Blackwell Reference Online

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Lucio Mendieta y Núñez graduated in law in 1920 and was awarded a doctorate in the same discipline in 1950. He is unanimously considered the founder of the first sociological institutions to exist in Mexico. Although the Institute for Social Research ( Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales , IIS) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico ( Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , UNAM) was created in 1930, it was not until Mendieta assumed the position of IIS director nine years later that the first institutionalized sociological research began in Mexico, along with steps to form Mexico's first communities of practitioners of this discipline. That moment also marks the beginning of the generation of a specific literature on the subject, around the Mexican Sociology Journal ( Revista Mexicana de Sociología , RMS ), founded by Mendieta in 1939. Mendieta's directorship marked the beginning of sociology's separation from law, ethnography, and anthropology, to gradually acquire its own identity. Lucio Mendieta y Núñez was also the primary promoter of the opening of the first school dedicated to training professional social scientists in Mexico, the National School of Political and Social Sciences ( Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales , ENCPyS), which opened its doors in 1951, thereby marking the end of the phase of initial institutionalization of sociology and ... log in or subscribe to read full text