John D. Wirth.

John D. Wirth, Gildred Professor of Latin American Studies at Stanford University, died of a heart aneurysm on June 20, 2002. Wirth was a member of the generation of Latin Americanists who entered the field in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, and was a pioneer in the little-studied area of Brazilian history, about which he would publish two major monographs. He later moved on to study the environmental history of the U.S.-Mexican border. For his Politics of Brazilian Development, 1930-1954 (1970), he won the Bolton Prize of the Conference of Latin American History, and won an honorable mention for a Bolton with Minas Gerais in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (1977). His Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution, appeared in 2000. In addition, he edited or co-edited four books and contributed dozens of articles to journals and collections. At his death, he was beginning a book on the history of Brazilian environmental problems, and thus returning to the country of his initial interest.

But John Wirth was not only a distinguished scholar; as a teacher he directed numerous Ph.D. dissertations, and made his mark as an institution-builder as well. At Stanford, where he remained from graduate school to retirement in 2002, Wirth headed Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies for eight years, consolidating Stanford's eminence in the training of Latin Americanists. In addition, at various times he chaired the Spanish Department and the Stanford University Press board, playing a major role in helping the Press become a leader in the publication of monographs on Latin America. Later, Wirth put his administrative skills at the service of the University at large, as Vice Provost for Academic Planning. Beyond the Stanford campus, Wirth was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the nation's most prestigious private foreign policy body. By presidential appointment, he also served on an advisory board on the environment for the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). Yet in the policy area I believe he took the greatest pride in co-founding the North American Institute, a public affairs forum concerned with the environmental issues common to the United States, Mexico, and Canada. He was president of the Santa Fe-based NAMI from 1991 until his death. Such diverse activities show that Wirth's impact on Latin American studies and policy extended well beyond his teaching and scholarly writings.

Born in Dawson, New Mexico, in 1936, John Wirth was educated at Putney School, Harvard, and Stanford, and held scholarships or fellowships at all three. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1967, shortly after becoming an instructor there. I met John five years earlier, and got to know him well in 1963-64, when we were both studying Brazilian history with Stanley Stein at Columbia University. Also enrolled in the course was Robert Levine, Stein's student at Princeton. Later in 1964 the three of us went to Brazil for dissertation research. Seeing each other frequently in Brazil led to intensive scholarly collaboration four years later, when we three began a project on regionalism in Brazilian politics, society, and economy. The enterprise lasted twelve years, with many face-to-face meetings in the United States and Brazil, where we all spent a calendar year in 1969-70, and returned together later. The three state-based volumes that eventually appeared on Brazilian federalism were explicitly designed as comparative studies. In fact we believed this to be the largest collaborative project ever mounted among U. S. historians of Latin America. Although I had just completed a dissertation on Rio Grande do Sul as a regional power in Brazilian politics, the initial inspiration for the multi-book project was Wirth's.

The three studies asked the same questions, relating state to nation; they used the same definitions and same types of data; and they had the same chapter format. They addressed the issues of economic structures and dynamics, regional society and culture, state and national politics, center-periphery...