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The Contributions of the Spanish Republicans

One of the most relevant events in the intellectual history of the period was the immigration of Spanish Republicans, who received the active support of President Lazaro Cardenas to immigrate to Mexico because of the rise of Franco’s dictatorship. The refugees, or transterrados, had a prominent cultural role in the field of the social sciences. Manuel Pedroso, a renowned professor at the University of Seville who stood out as a university lecturer, taught a seminar on political theory at UNAM’s School of Law which would be of great importance for future social scientists, such as Víctor Flores Olea, Enrique González Pedrero, and Cecilia Diamant, one of the first woman professors of political and social theory.

In the discipline of sociology, Luis Recaséns Siches and José Medina Echavarría (both educated as jurists in Europe) were some of the outstanding intellectuals of the Spanish Exile in Mexico Recaséns joined the UNAM as professor in 1940; he taught a course in Philosophy of Law and, from 1943, held a chair in sociology. Since no social sciences specialization existed at the time, his contributions had a significant influence on jurisprudence students, but not on the education of future sociologists. Medina (1903–1997), who arrived in Mexico in 1939 at the age of 36, had studied law at the universities of Valencia and Paris, and later taught this subject at the University of Murcia. An enthusiastic scholar of German philosophy, he translated into Spanish several texts by authors like Gustav Radbruch and Robert Michels. In Spain, he was actively involved in politics, but as a refugee, in Mexico, he focused only on intellectual pursuits (Zabludovsky, 2002).

At UNAM, from 1939 to 1945, Medina gave lectures in general sociology to law students, a social psychology course to future philosophers, and a research methodology class to students at the School of Economics, where his plans to hold an international seminar on Max Weber were rejected (Alarcón, 1991, pp. 60–67; Lida & Matesanz, 2000, p. 229; Soler, 2015, p. 135). As an “outsider” (Elias, 1994), Medina was largely excluded from some of the already established academic circles, such as those led by Mendieta Núñez, who, as will be seen later, was the founder of UNAM’s Institute of Social Research. During his residence in Mexico, Medina published several articles and the book Overview of Contemporary Sociology (1940), in which, to advance in his own sociological proposals, he displayed the main contributions of Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies, Weber, and other authors.

In collaboration with Mexican intellectuals, the refugees created pivotal institutions for the advancement of the social sciences. Among these, the most outstanding are the following:

  1. 1.

    La Casa de España en México (The House of Spain in Mexico), founded in 1938 by Mexican economist and historian Daniel Cosío Villegas, was initially conceived as a working place for the most prominent of the Spanish refugee intellectuals, including Medina, Pedroso, Recaséns, and the woman philosopher Zambrano. In October 1940, its name changed to El Colegio de México (COLMEX), that is to date one of the most remarkable institutions for education and research in the social sciences. From 1940 to 1950, COLMEX’s president was the well-known Mexican writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes, although much of the decision-making was in the hands of General Secretary Cosío Villegas who was also one of the founders of UNAM’s School of Economics and professor at UNAM’s School of Law, where he lectured Sociology for a brief period (1923–1924) at the chair previously occupied by Antonio Caso (Moya & Olvera, 2006, pp. 11–138; Soler, 2015).

  2. 2.

    The Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), founded in 1934, also by Cosío Villegas, became one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the Spanish-speaking countries, and the first independent Latin American publishing company with a global impact. Previously, most Spanish books in the region were printed in Argentina, through local branches of the main publishing companies from Spain. With the rise of Fascism in Europe, these were banned or censured, and the FCE began to play a central role in the dissemination of major social sciences works (Krauze, 1984, p. 15).

The FCE initially published books dealing with economy, followed by collections focusing on politics and law (from 1937), and later philosophy, anthropology, and sociology (from 1939). From its early stages, the sociology collection was directed by Medina, who, in collaboration with other refugees, achieved outstanding results, with the publication of 41 works from 1939 to 1946, many of which were translations of the most important classical authors (Alarcón, 1991, pp. 60–220). One of the most remarkable was the 1944 complete edition of Max Weber’s Economy and Society, edited by Medina, who regarded this author as the greatest sociologist of his time (Medina Echavarria, 1944). It was the first full translation from the German ever; the first complete English edition, by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, did not come out until 1968.

