This case study focuses on an emerging middle class Filipino family, its life history, its struggle to break out of economic marginalities and impoverishment of lower class life, and its attempts to find a niche within the upper class. In the analysis, the middle class is situated along the notions of contradictory class locations and economic marginalities in order to understand its private class struggle for self-improvement. Specifically, the study examines how this family negotiates the two contradictory class positions it occupies, on the one hand, as proletariat, and on the other, as a petty capitalist, and how these positions accorded it a more comfortable and dignified life at present than when this family was newly formed. Results of the case study show that the economic capital this family accumulated through many years of hard work, perseverance, determination, and frugality has been transformed into cultural capital that the children now enjoy.
