| Sumario: | This article considers the fieldwork that Redfield, Andrade, and Tax carried out in Mexico and Guatemala with locally recruited key informants and field assistants beginning in the 1930s under the joint auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Chicago. The "marginal man" emerges as a unifying reflexive concern for these anthropologists and their assistants in three ways: (1) in terms of possible sociological types suited to the role of informant or assistant, (2) in terms of the practical problems of mediation for the researchers that actual informants obviated, and (3) in terms of the roles of informants or assistants as institutional positions with emergent professional trajectories. Using the methods of linguistic anthropology, the historical lives of "marginal men," both conceptual and actual, are revealed as central to the emergence of both "academic" and "applied" anthropological projects in the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. [history of social science, fieldwork methods, applied anthropology, indigenismo, Chicago anthropology]
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