| Summary: | The Mexican project of professional anthropological education underwent a crucial formative process at the end of the post-revolutionary government presided by Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934-1940), as it was framed by the political program called socialist education. This program gave shelter to the foundation of the National Polytechnic Institute that had in its beginnings a Department of Anthropology, which would finally be transferred to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in 1942, receiving the name of National School of Anthropology (ENA). Although these institutional movements seemed only administrative rearrangements, within them interesting perspectives of anthropological and historical work were modeled that positioned their students in key positions in scientific, artistic and governmental institutions that are elemental for the understanding of the concerns and debates of the American anthropological and historical academy in the coming decades. In this context, this article identifies the potential of the academic and scientific training process at the ENA through the evidence contained in the teaching documentation of Robert H. Barlow, an American traveling professor who, after being a temporal student, worked at this school between 1945 and 1951. We consider his records as part of a dispersed vital archive that allowed us to trace some details about the people who were found in his classrooms during this process of institutional articulation of the ENA, contextualizing it under the state debate of his professional educational training, but also within the disturbing silences that surround the scattered walking memories of this migrant professor.
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