Pelado

In Mexican society, pelado is "a term invented to describe a certain class of urban 'bum' in Mexico in the 1920s."

Mexico has a long tradition of urban poverty, beginning with the léperos, a term referring to shiftless vagrants of various racial categories in the colonial hierarchical racial system, the sociedad de castas. They included mestizos, Indians, and poor whites (españoles). Léperos were viewed as unrespectable people (el pueblo bajo) by polite society (la gente culta), who judged them as being morally and biologically inferior. Léperos supported themselves as they could through petty commerce or begging, but many resorted to crime. A study of crime in eighteenth-century Mexico City based on arrest records indicates that they were "neither marginal types nor dregs of the lower classes. They consisted of both men and women; they were not particularly young; they were not mainly single and rootless; they were not merely Indian and casta; and they were not largely unskilled." All of the popular stereotypes of a young rootless, unskilled male are not borne out by the arrest records. "The dangerous class existed only in the collective mind of the colonial elite."