Carl Sauer's Vision of an Institute for Latin American Studies

Abstract

This working association of Latin Americanists has kept before itself the general objective of culture history. . . . Our reach at least is Wellsian. We are trying to understand the fortunes of man in Latin America, considering that there has been a significant contiguity and continuity of man in that geographic frame. Perhaps I can take two common catch words and give them a new juxtaposition, saying that we are interested in the personality of the culture or cultures of Latin America. This means that we have been working on studies concerned with the content of culture, with the values by which these cultures have lived, with the diffusion of cultural elements or the resistance thereto, with plasticity, stagnation, and self-destruction, in short with many questions of cultural growth and change. - Carl O. Sauer, letter to Stacy May, 30 July 1937 In the 1930s Carl Sauer spent a great deal of energy, though to little avail, trying to institutionalize Latin American Studies on the University of California, Berkeley, campus and to obtain outside funding for them. This effort, which promised little personal benefit, is detailed in the Sauer Papers in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley - a rich and accessible lode for anyone who is interested in the history of geography, especially as it relates to Latin America - based research (Constance 1978).(1) Sauer came late to the study of Latin America (Parsons 1976). He had been appointed to the Berkeley faculty as a full professor in 1923, at the age of thirty-seven, with an established reputation based on work in his native Midwest. The record suggests that he first set foot in Mexico, without any previous indication of interest in the area or familiarity with Spanish, in May and June of 1926, when he led graduate students Peveril Meigs, Fred Kniffen, and Samuel Dicken on a four-week reconnaissance of northern Baja California, almost three years after he arrived in California. There is a message here to all geographers: Careers need not be defined by one's graduate training or dissertation, or even by one's early professional years. Sauer's first substantial block of time in Mexico came in 1928, and thereafter he spent a month or more there in each of the next seven years. He happened onto a people and country that excited him, and he went for it, initially enticed by evidence that seemed to link the high cultures of central Mexico with the native peoples of Sinaloa, Sonora, and the Pueblo culture of the southwestern United States. Not until 1932 did he offer his first classes on Latin America. Oskar Schmieder, an early Sauer hire and a Latin Americanist, had elected to return to his native Germany, and the field was temptingly open. Interest in Mexico and the American Southwest was growing in other departments, and the Institute of Social Sciences, created three years earlier and of which Sauer was a part, promised limited support for fieldwork. EAST-COAST CONNECTIONS Sauer's relationships with higher-ups in the East Coast foundation world developed early and were close. In 1934, only three years after he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was named to the influential Guggenheim Selection Committee, on which he was to remain for thirty years. Through Henry Allen Moe, the Foundation's longtime secretary - and an unabashed admirer and personal friend - Sauer came into contact with the major figures in the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, as well as with other potential sources of funding. One of these was Joseph H. Willits, dean of the Wharton School of Business, who would later - 1939-1954 - head up the Division of Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. As early as 1934 Sauer had served with Willits on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Advisory Council on Population Redistribution, one of several Depression-born government agencies in which he was to become active. The uncommon warmth and mutual respect between Sauer and both Moe and Willits is richly documented in an extensive correspondence in the Bancroft Library (Sauer 1934). …