We are delighted that in December we will host Francisco Vergara-Silva, Researcher at the Instituto de Biología of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to discuss his work in progress:
The first and second versions of the UNESCO Declarations on Race and Racism were being published and evaluated internationally in the early 1950’s. More or less simultaneously, Mexican scholar-cum-politician Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán was openly using racial(ist) classificatory vocabulary to refer to the ‘human difference’ that sociocultural anthropologists were busy characterizing, in the context of ongoing State-sponsored efforts at indigenista research centers and stations away from Mexico City (e.g. the ‘Centros Coordinadores Indigenistas’ in Chiapas and Chihuahua). Aguirre Beltrán’s further references –sparse but significant, throughout his trajectoryto concepts in ‘human evolution and genetics’ might be understood (but not necessarily justified) in view of his initial training as a medical doctor. However, Aguirre Beltrán did not consider himself an expert in matters related to physical anthropology. In fact, most members of the elite defining indigenista policies in mid-20th century Mexico usually agreed that such role should be reserved for Juan Comas Camps, the Spanish expat professor who would later become the central figure of Mexican physical anthropology. During that process of career transformation and consolidation, Comas was recruited as a ‘helpful hand’ to official indigenismo, providing a scientific (but also political) service that had been already envisioned as necessary by Manuel Gamio.
The central theme of this session is informed by a long-term research project on Juan Comas himself a member of some of the aforementioned UNESCO commissions– and his role in the history of 20th century physical anthropology in Mexico. Paying special attention to the transnational networks in which Comas and other physical anthropologists, but also Aguirre Beltrán and their peers were embedded, in the provided materials I suggest that certain histories of Mexican indigenismo may have been missing some elements of the ‘race science / scientific racist’ projects (following nuanced versions of Alice Conklin’s definitions, derived from her historiographic perspectives on French physical anthropology) that Mexican physical anthropology amounted to, not only in the late 19th and early 20th century, but also for the most part of Mexican indigenismo’s ‘golden years’. I do not wish to imply that historiographies of Mexican and transnational physical anthropology should take absolute precedence over existing and further critical analyses of Mexican indigenismo. (On the contrary, I briefly state that some already produced histories of 20th century Mexican physical anthropology seem inadequate when they dislocate that discipline from the politics of indigenismo.) I argue instead that the local (but transnationally grounded) matrix / source that I call ‘Mexican race theory’ should receive a broader treatment, as it went beyond ‘scientific ideology’ and developed not only in indigenismo and in physical anthropology, but also in hybrid configurations of academic and public discourse and practice. Among these additional configurations, I propose to include eugenics, biotypology, ‘mestizaje talk’, and (via notions of ‘improvement of stocks’) even agronomy and allied research areas concerned with (non-human) species domestication. This more extensive horizon of subject matters for analysis might contribute to renovate viewpoints on the complex currents subtending all-pervasive, never-ending raci(ali)sms in ‘Mexico’ and about ‘Mexicans’.