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that virtually any North American facility in Mexico City could and probably would become a focus of attack. Additional discussions with representative Mexicans in the U.S. brought into focus that the social sciences, the scholarly purview of most of the CAORC centers, would present problems in Mexico and that the concentration should rather be on the arts and humanities, including archaeology and some history and anthropology.

Given this focus and an appropriate (i.e., exactly equal) balance in the governance of the pair of Centers then visualized, the Secretary, Millon, and Dr. Magali Carrera (coordinator of the Smithsonian's Latin American activities) paid the official visits in Mexico that had been suggested. A substantially different picture, which emerged from their lengthy, candidate and rewarding discussions there in May, can be summarized as follows:

1.) A physical facility for American scholars in Mexico City is viewed as a major political problem/risk. It probably would be scrutinized and delayed to death, irrespective of whether it was carefully "balanced" with a similar facility here. Moreover the localization of both such Centers in the respective capitals would fail to take cognizance of the geographic dispersion of the centers of scholarly and intellectual life whose close interaction the Secretary and his colleagues were seeking to encourage.

2.)Important as these objections are, however, they need not preclude establishing a facility of some kind in the U.S. (not necessarily in Washington) to further the goals of scholarly interchange. Without specifying forms and mechanisms, thinking in terms of U.S. home for coordination and for encouraging substantive relationships may give focus to the effort. The U.S. facility, for example, might be developed where there is an existing scholarly base and serve both as a residency site and a "switching station."

3.) In the present, highly politicized atmosphere, a new program in support of research that was jointly managed with the U.S. even in such seemingly more detached fields of social sciences concerning as anthropology, archaeology and history would provoke sufficient criticism so that it probably couldn't be launched. Reference was made to a number of specific cases of tension between U.S. and Mexican scholars in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, while in history the source of the difficulty seems to be a rising polarization among Mexican scholars that they may not be willing to air before their North American colleagues.

4.) With regard to at least the more topical, policy-oriented fields of social science investigation, careful inquiries by authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Relations suggests that in any case, there is already more (primarily U.S.) funding available then there are competent Mexican scholars to engage in it, though much may hinge on the definition of competence here (and on issue is making a judgment).

5.) In the arts, literature and the humanities, on the other hand, the breakdown in communication between the two countries is seen as being at its worst. An effort to promote interchange in these fields ––