Keywords

Sociology and Positivism (1856–1910)

Sociology was first introduced in Mexico in 1856 by the physician and jurist Gabino Barreda (1818–1881) who had attended Comte’s lectures in Paris in 1851–1853 and then played a key role in the advancement of President Juárez’s (1806–1872) liberal educational policies, the secularization of public life in Mexico, and the separation of church and state (Barreda Flores, 1877, p. 8). Barreda drew on positivist ideas on social progress to criticize what he perceived as an excessive role of religion in all areas of society and defended the importance of a secular, scientific, and compulsory education (Barreda Flores, 1863, 1979, pp. 116–118).

According to Barreda’s own interpretations of positivism, Mexican independence in 1810, and nineteenth-century historical transformations, were part of the universal road to progress. Upholding Comte’s theories about social change, he considered that given the growing importance of science, there was no reason for the Catholic Church in Mexico to continue to have the overpowering influence that it had during the three centuries of the Spanish colonial period.

These ideas were crucial for the foundation, in 1868, of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) (equivalent to the last three years of high school) as a public institution headed by Barreda until 1878. Beginning in 1897, sociology courses and general seminars were offered on an occasional basis and four years later “Sociology and Morals” was introduced as a regular subject (Barreda, 1901a, b, pp. 194–199; Hernández Prado, 1999, pp. 169–174; Murguía, 1993, pp. 11–23).

While carrying out his duties at the ENP, in 1877, Barreda called on his students to found the Asociación Metodófíla, which strove to apply the positivist method for scientific studies. One year later, they founded the “Political, Scientific and Literary Newspaper” La Libertad (Aragón, 1898; Covarrubias, 1880). One of the most important authors of this group was Porfirio Parra who also defended positivism as the basis for a practical education in Mexico, as a combative philosophy against “the old theological spirit” and for promoting progress (Manterola, 1898; Parra Hernandez, 1896; Zea, 1968, pp. 151–181; pp. 350–352).

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, during the administration of President Porfirio Díaz—a period known as El Porfiriato (1876–1911), Spencer’s ideas and social Darwinism began to have a special influence for a group of Barreda’s former students known as Los científicos (“The Scientists”), social thinkers, ministers, and public officials that would have a central role in the new regime.

One of the most outstanding members of this group was the Secretary of Education and prolific writer Justo Sierra who opposed any religious interpretation, and under the influence of Spencer’ sociology considered the new social order represented by the Díaz government as a “natural consequence” of Mexico’s social evolution (Sierra, 1948, pp. 85–132; Sierra, 1991, p. 15).

In 1902, Sierra edited the book Mexico: Its Social Evolution, an initiative by the government to enlighthen the Mexican people and foreign countries about Mexican progress. According to Laura Moya (2003, 23–56), the work may be considered as the most comprehensive and systematic production of a group of modern thinkers who saw constitutional reform as the best road to achieve social and political change. Under the influence of Comte’s notion of progress and Spencerian social evolution, the twelve chapters, written by different authors—mostly lawyers who were also public officers and members of the Asociación Metodófila, are works about different aspects of the Mexican people and their institutions, studied from a sociological perspective, with a secular, temperate, neutral objective, and scientific interpretation of history that was also capable of making social predictions with a certain degree of accuracy (Moya, 2003, pp. 6–37). Since social phenomena were subject to laws, government decisions were supposed to rest on scientific and rational foundations.

Since 1897, in collaboration with jurist Miguel Macedo, Sierra advocated the introduction of specialized sociology courses in the School of Jurisprudence. This proposal, however, was not put into practice until 1906, when general courses were offered for the first time at some Mexican regional law schools, such as those of the states of Michoacán and Puebla, as well as at the National University. In 1907, the subject “Principles of Sociology,” chaired for the first time by Pereyra, was included in the National School of Law’s regular curriculum (Hernández Prado, 1999, p. 170; Mendieta Núñez, 1955).

In 1900, Horacio Barreda (Gabino’s son), Ezequiel Chávez, and Agustin Aragón founded the Revista Positiva, with a circulation of 500 copies. A total of 189 issues were printed from 1900 to 1914. Among the works published were articles about the relevance of sociology for the study of Mexico’s central problems (Pereyra, 1903). Alberto Escobar (1902, pp. 1–118) published a preliminary version of his book Principles of Sociology (1902), where he presented an organicist interpretation of Mexican history in which Spencer’s ideas concerning the general laws of evolution were explained (Alvarado & Bosque, 2009; González Navarro, 1970; Rovira, 1999).

Revista Positiva also published articles dealing with the “Mexican national character.” Ezequiel Chávez (1901) explained the heterogeneous nature of the “Mexican organism,” and the “distinct sensibilities of Europeans, mestizos and Indians.” With a prejudiced view, he considered the Indian population as disdainful and “impervious in the face of progress,” with greater interest in their own territory than in the “Mexican motherland,” whereas Europeans were more rational and had “a greater ability for expressing emotions,” while mestizos (classified by him between the superior and inferior groups) had a shifting and more intuitive sensibility. In the same year, Julio Guerrero (2002, pp. 47–52) published a text in which he maintained that Mexicans were predisposed to sadness and melancholy (Bartra, 2002, p. 47). As will be shown in Chap. 3, these ideas would have a great influence on well-known twentieth-century authors like Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz.

In 1910, the year of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) against the Porfirio Diaz regime, as Secretary of Education Justo Sierra founded the National University (that later became UNAM) offering a free, secular education for the careers of engineering, jurisprudence, medicine, and architecture. Since 1907, in collaboration with Pablo Macedo, Sierra presented a project to introduce the social sciences in the curriculum of legal studies which changed its name to “National School of Social Sciences and Law,” as courses in sociology were incorporated (Moya, 2003, p. 43). However, due to the political situation in Mexico, although specialized social science courses were included in the new curriculum, they were not taught. Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, the importance of sociology in Mexico lay not so much in the academic as in the public arena.

Towards the end of the Porfiriato, in 1909, Andrés Molina Enríquez (1895–1940) published his study The Great National Problems (Molina Enríquez, 1984), considered to be the first thoroughly sociological book by a single author. He echoed the theses of positivism and evolutionism (Kourí, 2009, p. 302) and also introduced a new multicausal approach for the interpretation of Mexican society which included the distribution of agricultural property, social classes, and the racial composition of the population. Like many intellectuals of his time, Molina had studied jurisprudence, but he preferred to think of himself as a sociologist mostly interested in social groups, norms, and collectivities. In its first editions, the book was published with the subtitle “Studies in Mexican Sociology” (Magallón, 2004, p. 83). As also stated by Durkheim, Medina considered the concept of social cohesion as the main object of sociology. Since Molina could hardly have known Durkheim’s work, as it was being published in France at that moment, a more likely explanation for the coincidence between these two contemporaries is that they were both mainly concerned with sociology, and their ideas were heavily marked by the legacy of previous positivist currents.

Molina’s book offered an analysis of social problems that had not received proper attention until then. Particularly noteworthy was his concern about the cultural situation of indigenous peoples, absent from many historical studies written both after the independence and during the Porfiriato. When Sierra previously dealt with the matter (1899), he affirmed that the so-called social problem of indigenous peoples was mainly related to the lack of education and good nutrition, and what was needed was to reduce these inequalities (Kourí, 2009, pp. 281–282). In contrast, Molina’s work presented a painstaking classification of indigenous groups based on a combination of ethnical, racial, and sociological elements, including the economic and symbolic significance of the ownership of what they considered as their “ancestral lands.” Thus, in opposition to the views of certain científicos, who went so far as to affirm that the progress of Mexican agriculture would require European immigrants, Molina believed that the mestizo population took its strength from “its indigenous blood,” and that the native people had been undervalued and subjected to countless injustices in Mexican history (Hernández Prado, 1999, pp. 169–174). Far from remaining isolated, since independence, they had mixed with the rest of the population to such a degree that their presence had diminished in the same proportion that the mestizos had increased. Thus, Molina (2006, p. 30) stated that Mexico’s population “is on the way to becoming a single one.”

Molina’s book includes data about the different populations, with 50%, the largest segment, mestizo, followed by 35% indigenous peoples, and 15% criollos. In the author’s view, only mestizos were in an adequate position to become fully integrated, and to continue being “the political class leading the population” (Kourí, 2009, p. 302), since they were not only the largest, but also the strongest and most patriotic of the three groups. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Molina’s thesis had a strong influence in governmental and intellectual circles, and the conception of the Mexican people as a unified, patriotic mestizo population would become, in later years, a key argument in the legitimating discourse of the new regime (Molina Enríquez, 1984). Although in his book Molina extolled Porfirio Díaz’s leadership, after the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, in 1911, he opposed the concentration of privately owned lands in a few hands during his government, and 1915, in collaboration with Luis Cabrera, he drew up an important agrarian law reform to redress this situation (Villegas, 1993. pp. 17–18).

Studies dealing with Mexico’s intellectual history during the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth century do not usually include the role of women, and some authors of the time ignored them or talked about them showing their prejudices. Such was the case of Horacio Barreda, Gabino’s son, who in 1901 wrote against feminism and advocated for the traditional roles assigned to women, arguing that these conditions were based on nature and that women’s participation in politics may “destroy their femininity” (Barreda, 1901a; Ramos Escandón, 2001, 98–99). This was also the case for Molina who, under the influence of social Darwinism and the theses of Schopenhauer, claimed that since there were scientific grounds that proved men’s organism was superior to women’s, that women were unsuitable for leadership, and feminism was “mere nonsense” (Molina, 1984, pp. 363–364).

However, a few liberal thinkers appealed to positivism’s scientific discourse to question the traditional ideas associated with religious education and defended women’s right to partake in professional training. Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a permanent dispute between the liberal and the conservative Catholic sectors over the social role of women, with the former in favor of social transformation and the latter calling for the reinforcement of traditions. Some Mexican liberals, like Melchor Ocampo, spoke in favor of allowing women to enroll in higher education studies (López Pérez, 2008, pp. 50–51), and considered their situation of social inferiority to be one of the mightiest obstacles hindering the progress of the humanity (quoted by López Pérez, 2008, p. 55). One of the intellectuals who most strongly advocated in favor of women was the historian and director of the National Museum, Genaro García, an outspoken follower of the ideas of Spencer, whose 1891 dissertation to qualify as lawyer was about women’s inequality (Ramos Escandón, 2001, pp. 87–107).

These writings echoed the concerns expressed at the time by the pioneers of feminism in Mexico, a group of women writers who during the nineteenth century contributed to the country’s intellectual life by publishing several articles in magazines they had themselves founded with the purpose of promotion of the presence of women in the public sphere, arguing that they should “educate themselves in the study of science, the arts and history,” clearing the path towards social and economic progress (López Sánchez, 2012, pp. 608–613; Manresa, 1887, pp. 7–19).

Among the most outstanding women authors of the time was Lawreana Wright, a precursor of feminism in Mexico. She was the founder and director of the magazine Las hijas del Anáhuac (Daughters of Anáhuac)—whose name was changed to Violetas del Anáhuac (Violets of Anáhuac) in 1888—a plural, progressive publication that was widely distributed across Mexico, and even in other areas and countries, such as Cuba, New Orleans, and the United States, and which encouraged the creation of networks between women from different regions (CNDH México, 2021). Among Wright’s most significant texts are The Emancipation of Women through Education (Wright, 1891) and An Erroneous Female Education and the Practical Means to Correct It (CNDH México, 2021). In her works, Wright spoke about the importance of women’s economic independence and of professional degrees to achieve emancipation. In 1891, in cooperation with Montoya, the first female university doctor, she founded the first nursery in Mexico, where women workers could leave their children during the day. Another outstanding woman was Antonia Leonila Ursúa, one of the 84 females who graduated from the Faculty of Medicine from 1887 to 1937. As a writer, she also highlighted the importance of women’s emancipation and their right to study and enter the scientific professions (Castañeda & Rodríguez, 2012). The first suffragettes of the country also spoke out against Horacio Barreda’s positions, among them Hermila Galindo (1896–1954), who elaborated a view of feminism in which the autonomy of women and the collective well being converge (Galindo, 1993; Escorcia, 2013).

As is the case in other parts of the world, the contributions of these women authors have remained invisible, and for the most part unrecognized, in the history of Mexican social and political thought. However, in view of their contributions, the present study considers these women should also be given a place as forerunners of sociology.

“Mexican Renaissance” and the Institutionalization of the New Regime (1910–1930)

The present section analyzes the post-revolutionary Mexican thinking, focusing on the work and topics of three authors: Antonio Caso and the criticism of positivism, Manuel Gamio and the founding of anthropology in Mexico, and an incipient reflection on Mexican culture carried out by Anita Brenner. This period was defined by the Mexican revolution and the consolidation of the new regime. The civil war took place during the first stage (1910–1920), followed by intense infighting among the various factions involved in the conflict. The official party, founded in the late 1920s, would go on to govern the country until the year 2000.

