CAs part of the interdisciplinary Colloquium proposed by the magazine Encartes, and based on the text by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz, this text seeks to complement and broaden the debate on social inequality in Latin America. In order to overcome a strictly economic view on the subject, the author proposes, on the one hand, to incorporate social and cultural dimensions into the analysis, and on the other, to assume inequality as a class experience. Hence his concept of social fragmentation. Initially, the article reviews the most current data on the primary and secondary distribution of income in Latin America over the last 15 years. It is clear that these indicators do not necessarily correspond to the experience of the different social classes that live a growing fragmentation and distancing from their life experiences that imposes the need for an ethnographic approach to inequality. This fragmentation can hardly be understood without an analysis of the social mechanisms and processes of social classification, which legitimize hierarchies and gaps between social classes. The disparity in the distribution of income and wealth is key for the author in the genesis of social fragmentation, hence the centrality that he attributes to the role that the State can play.