The Mexican Viewpoint: Manuel Gamio and Chicago Sociology

Manuel Gamio’s Mexican Immigration to the United States and The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story, published in 1930 and 1931 by the University of Chicago Press, were pioneering studies of Mexican migration. The products of Gamio’s brief exile in the United States, the books combined Chicago sociology’s analytical framework with a non-Chicago viewpoint. Gamio was an anthropologist and archeologist in Mexico, the author of a nationalist manifesto, and an official in Mexico’s government. His “Mexican viewpoint,” as anthropologist Robert Redfield called it, reflected the political and intellectual climate following the Mexican revolution. This article traces the history of Gamio’s research project on Mexican migration and examines how Gamio’s account both worked with and departed from Chicago sociology. While Gamio borrowed Chicago’s view of migration as an experience of modernization, he did not equate modernization with assimilation into the United States. The article reconstructs Gamio’s argument and discusses the tension between Gamio’s perspective and the migrants’ experience. By focusing on Manuel Gamio’s encounter with Chicago sociology, the article seeks to highlight how the sociology of international migration took shape across national lines.