The sociology collection included other books originally in German, like F. Tönnies (1931) Principles of Sociology, Alfred Weber’s Historia de la Cultura (translation by Recaséns,) and various books of Karl Mannheim, including Ideology and Utopia (1942). Later on, texts from other languages would also be translated, including books by Comte, Durkheim, Linton, Pareto, and Veblen (Lida et al., 2000, pp. 230–231; Moya, 2007, pp. 765–779). In addition to his task as an author, at UNAM and the FCE in 1943, Medina founded COLMEX’s Centro de Estudios Sociales (CES, Center for Social Studies), which included a sociology division chaired by Medina, an economics area with a Keynesian orientation presided by the Mexican former student from the London School of Economics Víctor Urquidi, and a political science division directed by Manuel Pedroso.

From the beginning, two opposing viewpoints about the role of the social sciences were at stake in this project. Cosío Villegas encouraged a research and teaching program correlated with the national public agenda, whereas Medina’s aim was to endorse social theory and methodology for academic purposes (Medina Echavarria, 1944). Thus, the CES’s initial conception was far from UNAM’s juridical orientation with respect to the social sciences, and from COLMEX’s most relevant task, which was to prepare diplomats and historians. For the curricula contents, Medina explored some of the social sciences programs in US universities, particularly those in which sociology, economics, and political science were correlated, as was the case in the University of Chicago (Giorguli & Ugalde, 2020, pp. 116–117).

Included in the sociology curriculum were introductory courses on sociology, political science, and economics. The statistics course followed the University of Chicago’s program, whereas the economics courses were influenced by UNAM. The courses on methodology and social research had been designed by Medina to support students in their own scientific projects. The academic program prioritized theoretical contents, with courses like “Theory of Social Change” and “Sociology of Religion” with a mostly Weberian orientation (Morcillo, 2008; Moya, 2007, p. 782).

Courses were supplemented by open seminars addressing the most relevant topics of the time, like World War II (1943) and the situation in Latin America. That was the subject of lectures by Raúl Prébisch (1944), founder in 1948 of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a United Nation’s institute that would become an important “think thank” in the region, with influential proposals for economic policies and social change. The proceedings of these widely disseminated meetings were published in the series Jornadas del CES, with 56 editions issued from 1943 to 1946. Renowned international scholars who were invited by Medina to collaborate as authors included Leopoldo Zea (1945), Renato Treves (1945), Florian Znaniecki (1944), and Otto Kirchheimer (1945) (Morcillo, 2008, p. 161; Reyna, 2005, p. 439).

Unfortunately, the CES sociology program had a low graduation rate, and by 1946, it had been completed by only 18 students. This was considered as a critical situation by Cosío Villegas who, as mentioned above, in opposition to Medina’s theoretical and academic orientation, considered that COLMEX’s main mission was not to prepare future researchers, but graduates with pragmatic skills in foreign relations. As a result, the CES was closed after only three years of its founding. This was a real loss for sociology in Mexico and in Latin America, since the only graduate program that could compare to it at the time was the one established in 1941 at the School of Sociology and Politics in Sao Paulo by Florestán Fernández with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation (Reyna, 2005, p. 438).

Given these adverse circumstances, in 1946, Medina left Mexico for Puerto Rico, where he lived until 1952; from there he moved on to Chile, where he was appointed coordinator of the ILPES (Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning), the ECLAC entity that was responsible for research, planning and technical cooperation, and a catalyst for the first generation of social scientists with original proposals for the development of the region (CEPAL, 2022; Moya, 2007, pp. 768–790).

