Keywords

The End of the “Mexican Miracle”

Towards the end of the 1950s—in the context of the “Cold War” and of national liberation struggles in several countries and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959—the so-called “Mexican Miracle,” the post-revolutionary political establishment, and the country’s model of economic development began to be seriously questioned. By the end of 1957, the several labor movements in Mexico, including railroad workers, teachers, and doctors unions, which claimed autonomy and internal democracy, ended up being repressed by the government. Charged with the crime of “social dissolution,” based on the existing regulation that prohibited anti-government protests in the streets, some leaders and intellectuals were imprisoned, among them the well-known painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Certain intellectuals and politicians, including former president Lázaro Cardenas, created the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN, National Liberation Movement) that expressed its solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and demanded that the Mexican government liberate the political prisoners in the country and enforce freedom of expression (Beltrán, 2000).

The new political national and international situation had a strong impact on the social sciences in Mexico. The same year of the Cuban Revolution, the Center for Latin American Studies (CELA) was founded at the ENCPyS (Holguín, 1990) and Professor Enrique González Pedrero (director of ENCPS from 1965 to 1970) published a book about the Cuban Revolution (González Pedrero, 1959). The Cuban Revolution had a deep impact on Mexico, particularly in regard to interest in Latin American studies. This is a period in which important institutions for studying the region were created, in addition to those previously existing, such as the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), founded in Chile in 1957, and the Centro Latinoamericano de Pesquisas en Ciencias Sociais (CLAPSC), which was created in Brazil in 1957.

In 1960, C. Wright Mills visited Mexico to give a seminar on Marxism and Liberalism at the IISUNAM, when González Casanova was the director. The upshot of these conferences was the publication of a book, The Marxists, in which the author acknowledged ideas received from Mexican intellectuals Carlos Fuentes, Pablo González Casanova, and Enrique González Pedrero. As a result of his contact with Latin American and Mexican academics, Mills became interested in the Cuban Revolution.

Academic Production in the 1960s (1960–1965) or the Emergence of a Critical Social Scienses

Mexican academics gave a new importance to quantitative analysis due to the first-hand available official statistical data for the country—Ifigenia Martinez, a Mexican woman who was the first to obtain a master’s degree in Economics at Harvard University, published a study about Mexico’s distribution of income. With a critical analysis of the 1950–1957 data, she showed that the economic policies of the country had benefited a new thriving wealthy class and the population employed in industry, but not those groups working in agriculture and the more traditional sectors that were impoverished. In order to promote economic progress and human development, it was necessary to endorse a policy oriented towards a more equitable income distribution (Martínez de Navarrete, 1960, pp. 93–98).

Another book of the time written by a woman was María Luisa Rodríguez Sala’s El suicidio (“Suicide”), published in 1961, which was the first research to analyze the topic from a sociological point of view in Mexico, since the only few previous studies had been carried out by physicians working in clinics (Rodriguez Sala, 1963). The latter included psychiatrist José Gómez Robleda who as a member of IISUNAM played a significant role in endorsing the project and the research of other members of the institute interested in psycho-social and Criminalogical Issues. Based on press releases and INEGI’s demographic data, the author analyzed suicide rates, from 1934 to 1950, and their correlations with sex, age, marital status, occupation, nationality, place, and life cycles. In another book on the subject, published in 1974, she also studied the links between suicides and social status.

Among the authors who also made important contributions to the social sciences was Arturo González Cosío who graduated in law at the UNAM before studying for his PhD at the University of Cologne, Germany (1954–1957), where he became acquainted with sociology through the lecture classes of Leopoldo von Wiese and René Köning. González Cosío was influenced by Marxist humanism, as well as by several authors of diverse backgrounds, including Ralf Dahrendorf, Gurvitch, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Halbwachs, Frank Tannenbaum, Samuel Ramos, Octavio Paz, C. Wright Mills, Ortega y Gasset, and Max Weber. Upon returning to Mexico, in 1957, he worked for the federal government, and from 1962 to 1970, he taught sociological and political theory, at the COLMEX and UNAM. He was the author of the book social classes and strata in Mexico, in which he applied the upper-, middle- and lower-class taxonomy introduced by Iturriaga, adding a new historical interpretation for a dynamic analysis. Using data published in the 1956 official survey on income, occupation, and family spending, González Cosío proposed a social class taxonomy which considered, in addition to economic status, other cultural and political variables, including attitudes, aspirations, trust indices, and relationship with government officers (Arreola, 2008, pp. 78–83; González Cosío, 1961).