During this time period, there was a boom in the plastic arts, with a new narrative that dealt with the Mexican character and the country’s political history as it was expressed, from an epic perspective, in the works of the muralist movement headed by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, as well as a handful of women, including María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, who would receive no recognition until the twenty-first century. During the 1920s, the worldwide perception was that Mexico’s post-revolutionary era was highly attractive from the cultural point of view, as a kind of “romantic period.” Foreign intellectuals and photographers (such as Edward Weston and Tina Modotti) were working in the country. André Breton visited Mexico and proclaimed it a surrealist country.

Under the influence of a new national discourse that privileged artistic expression over science, the younger generation launched a crusade against positivism to restore´ imagination and a narrative closer to essay writing and philosophical discourse than to scientific works. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were set up against Comte and Spencer (Henriquez Ureña, 1914, p. 212; Zea, 1968, pp. 438–439). New magazines with an emphasis on literature were established, such as Savia Moderna, published from 1906 to 1914 (Murguía, 1993, p. 13; Sefchovich, 1989, p. 22).

One of the most important intellectual movements of the time was the Ateneo de la Juventud (Youth Athenaeum), founded in 1909, as a response to the nationwide political and social interest in renovation, and dissociation from the old regime. Among its members were renowned politicians, artists, writers, and social thinkers, such as Alfonso Reyes and Diego Rivera. One of its most prominent members was José Vasconcelos, who at a conference given in 1910 stated that positivism killed spontaneity and freedom and nullified non-scientific forms of expression (Vasconcelos, 1910, p. 22; Zea, 1968, p. 443). The positions expressed by Vasconcelos gained impetus from 1921, when he was appointed Secretary of Public Education and supported and called for a new attention to Mexican history and pre-Hispanic monuments (Zapata, 2014, 19–20).

A stand out among the members of the Ateneo was Antonio Caso (1883–1946), a man of great oratory gifts who became a sort of unofficial spokesman for the anti-positivism movement, Under the influence of European authors like Bergson, Dilthey, and Spranger, he questioned the validity of the positivist model and claimed that the conception of social sciences in Comte, Mills, and Spencer, and even in Marx, were philosophies of history with an inaccurate emphasis on causativeness over social understanding (Florescano, 1963, p. 358). According to Caso, both positivist sociology and historical materialism failed to understand the multiple aspects of social realities. In opposition to these theories, he considered that what was relevant for the study of society were psychological, anthropological, and cultural values, and a better understanding of religious, artistic, linguistic, and political phenomena (Caso, 1980, pp. 6–10; Caso, 1985, p. 7; Caso, 1999, pp. 152–153; Hernández Prado, 1990; Manterola, 1898).

Caso became director of the ENP in 1909, and he taught the course “Principles of Sociologie” for a long time (1909–1940). He also lectured sociology at the National School of Law and was first secretary and later president (1920–1923) of the National University (Hernández Prado, 1994, p. 36; Kozlarek, 2012, p. 11), where he defended the freedom of ideas and the respect and encouragment of different theoretical and political approaches to knowledge. As a university professor, Caso introduced a heterodox, anti-organicist strain of sociology, influenced by his professor at ENP, Alberto Escobar (1902), whose sociological teachings were published as a book. Caso also introduced in his classes the work of the Peruvian thinker Mariano Cornejo’s General Sociology, and later his own Genetic and Systematic Sociology (Caso, 1927) that two years later was incorporated as a textbook by most curricula that included sociology as a subject matter. First published by the Ministry of Public Education, the book went through several revised and expanded editions. The last to be published during the author’s lifetime was the 1945 version titled Sociología (Caso, 1980; Gardia, 1980; Hernández Prado, 1994; Murguía, 1993, p. 13).

From its first edition, Caso’s book received some radical criticism. One of his most brilliant students, the young philosopher Samuel Ramos (1867–1960), argued that the author’s “irrational intuitionism” confused positivism with science itself, without considering the risks of “vindicating intuitionism in a nation that needed to give more impetus to science.” Since Caso’s main arguments were closer to a philosophy of culture than to sociological concepts—the book would be widely read by philosophy students in Mexico—the future social scientists hardly regarded it as a reference work. Despite its editorial success, the ideas could not easily be applied to social research projects and, therefore, had no significant impact on the practice of sociology in Mexico (Florescano, 1963, p. 361; Hernández Prado, 1994, pp. 169–193; Murguía, 1994–1999; Ramos Magaña, 1946).

