This research analyzes a set of interconnected social science projects that examined the nature of racial difference, its salience, and its relation to poverty in Mexico and the United States, 1930-1970. The research tracks the scientists, mainly anthropologists, who carried out the research projects and explores the methods they used to categorize individuals and groups. It also ask how research agendas were shaped by the government and private agencies that funded the projects. My research sheds light on the internationalization of science and on the differing ways scholars conceptualized the relation of race-based policies to class.
The project charts the relations between scientists across national borders, their access to resources, and their ability to shape research agendas. It shows that knowledge travelled from South to North as well as from North to South, and reveals the unacknowledged creativity with which Latin American intellectuals appropriated and adapted ideas. Yet differences in power between North and South often led U.S. scholars to view Latin American social science as derivative. The research contributes to scholarship on race by examining whether scientists conceived of race as biological or cultural; what they identified as its bodily and mental manifestations; whether they saw racial differences as superficial or deeply engrained in individual essences; and whether they saw it as shaped primarily by socialization or economic structures. When was race was invoked by scholars? To what ends were racial categorizations put? And how did definitions of race or class change in distinct national contexts and over time? The research is grounded in reading of key texts and in archival research to track the institutional and personal networks of scholars. It will use secondary sources to identify the social science literatures on which prominent authors drew. Secondary works, published papers, and archival collections will help establish previously unknown connections among scholars and the role of institutional connections and funding on research.