Among books published abroad, Howard Cline (1964) published the statistical data-oriented study Mexico. Revolution to Evolution, 1940–1960 considered at the time an indispensable book with “the single most important source of information on Mexico since 1940” (MacAlister, 2018). Cline described the post as an “Institutional Revolution” an expression that from then on will be widely used to refer to the Mexican political regime.

Outstanding among the studies by foreign authors is the book The Children of Sanchez by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1964). First published in English in 1961, it was a great success and was acclaimed as the best foreign book in France in 1963 (Collado, 2017, p. 33). The work is based on the testimonies given by the members of a family from a downtown neighborhood in Mexico City, which depict their daily life, values, and customs, by which poverty becomes a way of life and a condition for survival. The testimonies also spoke about domestic violence, and the neighborhood as a space of identity (Semo Groman, 2010). The book exposed the desolation and the stark reality of a Mexican family, showing the “other side of the coin” of an official narrative that extolled prosperity, economic development, and the achievements of the “Mexican Miracle.”

Published for the first time in Spanish by the FCE in 1964, in a short time several re-editions had been made, and the text gave rise to conflicting arguments. The author had previously published two books on Mexico (Lewis, 1960, 1961) but neither of them matched the success and controversy aroused by The Children… Some of the country’s anthropologists and academics criticized what they perceived to be the author’s “ethnographic subjectivism,” and questioned his innovative research practices that replaced field notes with magnetic tape recordings—letting the characters speak while the anthropologist seemed to hide (Bautista, 2011; Lomnitz, 2012). The discrediting went so far that, the same year it was published, in an unusual act of persecution and censorship, the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics filed a complaint against the author, accusing him of being “anti-Mexican” and of having written a book that, on account of its “obscene, defamatory and subversive” nature, “was offensive to public morals,” and therefore “the demand was made that it be withdrawn from circulation and that criminal proceedings be instituted” (Semo Groman, 2010).

In the end, the case was legally released. However, in November 1965, the government of then president Díaz Ordaz forced the Argentinian Guillermo Orfila to resign his position as director of the FCE, which he had held since 1948. Orfila had edited several works that were identified with the Latin American left and critical thinking. Among these was Mills’s book Escucha Yankee, another best-selling book that was printed in Mexico three months before Lewis’s, prompting a backlash of disapproval from the US Embassy in Mexico (Bautista, 2011; Lomnitz, 2012; Nova, 2013, p. 115) (Servín, 2020). This was not the first time that the government had taken action against an FCE director: in 1948, Orfila had replaced Cosío Villegas after President Aleman requested that the latter step down for having written an article criticizing the Mexican government (Cossío, 1947; Nova, 2013, p. 129).

Lewis’ text is one of the few in Mexican history that gave rise to a real scandal. According to Lomnitz (2012), more than 500 news articles were published on the subject, and an important group of intellectuals responded by standing up for the publication, arguing that it “depicted the conditions of poverty such as they were perceived by its victims” (FCE, 1965; Benitez Gutierrez, 1965; Collado, 2017, p. 37). Among Lewis’s defenders were some ENCPyS professors and other intellectuals who pleaded for freedom of expression. However, unlike what happened at UNAM’s School of Economics, where a panel discussion on the book was conducted in 1965 (Hernández Puga, 2010), at IISUNAM and the ENCPyS there were no such events. After the FCE discontinued publication, Lewis’s study was published by the new Mexican publishing houses (Joaquín Mortiz and Grijalbo) and was even staged as a play in Mexico and made into a film in the USA. Moreover, several intellectuals supported Orfila in creating the publishing house Siglo XXI, an independent company conceived as “a Mexican publishing house for Latin America,” which would have a significant role in the publication of social science texts in the region. Among the academics and earliest shareholders of the new publishing house were Ifigenia Martínez, Pablo González Casanova, Pozas Arciniegas, and other professors from UNAM, including Francisco López Cámara, and future ENCPyS directors Enrique González Pedrero and Víctor Flores Olea (Nova, 2013, pp. 177–184).

One of the most important editorial events of the time was the publication of La democracia en México (Democracy in Mexico), a book written by González Casanova when he was director of the ENCPyS. First published in 1965 by a newly created Mexican publishing house, Editorial Era, its influence and reception was such that it came to be regarded as a classic work of sociology in Mexico and Latin America. Like some previous texts, including those by Iturriaga, Martínez, González Cosío, and Benítez, La democracia… offered a broad statistical framework that included information on social mobility, migration into cities, the position of marginalized groups, and also an analysis about attitudes (González Casanova, 2017, p. 141).

The study made reference to very up-to-date bibliographical sources, which included not only the classic thinkers of the social sciences, such as Tocqueville and Weber, but also renowned twentieth-century authors, such as Adorno and Darhendorf, Mexican authors of the time, such as González Cosío, Iturriaga, and Martínez de Navarrete and other foreigners who had written about Mexico, such as Richard Hancock (1959), Howard Cline, and sociologists residing in Latin American countries, such as Gino Germani. The author devoted a chapter to Marxism, as a theory useful for the interpretation of social reality, and also included references to important works of social criticism, including the anti-segregationist economist Gunnar Myrdal and anti-colonialist philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose book The Wretched of the Earth, originally published in French in 1961, was translated into Spanish in Mexico in 1963 (Los condenados de la Tierra, translated by Julieta Campos). One of the authors who most influenced González Casanova was C. Wright Mills—particularly with his book The Power Elite, published in 1956 and translated into Spanish by the FCE in 1957.

La democracia… analyzed the social and political structures of power, taking into account social classes and strata as well as Mexican values and history. From the sociological point of view, one of its most significant contributions was the analytical distinction between the official structures of government (whose study tends towards a more juridical approach) and the de facto “power groups” which include the clergy, businessmen, local caciques and caudillos, and even relations with the United States. The author demonstrated that although Mexico was formally and legally a federation of states, with a separation between the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers, in everyday political practice there was a concentration of power in the hands of the president of the Republic (González Casanova, 1965, pp. 16–17).

The author applied a theoretical-conceptual framework in which the categories “dual society” and “internal colonialism” were used to analyze the exploitation and mistrust against certain socio-cultural groups, specifically those belonging to the indigenous population, in a historical continuum since colonial times (González Casanova, 2017, pp. 101–107). The book drew both on the theory of social marginality and Marxist concepts—with references to Marx, Lenin, and Che Guevara—to emphasize the necessary commitment of the social scientist to bring to an end the semi-colonial exploitation: a topic that the author would further expound on in another book.

Unlike other previous books in Mexico that unfortunately did not receive any recognition from the academic community itself (as was the case of Iturriaga’s book, which was an important precedent for the work of González Casanova) La democracia... is considered as a key referential text for the social sciences and for the identity of sociology in Mexico. The extraordinary reception of the book must also be explained in relation to the important role of the author in the institutionalization process of sociology at UNAM and his plans to set an agenda for the future generations of social sciences (Castañeda Sabido, 2008, pp. 156–161).

After finishing his period as director of ENCPyS, in 1966 Gonzalez Casanova became director of both the IISUNAM and the RMS (from 1966 to 1970), where he questioned previous intellectual production and advocated for a critical sociology, with a Latin American approach, that questioned official history (González Casanova, 1970, p. 22; Farfán, 1994; Loyo et al., 1990, p. 47). After finishing his period as IISUNAM’s director, Gonzalez Casanova was ALAS’ president from 1969 to 1971 (and also from 1983 to 1985). His sociological position would have a deep impact on Latin American social sciences during subsequent years as the concept of “internal colonialism” was adopted for the study of the relations of domination and exploitation between culturally heterogeneous groups within a politically independent nation.

The only other author of the time whose sociological thought would be of comparable influence was Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Born in 1932 in Frankfurt into a family of Jewish descent that had arrived in Mexico in 1940 escaping from Nazi persecution. Stavenhagen studied for his BA in social anthropology with Robert Redfield at the University of Chicago, his master’s degree at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico, and his doctorate with Baladier at the University of Paris, where he engaged in the debates of structuralism, French sociology, Marxism, and the anti-colonialist struggles in Africa. In 1964, he wrote his sociology doctoral thesis about rural classes and social stratification in some underdeveloped countries.

After graduating, at a time when the exchange of intellectuals within Latin America was on the rise, Stavenhagen traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where he remained from 1962 to 1965 as the secretary general of the Latin American Center for Social Research created by UNESCO, and director of the journal América Latina. In 1965, as a consequence of the coup d’état that overthrew President Joao Goularte, he returned to Mexico, where he joined the Center for Economic and Demographic Studies of COLMEX, and simultaneously taught courses at the ENCPyS (until 1968), establishing important links with Julio Labastida and González Casanova (Béjar, 2008, pp. 126–127; Lida, 2015; Mendoza Alvarado, 2016; Mendoza & Chew, 2019).

In the same year that Gonzalez Casanova’s La democracia… came out, a national newspaper published a brief, well-known text by Stavenhagen (1965) entitled “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” in which the author also proposed the concept of “internal colonialism” for the analysis of the region. From 1966 to 1969, he conducted a study of social classes in agrarian societies (Stavenhagen, 1969). As a public intellectual with global influence, throughout his life he carried out research while actively participating in the defense of the rights and justice of indigenous groups. From 1970 to 1973, he worked in Geneva, at the Institute for Labor Studies of the International Labor Organization (Bejar, 2008, pp. 127–128; Garfias, 2016; Mendoza Alvarado, 2016; Stavenhagen, 1974).

The critics to modernization and the concepts about dualism and internal colonialism would have a very important influence on Latin America’s dependency theory that has been recognized as the most influential interpretation about the inequality in the region, at a time when the social sciences were going through a renewal period (Cardoso & Faletto, 1969; Roitman, 2008, p. 170; Sefchovich, 1989, p. 37; Torres, 2014). In an interesting article about this question, Bangel and Leone argued that the concept of “internal colonialism” was generated at the time of the institutionalization of the social sciences of the region and the critics toward “modenization theory “with debates between participants from various countries and disciplines. The seminal dialogues were established between Ricardo Cardoso de Oliveira, Gonzalez Casanova Stavenhagen Jacques Lambert, C. Wright Mills, and other authors between the late 1950s and the early 1960s at the Latin America Center for Social Sciences Research (CLAPSS) in Rio de Janeiro. The critiques of modernization theory and the concepts of dualism and internal colonialism would have a very important influence on Latin America’s dependency theory, recognized as the most influential interpretation of inequality in the region, at a time when the social sciences were going through a renewal period (Cardoso & Faletto, 1969).

In 1966, during the directorship of Enrique González Pedrero (1956–1960), when Cecilia Diamant, a woman who specialized in political theory, had an important line position at ENCPyS, the curricula was revised for the third time (previous occasions had been in 1951 and 1959), based on the proposition that sociology should be understood as forming part of the general field of social sciences, and that it was necessary to incorporate social practice, mathematics, theoretical, and empirical bases, as well as the techniques necessary to study the national problems for “scientific predictions.” In the new program, it was considered that the areas that offered job opportunities for graduates were lecturing in universities, research in academic and governmental centers, and working in agencies for economic and social development. Because until then there were no postgraduate social science courses in Mexico (those who were interested mostly went to other Latin American countries, like Chile), the division of higher studies was created in January 1967 to offer masters and doctorates in political science, sociology, public administration, and international relations, which led to the subsequent transformation of the school into a faculty, the FCPyS (Colmenero, 2003, pp. 117–128). One year after these academic reforms were enforced, the UNAM and the entire country would be strongly impacted by the 1968 student movement.

The Student Movement

As was happening in other countries, in 1968 there was an important student movement in Mexico. The violent reaction of President Díaz Ordaz’s government (1964–1970) changed the perceptions of stability and development that had distinguished Mexico during the so-called “Mexican Miracle.” Beyond the possibilities of industrialization and economic development, the social movement demands now focused on freedom of speech and a new agenda for promoting democracy. The student protest movement, which broke out in July 1968, was a major turning point in Mexican society, with innumerable repercussions in the civil and political spheres. In response to the government’s crackdown on the students, the imprisonment of their leaders and the occupation of the premises of the UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute, the protests continued until October 2, a few days before the beginning of the Olympics in Mexico, the demonstrators were brutally attacked in what is known as the “Tlatelolco Massacre,” when soldiers rounded up and opened fire on a crowded demonstration in a central square in Mexico City (Plaza de las Tres Culturas).

As a result of the first repression of such magnitude against a population that was peacefully protesting in favor of political liberties, the student movement of 1968 would become an inspiration for subsequent generations (Barros Sierra, 1972; Montaño, 2021). In the following years, the literature on the subject became very extensive; among the studies carried out by sociologists, Sergio Zermeño, a member of IISUNAM, published México: Una democracia utópica: El movimiento estudiantil de 1968 (Zermeño, 1978). The protests also had a great influence on ENCPyS students, together with other youth revolts of the time, including the “French May,” the “hippies” and the emergence of a new critical Latin American literature. Although classes were called off, the cohesion of the student community was very strong (Estrada, 2018).

