Rosemblatt's book began as a research project into the roots of Oscar Lewis's work on the culture of poverty, and its now widely discredited thesis about the causes of underdevelopment in Latin America (and elsewhere). In the process of trying to better understand the context of Lewis's Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959), Rosemblatt got sidetracked. We are the lucky recipients of Rosemblatt's diverted attention. Her masterful new book explores the ways that a group of transnational academics and scholars from Mexico and the United States collaborated “to manage racial differences within and across nations” (3). The interactions and exchanges between these scholars happened right as conceptualizations of race as a scientific category—studies in eugenics—were on the rise. The different demographic makeup of Mexico and the United States, both of which viewed themselves as modernizing, muddled a set of understandings that did not fit nicely with racial ideals of the day: namely, that the United States was a model of white racial superiority (with the need to manage its minority populations) and that Mexico was a racially backward country in need of redemption.

In spite of the fact that scholars from Mexico and the United States did tend to focus on what made their respective nations different, each had much in common, and each country served in some respects as a model for the other. That said, Rosemblatt correctly notes that the scholarly exchange between US and Mexican experts was (and continues to be) an unequal one. These inequalities had (and continue to have) real impacts. Despite these inequalities—inequalities that often resulted in the rejection by US scholars of cutting-edge conceptualizations and findings made by Mexican scholars—Mexican intellectuals often ended up being gatekeepers for US scholars doing research in Mexico. Furthermore, the actual experiences that US scholars had while doing research in Mexico often (though not always) transformed them and their thinking, thus mitigating some of the inherent inequalities.

The book is broken into two main sections. The first emphasizes the period directly after World War I and the Mexican Revolution, and the second focuses on the administrations of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45). In the first section, Rosemblatt expertly analyzes the ways in which World War I and the Mexican Revolution moved the two countries away from orthodox applications of the liberalism—both political and economic—that had effectively served to strip indigenous peoples of much of their ancestral lands. Each nation turned to a cadre of scholarly experts whose job it was to understand and design policy aimed at handling racial differences, in Mexico for indigenous peoples, and in the United States for Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans. Rosemblatt covers some familiar territory as we explore the work of scholars who shared, borrowed, and collaborated across national lines, such as Manuel Gamio, Franz Boas (and his many students), and John Collier, whose 1930s Indian New Deal owed much to 1920s indigenismo. She expertly explores how Mexico's indigenista adoption of mestizaje paralleled a US shift from eugenics to culture to explain backwardness for minority populations judged not yet ready for assimilation. This US shift constructed a nation around notions of whiteness, and it included the idea that acculturation was not a one-way street. Even whites, upon whom the national culture was imagined, needed to sympathize and embrace some aspects of non-mainstream culture.

One of Rosemblatt's most important contributions, however, is one of methodology. She argues, quite correctly, that most historians and social scientists have not quite known what to do with the vast accumulation of data that the various educational, cultural, and economic government entities collected during this time period. While US scholars tended to use theory to make sense of data, thereby promoting some data over others, and some generalizations over others, Mexican scholars who studied indigenous peoples often declared their inability to make theoretical generalizations, given the wide variations in data. She demonstrates how Mexican scholars used “at least three distinct forms of aggregation … taxonomic, encyclopedic, and numerical” (138). This vast collection of data makes for messy and uneven analysis. As a result, we historians have depicted Mexico as a place of many Mexicos. And while this is true, it is partially because of the approach that Mexican scholars took in understanding Mexico, and not just because Mexico has high levels of diversity.

Rosemblatt's wonderful writing brings to life nearly a half century of interchange between US and Mexican scholars. As a result, it will deservedly find its way into many upper division and graduate history courses.