The Institute for Social Research IISUNAM

During the 1940s, university courses in sociology were taught as part of the School of Law curricula. It was here that social science degree programs emerged, both those with a professional profile, such as economics (which took off as a university degree program in 1929), and those with a more practical approach, such as social work, first created in 1940 when a group of lawyers and doctors working in juvenile courts saw the need for new professionals to support in the rehabilitation of indicted individuals. As will be seen later on, offering sociology as an independent professional degree did not become a possibility until 1951. Nevertheless, its institutionalization at UNAM began in the late 1930s, when Lucio Mendieta y Nuñez (1895–1989), a former collaborator in Manuel Gamio’s research team, with important links to the governmental administration of the time, founded the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (IISUNAM, Institute of Social Science Research).

Mendieta (1895–1988) graduated in 1920 from the School of Law, where he worked as professor of agrarian law from 1929 and earned his doctorate degree in 1950. He was an advocate of then-president Lazaro Cardenas’s land distribution policy, and an author of several books on ethnic and indigenous questions in Mexico (Benítez Zenteno, 2008, pp. 15–30; Mendieta Núñez, 1938, p. 21; Olvera, 1999, 2018, p. 69). As head of the IISUNAM, the aim of Mendieta was to differentiate its projects from the philosophical and cultural movements of previous decades. The new institute was not intended to become a “conclave of intellectuals,” but rather a center for training future scholars, a “sociological laboratory” for studying social facts and suggesting new social policies to be applied in collaboration with the government as well as trade unions and employer organizations, eliciting their willingness to commission and finance university projects designed to improve the conditions of workers, the community, and society at large (Mendieta, 1939, pp. 4–15). However, as shown by Moya and Olvera (2015, p. 83), the results of research at the IISUNAM during the next year did not fulfil the expectations of the original project.

Although the IISUNAM was envisaged as a research institute that would encompass different disciplines (such as economics, law, anthropology, psychology, and mental health), Mendieta from the outset encouraged sociological research, with a special focus on urban and rural studies and criminal and legal sociology. This emphasis became evident with the launching of IISUNAM’s Revista Mexicana de Sociología (RMS, Mexican Journal of Sociology), a journal that has been published tri-monthly without interruption since 1939, and which, decades after its foundation, continues to be regarded as the most important journal of its kind in Latin America, with a great impact on the Spanish-speaking world. Lacking a defined editorial plan, during the 1940s, the RMS published miscellaneous articles including both empirical studies and essays inspired by the philosophical and hermeneutic traditions. Since Mendieta was well-acquainted with authors from both the United States and Europe, the journal included texts by Pitirim Sorokin, Robert Redfield, William Ogburn, Georges Gurvich, Raymond Lenoir, Alvin W. Gouldner, Thomas M. French, Ralph Linton, Ruth Benedict, Leopold Von Wiese, George A. Lundberg, and Gino Germani (Mendieta Núñez, 1939, pp. 7–11). However, most of the articles were by Mexican and Latin American authors who, according to Sefchovich (1989, pp. 18–26), may be classified into three main areas: (1) history of the social sciences, and the goals and methods of sociology, (2) articles on Latin America “as both an entity and an utopia” with social and political ideas of its own, and (3) indigenist studies, with more than 50 articles that offered a broad description of the various ethnical groups and their cultural expressions.

As head of the IISUNAM, Mendieta attended and took part in several international sociology congresses. In 1941, at the Congress of the American Sociological Society, he spoke in favor of “founding an inter-American sociological association to promote the organization of conferences and programs and the formation of research institutes in several countries.” Indeed, under the auspices of the IISUNAM (and with Mendieta as its chairman), the Mexican Sociological Association was founded in 1949, as part of UNESCO’s International Sociological Association. The first congress of the Mexican association was held in 1951, the same year as the first World Congress of Sociology took place in Zurich and the first congress of the Latin American Sociological Association (ALAS), the first regional sociological association in the world, was held in Buenos Aires (ALAS, 2022; Pereyra, 2007). In Mexico, the first two congresses (one in Mexico City, the other in Guadalajara) dealt with general sociology; the third, in 1952, focused mainly on criminal sociology, the fourth on the sociology of education; and the fifth embraced economics and the state of the world. These congresses, most of which were organized by the IISUNAM while Mendieta was its director, were held regularly in different regions of the country until 1972 (Morales, 2017).

