Eugenic Acculturation

Abstract

In January 1939 the anthropologist Manuel Gamio toured the hinterlands of the Mexican border town of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, to examine the progress of the federal government's Valle Bajo Rio Bravo agricultural development project and to conduct an anthropological survey of the region. Over the previous four years the government of President Lazaro Cardenas had invested huge amounts of money in the construction of irrigation and flood control works in the Mexican half of the delta region of the Rio Bravo (known as the Rio Grande on the Texas side of the border) in an effort to create a cottonproducing agricultural zone that would replicate the economic growth of other cotton regions in the borderlands. The project had the goal of easing the social problems caused by the crisis of the 1930s, the most important of which was the massive re-immigration, or repatriation, of Mexicans from the United States to the border region (Carreras de Velasco, 1973; Hoffman, 1974; Balderrama and Rodriguez, 1995). The report that Gamio produced was a regional study of the environmental and social conditions in Matamoros, to be used as a guide for settling repatriated Mexican workers from Texas as small farmers in this new irrigation district.' The anthropologist concluded: