead 2005 The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.

Heiman, Rachel, Mark Liechty, and Carla Freeman 2012 Introduction: Charting an Anthropology of the Middle Classes. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, and M. Liechty (eds.), The Global Middle Class: Theorizing through Ethnography. Pp. 3-29. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 1996 Por una sociología de las nuevas formas de religiosidad: algunas cuestiones teóricas previas. In Gilberto Giménez (ed.), Identidades religiosas y sociales en México. Pp. 23-45. México, DF: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-UNAM.

Herzfeld, Michael 2000 Uncanny Success: Some Closing Remarks. In João de Pina-Cabral and Antónia Pedroso de Lima (eds.), Elites: Choice, Leadership, and Succession. Pp. 227-236. Oxford: Berg.

Hogle, Linda 2005 Enhancement Technologies and the Body. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 695-716

Howes-Mischel, Rebecca E. 2012 Gestating Subjects: Negotiating Public Health and Pregnancy in Transborder Oaxaca. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, New York University.

196

INEGI [Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática] 2003 Mujeres y hombres en México 2003. Aguascalientes, AGS: INEGI.

Jackson, Michael, ed. 1996 Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jacobo Rojas, Xareni Paola 2005 Historia de la Gran Fraternidad Universal en México. Tesis de Licenciatura. México, D.F.: Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Jameson, Frederic 1991 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jiménez, Sergio, and Manuel Lombera 2009 Calderón reprocha hablar mal de México. El Universal, August 20. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/170754.html (accessed September 7, 2009).

Kern, Leslie 2012 Connecting embodiment, emotion and gentrification: An exploration through the practice of yoga in Toronto. Emotion, Space and Society 5(1):27-35.

Kingston, Paul W. 2000 The Classless Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kirsch, Max 2006 Introduction: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena. In M. Kirsch (ed.), Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena. Pp. 1-27. New York: Routledge.

Krauze, Enrique 1987 Místico de la libertad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Laurell, Asa Cristina 2001 Health Reform in Mexico: The Promotion of Inequality. International Journal of Health Services 31(2): 291-321. 2007 Health System Reform in Mexico: A Critical Review. International Journal of Health Services 37(3): 515-535.

Lea, Jennifer 2009 Liberation or Limitation? Understanding Iyengar Yoga as a Practice of the Self. Body & Society. 15(3):71-92.

197

Leal F., Gustavo 2010 2006. El final de un sexenio. Salud y seguridad social en el foxismo, núm. 92. México: UAM-Unidad Xochimilco.

Lefebvre, Henri 1991[1974] The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lewis, Oscar 1951 Life in a Mexican Village: Tepotzlán Restudied. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1952 Urbanization without Breakdown: A Case Study. The Scientific Monthly 75(1): 31-41. 1959 Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. 1961 The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Vintage Books. 1988[1965] Nuevas observaciones sobre el “continuum” folk-urbano y urbanización con especial referencia a México. In M. Bassols, R. Donoso, A. Massolo, and A. Méndez (eds.), Antología de sociología urbana. Pp. 226-239. México: UNAM. 1988[1966] La cultura de la pobreza. In M. Bassols, R. Donoso, A. Massolo, and A. Méndez (eds.), Antología de sociología urbana. Pp. 240-251. México: UNAM.

Lomnitz, Claudio 1999 Modes of Citizenship in Mexico. Public Culture 11(1):269-293. 2003a The Depreciation of Life during Mexico City’s Transition into “the Crisis.” In J. Schneider and I. Susser (eds.), Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Pp. 47-69. New York: Berg. 2003b Times of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice, and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City. Public Culture 15(1):127-147.

Lomnitz, Larissa 1977 Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown. New York: Academic Press. 1982 Horizontal and Vertical Relations and the Social Structure of Urban Mexico. Latin American Research Review 17(2): 51-74. 1988 Informal Exchange Networks in Formal Systems: A Theoretical Model. American Anthropologist, New Series 90 (1): 42-55. 1994 “El compadrazgo,” reciprocidad de favores en la clase media urbana de Chile. In L. Adler Lomnitz (ed.), Redes sociales, cultura y poder: ensayos de antropología latinoamericana. Pp. 19-46. Mexico City: FLACSO/Grupo Editorial-Miguel Ángel Porrúa.

