The beginnings of the discipline

The first historical compilations of science in Mexico date from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, i.e. the dawn of the Porfiriato and the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. The Porfiriato was a period in Mexican history between 1876 and 1911 when the country was under the total control of General Porfirio Díaz. During these years, Mexico experienced great changes: by increasing foreign investment in the country, which allowed the growth of agriculture, mining and communications, including the railway industry and the telegraph network, Díaz reformed the socio-economic structure of Mexico at the expense of the exploitation of vulnerable groups and increased general inequality. During this period, science and history studies in Mexico started as a means of legitimization and promotion of Mexican scientific work by creating scientific societies and compilations of previous scientific works. These efforts aimed to encourage Mexican science as part of general cultural growth, and to situate Mexican scientific advancements in the larger context of world history while the nation was still being built.Footnote ¹ For example, the most acknowledged and recognized contributions to the history of medicine in the country include the positivist physician Francisco de Asís Flores y Troncoso's 1886 work, History of Medicine in Mexico, from the Indian Times to Our Days, as well as Nicolás León's work, which focused on obstetrics and the description of Michoacán's medical world.Footnote ² These works became the first two narratives on the history of Mexican medicine. Adolfo Castañares, a pharmacist and professor at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP), published in 1911 an important pamphlet on the history of chemistry during the scientific and artistic contest of the century.Footnote ³ Among the efforts to historicize other areas, in geography we find Manuel Orozco y Berra's work Notes for the History of Geography in Mexico, and the Colegio de Minería's Ephemera of Development.Footnote ⁴

Although these authors were settled in different areas, and developed their works independently, they were all part of the cultural and social elite in Mexico. These works had a common historicization structure that was biographical, descriptive and advocative of Mexican science, with a nationalist rhetoric that positioned them at a high cultural level, highlighting the work of the pioneers of institutionalized science.Footnote ⁵ It was a historical reconstruction of science performed to fill the gap caused by the absence of such studies in the country, as compared to European nations. Nevertheless, the Mexican Revolution (the civil revolts that intended to expunge the Porfiriato's inequalities) halted what scholars had previously described as the main phase of the historical studies of science in Mexico.

Revival after the revolutionary period

It was not until 1939, during General Lázaro Cárdenas's administration, after the reopening of research centres that had been closed during the Mexican Revolution and the creation of new ones, that history of science began to be considered an independent discipline.Footnote ⁶ This resurgence of the history of science aimed at resurrecting the memory of Mexican scientific work, by recalling its institutions, achievements and pioneers. Perhaps Enrique Beltrán, Eli de Gortari and José Joaquín Izquierdo are the most important figures in the early efforts of achieving a systematized history of science.Footnote ⁷

It was José Joaquín Izquierdo (1893–1974) – physician and physiologist from Puebla, who also became a historian and political scientist – that turned the axis of history of Mexican science by leaving behind the characteristic positivism of previous work and introducing a contemporary sense to the field. He also worked in favour of decentralizing the studies of ‘national and global’ science, advocating instead for a local science with an interpretive history. The history of science proposed by Izquierdo tried to take into account the historical and sociological context from which facts emerged.Footnote ⁸

Enrique Beltrán Castillo (1903–94), considered the first historian of biology in Mexico, was a Mexican biologist and botanist who published numerous articles on natural resources and their conservation, as well as on history of science and its social and educational aspects. While attempting to trace biology in Mexico back to the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods in a narrative–descriptive fashion, Beltrán also recognized the importance of social conditions in the development of scientific thought.

Eli Eduardo de Gortari Carbajal (1918–91) was a Mexican logician, philosopher of science, historian of science and sanitary engineer, and an important connoisseur and promoter of dialectical materialism. De Gortari would later make use of historical materialism to interpret and understand scientific development based on received influences, historical facts and social conditions.Footnote ⁹ Eli de Gortari defined himself as Marxist and associated with socialist organizations. His vision of history of science criticized positivism and the way in which this discipline had sought Mexican contributions to universal science during the past.Footnote ¹⁰

