Interrogating Development: The Mobilisation of Science, Technologies, and Technical Assistance in Postwar Mexico

This volume explores the diverse meanings and ways of implementing development programs and technical assistance projects, through several case studies grounded in Mexico but transcending its geography. Despite – or perhaps because of – claims of “revolutionary nationalism”, Mexico played a crucial international role during the decades following World War II, both by challenging and enacting developmentalist models, values, and projects that stressed national priorities, resonating beyond its borders and even outside Latin America.

Energy, irrigation, communication infrastructures, nuclear technologies, public health, and patents, are meaningful examples explored in this volume of the mobilisation of science and technologies understood in a broad sense, including not only the natural and social sciences, but also bureaucratic technologies that accompanied infrastructural and industrial projects. These case studies interrogate the specific agents and mechanisms of technical assistance put to work to meet local priorities, which in turn required and informed different international models and ideas of development.

Gisela Mateos (PhD Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona 2001) is Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her main research interests are the history of 20th-century physics and scientific and technological development projects  in Mexico and Latin America during the Cold War. Her focus is on how technical assistance programs have changed scientific and medical practices in the so-called Third World.

Edna Suárez-Díaz (PhD National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, 1996) is Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Between 2005 and 2008 she was Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany. Her research has focused on the history and historical epistemology of twentieth century life sciences. Currently, her work focuses on technical assistance related to biomedical and health practices.