Eighteen studies trace how social hierarchies persist across Latin America and the Caribbean

An editorial published in Frontiers in Sociology on 20 October 2026 introduces a special Research Topic titled “Evolving social hierarchies: current patterns of stratification in Latin America and the Caribbean,” compiled by Vicente Espinoza of the Universidad de la República in Montevideo and Graziela Serroni Perosa of the Universidade de Sao Paulo. The collection brings together eighteen articles written by scholars from eight countries across Latin America and beyond, a breadth the editors present as evidence of the growing vitality of stratification research in the region. The contributions span a wide range of national settings as well as comparative cross-national analyses, and the editors frame them as an up-to-date compilation of contemporary scholarship on social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The editorial argues that the region offers a distinctive vantage point for studying inequality because economic disparity there has been a long-term trait that survived from colonial times despite modernization, pervading many domains of social life. The editors cite prior scholarship describing mounting inequality as an inescapable fact in contemporary societies, and they suggest that new insights about the effects of inequality on the social order can be gained from the analyses gathered in the collection. Rather than treating inequality as a passing condition associated with underdevelopment, the framing positions it as a structural feature whose persistence demands explanation.

A common concern unites the papers, according to the editorial: the mechanisms that engender, reproduce and legitimate unequal life chances, with social stratification understood as a multidimensional and dynamic process. The editors connect this view to classical mobility research, which examined the interaction between social origins and destinations net of structural processes, and to newer approaches centered on recognition, intersectionality, and the legitimacy of inequality. Unlike classical Latin American and Caribbean studies of class and inequality, the papers in this collection focus explicitly on identifying the specific processes that produce inequality rather than on broad characterizations of class structure alone.

The editorial situates this work in a longer intellectual history. Mobility studies in the region during the 1960s, the editors note, contrast with those of the last two decades. During the twentieth century, social mobility was mostly associated with large-scale structural changes such as demographic transition, rural-urban migration, industrialization and urbanization. Social development and dependency scholars expected that industrialization and urbanization, along with modern value orientations supported by redistributive public policies, would bring about a general improvement in life conditions. From the 1970s onward, however, market reforms and military rule put an end to redistribution policies, shifting the focus of inequality studies toward the analysis of poverty and informal labor markets.

That shift, the editors explain, also changed what inequality research noticed. Poverty studies brought into focus processes and groups that had been disregarded in previous analyses, notably the gender component of inequality, as well as its ethnic, territorial and migratory dimensions. The papers in the Research Topic are presented as responding to a problematic situation in the modernization of Latin American and Caribbean societies: the process of intergenerational mobility driven by educational attainment, supported by public policies enhancing human capital, did not prevent the reproduction of social inequality. The contributors therefore conceive of social inequality as an outcome of structural limitations of social inclusion models, examined across four main fields: social mobility, education, the legitimation of the social order, and intersectional approaches to class.

Social mobility and class structure form the backbone of the collection, since they test the distribution of opportunities across social groups. The editors describe the studies as a counterpoint to contemporary approaches based on log-linear and log-multiplicative analyses of the mobility table. Among the specific contributions, Ricardi Morgavi offers a comparative examination of social mobility by cohorts in Latin American and European countries. Boado and colleagues provide a historical view for Uruguay to assess hypotheses about levels of mobility and changes in class structure. Nieto-Rivera compares the reproduction of disadvantages across generations in Chile and Mexico, linking them to education, social capital and the vulnerability of social positions. Otero and colleagues study how short-term social mobility associates with the diversity of social contacts, showing a limited permeability of class boundaries, while Dalle and Carrascosa link mobility to micro-level processes across generations, ethnic descent, territories and occupational networks. Chávez Molina and Rodríguez de la Fuente examine automation through artificial intelligence, addressing the heterogeneity it introduces into class positions and living conditions.