Marxism and Latin American Sociology

The students’ demands, the influence of the Cuban Revolution, and the new theories on Latin America gave rise to a new development of the CELA, to which was added the creation of a postgraduate course in Latin American Studies at the FCPyS in 1972 (Valencia, quoted in Sosa, El, 1990, p. 8). The interest in studying the region would be further fueled by the arrival of refugees in Mexico. Due to the upsurge of authoritarianism and the growth of military regimes in Latin America, during this period academic intellectuals were forced to leave their home countries. Many of them arrived in Mexico and taught at the sociology departments of different Mexican universities, where they consolidated their work and influenced both students and professors.

Some of them had actually already arrived before this. Such is the case of Enrique Valencia who, in the wake of the popular rebellion known as El Bogotazo, moved to Mexico in 1957, where he studied social anthropology, collaborated with Oscar Lewis’s research and conducted a pioneering study of urban anthropology, a subject he taught at the same time at the FCPyS and at the CELA, where he became a full-time professor, training several generations of students in methodology and field work. At the Faculty of Political Sciences, he taught courses mostly in methodology and field work (CELA, 2020). Beginning in the 1970s, the influx of Latin American professors increased. In 1972, Agustín Cueva, founder and director of the University of Ecuador’s School of Sociology, became a member of the center and in 1977 he published El desarrollo del capitalismo en América Latina (The Development of Capitalism in Latin America), that received the Essay Award from the publishing house Siglo XXI 1972 (Maldonado, 1992).

The arrival of persecuted intellectuals increased after the military coup of September 1973 against President Allende that had a great impact on the social sciences in Latin America. Before that Chile had been the main place for the training of social scientists in the region, and the 12th ALAS Congress held in Santiago, in 1972, had an unprecedented number of attendees. After the coup, several academics went into exile in Mexico, where a “Latin Americanization” of sociology took place, propelling the development of the CELA with an unprecedented infusion of ideas, leading to a strong academic and ideological identity (Cueva, Oliver, and Ruiz quoted by Sosa, 1990, p. 8).

Among the refugees who arrived in the country and became academics at the FCPyS were the Bolivian René Zavaleta, author of the book El poder dual en América Latina (Dual Power in Latin America, 1979); the former president of the Chilean Writers Association, Armando Cassigoli, who taught Sociology of Knowledge; the Bolivian Cayetano Llobet, who would become director of the CELA; and the Brazilians Ruy Mauro Marini (1973) and Vania Bambirra (1978) who, alongside André Gunder Frank and Theotonio Dos Santos had formulated dependency theory and published, (with Almeyda an Borón) in Mexico El control politico del Cono Sur (The Political Control of the Southern Cone) (Almeyda et al., 1978).

As an aftermath of the military coup led by General Pinochet, the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO), located in Santiago de Chile, was forced to close, and in 1975, following an agreement with the Mexican government, a branch was opened in Mexico. The new headquarters initiated academic activities in 1976 with René Zavaleta as its first director. During its first period (1976–1980), FLACSO-Mexico concentrated its research on the study of political movements, the state, institutions, and democracy (Bobes & del Castillo, 2020).

In the aftermath of the student movement of 1968 and the arrival of intellectual exiles from Latin America, Marxism became the dominant theoretical and methodological framework. The notion of the social scientist as agency for social change, encouraged the engagement of sociologist as opinion makers, as members of left-wing political parties, and as active participants on other areas of public life. Thus, Marxism offered both a political ideology an academic and normative theory for the study of national reality (Castañeda Sabido, 1990; Sefchovich, 1989, pp. 34–35). The IISUNAM invited some of the most renowned Marxists authors of the time, such as Nicos Poulantzas, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Adam Przeworski, Enzo Faletto, Aníbal Quijano, and Ernest Mandel, and published two collective books dealing with social classes in Latin America (Benítez Zenteno, 1973), which went through a large number of editions and were considered classic contributions to the region’s scholarship (Andrade, 2008, p. 100; Perló, 2017). Books written by a sole author included Roger Bartra’s agrarian political classes (1977). In 1969, Víctor Flores Olea, who would head the FCPyS from 1970 to 1975, published a book about Marxism and socialist democracy. Other academics, like Enrique Semo Calleb (1973), incorporated Marxism for their own interpretations about Mexico’s history.