198

1994a Supervivencia en una barriada en la ciudad de México. In Larissa Adler Lomnitz (ed.), Redes sociales, cultura y poder: ensayos de antropología latinoamericana. Pp. 47-97. Mexico City: FLACSO/Grupo Editorial-Miguel Ángel Porrúa. 1994b Urban Women’s Work in Three Social Strata: The Informal Economy of Social Networks and Social Capital. In Gay Young and Bette J Dickerson (eds.), Color, Class & Country: Experiences of Gender. Pp. 53-69. London: Zed Books.

Lomnitz, Larissa, and Rodrigo Díaz 1992 Cultural Grammar and Bureaucratic Rationalization in Latin American Cities. In R. Morse and J. Hardoy (eds.), Rethinking the Latin American City. Pp. 179- 192.Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Lomnitz, Larissa, Leticia Mayer, and Marta W. Rees 1983 Recruiting Technical Elites: Mexico’s Veterinarians. Human Organization 42(1): 23-29.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler, and Marisol Pérez-Lizaur 1987 A Mexican Elite Family, 1820-1980: Kinship, Class, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994 Los orígenes de la burguesía industrial en México. El caso de una familia en la ciudad de México. In Larissa Adler Lomnitz (ed.), Redes sociales, cultura y poder: ensayos de antropología latinoamericana, (pp. 185-215). Mexico City: FLACSO/Grupo Editorial-Miguel Ángel Porrúa.

López, Ricardo A., and Barbara Weinstein, eds. 2012 The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Durham: Duke University Press.

Low, Setha 1996a Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica. American Ethnologist 23(4):861-879. 1996b The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:383-409. 2003 Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge.

Luz, Madel 1999 Cultura contemporánea y medicinas alternativas: nuevos paradigmas en salud al finalizar el siglo XX. In M. Bronfman y R. Castro (eds.), Salud, cambio social y política. Perspectivas desde América Latina. Pp.363-382. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública y Foro Internacional de Ciencias Sociales y Salud.

Lynch, Owen 1994 Urban Anthropology, Postmodernist Cities, and Perspectives. City & Society 7(1):35-52.

199

Maldonado, Andrea 2007 A Members’ Only Fortressed Paradise: The Meaning of Space and Community within Social Clubs in Mexico City. International Affairs Journal 4(1):3-7. 2010 A Members’ Only Community: Re-making the Middle Class in Mexico City. Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing AG & Co. KG. 2013 Cultivating the Collective through Practices of Self-Care. In Oliva López Sánchez (ed.), Cuerpo, salud, género y emociones: estudios diacrónicos y sincrónicos. Revista electrónica de Psicología Iztacala 16(4): 1486-1515. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Malkin, Elisabeth 2010 18 Bodies in Acapulco Grave Identified as Kidnapped Men. New York Times, November 7: A14.

Marsland, Rebecca, and Prince, Ruth 2012 What is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival, and the Politics of Life. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(4): 453-469.

Masferrer Kan, Elio 2000 La configuración del campo religioso latinoamericano: el caso de México. In Elio Masferrer Kan (ed.), Sectas o iglesias: viejas y nuevas religiones. Pp. 19-83. Mexico: Plaza y Valdes Editores/ALER.

Maternowska, M. Catherine 2006 Reproducing Inequities: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Mayer, Leticia, and Larissa Lomnitz 1988 La nueva clase: desarrollo de una profesión en México. Mexico City: UNAM.

McGuire, Meredith B. 1988 Ritual Healing in Suburban America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2002 Not All Alternatives Are Complementary. Medical Anthropological Quarterly 16(4): 409-411.

Melton, J. Gordon 1992 New Thought and the New Age. In James R. Lewis and J. Gordon. Melton (eds.), Perspectives on the New Age. Pp. 15-29. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Menéndez, Eduardo L. 1984 Hacia una práctica médica alternativa. Hegemonía y autoatención (gestión) en salud. México: CIESAS. 1990 Antropología médica, orientaciones, desigualdades y transacciones. Cuadernos de la Casa Chata, 179. México: CIESAS.

