This article explores the incorporation crisis that occurred in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century as a result of: changes in the economic model, the durability of electoral democracies and of inequalities; increasing expectations related to educational mobility, and the dissemination of new patterns of consumption. It is argued that this type of crisis can be best understood as an epochal change of "conservative modernization". It is also argued that this change is at the basis of the shift to the Left in present day Latin America.