In addition to publicizing the work done at the Institute, Mendieta had his own books printed abroad and translated to several languages. Among them was a study of social classes with a prologue written by Sorokin (1947). He also wrote more than 30 articles about diverse topics, such as land ownership and indigenous people, the European classics, analyses of the contributions of Gamio and other Mexican authors, political parties, bureaucracy, and sociology of art (Benítez Zenteno, 2008, pp. 13–33). In addition to these academic publications, Mendieta played an important role as “public sociologist” writing opinion articles in newspapers from 1934 to 1968. To educate the new generations of social scientist, Mendieta founded IISUNAM’s Collection of Sociological Essays and the series Sociological Studies where the proceedings of the 18 national sociology congresses (1950–1965) were published.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was still no teaching program for a degree in sociology; therefore, IISUNAM members came from other professions. In fact, during its early years, sociology was the competence of only a very small community of practitioners, whose role was more discursive and symbolic and, therefore, provided few opportunities for professional practice outside the UNAM (Olvera, 2013, p. 83). Thus, the process of the institutionalization of sociology in Mexico differs from that of other countries, where it was more common for a research institute to be created at the behest of an existing undergraduate teaching department. In Latin America, this was the case in Brazil, where by 1930, there were two schools with undergraduate sociology programs, as well as in Peru, where the institutionalization of research and teaching took place at the same time. In Mexico, the process was more similar to what happened in Argentina, where the Instituto de Sociología (in which Levene and later Germani worked as researchers) was created in 1940 by the University of Buenos Aires, but it was not until 1958 that degree programs were formally institutionalized at the sociology department (for which much credit must be given to Germani, who as an exile from Italian Fascism had arrived in Argentina in 1934) (Bada & Rivera, 2020, pp. 4–5; Blanco, 2006; Fernandes, 1970; Mejía, 2005; Tanaka, 2014).

The Social Science Degree Program and the School of Political and Social Sciences

In 1949, Mendieta was invited by UNESCO to attend a meeting in Paris to establish the International Political Science Association, and another in Norway to create the International Sociological Association, in which it was agreed that the formation of corresponding associations in different countries would be encouraged. With the inspiration of these international projects, Mendieta promoted the foundation of the National School of Political and Social Sciences (ENCPyS), which was inaugurated in May 1951 at the UNAM, offering degrees in diplomatic sciences, journalism, political sciences, and social sciences. With the new social sciences curricula, sociology was finally able to overcome its subordinate status at the School of Law (Garrido, 1984, p. 105; Mendieta Núñez, 1955).

Conditions were favorable, for the country was then ruled by Miguel Alemán (1946–1952), the first civilian president after the revolution, which meant there was a growing need for new professionals to occupy official and government positions. In the private sector, the ongoing industrialization policy also required experts with new technological skills. The demand for new professionals led to the construction of Ciudad Universitaria, UNAM’s main campus (Careaga, 2008, pp. 128–139), which would be classified by UNESCO as a world heritage site.

The impulse for creating the social science degree program responded to UNESCO’s commitment to generate a corpus of universal scientific knowledge. The curricula were predominantly influenced by the programs of the University of Leuven, Belgium, as well as the social and political departments of the of the universities of Florence, London, Madrid, and Paris (Colmenero, 2003, pp. 34–41). The program began with two years of common core, followed by a sociological orientation in the next year with courses on general sociology, social research methods, and statistics. In the final years, there were options to focus on art, law, labor, criminal, family, or religion. The program included instruction in European and North American and Mexican Sociology and social thought.

