Technocratic Visions

Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico

J. Justin Castro, James A. Garza, J. Justin Castro, James A. Garza

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780822989202
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of engineers, especially civil engineers, but also mining engineers, military engineers, architects, and other infrastructural and mechanical technicians. During the mid-nineteenth century, a period of immense upheaval and change domestically and globally, troubled governments attempted to expand and modernize Mexico's engineering programs while resisting foreign invasion and adapting new Western technologies to existing precolonial and colonial foundations. The Mexican Revolution in 1910 greatly expanded technocratic practices as state agents attempted to control popular unrest and unify disparate communities via science, education, and infrastructure. Within this backdrop of political unrest, Technocratic Visions describes engineering sites as places both praised and protested, where personal, local, national, and global interests combined into new forms of societal creation; and as places that became centers of contests over representation, health, identity, and power. With an eye on contextualizing current problems stemming from Mexico's historical development, this volume reveals how these transformations were uniquely Mexican and thoroughly global.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Engineering and Technocratic Visions in Mexico
• Chapter 1. Poetry in Stone and Iron: The Architect Emilio Dondé Preciat and the Construction of Modern Mexico City
• Chapter 2. Revelations from Rediscovered Artifacts of the National School of Engineers’ Construction Materials Collection
• Chapter 3. Engineering the Porfirian Landscape: Technology and Social Change in the Basin of Mexico, 1890–1911
• Chapter 4. The Preoccupation with Safety: Mining Engineers, Education, and Practice in Modern Mexico
• Chapter 5. Revolutionary Technoscience: Science, Industry, Education, and the Mexican State, 1910–1946
• Chapter 6. Technocratic Diplomacy: Constitutionalist Engineers as Diplomats to the United States
• Chapter 7. Punitive Engineering and Military Modernization: Reform, Revolution, and Reconstruction in Mexico and the United States, 1916–1924
• Chapter 8. Flying Machines as a Measure of Mexico: National Reconstruction, the Cultural Revolution, and the Maturation of Mexico’s National Aviation Program, 1921–1945
• Chapter 9. A Social History of Urban Expertise: Between Technobureaucratic Rule and the Right to the City in Twentieth-Century Mexico
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index