In this history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt reveals intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race, and policies toward indigenous peoples. Focusing on the anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, physicians, and other experts who collaborated across borders from the Mexican Revolution through World War II, Rosemblatt traces how intellectuals on both sides of the Rio Grande forged shared networks in which they discussed indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities. In doing so, Rosemblatt argues, they refashioned race as a scientific category and consolidated their influence within their respective national policy circles. Postrevolutionary Mexican experts aimed to transform their country into a modern secular state with a dynamic economy, and central to this endeavor was learning how to ""manage"" racial difference and social welfare. The same concern animated U.S. New Deal policies toward Native Americans. The scientists' border-crossing conceptions of modernity, race, evolution, and pluralism were not simple one-way impositions or appropriations, and they had significant effects. In the United States, the resulting approaches to the management of Native American affairs later shaped policies toward immigrants and black Americans, in Mexico, officials rejected policy prescriptions they associated with U.S. intellectual imperialism and racial segregation.
Karin Rosemblatt is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland and the author of Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950.
"A crucial contribution to the new literature on the transnational dimensions of post-revolutionary nation-building. . . . [and] the literature on US-Latin American relations. . . . One i?\x81nishes 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 i?\x81elds."--Journal of Contemporary History "A fascinating study of racial thinking and policy making in the United States and Mexico during the early twentieth century. . . . A deeply illuminating study."--Journal of American History "A very well written and thoughtful analysis of a complex and difficult body of social theory and policy. This book will prove to be of great interest to a wide number of readers, including intellectual historians, Latin Americanists, and historians of both the social and natural sciences."--U.S. Intellectual History Book Reviews "An exemplary work that shows the promise of transnational intellectual history. . . . Deftly researched and concisely written, Rosemblatt's study is a model of scholarship and required reading for those interested in the ways in which the science and politics of race became interminably entangled in twentieth-century North America and how that legacy continues to shape understandings of social difference."--Bulletin of Latin American Research "An extensive and deeply nuanced history about the importance of ideas of diversity and unity among transnational networks of intellectuals and state actors in north America. . . . Thorough, insightful and nicely penned."--Journal of Latin American Studies "In this history of the collaboration between social scientists in Mexico and the US, Rosemblatt (history, Univ. of Maryland) deftly explores the intricate connections between social science research, eugenics, changing racial concepts, and government policies toward indigenous peoples. . . . Highly recommended."--CHOICE "Offers a much-needed study on the intellectual networks established by Mexican and U.S. scholars."--American Historical Review "Rosemblatt deftly explores how notions of race, modernity, pluralism, and social change were mobilized by Mexican and U.S. social scientists dedicated to the project of reconciling racial and cultural dii? erence with liberal progress. . . . Rosemblatt's careful and clear-eyed treatment of these dynamics, as well as of the complicated ways in which scientii?\x81c ideas about race translated into state policies (and vice versa) make this book a signii?\x81cant contribution to the historiography of race in North America and to a transnational historiography of social science generally."--Ethnic and Racial Studies "Rosemblatt points the way forward, opening up new venues to explore in terms of shared political views and cultural and scientific linkages between two countries whose histories are clearly more connected than is generally assumed."--Isis "Rosemblatt's work advances our understanding about how so-called experts in Mexico and the United States established epistemological origins of race by looking in both directions across the Rio Bravo/Grande border to their counterparts and related social examples. . . . A fine work that has broad application and relevance well beyond its Mexican-US context.'."--Canadian Journal of History
