Mexicanos en Chicago: the Field Diary of Robert Redfield
Last fall, Patricia Arias and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University Jorge Durand, both professors of anthropology at the Universidad de Guadalajara, completed Mexicanos en Chicago: Diario de campo de Robert Redfield, 1924-1925. With the support of a Fulbright fellowship, Durand and Arias spent the fall quarter of 2006 in the special collections of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, where they revised Redfield’s less well-known research on Mexican immigrant communities in Chicago, and developed and edited a unique text that explores Redfield’s findings and considers his work within its larger historical and disciplinary contexts.
A lifelong Chicago resident, Redfield was intrigued by Mexican immigrant communities of Chicago that took root during the late teens and early nineteen-twenties; these became one of his earliest subjects of study, during his first year as a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. In the early 1920s, post-World War I immigration legislation that sought to restrict the flow of European immigrants into the US created a dearth of labor supply in the American Midwest. This led to massive efforts within the railroad and other industries to attract Mexican workers and their families to Chicago and neighboring cities like Detroit and Gary, IN; to the industry’s good fortune, economic hardship and political instability in the wake of the Revolution of 1910 made this a viable option for many Mexican workers. By 1929, Illinois had the third largest concentration of Mexican immigrants in the United States, after Texas and California.
This first exposure to the field would later lead Redfield to pursue comprehensive studies of immigrant communities from Tepotzlan, Chan Kom, and the Yucatan. His work connected analyses of immigrant communities in the United States with detailed studies of immigrants’ hometowns—what were their lives like in Mexico? What caused them to immigrate? The Diario de campo references Redfield’s earliest professional collaborations with Paul S. Taylor and Manuel Gamio, all of whom were part of a dramatic increase in scholarly research on Mexico, as the nation had come into a period of “rediscovery and revalorization of its indigenous roots.” Redfield’s notes illuminate the development Mexican studies within the field of anthropology and are highly reflective of the period during which he was trained, when the discipline was completing its transformation from a museum-oriented field to one that sought systematically to study the "patterns and mechanisms of social behavior." Durand and Arias write that the journal itself is purely a working document—in their raw, incomplete state, Redfield’s notes give the reader an unfiltered perspective on the his research, or a peek into what Luis Gonz ález calls “the anthropologist’s kitchen.”
Click here to learn more about the Redfield papers in the Special Collections department of the Regenstein Library.