Progression of different historiographies

Nonetheless, despite the effort and important inputs to the history of science of these scholars, the history of science in Mexico had not yet contributed significantly to the understanding of the state of science in the country. During the second half of the twentieth century, several initiatives in many countries encouraged the development of history of science. These efforts created multidisciplinary spaces for reflection, which contributed to the goal of making science one of the crucial axes of the academic, social, political and theoretical reflections demanded by the times. Two aspects were crucial for the institutionalization of history of science in Mexico: the opportunity to go abroad in order to become familiar with up-to-date historical studies of science, and the capacity of scholars trained outside to found institutions upon their return. Decisive steps in this direction came when philosopher Juan José Saldaña (1939–), historian Roberto Moreno de los Arcos (1943–96) and mathematician Santiago Ramírez (1945–97) began to teach and publish historical and philosophical studies of science during the 1980s and 1990s. It is worth noting that although all of them worked at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and were acquainted with each other, their trajectories, their philosophical approaches to the history of science and their academic agendas never coincided, as we will argue below.

Saldaña was one of the first professional historians of science in the country to have training outside Mexico; he obtained his doctorate from the University of Paris I in 1980. Upon his return to Mexico, he became a full professor and chair of history of science and technology of the School of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM, pioneering the first lecture on history of science. Saldaña was the founder and first president of the Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology from 1982 to 1988, was director and founder of the magazine Quipu (a Latin American magazine of history of science and technology) in 1984, and served as secretary general of the International Union of History of Science from 2001 to 2005. In this position, Saldaña organized the XIX International Congress of History of Science carried out in Mexico City in 2001, the first of its kind in the country.Footnote ¹¹ Like many historians of his time, Saldaña based his historiographic work on George Basalla's diffusionist model of centre–periphery published in 1967, giving rise to colonial studies of science in Mexico.Footnote ¹²

Historian Moreno de los Arcos got his bachelor's degree at the School of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM in 1967, and then his master's degree in 1973 with a study on Joaquín Velázquez de León's scientific works on geological, mineralogical and meteorological aspects and the results of measurements in the Valley of Mexico. Moreno was full professor at the Bibliographic Research Institute from 1967, and director of the Institute for Historical Research. Although Moreno was not formally trained as a historian of science, this discipline was an important part of his professional academic life. His most outstanding works include Linnaeus in Mexico, published in 1989, and The Controversy of Darwinism in Mexico in 1984. This last work opened a new panorama in the study of Darwinism in Mexico, generating various debates and lines of research that continue to this day.Footnote ¹³

UNAM mathematician Ramírez became the second of the first wave of professionals in history and philosophy of science in Mexico. Ramírez returned to Mexico in 1970 after completing a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Berkeley, and then went for his first PhD in 1976 on philosophy of mathematics, under the supervision of French professor Pierre Raymond at the University of Paris 7. Upon his return to Mexico, Ramírez began teaching history and philosophy of science for undergraduate science students at the School of Sciences in 1977. This was the first course of its kind at the UNAM. Ramírez also founded the first group of history and philosophy of science, a group to which biologists, mathematicians and physicists belonged, and where historians and philosophers of science could mature and in turn became principal investigators years later. Ramírez trained his students within what was known as the French epistemological school, which opened a new panorama about the different ways of making history of science. Ramírez and some of his first students published in 1979 The Silence of Knowledge. In this work, the authors developed as its central ideas Bachelard's notion of rational materialism and the epistemological rupture, Canguilhem's history of scientific ideas and historical epistemology, and Foucault's archaeology of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ While teaching history and philosophy of science, Ramírez also conducted research into the historical work of French mathematician Jean Cavaillès. His dissertation, called ‘The unknown number five’, gave Ramírez his second PhD at the School of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM in 1990, under the supervision of Mexican professor Cesáreo Morales.Footnote ¹⁵ This work became one of the first historical pieces on Cavaillès and paved the way for the history and philosophy of mathematics in Mexico. Although the work was never formally published due to Ramírez's early death, it became the basis of his work and teachings.Footnote ¹⁶ From Ramírez’s work, influenced by Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, and, years later, Dominic Lecourt, a lifelong friend of Ramírez, came some representative groups in the School of Sciences and other institutions, which have strengthened through the training of scholars specialized in the area.

