Race, Class, and the 1960s Crisis of Anthropology in the United States and Mexico

Insurgent anthropologists worked within a Cold War climate that pitted competing global capitalist and socialist economic systems against one another. This pushed scholars to place poverty and economic conditions at the center of their analyses. Many leftist scholars followed Marxist tenants that separated the structural economic conditions they believed caused inequality from an ideological and cultural superstructure they saw as secondary. Within this contest, they struggled to understand how race and ethnicity related to economics and culture and how they were all inscribed in the geopolitical space formed at the intersection of US-Soviet and North-South struggles. As scholars foregrounded economic systems that were national and international, they rejected scholarship that focused on local communities or on the role of the families and schools in enculturating individuals. They saw structural "external" forces as more important than "internal" factors in shaping both inequality and difference. At the same time, they believed unjust socioeconomic systems could only be changed by a wholesale transformation of both the nation and its insertion in the international community. Some saw race and ethnicity as local or familial and therefore unimportant. Others linked them to the historical development of a global capitalist system.  In many cases, that meant subsuming race into class.