About the Katz Center
Cover: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, by Professor Friedrich Katz.
The Katz Center for Mexican Studies was founded on June 16, 2004 and named in honor of Professor Friedrich Katz, one of the world's leading scholars of Mexican history. Professor Katz is the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Latin American History and co-director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Mexico and Latin America; diplomatic relations between Latin America, Europe and United States; and the Mexican Revolution.
Shortly after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Katz and his parents, who were Austrian Communists of Jewish ancestry, fled to France from their native Germany. As conditions continued to deteriorate approaching the start of the war, the Katz's fled again, gaining temporary asylum in the US and eventually landing in Mexico, where they could avoid possible deportation back Germany. After attending secondary school in Mexico City, Friedrich Katz moved to the US, where he completed his BA at Wagner College on Staten Island in New York City. He went on to earn his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1954. His doctoral thesis, Socio-economic relations of the Aztecs in the 15th and 16th centuries, broke new ground by placing the available anthropological and archeological research on Aztec civilization in a historical context, asking fundamental questions about the evolution of Aztec society by comparing it with other ancient or pre-modern societies. This was the first real history of Aztec society and is still required reading for students of pre-Colombian Mexico.
Dr. Katz taught at the University of East Berlin, and at the University of Texas, before coming to the University of Chicago in 1971. His work and scholarly leadership made Chicago the premier center for Mexican historical studies in the United States. In 1981, Katz published The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, a ground-breaking work of scholarship that examined the external forces at play during the Mexican Revolution, and situated the Revolution on the world stage, making this event intelligible to historians of other great social upheavals of the modern world.
In 2000, Katz published The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, in which he unearthed the complexity of the character of Pancho Villa and his movement, bearing notable contrast to the legends and myths that had previously reduced Villa and his followers to mere caricatures. In Villa's character he identified a tension between the moral necessity of agrarian and other popular reforms and the practical imperatives of military campaigns and stable government, which made him emblematic of contradictions in the Mexican Revolution as well as post-revolutionary Mexican society.
Throughout his work on post-conquest and twentieth-century Mexico, Professor Katz's scholarly commitment to democratic values, internationalism, and the value of comparative history have profoundly influenced the development of core theoretical and methodological frameworks in the field. The Katz Center for Mexican Studies honors the work of Professor Katz and his tremendous contributions to the study of Mexican and Latin American history.
