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The Leaders. The new class creates markets for businessmen; in demanding entertainment, it creates a need for entertainers ; by growing in strength and importance, it creates leaders. A new class of the popular, or the powerful, or the influential has risen to the top of the middle class to meet the demand. Famed Cantinflas, who charmed as well as went Around the World in 80 Days, was once a tent-show clown. Mexico City's Archbishop-Primate Dario Miranda had a boyhood poorer than that of Pope John XXIII. Top Matador Carlos Arruza learned his trade at 14 in Mexico's dusty, provincial bullrings; at 24 he was fighting with Manolete. Switch-hitting, switch-pitching Angel Macias, 14, came out of the slums of Monterrey to win a Little League world series title in 1957 in Williamsport, Pa. Such cultured artists as Composer-Conductor Carlos Chávez, Actress Dolores del Rio, found big audiences and vast popularity among the new middle class.
"We've got a new breed of technicians," says López Mateos. "Mexican experts who belong to the people They are our middle-class leaders—bosses, employees, doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers—and I'm with them too."
The Climber. As ranking leader of Mexico's new middle class, President López Mateos is stamped in the left-favoring, socially conscious mold of such Latin American leaders as Costa Rica's José ("Pepe") Figueres and Puerto Rico's Luis Muñoz Marin. His father was a dentist who died in 1910 when Adolfo was less than a year old; his mother was a granddaughter of a hero of the 1865 war against the hapless Emperor Maximilian.
In his boyhood, as his mother struggled to support five children on a trickle of pesos from a small insurance policy and handouts from relatives, López Mateos' life was a struggle against genteel poverty. He was a scholarship student both at Mexico City's French Lycée and at secondary school in Toluca, the capital of Mexico state. Ruggedly athletic, he played soccer and boxed, sometimes walked 35 miles over 12,000-ft. mountains to Mexico City on weekends to see his mother. Eventually his walking took on epic proportions, and once he hiked all the way to Guatemala—700 miles—in 36 days. "I had my shoes half-soled oftener than any other student," he jokes today. Walking led naturally to mountain climbing—and climbing mountains, including Popocatepetl (17,887 ft.), led to a disciplined approach to life. "The way to climb mountains," he says, "is never to forget your goal—the top."