To fulfill his dream of watching Colombia play in the World Cup, Marco Triana Lozada, an engineer from Bogota, cobbled together savings to travel to Brazil this month. But to avoid spending money on hotels, he and his friends have traversed the country at night on buses to watch Colombia play, even opting to stay in tents at campsites.
"Ten years ago, this kind of thing wouldn't have been possible for someone like me," said Triana Lozada, 24, emphasizing that he could only pay for the trip thanks to a credit line from his bank.
While he is skipping meals to keep costs down, he has not let that get in the way of having fun. "During the day we are only buying caipirinhas," he said, referring to Brazil's signature cocktail, made from cachaca, sugar and lime.
Fans like Triana Lozada are sleeping on buses, staying in hotels or on cruise ships, or simply bedding down in vehicles near Rio de Janeiro's beaches. And the arrival in Brazil this year of more than 200,000 Spanish-speaking fans from large nations like Mexico and Colombia and smaller ones like Costa Rica and Uruguay exemplifies one of Latin America's most profound shifts since the start of the century: the rise of the middle class.
As the U.S. grapples with growing inequality and poverty rates that remain higher than in the 1970s, Latin America's middle class has grown 60.3 percent since 2003, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. During that period, the population living in poverty declined by 34 percent. Altogether, the World Bank puts the middle class at about 30 percent of Latin America's population.
The criteria for determining who is middle class in Latin America is remarkably elastic across the region, in some cases including people earning as little as $10 a day. But while defining the middle class remains a subject of fierce debate, rising incomes in country after country have come into sharp relief as Latin American soccer fans follow their teams around Brazil.
"Latin America has stopped being a region that is predominantly poor," said Marcos Robles, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington who studies poverty and inequality. "The new mobility is a recent phenomenon begun 10 years ago after two decades of social deterioration."
Scholars attribute the expansion of Latin America's middle class to an array of factors including rising education levels, social welfare programs which provide monthly stipends to millions of families and per capita incomes which climbed 5.1 percent a year from 2003 to 2012, a period when various countries benefited from robust global demand for commodities.
During the World Cup in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, which has experienced its own huge growth of a middle class, the arrival of tens of thousands of neighbors from Spanish-speaking countries is producing a level of face-to-face interaction with few precedents in recent history.
Excluding Brazil, the tournament's host and by far the top source of demand for tickets, four Latin American countries - Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Mexico - rank among the top 10 countries where tickets for World Cup games were purchased, according to FIFA, the organization overseeing the event.
Together, more than 208,000 game tickets were purchased in Latin America outside Brazil, surpassing the estimated 200,000 tickets sold in the United States, the country with the second largest number of ticket buyers, and Germany, the biggest source of ticket purchasers in Europe, with almost 60,000.
Some of this demand boils down to a historic love of soccer in the region and proximity to Brazil.
Even so, travelling to Brazil and from one host city to another in Latin America's largest country involves lodging, transportation and food costs which are far in excess of a budget vacation, reflecting newfound purchasing power for many people in the region.
Highlighting the price rises during the World Cup, especially in Rio, a local magazine compiled a list of eye-popping expenses, including hotel rooms averaging $430 a night to French fries going for $16 at a seaside kiosk.
But those prices did not stop Rafael Concha, 45, a Chilean who repairs power lines for a living, from flying here for a three-week stay. He is traveling with two friends who are in the same line of work and said they were paying $270 a night for a two-bedroom apartment in Copacabana, a beachfront district crammed with visitors from Latin America.
"This is my first journey abroad apart from going to Argentina," said Concha, noting that he did not even have tickets for games, but wanted to soak up the World Cup experience.
Some Latin American visitors are doing more than just taking in the sights. More than 80 Chilean fans without tickets busted into Rio's Maracana Stadium last week when their team was about to play against Spain, before they were detained by police officers and told to leave Brazil within 72 hours.
Still, the episode did little to disrupt the Cup's positive vibe.
"I respect and even admire those crazies for doing whatever they can to see the World Cup," said Mauricio Stycer, a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
David Goldblatt, the author of a global history of soccer, said that Latin Americans have long made their presence felt at World Cups, as when the high society of Buenos Aires sashayed across the Rio de la Plata for the first tournament in Uruguay in 1930 or when Chilean exiles protested against Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany.
But it is in the last decade, Goldblatt wrote in a blog post for Al-Jazeera, that "we have only begun to witness Latin American versions of the large caravans of fans that have traditionally accompanied European teams to the tournament."
Progress remains uneven, with some countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras experiencing a decline of their middle class since 2000. Brazil, with a population of more than 200 million, boasts the region's largest middle class, though it still grapples with high levels of inequality.
And though living standards have improved for millions in Brazil over the last decade, some here contend that grouping so many into the middle class is misleading.
"There are families now who can afford to buy flat-screen televisions but who still live in places without treated sewage," said Lena Lavinas, an economist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. "We shouldn't confuse the formation of a society of mass consumption with the expansion of the middle class."
But whether they are inside Brazil's new stadiums or simply at the celebrations on the streets, many of the Brazilians and their neighbors visiting here for the World Cup are displaying how Latin America's fortunes are changing.
© New York Times