Western science has played a fundamental role in the creation of the modern world.1 The emergence of modern science in Europe in the Renaissance accompanied and helped propel European overseas expansion.2 It played an important role in the conquest and colonization of Latin America, and in the "second conquest" in the aftermath of independence in the nineteenth century. Despite its importance, the history of science in Latin America has been inadequately cultivated, especially in comparison to themes such as land tenure, labor systems, slavery, and political power. A few Latin American nations-most notably Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela-have venerable traditions in the publication of works on the history of science that in some cases date back to the beginnings of the discipline in the early twentieth century.3 Only in recent years, however, have North American scholars begun to turn their attention to the history of Latin American science rather than the more intensely studied scientific traditions of Europe and the United States

In the winter of 1791-1792, meetings were being held in all of the principal towns of the Mexican province of Tlaxcala. Decisions had been reached that something had to be done about the recurring flooding of the Zahuapa river in central Tlaxcala and, independently, about the lack of an adequate water supply for the southeastern provincial town of Huamantla. As a result of these meetings, two independent projects began both of which were locally conceived and, more importantly, locally funded. In a burst of civic pride groups of Spanish vecinos (landowners and merchants who claimed Tlaxcala as their home) and Indian communities collaborated in constructing and financing these improvements. The work on the Zahuapa lasted until 1802, and the work to supply water in Huamantla was ongoing in 1810 when the Hidalgo revolt interrupted it. What is interesting about these decisions is not the success of the projects themselves—the first failed badly and the second was foundering when aborted—but rather what they highlight about the way Spanish and Indian leadership in local communities interacted politically in the late Bourbon period, both with each other and with Bourbon officialdom.

On the 17th of August 1671, Manuel de Morales, a 49-year-old Angolan slave employed on a Dominican-owned sugar plantation in the Pacific coastal hotlands of what is now the republic of Guatemala, came before a priest and declared his intention to marry. Accompanying Morales was his proposed spouse, Inés Hernández, an Indian widow from the nearby town of Escuintla, capital of the colonial Guatemalan corregimiento of Escuintepeque in which the Dominican ingenio lay. Four male witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage between Morales and Hernández, two on behalf of each contrayente, or prospective spouse. Three of the witnesses were slaves: Silvestre Ramírez, defined as mulatto, and Jacinto Pereira and Miguel de la Cruz, both identified as black. The fourth was Diego de Arriasa, mulatto and free.

In a 1924 essay, the botanist Henri Pittier worried that many of Latin America's tropical products—particularly its plants—lacked a ‘civil status.’ By this, Pittier meant that they had not yet been identified and named scientifically. He likened the plants’ lack of a botanical ‘civil status’ to a person's lacking a passport or credentials that proved their citizenship. This was more than a casual analogy. Over the previous half-century, many states in Latin America had begun to take inventories of their plants, just as they had begun taking censuses of their citizens, and surveying and mapping their national territories. These botanical inventories helped states establish control over the natural world, just as censuses helped the state establish control over civil society. Between 1885 and 1935, governments throughout Latin America began to fund botanical research institutions and to finance the publication of national floras. Pittier had been actively involved in this process: he had helped establish national natural history museums in Costa Rica and Venezuela, and wrote or edited three national flora: the Primitiae Florae Costaricensis (1891-1901), the Ensayo sobre las plantas usuales de Costa Rica (1908), and the Manual de las plantas usuales de Venezuela (1926). National floras such as these were not simply ‘entertainment for intellectuals’ but also part of broader programs by Latin American governments to incorporate the natural world into the national political and economic order.

“If the charity that one practices for adults honors and gratifies, that which one engages in for children redeems and glorifies,” wrote Juan de Dios Peza, poet and playwright, in his journalistic chronicle of public welfare under the government of Porfirio Díaz. Peza elaborated: “If charity is beautiful when exercised in favor of adults, it is a divine reflection, a smile of God, when given to children.” Peza's imagery evoked religious charity of the colonial era, when giving alms and pious bequests earned the salvation of the donor. But Peza wrote in 1881 to celebrate the achievements of General Porfirio Díaz's first presidential term in the realm of public welfare, principally bringing welfare administration under federal jurisdiction.

