The Constitution of Sociology at El Colegio de México: Two Key Intellectual Cohorts of Refugees and the Legacies They Left for Mexico and Latin America

Abstract

This chapter recreates the legacies and the products of the first era of the sociological discipline at El Colegio de Mexico. It stresses the importance of Jose Medina Echavarria and his contribution to institutional building in El Colegio. The Centro de Estudios Sociales (1940–1943), and the Centro de Estudios Sociologicos (1973–), were endowed with more than one generation of intellectual emigres, since two cohorts of refuges (First Medina and then Stavenhagen, Stern, Oliveira, Salles, Padua, Zapata & Cortes, among others) have important contributions to the development of social sciences in the institution. One the one hand, El Colegio provided a space for exiles to continue to work on their topics of expertise and on the other hand, they contributed with new disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches.