The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950. By Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

Abstract

This book is a unique addition to the history of American states’ ardent attempts to cope with their multicultural societies during the first five decades of the twentieth century. Rosemblatt, an established scholar of race and gender in Latin America, has produced a remarkable study of the U.S. and Mexico at a time when social sciences in both countries were growing, and state agencies in both nations made attempts to manage and aid vulnerable populations. Skillfully weaving the history of social science ideas and state policies aimed at indigenous people in early twentieth-century Mexico and the U.S., the author transcends comparison and provides a truly transnational study. Rosemblatt’s goal is to study the efforts of social scientists “who worked with state officials to understand how to manage racial difference within and across nations” (3). The book has three sets of arguments, one for each nation and then a third about the relationship between the two. The author finds important distinctions between the two countries’ intellectual perspectives and policy outcomes, even as scientific communities in each nation freely shared ideas. For example, in the U.S., the overarching goal was “sensitive” acculturation of indigenous people in the context of the overarching assumption that indigenous cultural expressions would “disappear” once no longer functional. Mexican scientists’ energies, on the other hand, were largely devoted to documenting in great detail the cultural diversity in their nation, and they resisted generalizing theories. Finally, Rosemblatt convincingly demonstrates that Mexican scholarship influenced U.S. social science—in spite of the fact that scientists in both countries acknowledged the imbalance of power between the two.