Dissolved in humor—and therefore, in culture—a network of social containment maintains distance. With what was expressed in caste painting in the 18th century, costumbrismo elaborated social types in the 19th century, which, with music, cinema and television as allies, were recoded as cultural stereotypes, completely alienated to a economic condition. Racism, then, with the irrecoverable “natural” differences, belongs to the same vision that classism uses to maintain privileges in the face of mass society (despite all the efforts of official culture to annul them). Racism and classism thus share a form of discrimination that incorporates racist assumptions without making them explicit, to which are added differences based on birth and customs; so that a social grid has been superimposed on the ethnic one, along with other layers. Without attempting to do a sociology of the national period, this book deals with how classes are represented, the conflict between them and the way in which inequality was rationalized. This is an eclectic approach to the various materials on which these representations were reproduced. Here remains the cultural record of the multiple ways of blocking promotion in Mexico.