In 1964, U.S. civilian teenagers managed a rare feat by sparking a major foreign policy crisis. Even more remarkable, they were abroad when they did it, and they caused the crisis out of what many considered too much patriotism. The riots that rocked Panama beginning on 9 January of that year started as a scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. high school students in front of Balboa High School (BHS), a “Zonian” institution mostly for U.S. citizens. The immediate circumstances were complicated: teenagers from Panama City marched into the town of Balboa in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone to protest the fact that BHS was not flying the Panamanian flag. Balboa High students, in turn, were already demanding that their flag continue to fly. President John Kennedy had ordered that both nations' flags be hoisted in the Zone, but implementation was slow. Then, local administrators decreed that neither flag would fly at BHS. The flag dispute seemed trivial, but its resolution could change which nation enjoyed sovereignty over the Zone. On 9 January, in the scuffle between Panamanian and U.S. students, the Panamanians' flag was torn. Then came the crisis. Within hours of the altercation, thousands of adults unleashed a bloody violence that lasted four days and killed twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers. The U.S. Army took control of the Zone and Panama suspended diplomatic relations with the U.S. government. Panamanians further insisted on the scrapping of the 1903 Treaty that had established U.S. control over the Canal Zone. After years of negotiations, these riots led to the Panama Canal treaties in the 1970s and to the transfer of the Canal from U.S. to Panamanian hands in 1999.

Lorenzo Barbosa had a big problem with his daughter Josefa. In June 1821, in Buenos Aires, young Josefa Barbosa was in love with Pascual Cruz. What bothered Lorenzo was that Pascual was a mulatto, while the Barbosa family was white. When the couple asked his permission to marry, Lorenzo vehemently opposed the union and withheld his consent. He was acting within his rights, since minor children (men and women younger than 25 and 23 respectively) were required by law to obtain parental permission to marry. To bolster his case, Lorenzo invoked the power of a colonial law issued in 1778, known as the Royal Pragmatic on marriage, which gave parents the right to block their children's marriages to “unequal partners.” Even though Buenos Aires had broken away from Spain in 1810, most colonial laws regarding family life, including the pragmatic, continued in force into the national period. But just as in colonial times, children retained the right to challenge parental opposition in court. If they chose to do so, the resulting case was known as a disenso.

On October 8, 1930, on her way to the Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico City to purchase alfalfa for her employer's poultry, Elvira C. was forced into a police truck. Despite her protests, she was taken to a detention center known as El Carmen. The 28 year old widow from Puebla was arrested for begging and placed in the custody of Mexico City's Public Welfare Agency. After four-and-a-half months in welfare institutions, a social worker recorded Elvira's work history, inquired into her living situation and drinking habits, and visited her place of residence and her place of work. The social worker finally concluded that Elvira was not a beggar and should be released. On March 18, 1931, over five months after being detained, Elvira was ordered released.

In 1886 the Argentine Congress adopted a new penal code for the country which replaced the existing, and often contradictory, maze of colonial laws and local bandos—ad hoc decrees—that had hitherto regulated criminal procedure. Although it is worth examining the provisions of the Código Penal as a fruitful indication of nineteenth-century legal development that witnessed an increasing centralization of power by the Argentine state, scholars have completely ignored one momentous omission in the code. As it quickly becomes apparent after perusing its pages, the new penal code had no provision regulating consensual sodomy, a practice that until then had been severely punished and was considered second in gravity only to heresy and treason. Indeed, the utter silence concerning consensual sodomy in the code effectively decriminalized it. Sodomy shifted from a crime punishable by death to a lawful activity between consenting adults in private. This sudden legal change raises a variety of questions that bear on the process of Argentine state formation and illuminate the connection between sexuality and nation building.

By the 1960s many biologists affiliated with North American institutions were intent upon establishing a new kind of field station within tropical America. Conditions at such new stations contrasted with those at tropical medicine research centers, commodity-oriented agricultural research stations like those run by the United Fruit Company, or established botanical centers such as the Atkins Garden and Research Laboratory in Cuba. Absent were the arboreta, the crop demonstration plots, full-scale expatriate residences and most home comforts. Absent too were the nearby plantations served by the economic botany practiced at the agricultural stations.

A partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX se inició en la Argentina un proceso de crecimiento y diversificación económica y social que hizo posible para los hombres del ‘80 proyectar un orden de liberación y progreso. En efecto, la tarea de modernización tuvo sus primeras manifestaciones en torno a los años cincuenta, pero fue en los tiempos de la Argentina Moderna cuando se pudo dar forma definitiva al modelo agroexportador y su inserción al mercado mundial. La inversión de capitales extranjeros, la eliminación del “desierto” para obtener tierras económicamente productivas y la formación de un mercado de trabajo, a partir del disciplinamiento de la mano de obra nativa y el arribo de gentes de otras latitudes, fueron los aportes indispensables para poder concretarlo. Quedaba pendiente para el Estado de reciente organización-gracias al marco legal que concretaba la Constitución-un complejo desafío, el de “construir la nación.” El crecimiento económico estuvo acompañado por la consolidación del régimen político oligárquico de los “notables” que entendieron el ejercicio de la política como una facultad exclusiva de los que disponían de la riqueza, la educación y el prestigio social.

