Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In this article we analyze in detail the conception and daily functioning of the Colonias Escolares de Vacaciones program in Colombia. This was a state project initiated in 1937 during the so-called Liberal Republic (1930-1946) and has generally been analyzed as an example of medicalization of school education. Here, we propose a different approach that aims to frame this project in a broader process of rural development and food intervention. We show that this project aimed at transforming a series of communal agricultural, food and health practices of young farmers in order to raise their standard of living, foster a cooperative spirit of production and boost the country's economy. At the same time, an analysis of their daily actions shows us the contingencies and the fractured nature of the functioning of the State and its relations with experts to structure social intervention strategies. With this, we want to contribute to the literature that has recently asked about the conformation of the "developmental States" in Latin America and their connections with and influences on the international development projects of the so-called Global North.

This article studies the creation of chemical municipal laboratories in Chile between 1892 and 1924 as part of an early health policy associated with the circulation of safe food. It explores the formation of the food problem as a scientific matter, which was managed at the state level under municipal direction. Along with placing this policy as part of an international change in food management, it studies from a local scale its national anchorage in the main cities of Chile. It proposes that these offices not only helped to identify the risks of food during early industrialization, but also collaborated in the formation of the national sanitary system through the development of a network of laboratories and the modeling of new scientific and bureaucratic elites.

Este dossier, elaborado como parte de las actividades promovidas por la Red de Estudios Históricos y Sociales de la Nutrición y la Alimentación en América Latina (https://www.redehsnal.com/), busca contribuir y reforzar esta agenda de investigación, centrada en el análisis de la imbricación entre Estado, saber experto y alimentación en América Latina. Pese a los antecedentes mencionados, cuando nos desplazamos desde los procesos que tuvieron lugar en el Norte Global hacia el contexto latinoamericano, nuestro nivel de conocimiento se reduce considerablemente.  De esa forma, cada uno de los trabajos presentados en este dossier constituye una pieza con la que avanzar hacia la elaboración de esa narrativa más amplia e integrada a propósito de los modos en que nuestras sociedades configuraron históricamente sus modos de concebir los problemas referidos a la alimentación de la población e intervenir sobre ellos, a lo largo de toda la cadena alimentaria.

At the end of the Mexican Revolution, the State that emerged was involved in recurrent legitimacy crises. One of the means by which certain phenomena were stabilized as relevant to obtain knowledge about the reality to be governed was the consolidation of statistical expertise. The Department of National Statistics served as a center from which data and information of diverse origin were articulated and subjected to statistical analysis. This resulted in "scientific objects" that made it possible to articulate social realities and produce new research niches, which allows us to connect historical narratives that had been produced independent from each other. This article traces some of the objects related to food that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s and consolidated phenomena such as population consumption statistics, which made possible the creation of other objects, such as the rural worker's "food basket".

The aim of this article is to analyze the encounters and disagreements between Brazilian and American experts in the technical cooperation agreements established by the two countries in projects focused on the brazilian workers’ food. The time frame is the 1940s, when the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA), created by Nelson Rockefeller, signed an agreement with the Serviço de Alimentação da Previdência Social (SAPS), to the creation of the Setor de Visitação Alimentar (SVA), which would be coordinated by US experts. Inspired by the US Home Demonstration model, the objective was to disseminate and coordinate Home Economics courses in Brazil. Based on this agreement, we argue that the social policies of the period were also related to international debates on the issue of food and health for workers in a context of widespread urbanization and profound economic transformations in Brazil.  

This article analyzes a set of initiatives taken by the Argentine State concerning food production, trade and consumption between 1930 and 1943. The paper considers three areas of state intervention (Ministerio de Agricultura, Oficinas Químicas and Instituto de la Nutrición) and shows the actions that were taken to improve and diversify food production for the domestic market, strengthen food control and ensure good nutrition for different sectors of the population. In each of these areas, the paper argues, the action of some experts identified with global epistemic communities, who promoted foreign developments locally, played a key role. The paper also analyzes transformations in the economy, the society and the State that favored the realization of these initiatives.

In this work the Museum of the Castle of Parque Luro (La Pampa) is analyzed. Historical representations referring to different communities and narratives about the past are observed. This study allows to advance in the understanding of the exhibitions of objects and images in an Argentine Province where, through the formation of a state public institution, traditional museum stories are reaffirmed in relation to the Western world and the original societies.

This article proposes the analysis of Telethon as a producing and reproducing event of a “sensitization process” in which patterns of interaction with and towards people with disabilities are preformed. It is also considered as the necropolitical arm of capitalism. Fostering sensitivity towards situations of vulnerability as a source of accumulation and generation of capital. To support these arguments, I present the main theses of the analysis of emotions in capitalism developed by Adam Smith. As well as the fetishization and totemization of money developed by Karl Marx. Finally, I present Mbembe's theoretical arguments regarding enrichment from tax exemption. This theoretical review serves as a framework to analyze and review videos of the Teletón México 2021. In which life stories of childhoods with disabilities and cancer are promoted. Among other aspects, the disqualification of the disability built from rehabilitation stands out. As well as a review of rehabilitation as fiscal immunization.