200

2009 De sujetos, saberes y estructuras. Introducción al enfoque relacional en el estudio de la salud colectiva. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial.

Miles, Ann 2003 Healers as Entrepreneurs: Constructing an Image of Legitimized Potency in Urban Ecuador. In Joan D. Koss-Chioino, Thomas Leatherman, and Christine Greenway (eds.), Medical Pluralism in the Andes. Pp. 107-128. London: Routledge.

Módena, María Eudenia 1990 Madres, médicos y curanderos: diferencia cultural e identidad ideológica. México: CIESAS.

Monsiváis, Carlos 1976 Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX. In D. Cosío Villegas (ed.), Historia general de México, Tomo IV. Pp. 305-476. México City: Colegio de México.

Morales, María Antonieta 2009 El que espera desespera…El Universal, 30 June. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/editoriales/44709.html (accessed July 4, 2009.)

Moreno, Jenalia 2002 Mexico’s Struggling Middle Class / Paying the Price. Houston Chronicle, September 1: A1.

Moreno, Julio 2003 Yankee Don’t Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Moreno Fernández, Silvia 2005 Pertenencia, identidad, relación social y búsqueda de los alumnos de hatha yoga de la red GFU. Tesis de Licenciatura. México, D.F.: Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Muédano, Marcos 2011 Los signos de una sociedad violenta. El Universal, 7 November. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/190558.html (accessed December 28, 2012).

Napolitano, Valentina 2002 Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

201

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim 2005 Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship. In A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Pp. 124-144. Malden: Blackwell.

Nieto, Raúl 1998 Experiencias y prácticas sociales en la periferia de la ciudad. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol.1. Pp. 235- 277. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo.

Nigenda, Gustavo, Lejeune Lockett, Cristina Manca, and Gerardo Mora 2001 Non-biomedical Health Care Practices in the State of Morelos, Mexico: Analysis of an Emergent Phenomenon. Sociology of Health & Illness 23(1): 3-23.

Nivón, Eduardo 1998a Cultura urbana y movimientos sociales. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. 1998b De periferias y suburbios: territorio y relaciones culturales en los márgenes de la ciudad. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol.1. Pp. 205-233. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo.

Novelli, Diego 1990 La cultura de la ciudad. In Jordi Borja et al. (eds.), Las grandes ciudades en la década de los noventa. Pp. 511-519. Madrid: Editorial Sistema.

Nutini, Hugo G. 1995 The Wages of Conquest: the Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2004 The Mexican Aristocracy: An Expressive Ethnography, 1910-2000. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005 Social Stratification and Mobility in Central Veracruz. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Nutini, Hugo, and Barry L. Isaac 2009 Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000. Austin: University of Texas Press.

O’Dougherty, Maureen 2002 Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. 2013 Plot and Irony in Childbirth Narratives of Middle-Class Brazilian Women. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27(1):43-62.

202

Olive Negrete, Julio, and Beatriz Barba de Piña Chan 1960 Estudio de las clases sociales en la ciudad de México con vista a caracterizar la clase media. Anales. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, Tomo XI (40): 153-199.

Ong, Aihwa 2006 Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ortner, Sherry 1991 Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture. In R.G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. 1998 The Hidden Life of Class. Journal of Anthropological Research 54(1): 1-17.

Osorio, Rosa María 1995 La cultura médica maternal en la atención de la salud materno—infantil. In S. E. Pérez, J. C. Ramírez, and P. Ravelo (eds.), Género y salud femenina. Experiencias de investigación en México. Pp. 45-54. México: CIESAS and Instituto Nacional de Nutrición Salvador Zubirán.

Palacios, Juan José 1990 Economía subterránea en América Latina: ¿Alternativa obligada de supervivencia o mecanismo ilegal de producción? In G. de la Peña, J. M. Durán, A. Escobar, J. García de Alba (eds.), Crisis, conflicto y sobrevivencia: Estudios sobre la sociedad urbana en México. Pp.119-138. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/CIESAS.

Pantoja, Sara 2010 Presume Red Ángel y las becas. El Universal, 18 September. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/ciudad/103389.html (accessed October 1, 2010).

