Nation as Laboratory

This chapter offers a new reading of popular science publications from the period of the República Restaurada (1868–76) in Mexico, namely José Joaquín Arriaga’s La Ciencia Recreativa (1871–74), a set of science primers for children and articles from Santiago Sierra’s popular-science magazine, El Mundo Científico (1877–78). Situating these publications within this period of political, cultural, and social stabilization, Blanco explores the uses of popular science writing as modes for perceiving the Mexican landscape in the throes of modernization. Employing Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s concept of the laboratory as a space of and for inscription, Blanco argues that these Mexican science writers in effect conceived the nation’s landscape as a kind of open laboratory in which natural phenomena were continuously recorded and measured. These inscriptions, in turn, were a way of integrating the Mexican nation into the practices of global science in the late nineteenth century.