Some outstanding professors who were originally lawyers, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers included Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, for criminal sociology; Pablo González Casanova and Manuel Germán Parra, for Mexican sociology; Horacio Labastida, for history of sociology; Eusebio Castro and Jesús V. Vázquez, for general sociology; Ezequiel Cornejo, for ethnography. However, degree programs in the social sciences did not receive enough institutional attention during the early years as the main ENCPyS‘s concern was to prepare new diplomats (Colmenero, 1991, p. 61).

Nevertheless, despite the low number of graduates, the social sciences program opened new opportunities for incorporating some of its graduates as researchers at the IISUNAM, as was the case of Raúl Benítez, Jorge Martínez Ríos—a researcher dedicated primarily to the study or rural problems in Latin America (Ruiz de Chavez, 1972)—and, shortly after, María Luisa Rodríguez Sala, a woman student of the first ENCPyS generation who went on to participate in a project directed by Mendieta. In 1957, she published, as a sole author, research on child protection institutions.

The second director of the ENCPyS (from 1953 to 1957) was Professor Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, a graduate from the School of Law who, “with the objective of educating social sciences professionals with a sound culture and a comprehensive understanding of the social reality,” complemented the study programs with research seminars, colloquia, and conferences. In 1955, the ENCPyS launched the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (RMCPyS, Mexican Journal of Political and Social Sciences), which has been published quarterly ever since. Although it had separate sections dedicated to political science, journalism, and diplomacy, in practice most of the articles dealt with the “social sciences from a sociological point of view (Colmenero, 2003, pp. 66–112).

With the intention of consolidating the social sciences and reducing the prevalence of jurists and philosophy professors, the ENCPyS gradually incorporated specialists from other professions, such as anthropologists, historians, and internationalists. Among them was Catalina Sierra, granddaughter of Justo Sierra and editor of his complete works; she had studied Social Sciences at COLMEX and took up postgraduate studies at Columbia University in New York. Essayist, historian, and editor, she was the author of the book El Nacimiento de México (The Birth of Mexico) and several studies on nineteenth-century Mexican writers and politicians. She held public posts and was the only woman to belong to the distinguished group of government officials who founded the National Institute of Public Administration.

From Social Sciences to Sociology

From 1957 to 1965, the ENCPyS was led by Pablo González Casanova (the only director to have served for two terms until then), who introduced important changes in the curricula and gave greater importance to the political and social sciences degree programs. González Casanova had taken an interest in the social sciences under the intellectual influence of his father, who had pursued degrees in anthropology and linguistics. It was through him that he got in contact with Mendieta and completed an academic internship at the IISUNAM. He began his professional studies at the National School of Anthropology (ENA), and then studied a master’s degree in historical sciences, an interdisciplinary program centering on the history of ideas and political institutions that was jointly designed by COLMEX, UNAM, and ENAH with the collaboration of Mexican intellectuals and Spanish exiles, including Pedroso and Medina Echavarría. The latter’s general sociology course was considered excellent by Gonzalez Casanova and had a considerable impact on his intellectual development. After concluding the program, Pablo Gónzalez Casanova undertook postgraduate studies in France, taking sociology classes with professors like Gurvitch, Georges Friedmann, and Gabriel Le Bras (González Casanova, 2017, pp. 53–83; Pozas Horcacitas, 1984).

Upon returning to Mexico, P. G. C. worked as a researcher at both IISUNAM and COLMEX, where he was invited by Cosío Villegas to work in a Mexican history project with a text on the period of the revolution. In the end, due to a lack of understanding between the two, the collaboration did not prosper. In 1954, P. G. C. began giving lectures as sociology professor at the ENCPyS and joined UNAM’s Faculty of Economics, as its first full-time researcher and at the same time studied statistics with Felipe Montemayor, who was lecturing on the subject at the ENCPyS (Colmenero, 2003, pp. 81–82; González Casanova, 2017).