This new generation of historians of science coincided with the emergence of strong criticism of some disciplines for being too closely engaged with the legitimization of the Mexican state. This critique was aimed particularly at anthropology, demography and the establishment of national museums.Footnote ¹⁷ Historians of science had been aware of this issue since the 1980s. In this vein, Adelman argued that historiography for Mexico was made with respect to the colonial regime, and that it was overwhelmingly focused on accounting for how the colonial regime had fostered Mexico's accession to the universal concert of scientific progress.Footnote ¹⁸ In order to turn away from these national and parochial narratives, the scholars mentioned above, together with the new generations they trained, and many others who were being trained elsewhere, started exploring historiographical strategies that would enable them to illuminate different aspects of the history of science in Mexico and Latin America. As a result, very different approaches have appeared in recent years. Some interesting lines of research include those seeking to perform rereadings of intellectual contributions of periods formerly considered dark or retrograde, such as the Porfiriato. In this sense, studies in the history of science have explored the tangled relationship between, for example, cartographic studies and the presumption that national boundaries were, in effect, pre-given, timeless demarcations, or the influence of hygienist theories on the design of hydraulic engineering in Mexico City.Footnote ¹⁹ There is also an increasing interest in population as an object of study. For example, the histories that highlight the development of criminology and medical studies stand out. They describe how the idea of mestizophilia (i.e. the belief that the racial and cultural mixture between Spaniards and indigenous people is desirable) developed during the Porfiriato and provided the scientific basis for nineteenth-century racial science.Footnote ²⁰

Similarly, there was a reinterpretation of the colonial period. Cañizares Esguerra, for example, questioned the criteria used to validate sources when talking about Ibero-American history. His work challenges the interpretation of America and its inhabitants as a young and backward place in the evolutionary scale in the Spanish Illustration and the Bourbon reforms in its colonies.Footnote ²¹ For Cañizares it was possible to reject the vision of Latin America as a structure where there was no development or communication of science, but as a period with particular and diverse values, exploring new sources and differences in the knowledge system. The work of Mundy on Tenochtitlan maps illustrates this framework, in which native knowledge – including their world view and representation practices – influenced the conquerors’ cartography. Esguerra himself did this in his work on the development of mining technologies, in which he pointed out that scientific knowledge in the Spanish colonies circulated around the Crown in a highly hierarchical system. This account sharply contrasts with the previous notion that scientific knowledge was available to all public spheres.Footnote ²²

The global turn

A remarkable historiography followed by many scholars in recent years is the global turn, which accounts for the variable density of world relations when it comes to mobilizing knowledge and technology. A critical post-colonial reading and the global shift in science require a delicate balance: while noting the active participation of post-colonial territories in the construction of knowledge, it should not be forgotten that they existed within asymmetrical power relations. To be sensitive to both scenarios, one methodology that has already been used for these global histories of science is to follow people under the line of microhistory and enrich the techniques with tools provided from anthropology, such as ethnographic registration, interviews in relatively contemporary cases, and object tracking or scientific concepts in global circulation. This approach makes evident that the boundaries between the centre and the periphery are negotiable and changing.Footnote ²³

By the last two decades of the twentieth century, histories of science have also turned their gaze to local knowledge constructed on the so-called peripheries.Footnote ²⁴ This in part allowed the history of science to turn not only to the local and to the global but towards the perspective of the transnational, thus giving rise to the so-called ‘glocal’.Footnote ²⁵ This style of historiography takes sciences as a global phenomenon shaped by means of transnational circulation of knowledge and material culture, as well as through collaborative networks and actors, both social and institutional.Footnote ²⁶ This perspective allows historians to understand science in a way that stresses the importance of mobility and circulation as inherent features of scientific knowledge. Consequently, the context, whether national or international, is relevant to the making of a global history of science, as well as accounting for the fact that, for science to be successful, it must travel to other regions. This global approach to the history of science, which works with the concepts of local and transnational, represents one of the most viable ways of explaining how scientific practices, ideas, teachings, material and even scientists themselves circulate across borders in collaborative networks.Footnote ²⁷ One of the limitations of this way of doing science history arises with the questions of what exactly is circulating through these networks, and, more importantly, what exactly these networks are transforming. Another problem is that of identifying and characterizing local knowledge, epistemologies, styles of reasoning and even local organisms. In doing so, one runs the risk of making the local objects of study immutable in broad generalizations about peoples, cultures or languages that ignore differences and, sometimes, great variations within the framework of a local epistemology.

