ORFor some time he has been approaching Mexican sciences through the prism of relations with Europe, emphasizing the colonization of knowledge brought about by the Spanish conquests from the Renaissance onwards. But also the progressive Americanization of these sciences as Creole scholars (of European origin but born in the empire) and indigenous defend a way of practicing naturalist inventories, astronomical observations or pharmacopoeias that are their own. After independence, New World scholars felt the need to further emphasize their difference from Europe.
The creolization of the sciences has become the most discussed topic of Iberian or Latin American historiography. As Gabriela Goldin Marcovich, postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and author of a thesis on this topic in 2020 recalls, this historiographical theme was linked to a political agenda that saw scientific activities as the first manifestation of Mexican patriotism . The expression of a “Creole pride” will thus be regularly mobilized throughout the 19th century.And century earlier, then around the nationalist phase of the early 20thAnd century, and finally in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the promotion of North-South indigenism and anti-Americanism.
Conflicts between collectors, multinationals and the state
Thus approaching the second half of the twentiethAnd century, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, shows how Mexico is an interesting case for understanding the tensions surrounding the globalization of developmental sciences. In Jungle Laboratories: Mexican farmers, national projects and the making of the pill (Duke University Press, 2009), had already studied the use by the pharmaceutical industry, starting in the 1940s, of barbasco, a wild yam native to Mexico, in the production of the first effective oral contraceptives. He had highlighted the conflicts between traditional harvesters, multinationals and the Mexican state.
In a recent article published in the magazine American Isis (2022), is interested in a case from the early 1970s in northern Mexico between farmers and researchers at an agronomic station on unauthorized seeds. Farmers were complaining about an experimental new variety of wheat being unwittingly introduced into their fields. This scandal offers, according to Gabriela Soto Laveaga, “a curious counter-narrative with well-crafted tales of acceptance or rejection of improved strains”. In fact, this story reveals how farmers faced the problem of new hybrid seeds by trying to find new legal protections and struggling to clarify the boundary between private ownership of companies and public ownership of the state. Gabriela Soto Laveaga points to the circulation of this high-yield seed research from South America to South Asia right now.
You still have 21.24% of this article to read. The following is for subscribers only.