Sociology was more influenced by the Anthropology of Manuel Gamio than by Caso’s philosophy of history. Like many authors of his time, Gamio had been educated as a liberal-positivist lawyer at the ENP. From 1906 to 1908, he took courses in archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology at the National Museum, where he later became a history teacher and afterwards conducted excavations in the state of Zacatecas which aroused the interest of academic sectors in the United States. Between 1909 and 1911, he was awarded a scholarship to study at Columbia University. He met anthropologist Franz Boas there, who was undertaking a project to initiate an anthropology school in Mexico and had asked American ethnologist and archaeologist Zelia Nutall to help him look for a Mexican that was up to the task (Kourí, 2009, p. 60). Once Gamio concluded his professional preparation in the USA, he joined an archaeological expedition to Ecuador, and upon his return to Mexico, in 1913, he was appointed the inspector general of Archaeological Monuments for the Ministry of Education.

Recognizing the rich linguistic, cultural, and racial heterogeneity of indigenous peoples, and in line with the official ideology of his time, Gamio defended the need to integrate them to the nation (Murguía, 1993, pp. 12–13). As Molina Enríquez had done before, focused on mestizaje, Gamio (1916) claimed that “the fusion of races” and linguistic unification would promote the “economic and social equilibrium of the country.” Such arguments revealed the close ties between applied anthropological research and the post-revolutionary official national narrative: indigenous groups would be integrated in the country along with the other sectors of the Mexican population, giving shape to “a powerful homeland and an articulated nationhood” (Castillo, 2014, pp. 176–178; Gamio, 1960, p. 325). Gamio’s arguments would have a strong influence on Vasconcelos’s well-known book The Cosmic Race (1925), considered a “manifesto” of Mexican identity at the time.

In 1916, Gamio headed Mexico’s delegation to the Second Pan-American Congress in Washington, where his proposal was that each country should create its own Anthropology Department. The Mexican one, founded by Gamio, would be the first in the continent and later became the Department of Indigenist Studies (Olvera, 2004, p. 84). In 1920, Gamio founded and directed Ethnos, a journal devoted to the study of indigenous communities and social conflicts in rural and urban areas, and published diverse works dealing with anthropological, sociological, juridical, and philological issues. Among the authors were Lucio Mendieta y Núñez and Pablo González Casanova, all of whom would play key roles in the institutionalization process of sociology (Comas, 1993).

In 1922, Gamio’s research, The Population of the Valley of Teotihuacan (Gamio, 1922), was published. It became a landmark in social studies by introducing a conception of social science with close link with social policy and social practices. Backed by the government, the project may be considered as a turning point, as a model of collective intellectual enterprise with a significant effect on the formation of future social scientists. Among them was Mendieta, who worked in the project as an assistant to Gamio (Mendieta Nuñez, 1955, 1961; Olvera, 2004). The research, conducted in the Teotihuacan valley, 50 kilometers away from the country’s capital, was done through as a multifactorial analysis including political and juridical practices, land distribution, housing conditions, and a general social diagnosis of the inhabitants. Through the Directorship of Anthropology, Gamio conducted an “integral census.” In accordance with the results, inhabitants were classified whether they belonged to “indigenous” or “modern civilization” (the latter included non-indigenous and mostly mestizo inhabitants). In this comprehensive study, Gamio disclosed data in relation to schooling, marriage, mortality rates, health conditions, economic and social inequalities, and other adverse circumstances (Gamio, 1922).

Given that Teotihuacan had received less attention in comparison to other cultures, such as the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, the study focused on archaeological findings, architecture, plastic arts, religion, “regional folklore,” and other practices considered by Gamio as constituents of their “moral education.” The research also included different proposals for the improvement of salaries and access to economic and cultural resources, including a new program to reinforce “national identity”—a new education plan that included attention to the special needs of indigenous children and adults and teaching methods with films and audiovisual techniques that were very advanced at the time (Gamio, 1922, pp. 55–57). In collaboration with the government, the project also made policy proposals for reforestation, farming construction plans with regional supplies, and training programs to develop skills for handicraft and industrial production, (Gamio, 1922, pp. 156–165).

In his work, Gamio criticized the role played by certain sectors of the Catholic Church and its “fanatical prejudices” and stated that “despite all the diseases suffered by the population” in the Teotihuacan valley, no priest could be found there to “heal the sick, assist the hungry and comfort the outcast” (Gamio, 1922, p. 48). On the other hand, concerned about the spread of the Russian Revolution’s ideology to other countries, he also warned that Mexico’s improvement programs should keep away from any projects linked to the “Soviets,” because despite all the abuse and scarcity in their lives, “indigenous peoples have gained nothing out of Bolshevism” (Gamio, 1922, p. 72).

