A Members'' Only Community

Walled, gated, and guarded social clubs in Mexico City typically denote to the public a material and symbolic representation of exclusion and privilege. Many of these private communities have been home to affluent Mexicans for at least fifty years. In recent decades, however, it has become more common for the middle class to frequent these spaces and create their own social networks therein. Based on participant observation and interviews with club members, administrators, and employees, this book examines the relationship between club membership and the ways in which class and status identity distinctions are spatially, socially and conceptually elaborated. Specifically, it explores ideologies and practices that club members employ in their construction, explanation, and proliferation of boundaries that separate a class/status social Self from a class/status social Other. This analysis suggests that social barriers intend to be just as impenetrable as the material ones that physically surround the clubs. Hidden behind the walls of their social club oases, members perform and validate the collective Self-Other class/status distinctions they perceive as fundamentally real.