During my studies of Mexico's elite, I often wondered how a select few could live so completely disconnected from the reality of the many in their own country. Their respective worlds only touch superficially, and many areas of public and private life are largely segregated. One of my informants, a young inheriting entrepreneur, suggested this was because the rich and poor did not share ‘similar interests’ (as in leisure activities), since these were conditional on income. If he, ‘just to say something’, liked golf, he would interact with other people who could play golf. Their shared culture gave them a shared way of understanding life, and according to him, there was little (non-contractual) interaction between people of different interests and activities in Mexico as the cultural interests of the rich and poor were different. Rather than imagining some essentialised cultural profiles for different socio-economic levels, though, he understood this lack of interaction between people of different interests and activities in Mexico to be a ‘cultural, racial and social’ issue, that is: people in high social strata would not interact with people they consider Indigenous, for instance, because this would not be socially acceptable. My informant had not read Bourdieu; yet his rather accurate description of the strictly stratified contemporary Mexican society points to the complicated amalgamation between class, race and culture. The mobilisation of visible personal characteristics to explain socio-economic differences helps to normalise the existence of extraordinary wealth amidst massive want, because it makes them both easily recognisable and continuously enforceable at the same time.
In other words, some happen to like golf, and others are considered too Indigenous (also: poor) to play. In a context where each social class has its corresponding racialised profile, ‘golf’ does not represent a neutral interest, but the site of vast multidimensional privilege at play. Hugo Cerón-Anaya seizes the opportunity for inequality research this offers: for his 2019 book Privilege at Play, he observes Mexican elites playing golf.
The book's main objective is to shed light on how the structures of privilege are engrained in the most mundane practices and banal interactions. But, of course, playing golf is neither mundane nor banal; like all sports, it requires specialised know-how and technical skills; unlike any other, it requires enormous economic resources even before setting foot on the green. This aspect allows the book to illustrate, over the course of seven chapters, how class, racialisation and gender interact with ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and result in durable privilege for a distinctive elite (a methodological appendix elaborating on the positionally of the author is included at the end).
We learn that during the expansive capitalism of early twentieth-century Mexico based on foreign influence and racialised ideals, golf explicitly functioned as a ‘modernizing’ project (Chapter 1). Following the neoliberal turn of the 1990s, Mexican golf clubs transformed from ‘Anglo-American enclaves [in]to communities of upper-middle- and upper-class local people’ (p. 13). The urban spaces they occupy are all but invisible to the outside world, dissuading any passer-by from so much as noticing the exclusive microcosm hiding behind infinite walls and security checkpoints. Once inside, however, the visitor is greeted by unobstructed views. The architectural arrangements simulating spaciousness induce a misguided perception of openness (Chapter 2), concealing spatial and temporal segregation in place: caddies and women, judged by players as inferior beings both biologically and culturally, face restrictions to access socialising spaces and for playing times.
One concrete expression of the resulting discrimination the book explores (Chapter 3) is the linguistic hierarchisation constructed between players and their caddies, according to which players would call each other by their first names, but have caddies use their titles and last names (and only know caddies’ nicknames). That these practices are not portraying the features of a game or arising from mere ‘professional’ differences, but represent a deeply entrenched system of social stratification based on mutually reinforcing class and ethnoracial divides, is at the core of Cerón's analysis of the role Mexican elites take on in their country (Chapter 4). He explains how cultural narratives governing the more fluid ‘racial’ relations among lower and middle classes differ from those in the upper class, where they represent a rigid socio-economic order based on biologistic perceptions. Wealthy, ‘Whiter’ players consider the clubs’ caddies, who often hail from the lower classes and tend to be ‘Browner’, as incapable of becoming good golfers on the basis of just these two criteria – instead of considering their often exceptional practical and theoretical knowledge of the game (Chapter 5).
Cerón shows how, ‘in a society where racial categories are not always openly acknowledged, people frequently resorted to class and spatial allegories to articulate racialized arguments’ (p. 16). His analysis would be incomplete without considering the subordinate position of women, which fits uncomfortably onto the hierarchy outlined: on the one hand, they share some eliteness with male players, in terms of ethnoracial attributes and to a lesser degree socio-economic status, but on the other hand are themselves restricted in their movement around the golfing world. Their perceived inferiority as players (and human beings) leaves them in a liminal space which creates an identity dilemma for Cerón's participants: left between having to challenge their place in the internal structure of the golfing world and maintaining their privilege on the class and ‘racial’ hierarchy of Mexican society, most tend to opt for the latter (Chapter 6). Even privilege comes in layers. Cerón's book is strongest where these conflicting and colliding privileges are found unable to lineally align, and where thus the real power struggle surfaces behind the glossy, if brittle, facade of luxury pastimes. His ‘call to arms’ for social scientists to research, and challenge, ‘the paradoxical relationship between wealth and poverty’ (p. 17) at the end of the book (Chapter 7), if anything, is even more urgent today after further concentration of privileges during the pandemic years.
Instead of getting caught up in an impossible discussion about the primacy of either class or ‘race’, Cerón exposes how ‘racial’ dynamics always operate in conjunction with class relations in Mexico, those being ‘relational, situational and contextual’ (p. 90). This is an important remark on a country that tends to hide its racism behind its ‘classism’, thereby diminishing the seriousness of both forms of discrimination.
