La Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia forma parte de toda una tradición en la educación y la investigación antropológica nacional. La idea central del artículo es analizar las condiciones políticas y sociales que dieron origen a la ENAH en 1937. Marcado desde el principio con un sentido nacionalista y popular, tenía por meta formar gente capaz de solucionar muchos problemas económicos y sociales en el sector indígena y campesinos de México. The National School of Anthropology and History forms part of all a traditjon in education and the anthropological national research. Upon approaching some look on their origins and first years, we reaffirm the education we must review the idea and original circunstances that motivated the arise of the institution. The central idea of the article, it is that they were social and political conditions not irrelevant to the antropological national group, that were conjugated in order to generate the National School of Anthropology in 1937. Marked from its beginins with a nationalist and popular sense, it had as a goal to educate people able to solve many of the economical and social problems of the indigenous sectors and peseants of the country. The idea of an anthropological useful knowledge in order to know the reality, of academic quaüty, of cardenistas lineaments in the solution of problems of the majorities, the notion of collective effort (of students and professors) to support the institution. We think, they were the premises of a successful beginning of the School of Anthrcpology. It is necessary a revision of these beginnings to 50 years of life of the institution.