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U.S. names rise above factories everywhere : Goodyear, Westinghouse, Monsanto, Kelvinator, General Electric, Pennsalt, Singer Sewing Machine, Carnation Milk, Ralston Purina, Kellogg. Mexicans flock to Dairy Queen frozen-custard stands in Chevies, Plymouths and Fords labeled "Made in Mexico by Mexicans."
To the Laundromat. The jobs, dreams and struggle of the new middle class are typically on display in Guadalajara (pop. 560,000), the once sleepy colonial capital of Jalisco state. In humming factories on the grassy hills around the city, men, women and machines make textiles, copper tubing, shoes, mattresses, Nescafe, paper bags, fertilizer, matches, glass, plumbing supplies, corn sirup, and the oils of cottonseed, peanuts and sesame. In the city are the concrete skeleton of a high new medical center, a sprawling new market, the circular sweep of a new sports arena, the glassy modern blankness of expensive new houses in 16 separate real estate developments.
On Saturdays work slows, and the city's center fills with men, women and children with pesos in their pockets. They mill through Sears, Roebuck, buying made-in-Mexico soap, blankets, toys and washing machines. They sit in chrome chairs along barbershop and beauty-parlor walls, waiting and listening to the hum of electric clippers and dryers. Young wives come in fashionable maternity middy blouses, push wire carts through the aisles of bright supermarkets, squeeze cellophane-wrapped loaves of Bimbo bread and Bimbollos (rolls). Husbands buy bottles of the new, high-quality tequila (from the modernized distilleries in the town of Tequila, 35 miles away) and Sangrita, a tequila chaser made of a secret formula of tomato juice, lime juice, orange juice, sugar, salt, pepper, chilies and spices. The couples watch carefully as automatic cash registers whir up the week's purchases in toothpaste, carrots and dehydrated pimento soup — and then they stop by the Laundromat to pick up the washing.
Sunday afternoons Guadalajarans like to gaze through the windows of a two-bedroom model home on Independence Highway. A sign over the house tells why: "12,000 pesos [$960] total cost! Ten years to pay! Complete with life insurance and water!"
Bound to Rise. Away from the boulevards and the showcases lurks old Guadalajara, with adobe slums, iron-grilled balconies and carriage-width streets. Swarming families live on tortillas and cheap pulque; rack-ribbed dogs nose through decaying garbage. But even here the gaudy gleam of a twirling hula hoop around the waist of a barefoot child serves notice that the old standstill Mexico of mañana and the travel posters is scrambling toward prosperity.
The urge among swarming lower-class families to put at least one member on the bottom rung of the new middle class stirs all across Mexico. In Portales, a section of Mexico City, one such family lives over the garage behind a big house. The father is caretaker for his landlord. The Indian mother and all the family—except one—spend their days squatting on a curbstone around an open charcoal brazier, making and selling tacos (tortillas rolled around fillings of beans, meat or chicken). The exception is a teen-age daughter, who wears nylons and goes to a commercial school—her way into the middle class paid for by her family.