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 20 th 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.

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

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

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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.

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 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).

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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“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

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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.

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 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

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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.

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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-

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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.

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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.

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 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].”

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 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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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.

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 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).

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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

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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

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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.

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 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.

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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

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 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.

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 
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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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circumstances as best as they can.

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 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

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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.

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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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 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

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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.

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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).

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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
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