The Initial Stage of the Mexican Journal of Political and Social Sciences from a Sixty Years Perspctive: Commemorative Practices, Legacies, Forgetfulness and New Past / Present

Abstract

This article offers a contemporary reading of the foundational period of the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (Mexican Journal of Political and Social Sciences)(1955-1968), as part of the process of writing the history of social sciences in Mexico. The point of departure is the fulfillment of a commemorative cycle that marks 60 years of existence of the journal and its significance for our disciplinary communities. The place of the Revista is asserted in the framework of preceding journals of the beginning of the twentieth century and the original enunciation context is examined, as well as the communities and purposes that gave birth to it by the mid-fifties. Simultaneously, its thematic transformations and most meaningful contributions toward the shaping of the knowledge patrimony of political and social sciences in Mexico and in Latin America, are assessed, as well as of the institutional consolidation of these disciplines in the context of the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (School of Political and Social Sciences of the UNAM). The text ends with a general outline of its later stages and of the cognitive possibilities, represented by the journal’s present professionalization and specialization phase, and its potential increase in the transmission and reception of its contents, in the horizon of the third millennium.