Let us keep a place where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction." This was the response of a prominent North American naturalist opposed to a 1924 proposal to build facilities for women at the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory in Panama. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and as the United States built the Panama Canal, the American tropics became a major focus for North American politics and natural history, with government funding and logistical support from the military for scientific expeditions. As the North American western frontier closed, the New World tropics—or Neotropics—assumed the role that the West had played for an earlier generation of nineteenth-century explorers. In a post-Darwinian world, a field trip to the tropics with its rich biodiversity had become a rite of passage and a route to fame for young North American naturalists. And in the decades during and after the successful campaign for women's suffrage in the United States, tensions between men and women ran high, in the home, at the ballot box, and at the field station.

In the nineteen twenties a group of graduates from the Colegio de San Nicolás and the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán, drafted a program for the economic and social development of the countryside that, in the next decade, influenced federal policies and ideas about health care. This article examines the ideas and efforts of two Morelian physicians, Jesús Díaz Barriga (1891-1971) and Enrique Arreguín Vélez (1907-1989) who, during the 1920s and early 1930s, developed an incipient system of rural health in Michoacán. In 1935 they organized the First Congreso of Rural Hygiene, an event which they hoped would launch a state-managed system of rural health, and eventually the socialization of medicine in Mexico.

On December 13, 1845 the recently founded Santiago newspaper El Artesano Opositor (The Opposition Artisan) published a letter submitted by “twenty artisan friends of Cerda.” The letter related the tragic case of José Agustin Cerda, a young tailor, soldier in the civic militia, and member of an electoral association called the Sociedad de Artesanos de Caupolicán (Caupolicán Artisans Society), who had been arrested on November 12 by the city's military prosecutor on the charge that he was involved in an anti-government “conspiracy.” Claiming innocence, Cerda, according to his companions, denied his involvement in the alleged conspiracy “with noble arrogance.” As a result he was locked in iron shackles in a military prison, causing his legs to swell up and his illness-weakened lungs to struggle for air. A follow-up article in the newspaper announced that Cerda was still being held in that “unjust and inhumane” condition two months later, along with several other city residents who were linked to the electoral associations of the liberal opposition in Santiago. While the outraged authors of the letter to El Artesano Opositor singled out the Cerda case for its malicious effects on their friend, they clearly saw the incident as part of a larger problem: the routine and systematic mistreatment of all artisan militiamen by the conservative governing regime. Not content simply to demand the release of their colleague, the “friends of Cerda” demanded the complete reform of a political system that denigrated the honor, dignity, and patriotism of all the city's artisans. “Understand,” continued the letter in a provocative flourish, “that by attacking the innocent life of Cerda you attack the lives of all the artisans of the Republic.” “We should expect more,” it concluded solemnly, “from the men we elevate with our votes, defend with our blood, and maintain with our sweat and labor.”

Brazilian hygienist Dr. Alfredo Ferreira de Magalhães proclaimed his view of child welfare to an elite audience of medical, legal, political, military, and business leaders during the opening ceremonies at the 1922 First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Childhood held in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in Brazil, children had become a distinct focus of teachers, lawyers, military leaders, politicians, police, priests, judges, journalists, and novelists who struggled to incorporate liberal and positivistic ideas into public policies and institutions. Members of all classes of Brazilian society had cared for children and had lamented high rates of infant mortality well before the turn of the century. The 1920s movement, however, differed significantly from previous approaches to child welfare in Brazil. This was the first time that elites from such a wide variety of professions and positions of power insisted that the state assume responsibility for funding, implementing, and enforcing child welfare legislation and institutions.

Among all the zoological species, birds are the easiest to observe and study. Their diurnal habits, the songs, and visual features make them conspicuous. These characteristics have made birds one of the bestknown animal groups even though ornithologists do not make up a large community among zoologists. For Ernst Mayr, an ornithologist who has made significant contributions that go beyond his own field, the accessibility of birds to research has allowed ornithologists to make important discoveries in several new fields of biology, ranging “from new systematics and speciation research to endocrinology and behavioral biology.”

Between 1880 and 1916, elite women engaged in social welfare and transformed the politics of subordination in Argentina as they brokered a new accommodation between the Catholic Church and the Argentine state. Without ever claiming equality, women made it clear that the progress of the new nation—as male intellectuals and statesmen conceived it—could not be accomplished without their assistance. By stressing what they considered to be their essential contributions to social peace and national integration, elite women completely ignored both traditional and liberal ideas of the divisions between public and private responsibility without appearing to challenge gender norms.