Mexican Indigenismo and the International Fraternity of Science

Mexican racial science developed in close relation to foreign scholars and institutions including Corrado Gini of Italy, a proponent of Latin eugenics, Franz Boas, the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the international eugenics movement, and the Pan-American child welfare movement. Along with the mobilization of rural peoples during the Mexican Revolution, growing international interest in Mexico and the international eugenics movement galvanized Mexican indigenismo, the state-sponsored movement championing the nation’s indigenous heritage. This chapter focuses on Manuel Gamio, who founded Mexico’s Dirección de Antropología and worked in the powerful Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). Gamio conveyed Mexican social science abroad and foreign social science to Mexico. He attempted to create a social science that was both “Mexican” and modern, but found it hard to delineate a modernity that could accommodate Mexico’s demographic heterogeneity. Gamio creatively reconciled Mexico’s demographic characteristics with liberal universalism and scientific rationality, yet still suffered the intellectual imperialism and condescension of his U.S. counterparts.

Migration, U.S. Race Thinking, and Pan-American Anthropology

This chapter explores US debates over immigration and race that took shape within new academic disciplines and new institutions, including the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council. U.S. studies of Mexico and Latin America emerged as part of US domestic debates regarding Americanization and immigrant assimilation. These studies of Latin America were part of a comparative project aimed at understanding the ostensibly backward peoples within the United States and the biological and cultural processes of contact and mixing through which they might be assimilated into prevailing Euro-U.S. lifeways. As Mendelianism spread, race came to be defined as biological and inherited. Cultural anthropologists in turn drew on the work of Franz Boas to deny the importance of biological difference. These cultural anthropologist circumvented hierarchical evolutionary views through paradigms of cultural relativism and historical diffusion. They supported more pluralist policies.

Cultural and Economic Evolution, Pluralism, and Categorization in Mexico

This chapter shows that Mexican indigenistas eschewed grand theories and approached modernization within a framework that was local and empirical. As a Mexican socialism took hold in the 1930s, they increasingly placed economics and class—rather than ethnicity, culture, or race—at the center of national policies, and they accepted forms of cultural difference that they viewed as compatible with economic progress. Their approach to economics, however, was ethnographic, focusing on specific localities and insistently documenting experts’ inability to reach broader conclusions about the characteristics of the peoples they studied. Somewhat paradoxically, their approach was fundamentally evolutionary, and this chapter examines the complex ways indigenistas reconciled their belief in progress and science with attention to particularity, including strategies of compilation, categorization and taxonomy, and statistical aggregation.

From Cultural Pluralism to a Global Science of Acculturation in the United States

This chapter focuses on Collier and the US Indian Service (IS). Collier brought applied anthology into the Indian Service so as to develop culturally appropriate policies—an innovation he claimed was inspired by what he saw in Mexico. Collier drew on examples of indirect colonial rule, including Spanish colonialism in New Spain, to further a scientific democratic governance of cultural and racial differences. Collier and others sought to promote and use democratic forms of Native leadership. During and after the Second World War, Collier, along with Laura Thompson and other academics, extended what they had learned regarding the management of ethnic difference to the Japanese-American internment camp at Poston, Arizona, which was run by the Indian Service, and, later, to U.S. “dependencies” abroad and “minorities” at home. This chapter charts the shift toward a more universalizing view of modernization and its application to diverse groups.

Conclusion

Picking up where the last chapter left off, this conclusion argues that economic and numerical criteria provided a way for Mexican scholars to create a presumably scientific yet flexible definition of race and indigeneity that allowed for social and racial mobility. Many U.S. scholars thought that their Mexican counterparts confused race and class. More broadly, Mexicans’ attention to particularity and their attempts to reconcile indigeneity with modernity and liberalism were a creative effort to generate new forms of governance and new policies. However, Mexican experts shared with their US counterparts problematic assumptions about progress and evolution that—along with US intellectual imperialism--hampered the antiracist potential of their endeavors. This Conclusion returns to the questions of difference and modern liberal democracy. Mexican intellectuals subsumed differences into global theories of evolution or cultural diffusion, it shows. But they could apply those global theories only loosely and partially. They therefore offered a practical or tactical definition of indigeneity aimed at guiding social policies and encouraging social mobility, especially economic mobility.

Introduction

This chapter lays out this book’s approach to the history of the human and social sciences and introduces a set of scholars who compared Mexico to the United States. Their comparisons, the chapter argues, hid from view the variety of peoples within each country, the transnational connections that bound the two nations, and the parallels between them. This book unearths those connections and suggests that expertise moved from South to North as well as from North to South. Intellectuals deployed a model of liberal modernity that characterized all humans as sharing a set of universal potentials. Liberal universalism spurred epistemologies and forms of social engineering that favoured generalizable knowledge. Yet experts were also inspired by eugenics and evolutionary ideas, and they ranked nation-states according to how closely they approximated universal criteria of progress. They thereby created exceptionalist national narratives, and those narratives grounded their comparisons. By revealing the shared paradigms that connected the United States and Mexico, this book calls into question those exceptionalist narratives and their racial underpinning.