Weitlaner moved to Mexico in 1922, accompanied by his wife, Olga Lipp, who had followed him to America, and his young daughters Irmgard and Olga. In Mexico City, he worked as a
metallurgical engineer with La Consolidada, Mexico's largest steel company, until his retirement in 1939. The events that led an Austrian professional engineer to Mexico by way of the United States and to a postprofessional career of nearly thirty years resulting in almost a hundred published works. Weitlaner began his countless trips to the
Otomi and, beginning in 1934, to the
Chinantec. One of Weitlaner's arguably most important developments in the years that followed include the re-discovery by
western nations of Mexican
psilocybin mushrooms in 1936 . As a consequence of the experience and knowledge derived from these field studies, and from wide reading in Mexican
linguistics and
ethnology, he was sufficiently well grounded in
anthropology when he left La Consolidada to pass the professional examination that led to a full-time appointment as Ethnologist in the
National Institute of Anthropology and History, a post he had occupied on a part-time basis for several years prior to 1939. With the founding of the
National School of Anthropology and History about the same time, he was appointed (in 1940) Professor of Indigenous American Languages, of Otomian Languages, and of Contemporary Ethnology of Mexico and Central America, teaching first in the old
National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico) on Calle Moneda, behind the
National Palace (Mexico); and after 1964 in the new Museum of Anthropology in
Chapultepec Park. == References ==