During the period in which P. G. C. was ENCPS’ director, the social sciences degree program changed its name to “sociology,” and plans were made to cut the number of professors specialized in law and to hire more lecturers with a background in the social sciences, such as historians and anthropologists. Among the latter were Ricardo Pozas Arciniegas and Isabel Horcasitas de Pozas, the first professors to introduce field research practices in the curriculum, which had a lasting influence on several generations of social scientists. Pozas Arciniegas also launched the journal Acta Sociológica (1969) that was initially conceived to publish students’ field practice experiences (de Dios, 2008, pp. 116–118).

In collaboration with Felipe Montemayor and other professors, Pozas Arciniegas proposed a new curriculum for social and political sciences degree programs. To this purpose, a series of conferences were held with the participation of Mendieta y Núñez and other ENCPyS professors, including Horacio Labastida and Francisco López Cámara. The debates centered on the relationship with the state, the need for greater professionalization and the importance of the study of national problems (González Casanova, 1984, 2017, p. 54). The new curriculum, valid from 1959, increased the number of courses in methodology, statistical techniques, demography, studies about Mexico, and field practices. Electives and specialization courses and seminars were also introduced (Colmenero, 2003, p. 87). By 1956, ENCPyS’ number of students grew to 384 (three times the initial enrollment). Among the first graduate theses in social sciences presented in 1956 were “Sociology of Hunger,” by Roberto Monsivaís; Statistical Study on Middle Class Families, by Emma Peralta (D’Aloja & Gómez, 1960); and “The protestant movement in Mexico,” by Cassaretto (1956).

Leading Publications and Research Topics

In addition to the RMS, there were other important social sciences journals like Trimestre Económico (founded in 1934) with articles written by different authors including Gamio, Mendieta, and Recaséns (Olvera, 2013). Another relevant publication was Cuadernos Americanos edited by Mexican economist Jesús Silva Herzog and published bimonthly from 1942. Like the magazine Sur (South), published in Argentina during the 1940s, Cuadernos Americanos, recognized its cultural heritage from the Spanish journal Revista de Occidente.

One of the most important Mexican publications, printed from 1946 to 1959, was Problemas Agrícolas e Industriales en México (Agricultural and Industrial Problems in Mexico), founded by agronomists Manuel and Enrique Pardiñas to publish studies about Mexico written by social scientists, economists, and philosophers. Due to its critical stance against the government of President Miguel Alemán, the journal was discontinued from 1946 to 1948 (Guerrero Mills, 2012). The impact of this publication on the national and international debate was far greater than that of the RMS which, according to Olvera (2013), was due to the RMS’ absence of an editorial policy and the dominant role of Medina’s decisions as an editor. Within the UNAM, another journal launched in 1953 was Medio Siglo (Mid-Century), published at the School of Law, with young authors that included the two future ENCPyS directors, Víctor Flores Olea and Enrique González Pedrero.

The period was also fruitful for the publication of books, such as Mexico’s Demographic Policy, written by economist and vice-president of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography-INEGI Gilberto Loyo González (1935) and Juan Pérez Jolote (Pozas Arciniegas, 1948), a study on an indigenous community written by Pozas Arciniegas which was translated into 17 languages (de Dios, 2008, pp. 120–121).

An interest in understanding the idiosyncrasies of Mexico was expressed in different essays. One of the most important authors was the philosopher Samuel Ramos, who in his work El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (published in 1942) (Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico) claimed that, since the Spanish conquest, Mexicans have been distrustful, resentful human being whose “many faces” and “feeling of inferiority” led them to question European cultures and values (Ramos Escandón, 2001, pp. 143–146). Following Ramos’s thesis, several authors have conceived of the Mexicans as reserved, distrustful, and suspicious. In a text published in 1946, César Garizurieta states the Mexican “acts fearfully, unwilling to do the things he has committed himself to do.” Three years later, Emilio Uranga (1949) considered the Mexican as sentimental, enigmatic, passive, melancholic, and fragile “trapped in his interior abode.” With similar arguments, in his works the playwright Rodolfo Usigli (1947–1952) used the metaphor of the many masks when talking about the distrustful nature of Mexicans (Uranga, 1949).