In response to demands from students and a group of professors, the sociology curriculum at the FCPyS underwent a series of changes, which gave greater weight to political economy (Perez Siller, 1985, pp. 31–32) and drew a distinction between Marxism and “bourgeois social theories,” leading to the introduction of a compulsory subject called sociological theory (Lenin, Gramsci) and the inclusion of a “Seminar on Capital” as a semi-optional sequential subject (Colmenero, 2003, pp. 191–192). As stated by Salazar, the ideals of the Revolution and Socialism were incorporated without an analysis of the real situation at the USSR and other Soviet-influenced countries (Sosa, 1990). Therefore, according to Castañeda Sabido (2004), while Marxism promoted the autonomy of social sciences from the state, its uncritical appropriation as the only theoretical alternative led to an over-ideologization of research, which in its turn eroded the discipline’s autonomy.

Besides sociology, during the 1970s, Marxism was adopted as the main theory of other social sciences including economics and anthropology. Among philosophers, Bolívar Echevarría, Eli de Gortari, Carlos Pereyra, and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez had an important influence on the social sciences. Whereas some intellectuals held to Marxist positions throughout their lives, others, like Carlos Pereyra and Roger Bartra, later embraced other theoretical and political positions (Illades, 2018).

The predominance of Marxism, and the incompatibility between the viewpoints of the intellectual leaders Lucio Mendieta and Pablo González Casanova, led to the criticism of previous sociological practice, motivating a new interest in the social sciences themselves as a subject. As pointed out by Moya and Olvera (2013), with the exception of González Navarro’s book (1970) about sociology and history in Mexico, which analyzes the legacy of a number of some important authors, the first collective efforts to reconstruct the history of the social sciences in Mexico took place towards the end of the 1970s with the publication of the book Las humanidades en México (Humanities in Mexico), whose chapter on sociology was written by Arguedas and Loyo (1978). To commemorate its 40 years of existence, the IISUNAM published Sociología y ciencia política en México (Arguedas, 1979) and the COLMEX journal Estudios Sociológicos published an issue dedicated to the research and teaching carried out during the first ten years of the CES (Stern, 1984).

Research Trends

The predominance of Marxism, so pivotal in the orientation of teaching, did not spread over the whole of research. During Benítez’s period as head of the IISUNAM (1970–1976), a new area of population studies was created which gave new visibility to the institute. Focused on demographic dynamics and economic issues, a study about migration was conducted in collaboration with COLMEX, and a project of Latin American regional history was promoted (García Muñoz, 2006; IISUNAM, 2017, p. 69). Benitez also conducted a collective project about the Mezquital valley, one of the country’s poorest areas.

Researchers at the IISUNAM worked in a wide range of specialized fields, including sociolinguistics, political sociology, sociology of art, sociology of knowledge, as well as an area that was linked to Mexico’s recent history (Perló, 2017; Loyo et al., 1990; Welti, 2006). During this period, the IISUNAM expanded its number of researchers with refugees from Latin American countries and the new ENCPyS and FLACSO graduates (IISUNAM, 2017, pp. 64–66). María Luisa Rodríguez-Sala was the first woman academic secretary at IISUNAM, an editor or RMS, and an important group of other female researchers started publishing their works. Among them were Regina Jiménez Ottalengo (1977), and María Elena Cardero (1976). One of the most important events was the 1972 conference dealing with the main national problems. The presentations were published as a three-volume pioneering collective book El peril México en 1980 (1971) that went through several reprints. From 1976, now under the leadership of Julio Labastida Martín del Campo, to ISUNAM, new areas were created including sociology of institutions, classes and social movements, as well as urban sociology, which would later become urban and regional studies (Perló, 2017).

Since the Revista latinoamericana de sociología (Latin American Journal of Sociology) published by FLACSO, Chile had been forced to close during the rise of the military regime, the RMS—under the coordination of Sergio Zermeño, Aurora Loyo, and Carlos Martínez Assad (1976–1989) in different periods—became the most important Latin American social science journal with an international impact and a range of authors from different countries like Guillermo O’Donnell, Marcelo Cavarozzi, and Sergio Bagú (IISUNAM; RMS, 2019).