Gamio may be considered as the first intellectual whose major role was as an academic scholar with no interest in a political career. Besides his responsibilities in the Anthropology Department, the only other government position that he held was the deputy minister of education, in 1924 (President Elías Calles ‘Government), which he resigned after he publicly decried the corruption and servility of officialdom. Gamio was compelled to leave the country, and after a short stay in the United States he was commissioned by the American Archaeological Society of Washington to head a research project in Guatemala (González Gamio, 2003; Villoro, 1987, p. 9).

In the mid-1920s, Gamio began to study Mexican migration to the USA, at the request of several American foundations and the Social Science Research Council, whose director, Dr. Charles E. Merrian, thought of him as “the most qualified person for the job, given his outstanding academic career.” For this project, Gamio and his team conducted some 60 interviews of migrants, the results of which were published in the English-language books Mexican Immigration to the United States (1930) and The Mexican Immigrant. His Life and Story (1931). Unfortunately, these publications were scarcely known and circulated in Mexico, since in those times migrants to the US were regarded as “traitors to the homeland,” and the books would not be published in Spanish until 1969 (Alanís, 2019; Douglas & Hansen, 2002, p. 172; Gamio, 1931; Zapata, 2014, p. 14).

Another student of Franz Boas who wrote important texts on Mexico’s cultural life was Anita Brenner (1905–1974), born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, to a family of first-generation Latvian Jews who had migrated to Mexico. Anita’s early political awareness probably resulted from her origins as a Jewish woman who had been displaced, and her affinity to a Mexican culture she nonetheless felt as her own. There were periods in her childhood in which the family were expatriated from Mexico, because of the revolutionaries’ efforts to oust US citizens, a situation that forced them to migrate to San Antonio, Texas, in 1916. At 18, however, Anita took the decision to reclaim what she saw as her inalienable roots. Returning to Mexico on her own, she enrolled in the university. In 1925, she went to New York to pursue a degree in anthropology at Columbia University, where she graduated with a doctoral thesis project on Mesoamerican culture, under the direction of Boas himself.

When Anita went back to Mexico in 1927, she took notice of how American media contributed to a negative view of the country, and became convinced that she had a major role to play in promoting the new Mexican identity abroad. Out of this concern, and as a result of her research, in 1929, she published her book Idols behind Altars in the USA which included images from the renowned photographers Weston and Modotti, who had been invited by Anita to visit Mexico and were to have a lasting impact on the country’s cultural life (San José Vázquez, 2009, pp. 71–76). As Alan Grabinsky (2017) notes, “As journalist and anthropologist, cultural promoter and traveler, Anita helped the cultural movement called Mexican Renaissance to find a place in the United States; her hybrid identity allowed her to crisscross national boundaries, earning her an important role as some sort of cultural diplomat.”

According to Brenner (1929, pp. 31–32), nowhere as in Mexico has art become a constituent part of life and national identity. Like many mural paintings of the time, the author stresses the unfavorable conditions of indigenous groups throughout the country’s history. With this publication, Brenner initiated the study of Mexico’s eclectic religious celebrations as an expression of the historical heritage and the fusion of universal and particular cultures in the celebration of unconventional festivities, like the Day of the Dead (Brenner, 1929, pp. 11–19). Brenner’s analysis would be crucial for subsequent books on this matter, including those by Samuel Ramos or Octavio Paz which will be examined in Chap. 3.

Idols behind Altars thus offered the earliest synthesis about the political, intellectual, and artistic movement of 1920s Mexico known as the “Cultural Renaissance” (San José Vázquez, 2009, pp. 71–82). The book was an instant success. Anita was only 24 years old when she received congratulatory letters from European writers like Miguel de Unamuno and Richard Hughes (Grabinsky, 2017). A few years later, the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to film a movie he never finished, ¡Que viva México! (1932), with a script that was an adaptation of Anita’s book. Years later, in 1943, Brenner published The Wind That Swept Mexico. The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1942, “the first book to present a broad account of Mexican Revolution in its different phases.”

Notwithstanding her success and the significance of her anthropological and cultural insights, Brenner’s studies have received no recognition as an antecedent of sociology and the social sciences. This may well be due to her background as a Mexican American woman who mainly wrote in English, spent a good part of her life on both sides of the border, taught no classes at Mexican universities and belonged to no academic or intellectual group of the time, other than the muralists and other groups of artists.