In 1950, Mexican writer Octavio Paz, winner of the1990 Nobel Prize for Literature, published his famous essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, which amalgamated the ideas of Samuel Ramos and other previous authors giving a portrait of the Mexicans as an insecure people who hide themselves behind a “different mask” (Bartra, 2002; Paz, 1970, p. 43). In spite of its enormous worldwide success, the book was questioned from the very year of its publication by Marxist writer José Revueltas, who stated that Mexicans must not be considered as “a single type,” and that besides the so-called “Mexican character” and personality, also the material conditions of social life should be taken into account. Octavio Paz’s theses were also criticized by Eric Fromm’s disciple, Michael Maccoby (1967) (Revueltas, 2002, pp. 215–234).

From a sociological point of view, it has been pointed that in their literary and philosophical essays about Mexicans, Ramos, and Paz, displayed levels of generalization unsuitable for a social scientific diagnosis. Nevertheless, El laberinto had an extraordinary impact, and its ideas were taken up in many later texts, like The Mexican: A Psychology of His Motivations written by psychoanalyst Santiago Ramírez (1959). Despite what could be regarded as a lack of academic precision or accuracy, the works of Ramos and Paz contain important and innovative arguments that were absent from the social sciences of the time. Such is the case of their references to the aggressive masculinity and virile practices associated with “Mexican machismo” and the role assigned to women in history, as described in Paz’s vindication of Hernan Cortés’s female translator, known as La Malinche. Moreover, El laberinto also includes a section on the pachuco, which provides a depiction of Mexicans in the United States.

From the perspective of social scientific analysis, one of the most relevant books of the time was Mexico’s Economic and Social Structure. Sociology, Economics and National Politics written by historian José Iturriaga (1950), which was the first accurate sociological study that, in contrast with the philosophical and literary essays, carried out quantitative and qualitative research based on institutional analysis. The book is divided in two parts. The first, “Society,” focuses on the countryside and the city, families, social classes, ethnic composition of the population, and nationalities. The second section, “Culture,” examines education, religion, the diverse language and dialects of the population, the influences of foreign cultures, and also the character of the Mexican people. Unfortunately, this book has not been given enough credit in the history of sociology in Mexico.

Studies on Mexico were also published in the United States: Franz Tannenbaum’s The Struggle for Peace and Bread (1950), and Robert Mosk’s Industrial Revolution in Mexico (1950), which offered an innovative analysis of business organizations. Both studies, translated and published in Spanish in Problemas agrícolas e industriales, were discussed among the country’s intellectual and political circles as part of the debate concerning Mexico’s road to progress. An admirer of President Cárdenas’s agrarian policy, Tannenbaum believed that Mexico should hold on to the agrarian society model as an exporter of raw materials. He considered that modernization could lead to urban concentration, excessive consumerism, and an inequity between agricultural and industrial production.

In the opposite direction, Manuel Germán Parra, a professor of sociology and economics at the ENCPyS, who also worked in the public sector, wrote a book explaining how the country’s industrialization that begun during World War II was driven by the absence of competitors and the emergence of a new, large domestic market. However, given the slow-down that could be expected to take place after 1946, due to the rise in manufacturing production in several Latin American countries, he argued in favor of the implementation of a new public policy to protect national producers from foreign competition. With a comparative statistical and historical analysis, he explained the process of industrialization in United States and Mexico and the role of special economic policies to promote the transformation from an agrarian to an urban society. Appealing to a theory of human progress and scientific planning, Parra argued that industrialism was part of an unavoidable historical process (Careaga, 2008, pp. 54–68; Parra, 1967, pp. 4–28).

Parra’s book was written in an epoch where Mexico was going through an industrialization process with a substantial emigration from the countryside to the city, resulting in an unprecedented urban growth (by 1960, the population of the country’s capital already reached 45% of the total population) (Parra, 1967, p. 56). Along with the newest architectonic projects and the notorious influence of television (which was inaugurated in Mexico in 1951) as a mass communication medium, a new “urban mythology” was expressed in the language and customs as an “industrial utopia” centered on the possibilities of leaving behind the rural culture of Mexico’s historical past, and venturing into the values of a modern society with new economic sectors and higher productivity rates (Careaga, 2008, pp. 54–70).