Parker, David S. 2012 Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas and Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860-1930. In A. R. López and B. Weinstein (eds.), The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Pp. 335-354. Durham: Duke University Press. 2013 Introduction: The Making and Endless Remaking of the Middle Class. In D. Parker and L. Walker (eds.), Latin America’s Middle Class:Unsettled Debates and New Histories. Pp. 1-22. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Patico, Jennifer 2008 Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

203

Pellow, Deborah 1996 Concluding Thoughts. In D. Pellow (ed.), Setting Boundaries: The Anthropology of Spatial and Social Organization. Pp. 215-225. Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

Phillips, Lynne 1998 Conclusion: Anthropology in the Age of Neoliberalism. In L. Phillips (ed.), The Third Wave of Modernization in Latin America: Cultural Perspectives on Neoliberalism. Pp. 193-198. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc.

Pina-Cabral, João de and Antónia Pedroso de Lima 2000 Elites: Choice, Leadership, and Succession. Oxford: Berg.

Portes, Alejandro 1985 Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Last Decades. Latin American Research Review 20(3): 7-39.

Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman 2003 Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era. Latin American Research Review 38(1):41-82.

Quintero, Josefina 2007 En marcha, programa para recuperar espacios públicos. La Jornada, 28 April. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/04/28/index.php?section=capital&article=034 n3cap (accessed March 1, 2014).

Ramstedt, Martin 2007 New Age and Business. In Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook of New Age. Pp. 185-205. Leiden: Brill.

Redfield, Robert 1941 The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Robles-Silva, Leticia 2004 El cuidado en el hogar a los enfermos crónicos: un sistema de autoatención. Cadernos de Saúde Pública 20(2): 618-625. 2007 La pobreza urbana. ¿Cómo sobrevivir enfermo y pobre? In P. Arias and O. Woo Morales (eds.), ¿Campo o ciudad? Nuevos espacios y formas de vida. Pp. 67-100. México: Universidad de Guadalajara. 2010-2011 La autoatención en la enfermedad crónica: tres líneas de cuidado. Rivista della Società italiana di antropología medica 29-32: 279-298.

204

Román, Romina 2009 Sube 5% robo de autos: Iztacalco lidera atracos. El Universal, 26 February. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/ciudad/94315.html (accessed March 1, 2009).

Safa, Patricia 1999 Construir mundos, levantar muros y preservar patrimonio: ¿una alternativa de vida en las grandes ciudades? Condominios y fraccionamientos cerrados en la Ciudad de México. Guadalajara: CIESAS-Occidente.

Sánchez Hernández, Gabriela 2005 Esbozo etnográfico de prácticas mágico religiosas en familias católicas del Distrito Federal (México). Unpublished paper. Mexico City.

Sarabia, Dalila 2014 Invaden Reforma con yoga. Reforma. 27 January.

Sariego Rodríguez, Juan Luís 1988 La antropología urbana en México (ruptura y continuidad con la tradición antropológica sobre lo urbano). In [ed. not noted], Teoría e investigación en la antropología social mexicana. Pp. 221-236. Mexico City: CIESAS.

Sassen, Saskia 2006 Theoretical and Empirical Elements in the Study of Globalization. In M. Kirsch (ed.), Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena. Pp. 43-69. New York: Routledge.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1992 Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock 1987 The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1):6-41.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric 2005 Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers.

Schneider, Suzanne D. 2010 Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Schneirov, Matthew, and Jonathan David Geezik 2003 A Diagnosis for Our Times: Alternative Health, from Lifeworld to Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

205

Secretaría de Salud (SS) 2007a Diagnóstico de los aportes de diferentes modelos clínico terapéuticos para la diabetes mellitas. Dirección de Medicina Tradicional y Desarrollo Intercultural, Dirección General de Planeación y Desarrollo en Salud. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud. 2007b Estrategia nacional de promoción y prevención para una mejor salud. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud. 2007c Plan nacional de salud, 2007-2012: por un México sano. Construyendo alianzas para una mejor salud. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud. 2007d Propuesta operativa para abordar la diabetes desde los aportes de diferentes modelos clínico terapéuticos. Dirección de Medicina Tradicional y Desarrollo Intercultural, Dirección General de Planeación y Desarrollo en Salud. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud. 2008a Medicina Intercultural. Diversidad y sociedades multiculturales. México Sano 1(1): 20. 2008b Programa de acción específico, 2007-2012: medicina tradicional y sistemas complementarias de atención a la salud. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud. 2009 Interculturalidad en salud: experiencia y aportes para el fortalecimiento de los servicios de salud. 2ª. Edición. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Salud.

