The Institute for Latin American Studies and the International Research Training Group (IRTG) Temporalities of Future mourn the loss of Ricardo Pérez Montfort, who has passed away at the age of 72 following a severe illness.

In Ricardo, we have lost not only an outstanding scholar, but also a long-standing colleague and friend, whose intellectual presence, warmth and inexhaustible curiosity enriched our academic lives for many years.

Ricardo Pérez Montfort was a driving force and dedicated researcher in the International Research Training Group Entre Espacios from the very beginning, and played a key role in securing the project’s progression to the second funding phase, working alongside colleagues in Berlin and Mexico. He also co-founded the IRTG Temporalities of Future, which successfully secured funding for a further period in 2023. Throughout all these years, Ricardo was a reliable and inspiring partner, advisor, supervisor and friend to the members of the IRTG.

As a professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ricardo was an exceptionally versatile and interdisciplinary researcher. With great intellectual agility, he combined ethnology, anthropology, and historical and cultural studies. His work on photography, cinema and other visual, audiovisual and musical forms of expression has shaped generations of students and doctoral candidates. Equally groundbreaking is his research, which was always underpinned by a critical, nuanced and sensitive perspective.

His historical thinking was characterised by a rare combination of analytical rigor and poetic sensitivity. Ricardo understood cultural history not merely as an academic endeavour, but also as a form of wonder at the world, as a search for the aesthetic experiences, the joys, and also the moments of resistance expressed through cultural practices. Drawing on his own experiences and research interests, he demonstrated time and again over more than four decades just how fruitful it can be to rethink the familiar through historical analysis.

His academic work impressively reflects this intellectual breadth. Since the 1980s, Ricardo published seminal studies on the cultural history of Mexico and on popular nationalism. His early work on the cultural construction of nationhood and identity culminated in influential books investigating the visual and symbolic forms of nationalism. In the following decades, he expanded this perspective through studies on music, cinema, photography, and other expressions of popular culture, as well as through analyses of conservative and Hispanist ideologies in Mexico and Latin America. His later works deepened these socio-cultural inquiries, weaving them into broader reflections on memory, cultural imagination, and the history of drug policy. His magnum opus is undoubtedly the three-volume biography of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas. Over several decades, he produced a body of work that has left a lasting mark on Mexican historiography and for which Ricardo received numerous accolades, including the Humboldt Research Award.

Yet those who knew Ricardo Pérez Montfort will remember more than just his books and ideas. A defining dimension of Ricardo’s work throughout his life was his immense warmth and approachability. He met everyone with openness and respect, regardless of rank or social background. With his humour, generosity and kindness, he quickly won the sympathy and affection of those around him. His nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Mexico and Latin America, his experiences as a travelling artist, journalist, filmmaker and writer, as well as his passion as a researcher and inspiring academic teacher, made him an extraordinary personality, perhaps best described by the word Menschenfreund.

With the passing of Ricardo Pérez Montfort, the IRTG and the LAI have lost one of their most loyal and distinguished Mexican partners and a great friend. His way of thinking, his humanity and his zest for life will remain vivid in our memories.

We will miss him greatly. Our deepest sympathies go out to his family.