The Expansion of Sociology in Mexico

In 1973, 20 years after Medina’s unsuccessful efforts, the CES (Center for Sociological Studies) was inaugurated at COLMEX, offering a PhD in social science with a specialization in sociology. The project was headed by Víctor Urquidi, Rodolfo Stavenhaguen, and some of the researchers that previously worked at COLMEX’s Center for Economic and Demographic Studies, created in 1963. The CES focused mainly on empirical studies: such topics as Mexican migrations, social stratification, and mobility in rural–urban relations, local development, labor and employee organizations, as well as research on education, family, behavior, and values. From 1976, the CES incorporated new research areas on domestic groups, culture, ethnicity, bureaucracy and public policy, technology and rural employment, women and family, bureaucracy, social movements, and trade unionism. Besides the academic results, some of these studies had an impact on public policy (Giorguli & Ugalde, 2020, p. 120).

Some of the books written in the late 1970s by COLMEX professors include those by Claudio Stern on migration and development in different Mexican regions; Jorge Bustamante on migration of Mexicans to the United States; Ricardo Cinta and Santin y Codero about power, business, and pressure groups; Claudio Stern on social inequality; Jose Luis Reyna on authoritarianism, political control, and development; and Hugo Zemelman on militarism, problems of political transition, and sociological theory (Stern, 1984). Among the CES women scholars, Lourdes Arizpe did studies on migrant women; Silvia Gómez Tagle on agricultural cooperatives and labor unions; Brígida García and Orlandina de Oliveira on migration; Mariel Martinez on class struggle in the countryside; Maria Teresa Rendón on livelihoods in rural areas; and Vivian Brachet on bureaucracy and the sociology of organizations. Some of the pioneering social research on the situation of women was done at that time by women academics at COLMEX, among them Lourdes Arizpe in the informal sector, Garcia and Oliveira on the relationship between female work and fertility, and Alcántara on the opportunities for women from low-income families (1979).

In 1974, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), a new public university was founded in Mexico City with sociology programs in its three campuses. UNAM also opened other campuses in the Mexico City metropolitan area offering sociology degrees. Apart from these university institutions, there were also a few small research centers for specialized studies, such as the Centro de Estudios Educativos (CEE, Center for Educational Studies), founded and directed by Pablo Latapí in 1961, the Instituto Mexicano de Estudios Sociales A. C. (Mexican Institute of Social Studies) (1971–1974), created by former FCPyS student Luis Leñero and geared towards self-managed social action, and the Instituto Mexicano de Estudios Políticos (IMEP, Mexican Institute of Political Studies), a private academic association founded and directed by FCPyS sociologist and future director Antonio Delhumeau, who in 1973 published, with Francisco Gómez Pineda, the book Los mexicanos frente al poder (Mexicans in the Face of Power), authored jointly with a psychoanalyst. Other collaborators in this project were UNAM women sociologists Bertha Lerner and Susana Ralski, who wrote about the president’s power (Ruiz de Chavez, 1972).

In addition to the Latin American and global dimension that sociology took on in Mexico, the rapid growth of university enrollment since the 1970s led to the creation of new academic institutions outside of Mexico City, fostering a national presence of the social sciences and a de-centralization of research and teaching, as well as the development of graduate programs in several states (Figueroa Gómez & Figueroa, 2002, pp. 35–36; Silva, 1987). Also, with the iniative and support of the IISUNAM, in 1974, a new center for preparing social sciences professors and researchers began offering courses in anthropology, economics, and sociology at the Universidad Autónoma “Benito Juárez” in Oaxaca (UABJO) (Andrade Carreño, 2008), one of the southern states of the country with the highest poverty rates and a significant indigenous population. Social science degree programs also began to be taught in the north of the country, and in 1975, a sociology degree was founded at the University of Sonora (UNISON) (Durand et al., 2019), one of the states located in the north along the US border.

At the important University of Guadalajara (UDG), in the second most populous city in the country, and the capital of the state Jalisco located in Mexico, a degree program in sociology was created in 1977 at its four campuses, offering specializations in Latin American sociology, cultural sociology, labor studies, inequality, politics and social movements, social communication, and education. That same year, under the strong influence of the Marxism (which would prevail until the curriculum was changed in 1993), a School of Sociology was founded at the University of Veracruz, the fourth most populated state, located in the eastern part of the country. With the creation of the sociology departments in these universities, studies of regional history and society would begin to have a remarkable importance.