Shakow, Miriam In press. States of Discontent: Political Dilemmas of the New Middle Classes in Bolivia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta 2006 Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in the Age of Globalization. In Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds.), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Pp. 1-41. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shore, Cris, and Stephen Nugent, eds. 2002 Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Silva, Armando 1992 Imaginarios urbanos. Bogotá y Sao Paulo: cultura y comunicación urbana en América Latina. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores.

Skeggs, Beverly 1997 Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage.

Sointu, Eeva 2006a Healing Bodies, Feeling Bodies: Embodiment and Alternative and Complementary Health Practices. Social Theory & Health 4:203-220. 2006b Recognition and the Creation of Wellbeing. Sociology 40(3):493-510. 2006c The Search for Wellbeing in Alternative and Complementary Health Practices. Sociology of Health & Illness 28(3):330-349.

206

Suárez, Francisco 1997 Nuevas tendencias residenciales en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Carta Económica Regional 52: 31-38.

Taussig, Michael 1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Janelle 2005 Surfacing the Body Interior. Annual Review of Anthropology 34:741-56.

Thompson, Ginger 2002 Free-Market Upheaval Grinds Mexico’s Middle Class. New York Times, September 4:A3.

Trumper, Ricardo, and Lynne Phillips 1995 Cholera in the Time of Neoliberalism: The Cases of Chile and Ecuador. Alternatives 20:165-194.

Uribe Salas, José Alfredo 2003 Sectores “medios” y movilidad social en los minerales de El Oro y Tlalpujahua, primera mitad del siglo XX. In B. Von Mentz (ed.), Movilidad social de sectores medios en México: una retrospectiva histórica (siglos XVII al XX), (pp. 103-125). Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social.

Vernik, Esteban 1998 Comunidades cercadas: la exclusión urbana en la televisión y en la vida. In Néstor García Canclini (ed.), Cultura y comunicación en la ciudad de México, vol. 2. Pp. 156-181). Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Grijalbo.

Von Mentz, Brígida 2003a Educación técnica, reclutamiento de empleados y ascenso social en una empresa: el caso de la compañía minera de Vetagrande, Zacatecas, 1790-1840. In B. Von Mentz (ed.), Movilidad social de sectores medios en México: una retrospectiva histórica (siglos XVII al XX). Pp. 127-166. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. 2003b Introducción. In B. Von Mentz (ed.), Movilidad social de sectores medios en México: una retrospectiva histórica (siglos XVII al XX). Pp. 7-47. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social.

Wacquant, Löic J.D. 1991 Making Class: The Middle Class(es) in Social Theory and Social Structure. In Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia (eds.), Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Pp. 39-64. Boulder: Westview.

207

2004 Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walker, Louise E. 2013 Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968. Stanford: Stanford University Press; Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Werbner, Pnina 1999 Global Pathways. Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds. Social Anthropology 7(1):17-35.

Whetten, Nathan L. 1984 El surgimiento de una clase media en México. In [ed. not noted], Ensayos sobre las clases sociales en México. Pp. 69-90. Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo.

Whiteford, Michael 1999 Homeopathic Medicine in the City of Oaxaca, Mexico: Patients’ Perspectives and Observations. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13(1): 69-78.

Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Sjaak Van der Geest, and Anita Hardon 2002 Social Lives of Medicines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilkinson, Amanda, and Whitehead, Lisa 2009 Evolution of the Concept of Self-Care and Implications for Nurses: A Literature Review. International Journal of Nursing Studies 46: 1143–1147.

Yeh, Rihan 2012 A Middle-Class Public at Mexico’s Northern Border. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, and M. Liechty (eds.), The Global Middle Class: Theorizing through Ethnography. Pp. 189-212. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Zermeño, Jésica 2009 Hay un gobierno fallido. Reforma. 29 January.

Zolov, Eric 1999 Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

208