The History of Science in Mexico was formally established in 1964 with the creation of the Mexican Society for the History of Science and Technology (MSHST). Initially, the field struggled due to a need for qualified professionals. It gained recognition under the leadership of Juan José Saldaña González, who served as the president of the MSHST and played a crucial role in professionalizing the discipline at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Saldaña made history as the first Mexican to earn a PhD in Philosophy and History of Science in Paris (France). He was also the inaugural president of the Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology (LASHST) and the first Latin American to serve as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology / Division of History of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST). Additionally, he was the first person to organize an international congress of the IUHPST in a Latin American country, which took place in Mexico City in 2001. Saldaña was the founding editor of the journals Quipu and Cuadernos de Quipu. Thanks to his efforts and his collaborators, the institutionalization of the History of Science was solidified in Mexico and throughout Latin America, enhancing the visibility of Latin American History of Science on the international stage.

By 1920 Argentina had consolidated itself in its present form for more than a generation. A nation-state with universal male suffrage, it enjoyed material prosperity and undertook practical and intellectual projects inspired by Western Europe. Until the middle 1920s, however, there was little popular enthusiasm for the European innovations of Cubism and Relativity. I examine this lack of interest by focusing on the indifferently received lessons in Non-Euclidean geometry of two professors, the geometer-architect Claro C. Dassen in Buenos Aires and the artist-geometer Emilio Coutaret in La Plata. Picasso and Einstein were disciplinary paragons in easel painting and theoretical physics. Unlike them, Dassen and Coutaret were counterdisciplinary intellectuals who ranged across art and architecture, mathematics and engineering, literature, philosophy, and public affairs. Dassen’s and Coutaret’s wide embrace of technology (including the visual arts) and science discouraged students from acquiring a familiarity with the Non-Euclidean geometry that figured at the core of Picasso’s and Einstein’s revolutionary work. This counter-disciplinary pattern of intellectual life was prominent in other settings around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It helps explain distinct manifestations of Modernity in Latin America and Asia.

The mobilization of a group of scientists boosted the organization of the field of Social History of Science in Brazil. The institutionalization process began in the late 1970s in São Paulo, where a group of scientists created a postgraduate course in the social history of sciences. Soon this group began working with Latin American historians of science. In 1982, at the congress of the International Union for the History of Sciences in Bucharest, Brazilian and Latin American historians planned the creation of the Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology. They created an international network of historians of sciences, considering that sciences had an important role for the development of countries that emerged from the colonial political process. They recognized the universality of sciences and also realized the importance of local scientific practices. In the second half of the 20th Century, the History of Sciences was institutionalized with the first postgraduate course in Social History of Sciences, the first research institutions in history of sciences and preservation of scientific heritage and the Brazilian Society of History of Sciences (1983). The structuring the field of history of sciences meant scientific autonomy. Studies in the social history of sciences produced an epistemological break in the way of making history and interpreting the country's scientific past. The image of the scientific backwardness was broken and science entered the universal geographic map. The decolonization of sciences was underway, in Brazil and Latin America.