In 1971, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT, National Council of Science and Technology) was created as an advisory governmental entity to design, promote, and evaluate scientific research and technology programs in accordance with national goals (Pozas, 2015, pp. 258–259). With these purposes in mind, CONACyT supported the creation of several social science research institutions, such as the Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropología e Historia, founded in 1973 and restructured in 1980 as the Centro de Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), with the aim of doing interdisciplinary approach on various regions. In 1974, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE, Center for Economic Research and Teaching) was created, offering degrees in economics, political science, international relations, law, and public administration (López & Cejudo, 2020, p. 9; Tenorio, 2009, p. 21). In 1979, in the central-western part of the country, El Colegio de Michoacán was established, with PhD and research programs on the social sciences and humanities focused on regional studies. In 1976, FLACSO was founded in Mexico following and an agreement signed by the Mexican government through the Ministry of Public Education (Pozas, 2015; pp. 258–261; Salmerón and De Gortari, 2020, p. 35).

In 1976, a group of academic authorities from different institutions created the Consejo Mexicano de Ciencias Sociales (COMECSO, Mexican Council of Social Sciences), an organization with the purpose of communicating and pursuing the improvement and professionalization of the main social science schools, postgraduate programs, research centers, and publications around the country. With the foundation of COMECSO in 1970, a new phase in the institutionalization of the social sciences began (the former had been from 1950 to 1970). The renewed social sciences pathways contrasted with the hierarchical organizations of the past and with the protagonist intellectual academic leaders of previous decades who positioned the research and teaching agenda of their institutions according to their own intellectual concerns (Pozas, 2015).

Main Publications

Professors at the FCPyS wrote a number of key studies with critical interpretations of Mexican official history. Among them were Adolfo Gilly’s Interrupted Revolution (1971) and Arnaldo Córdova’s The Ideology of Mexican Revolution (1973). Due to the industrialization process, there was also an emerging interest about the economic situation and cultural values of the urban middle classes, as shown in the interesting books written by Francisco López Cámara (1971) and Gabriel Careaga (1974). Towards the end of the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in the study of collective identities and the Mexican national character. The sociologist Raul Bejar (1968a, b, 1979) criticized the scientific validity of the classic essays by Ramos, Paz, and other authors, and instead examined national identity as psychological and socio-historical process and a series of behavior patterns that must be studied empirically. Important innovations in quantitative research were also shown in the book of COLMEX scholar Rafael Segovia’s (1975), about Mexican youngsters’ political culture. Based on a survey of 3500 students and their parents, the study analyzed the main traits of the socializing process and the values transmitted through schools, friends, families, and the media.

One of the most outstanding and influential books for Latin American urban studies—that unfortunately was not often included in the UNAM’s sociology curricula—was one written by the woman anthropologist Larissa Adler Lomnitz (1975). Based on the analytical framework of the theory of marginalization, which was so influential at the time for studying about the larger South American metropolises, such as Lima, Bogota, and Rio de Janeiro, the author introduced an innovative concept of “survival strategies” which allowed her to illustrate the importance of social solidarity networks among precarious urban groups with unstable employment situations (Stavenhagen, 2012, p. 10). From a universe similar to the one studied by Lewis in Los hijos de Sánchez, but with a different interpretation, Adler Lomnitz rejected the equation between urbanization and disorganization attached to the concept of “culture of poverty,” and gave a pragmatic twist to the studies on the subject by showing how, in a situation of scarcity of resources, the extended family of rural migrants adapted to the urban environment by reinforcing its social solidarity ties.

Among the books written about Mexico by US scholars, the following stand out: Eric Fromm and Michael Maccoby’s Social Character in a Mexican Village written in 1970 (Maccoby, 1996) Frank Brandemburg’s The Making of Modern Mexico (1972), Roger Hansen’s The Politics of Mexican Development (1971), and Clark Reynolds’s The Mexican Economy: Twentieth Century. Structure and Growth (Reynolds, 1970). Other books consulted by students were C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination, Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Fernando Holguin (1984) on statistics for the social sciences, Leopoldo Solis (1973) on the Mexican economy, and Cardoso and Faletto’s (1969) dependency theory.

In 1976, Raul Rojas at the FCPYS published a guide for social research, with numerous reprints in the following years (Rojas Soriano, 2013). At the Law School, Leandro Azuara’s comprehensive book Sociology demonstrated the relevance of the discipline for legislators, lawyers, and magistrates (Azuara, 1977). Unfortunately, like other texts published by the Law School, it would not be consulted by sociology students. A new interest in gender and women studies also arose in this period, leading to a financial collaboration of the Mexican government and ECLAC supporting the publication of a book by Liliana de Riz (1975) about women’s participation in the Mexican labor market.