Gerónimo de Sierra

The journey of a Latin American sociologist

Abstract

Gerónimo de Sierra is part of that fertile generation of Latin American intellectuals marked by a deep interweaving of the professional and the political. Its members are now in their eighties and even in their nineties. Let this personalized portrait serve as a tribute to all of them, pioneers of our social sciences. His status as a “committed intellectual” - as they said in the 1960s - never prevented him from distinguishing between political work and academic work. A distinction that was not easy to steer in the midst of the political storm that shook our America between the 1950s and 1970s. His work has not avoided the issues of everyday politics, approached with methods proper to social science and inspired by the “Marxian” and “Tourainian” conceptual universe according to the periods. At the same time that he cultivated the link with the European classics, he dialogued early on with the “new” emerging classics in Latin America, which was not always the case among his colleagues in Latin America. This is a brief sketch of his life, still incomplete but already long and full of professional vicissitudes. As can be seen, throughout almost 60 years of practice as a sociologist, the political, the human and the emotional compete in importance. This “ordinary sociologist” - as he himself likes to say - shaped by the great cultural and political currents of the time, was led at certain times to assume academic and political responsibilities of important significance. All this without ever losing his good nature, his modesty, and above all, his keen sense of humor.