Manuel Sandoval Vallarta, from the May 1927 issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine.
MIT Museum.
For Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15, we asked Adriana Minor García, a profesora-investigadora at the Centro de Estudios Históricos of El Colegio de México, to provide a contribution highlighting the career of Manuel Sandoval Vallarta. Minor is the author of the book Cruzar Fronteras: Movilizaciones Científicas y Relaciones Interamericanas en la Trayectoria de Manuel Sandoval Vallarta, 1917-1942. She has also written articles and chapters in English, including one on the place of Latin America in cosmic ray research and another on Sandoval Vallarta’s experiences during World War II.
Manuel Sandoval Vallarta is an especially important figure among the Latin Americans who contributed to United States physics in the early 20th century. A Mexican who moved to the US to enroll as an undergraduate at MIT, he became a doctoral student and faculty member at the institute and was one of only a few theoretical physicists in his generation in the US to specialize in the emerging field of quantum physics. His role in the area was recognized by his colleagues, but it has received only a little attention from historians.
Even less known are Sandoval Vallarta’s initiatives to encourage inter-American scientific relations during his time living in the US, a country he felt compelled to leave by the end of 1942. His experience illustrates Latin American contributions to building bridges in science—work that mostly benefited the US—as well as the circumstances that enabled and constrained such efforts.
Vallarta’s rise as a physicist
When Vallarta (as he was known in the US) arrived from Mexico in 1917, the country was mobilizing for the Great War. It was also a significant moment for MIT as an institution. Vallarta found not only a school deeply involved in the national war effort, but also a campus that had just relocated from Boston to Cambridge, with fresh new buildings.
MIT’s relocation was also accompanied by the creation of a new university club for Latin American students, “for the purpose of developing more friendly relations among [students from the Spanish-speaking countries and from Brazil], and of fostering a better understanding and more intimate relationship between all the nations of America […] and the ultimate benefit of Pan-Americanism.” Vallarta joined the club two years after his arrival. In doing this, he also began his own journey as a transnational figure.
The MIT Latin American Club, from the 1922 edition of MIT’s Technique yearbook. Sandoval Vallarta, then completing his undergraduate degree, is in the second row, third from the left.
After receiving his doctorate in 1924, Vallarta remained at MIT as a physics professor, and he was among a set of faculty members seeking to raise the department’s profile in theoretical physics, according to John Slater, who was department head in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the mid-1920s, Vallarta was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to train in European scientific centers, especially Germany, as did a number of other US physicists whom Slater later called “the lucky generation.” Their travels allowed them to compare the state of science in Europe and the US, giving them a sense of which areas needed strengthening at their home institutions.
Accordingly, in the following years, Vallarta helped to introduce quantum mechanics at MIT by participating in and organizing seminars and translating when they were given in German, as he did during a visit by Max Born. He also invited renowned European physicists such as Werner Heisenberg to visit, taught courses on the theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics, and supervised students, including Nathan Rosen and Richard Feynman, who both became well-known.
Vallarta earned a strong reputation in the US for his theoretical work on cosmic rays, which also allowed him to build connections between the US and Mexico in physics research. This opportunity arose from Arthur Compton (brother of MIT president Karl Compton) carrying out experiments in Mexico and other Latin American countries as part of a worldwide campaign to study cosmic rays. This opened the door for Vallarta to become involved in the area and created a framework for forging powerful links between the US and emerging scientific institutions in Mexico.
Vallarta and the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître proposed a theoretical explanation of Compton’s results, which became the most accepted theory of the latitude effect of cosmic rays, demonstrating they were composed of electrically charged particles. This remains one of Vallarta’s best-known scientific contributions.
An advocate for transnationalism
As a prestigious physicist in the US, Vallarta’s transnationalism was valued as a virtue when the Roosevelt administration reached out to Latin America as part of its Good Neighbor Policy. This policy gained new importance during World War II, as the US drew on institutions and individuals who had decades of experience in building ties in Latin America. It also served as a regional testing ground for a form of cultural diplomacy that, by the end of the war, would expand globally as the US built up its scientific and cultural hegemony.
Looking to contribute to the war effort, Vallarta successfully proposed an idea that took advantage of his transnational identity to bring scientists from Latin America and the US closer together. Supported by the US government’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, he led a Committee on Inter-American Scientific Publication, which invited high-profile Latin American scientists to publish papers in US scientific journals instead of German, Italian, and French ones. It facilitated the process by accepting papers written in Spanish or Portuguese, translating them into English, and identifying an appropriate journal for them. The explicit aim was to take advantage of circumstances to increase the scientific prestige of the US at the expense of enemy and occupied nations.
However, as the war progressed, MIT and the US government shifted priorities, and the MIT physics department asked Vallarta to set aside his leadership of the committee to focus on teaching physics to students. He saw this as dismissive of his own way of contributing to the war effort through cultural and scientific diplomacy, and, while he did not refuse the call to teach, he asked that he also be allowed to continue leading his committee. However, his request was declined. Rather than devote himself exclusively to teaching, he elected to return to Mexico at the beginning of 1943.
Sandoval Vallarta in 1946 as the Mexican delegate at the third meeting of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.
UN photo.
The kind of scientific diplomacy that Vallarta championed would become an important tool for the US during the Cold War, but at that moment it was less valued. Instead, an undivided national loyalty was demanded that was incompatible with the transnationalism that had defined his scientific career as a Latin American in the US. Under these circumstances, he left his life in the US behind, and, as a result of this decision, his influence in US science declined. At the same time, though, he quickly became a leading figure in the Mexican scientific community.
Vallarta’s case allows us to reflect on what factors make transnationalism an advantage or an obstacle for those whose identities are tied to multiple countries. For Vallarta, his identity was built around the bridge-building he practiced as a Mexican who belonged to the US scientific community, linking science and geopolitics. Yet, as much as transnationalism is seen as a virtue, circumstances can also arise in which it becomes an obstacle, such as when essentialist and exclusionary nationalism is on the rise. As we find ourselves in just such a moment, the risk of losing contributions to US scientific leadership like Vallarta’s is present once again.
Adriana Minor García
El Colegio de México
aminor@colmex.mx
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