Education receives sustained attention in five papers, which examine the extent to which schooling helped moderate inequality in the region. In the classic status attainment model associated with Blau and Duncan, education drives upward mobility by weakening the association with social origin and through returns to educational achievement. Boniolo and Lemos analyze educational transitions from primary to higher education in Argentina, Chile and Mexico, and find that despite the expansion of access at all educational levels, the reduction of educational and social inequalities was uneven and limited, as social origin continued to shape educational attainment. Ziegler and Giovine examine Argentina’s egalitarian model of access to education and show that its equalizing contribution has been challenged by institutional factors such as hidden selectivity mechanisms and the expansion of private education. Reverón Peña offers an encompassing explanation of the linkages from educational transitions to social inequality, considering class, social capital and territorial segregation, and further work on socioeconomic factors affecting educational achievement is presented by Cabra Hernández.

Two additional papers concentrate on tertiary education. Alves de Brito shows how quota policies governing access to higher education widen opportunity structures for disadvantaged groups. Tabilo-Prieto analyzes how the first generation with college education makes sense of that experience, finding that initial feelings of inadequacy give way to an appreciation of diversity coupled with a critical view of social injustices. Beyond formal schooling, a further set of papers extends the subject of inequality to the perception of fairness in how valued resources are distributed, examining to what extent and on what grounds people justify inequalities. Meritocratic beliefs, defined as the distribution of social rewards on the basis of individual effort, serve as a key justification for social justice and address the difficulty of predicting preferences for redistribution from class positions alone.

Three papers focus on the legitimacy of inequality in Chile, where social inequalities persist despite personal effort. Castillo and colleagues investigate why consistent support for an income-based pension system cuts across social classes, and find that meritocratic beliefs explain this support better than class position. Iturra-Sanhueza and colleagues show a positive association between subjective social status and meritocratic perceptions, one that is somehow modified by income and educational levels. Biehl and colleagues use a life-history survey to test the association between employment trajectories and distribution preferences, finding that a history of unstable employment correlates with lower support for universal policies. In a separate strand, three papers examine the relationship of gender and race or ethnicity with class, challenging the alleged gender or race neutrality of class studies. Ney Simons and colleagues provide an intersectional analysis of social class in Honduras, examining the interaction among gender, ethnicity, urbanization, sector of activity and labor relations. Muñiz Terra and colleagues compare the interplay of class and gender in the life histories of women under dissimilar welfare systems in Argentina and Cuba, finding convergences in patterns of labor-market participation, and Castillo and Salgado show that ethno-racial configurations expressed in skin color have a significant effect on educational attainment.

In summary, the editors present the collection as a comprehensive overview of current debates and research agendas on inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, showing how structural features of social inequality in the region are actively reproduced by institutional and ideological processes. By shifting analytical focus from macro-level trends to micro-level mechanisms such as hidden educational selectivity, social network closure and meritocratic legitimation, the volume addresses why intergenerational mobility remains bottlenecked despite human capital expansion. The editors describe a central theoretical paradox in which modern social relations coexist with, and are cushioned by, subterranean exclusionary practices and ingrained normative beliefs. The eighteen studies, they conclude, challenge regional stratification research with outcomes that capture how structural advantage, policy friction and intersectional power dynamics jointly perpetuate enduring social hierarchies. The editorial, published in Volume 11 of the journal, was edited and reviewed by Hannah Bradby of Uppsala University and is available under an open-access license.

Subject of Research: An editorial introducing a Research Topic of eighteen studies on social stratification, mobility, education, legitimation of inequality and intersectionality in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Article Title: Editorial: Evolving social hierarchies: current patterns of stratification in Latin America and the Caribbean

Article References: Espinoza, V., & Perosa, G. S. (2026). Editorial: Evolving social hierarchies: current patterns of stratification in Latin America and the Caribbean. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 2013173. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.2013173

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.2013173

Keywords: social stratification, Latin America, Caribbean, social mobility, educational inequality, meritocracy, intersectionality, social class, poverty, higher education, redistribution, Frontiers in Sociology