By Jane Bauer @livingfoodmexico

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Dorothy Allison

This month our writers explore the class system. As humans, we love to categorize. We name things, sort them, put them in their proper place. It’s how we make sense of the world, how we navigate complexity. We do this with plants and animals, with time and space, and, of course, with people. We build systems, hierarchies, and classifications—some useful, others arbitrary, and some deeply entrenched in power and history.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this as I care for my mother, who has dementia. She was once an avid birdwatcher, able to name and identify countless species at a glance. Now, those names are slipping away. She no longer calls the kiskadee by name, no longer distinguishes between a flycatcher and a warbler in the way she once did. And yet, she still sees the birds. She watches their movements, listens to their calls, notices the shimmer of their feathers in the morning light. In some ways, she is experiencing them more purely, freed from the constraints of classification. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s famous question: would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? While naming things helps humans to make sense of the world, it is also a way that we create divisions between ourselves and the world.

Mexico has long been a place of rigid social categories. The casta system of colonial times assigned people value based on their ancestry, with Spanish blood at the top and Indigenous and African heritage ranked below in an elaborate taxonomy of race and class. Those classifications may no longer be law, but their impact lingers. Social class in Mexico today is still a structure of division—one shaped by wealth, education, and skin color, as well as deeply ingrained perceptions of worth. The categories may have changed, but the impulse to sort people into hierarchies remains.

And yet, what if we let go of the names? What if, instead of seeing people through the lens of class, we focused on their essence—their kindness, their resilience, their humor? What if we paid attention to the qualities that matter, rather than the labels that confine? My mother may no longer remember the names of birds, but she still finds joy in watching them. Perhaps there’s something to learn from that.

See you next month,

Jane