Abstract
This book explores how Mexican and US officials and experts – mainly social scientists – thought about and administered indigenous people. It shows how the concept of race informed their efforts in increasingly complicated and contested ways. Biological determinism gradually lost ground to culture and class, and the desire for cultural assimilation competed with more pluralist visions, although these changes generally proceeded further in Mexico than in the United States. By showing the heterogeneity of expert views, the tensions in their ideas about race, and how they sometimes challenged without wholly overturning dominant ideas of progress, Rosemblatt builds on the central insights of Mexico’s post-revisionist literature on indigenismo. However, the book’s main contribution is to show how US and Mexican discussions connected and influenced each other. Indeed, Rosemblatt argues that experts sometimes obscured these connections and exaggerated national differences to bolster their ideological agendas and professional interests.
The geographic sequencing of the chapters foregrounds the travel of ideas from South to North. Chapter one focuses on Mexican anthropologists and educators in the 1910s and 1920s, particularly Manuel Gamio. It traces Gamio’s years as a student of Franz Boas at Colombia University, but the main argument is that Mexico’s post-revolutionary tumult pushed men like Gamio to experiment with new approaches to race relations, even as they struggled to reconcile their faith in universal progress and scientific rationality with a respect for cultural difference. The chapter also describes the many links between the social sciences and Mexico’s eugenics movement, which generally aligned with the ‘soft’, ‘Latin’ eugenics pushed by the Italian Corrado Gini. Chapter Two analyses US debates in the 1920s, underlining the importance of anxieties about immigration to early US social science, and the persistence of a harder-edged biological racism. Chapter Three then moves into the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the career of John Collier, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the New Deal. The chapter shows the profound influence that Spanish colonial history and post-revolutionary Mexico had on Collier’s efforts to reform US Indian policy; it also shows how, by the 1940s, Collier downplayed these Mexican influences, promoted a supposedly universal model for ethnographically-informed race-relations, and sought to apply it in range of new contexts, from Japanese internment camps to new colonial territories like Guam. The final chapter returns to Mexico, arguing that by the 1940s social scientists had reached a rough consensus: cultural diversity and economic integration were distinct but compatible objectives which, with government help, communities could embrace in tandem. This chapter also proposes an interesting and novel argument about official information-gathering in indigenous communities: according to Rosemblatt, it was driven less by the familiar exigencies of taxation or social control, and more by a kind of epistemic anxiety, as anthropologists struggled to grasp an elusive indigeneity using scientific standards of measurement.
Impressive primary research underpins all these chapters. While many of the key characters – Gamio, Boas, Moisés Sáenz, Robert Redfield, Collier – will be familiar to specialists, Rosemblatt provides an unusually deep sense of the intellectual and institutional context in which they worked; she moves far beyond the standard published works, delving into confidential reports, and personal correspondence with funders, peers and publishers; she also traces subtle and revealing changes between different editions of published works.
This book is a crucial contribution to the new literature on the transnational dimensions of post-revolutionary nation-building, joining recent studies by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Rubén Flores and Tore Olsson, among others. (Indeed, Mexicanists might have wanted some more discussion of this context, and how the networks that Rosemblatt analyzes compared with those that emerged around public education, agronomy, and public health.) The book also contributes to the literature on US-Latin American relations, showing how the earliest US efforts to develop systematic knowledge about Latin America were driven not by the Cold War but by concerns about racial heterogeneity and immigration in the mainland United States. Finally, it deserves an audience among those interested in the intellectual origins of US Cold War development projects. For example, John Collier – whose search for organic local communities proved a life-long (and ultimately rather quixotic) obsession – emerges as another tributary to the tradition of community development recently analysed by Daniel Immerwahr. In sum, one finishes the book thoroughly convinced by its central thesis: a national frame greatly distorts our understanding of race and science in the period. This deeply-researched book is necessary reading for researchers in a number of interlocking fields.