Among the texts used in university classrooms, one of the most important of the time was a book written by Recaséns Siches (1991) first published in 1956, with a third, renewed and enlarged edition in 1960. Dealing with the most diverse sociological topics, the book included references to different fields, such as sociology of law, culture, language, and technology. Despite its great editorial success, since the book was consulted mostly by law undergraduates with a minimal distribution among social science students, it had no significant impact on the education of future sociologists.

One of the most important academics of the time was Raúl Benítez, who studied Social Science at the ENCPyS before he entered the IISUNAM (and later became its director) where he collaborated with Mendieta and Fernando Holguín on a project to study the consequences of public policy on agrarian communities. As a professor, Benítez taught the course “Economic, Political and Social Problems in Mexico” at the ENP, as well as classes on statistics, social structures, and sociology theory at the ENCPyS. In 1958, Benítez was the first Mexican to study at the newly opened Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE) in Chile, from which he graduated with a work about Mexico, published later as a book. This study provided important statistical data on fertility, mortality, migration, and life expectancy (Andrade Carreño, 2008, pp. 91–94; Benítez Zenteno, 1961; Welti, 2006, p. 583). Benítez (1961) was an innovator in the analysis of population survival data from a historical perspective, using future scenarios, at a time when Mexico had reached its highest fertility rate in history (Benítez Zenteno, 1961).

In 1963, he was appointed a full-time researcher at the IISUNAM, and in 1964 he co-founded the COLMEX’s Center for Economic and Demographic Studies, in which he served as a professor and an advisor until 1970. In collaboration with Gustavo Cabrera, and commissioned by the Bank of Mexico, he made the country’s first population forecast as a key input for economic planning (Welti, 2006, pp. 583–585). Benítez also promoted the Comparative Fertility Surveys in Latin America, a groundbreaking program of global studies and a cornerstone in the interpretation of statistical information to aid in population policies.

Oscar Uribe Villegas was another highly productive IISUNAM researcher, who published 42 titles between 1952 and 1965. His early interests centered around methodological and conceptual questions (Uribe, 1958) and the importance of mathematics for social science research (Uribe, 1957). He was also the editor of the RMS, and for 15 uninterrupted years played an important role in organizing the National Sociology Congresses (Paulín, 2017; Uribe, 1961). In 1958, he published the book Social Causation and International Life, becoming one of the first authors to defend the thesis that social phenomena ought to be understood within a global framework. Without abandoning his early concerns, in 1965 he began a project dealing with sociolinguistics and semiology (Camero & de la Vega, 2015; Jiménez, 2009, pp. 35–39).

Another important intellectual of the time was Mario de la Cueva, a Mexican researcher with postgraduate studies at the University of Berlin, and UNAM’s president from 1940 to 1941. With a global impact, his contributions to the social sciences revolved mainly around theory of the state and studies about labor law that included a vision of social justice—he also translated several books (UNAM, 1981; Zarza, 2006).

In addition to these publications, in 1959 the Stanford University researcher Richard Hancock published the book The Role of the Bracero in the Economic and Cultural Dynamics of Mexico. A Case Study of Chihuahua (Hancock, 1959).

In 1957, the first Latin American Conference on Social Sciences was organized, at the initiative of UNESCO, which would lead to the foundation of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), a leading institution for graduate studies and research (Bobes & del Castillo, 2020, pp. 60–61). In the same year, also at the initiative of UNESCO, and with the support of the University of Chile (which a year later created a sociology degree), the Economic Commission for Latin America was created, and one year later it launched a sociology program (Blanco & Jackson, 2017, pp. 3–4; Bada & Rivera-Sánchez, 2020, pp. 3–4).