The global is also a way of placing objects of study in a certain time and place. Scholars in the history of science have tended to understand globalization as something positive, opening possibilities for new sources and methodologies, decentralizing Europe, moving away from colonial histories, and re-examining categories of analysis.Footnote ²⁸ In Mexico, the aim of some historians is to identify and analyse different processes of globalization through different disciplines, such as history, sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural studies and economics. All of this aims to cover the diversity of the emerging contexts in the world that are marked by regional fragmentation.Footnote ²⁹ In this regard, the works in Mexico by Hausberger and Pani, Pineda de Ávila, Morales Sarabia, López-Beltrán and Barahona, among others, are references to the historiographies of the local and the global and the circulation of knowledge in different moments in history, from the sixteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁰

Consolidation and institutionalization of the history of science

Physician Ruy Pérez-Tamayo recently carried out a novel effort to map the most important developments in the contemporary history of science in Mexico.Footnote ³¹ Although not a professional historian, Pérez-Tamayo related the many of the key events in Mexican history that helped give shape to the national scientific system, most of which have been covered in this piece. Despite lacking a theoretical and a strict historical methodology, Pérez-Tamayo's compilations are a notable resource that has gathered many of the key authors and protagonists of the history of science in Mexico previously mentioned here. Some of its relevance lies in that it illustrates how the progress of the Mexican scientific system intertwined with the foundation, development and flourishing of educational, funding and scientific institutions, and the effect that scientific policy has had in the last century on the institutionalization of science in Mexico. In his work General History of Science in Mexico during the 20th Century, Pérez-Tamayo points out the paramount role that some institutions had in the development and boosting of the national scientific system. Among the most important institutions described by Pérez-Tamayo are the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) and its National Researchers System, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Advisory Council of Sciences. Tamayo also points out how the creation and development of research institutions, such as CINVESTAV, the Public Research Centres of CONACYT and the growth of UNAM, boosted the development of science in Mexico. This resulted in a diversification in the research lines and academic efforts focused on the history of science in Mexico, an effect relevant to our discussion below.

Regarding the institutionalization of the history of science in Mexico, several factors have significantly strengthened the field. For example, the creation in 1994 of the Graduate Program in Philosophy of Science (including history of science and science communication) at UNAM, and spaces such as the Darwin Centre for Evolutionary Thought, created in 2010 at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), have gathered leading historians that already have a strong trajectory in the field. Another space that contributed to the institutionalization of the history of science is the Lombardo Toledano Centre, which founded the Mexican journal Ludus Vitalis in the last decade of the twentieth century, where works on history and philosophy of science are published. These institutions have been important for the development of the discipline in Mexico.Footnote ³²

A different strategy to the specialization of fields at the institutional level has been the generation of research lines on history of science from broader projects from scholars and graduate students within specialized spaces. Such is the case of the UAM, where the history of science is enfolded within a broader humanities research specialization in the philosophy of science. In this same vein, there are programmes outside Mexico City of renowned universities such as the Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla and the Nicolaíta University in Michoacán. Additionally, it is important to highlight the associations that coalesce around interest in the subject, among which the Civil Association of Historians of Science and the Humanities stands out. These spaces of gathering for scholars and students have become a melting point for new research projects and a great diversification of perspectives on the study of history of science in Mexico.Footnote ³³

In conclusion, it is important to point out that most of today's scholars have moved away from an exclusively historical approach to combine history of science with philosophy, sociology, anthropology, politics or other related disciplines, known as science and technology studies (STS). This interdisciplinary approach has drawn attention to a myriad of interconnected aspects of the dynamics of science that had previously gone unnoticed. Certainly, we should expect an invigorating new wave of scholars in the near future, who are currently students-in-training, as STS helps to diversify the way history of science is studied in the country, whether in new topics or new epistemological approaches to traditional issues. Regarding the role of history of science in the future of Mexico, it is important to mention that efforts are being made to establish history of science departments in a variety of different institutions, with the aim of contributing to the intellectual development of scientists and scientists-in-training in these institutions. This use for the history of science could make it possible to address, in a more critical and reasoned way, some of the interrelations between science and society. If so, this would considerably enrich current debates and endeavours on issues regarding environmental policy, sustainability, the orientation of basic research, public health and technological developments of great importance for Mexico and the rest of the global community.