Mexican Modernity, Science Magazines, and Scientific Personality: Santiago Sierra’s El Mundo Científico (1877–78)

This article is a microhistory that explores a brief, yet significant moment in the early days of Díaz’s rule, in which the pursuit of a modern position is manifested on the pages of a magazine that boasted its being the first ever popular science publication in the country: Santiago Sierra’s El Mundo Científico (1877–78). This publication offers an insight into the problems and particularities of the “popular” in Mexico during this period, while illustrating the ways in which the literary and the scientific came together in a time of future-thinking in the republic. As a textual object that condenses the news of scientific, technological, and theoretical breakthroughs from across the world, El Mundo Científico represents the cumulative process that is modernized wonder— that is, it is organized according to the logic of ongoing and diverse discovery. As a publishing project that resembles science publications from other global localities, the magazine reveals a conversation, as well as a self-reflection, about the cadences of scientific modernity developing in Europe and the Americas. Setting this account against a wider understanding of late nineteenth-century intellectual and publishing history will in turn allow for a more distinctive perception of the global experience of modernity and modernization