El surgimiento de la ingeniería en Bolivia

In 1918 Roman Kozlowski, a Polish geologist, was looking for mining professors from Paris, where he had once worked. The war prevented engineers from leaving France, so he started recruiting locally. He hired an engineer from the prestigious mining schools of Freiberg and Clausthal, both in Saxony. As he could not find a competent professor in electrical engineering, he started a new search, this time through consulates in Europe. Kozlowski was the director of a small elite institution serving 39 scholarship students: the Escuela Nacional de Ingeniería in Oruro, Bolivia. This volume, centered around the history of engineering education in the first half of the twentieth century in Bolivia, answers why a medium-size city could become such an international hotspot for technical education.The book is in part a translation of Manuel E. Contreras's 1990 doctoral dissertation. The author published portions of the research in 1994 and 1995 before turning to broader educational topics. This volume's structure tries to revisit some of the arguments made in the original dissertation in light of the current state of the art while keeping the dissertation's original structure. The introduction, therefore, primarily reviews the relatively recent scholarship on engineering history in Latin America, framing the research from the 1980s into the revival of technocracy studies of the last years. Chapter 1 gives a general framework of Bolivia's educational and economic system; the chapter thus works as a second introduction. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the history of the engineering school at Oruro. Chapters 4 and 5 narrate the history of technical education in Potosí, La Paz, and abroad. Chapter 6 gives more context on the professional status of engineering in Bolivia during the period and the employment of engineers in the tin industry, both private and nationalized. Chapters 7 and 8 detail the relationship between engineering and the state as an employer, funder of educational programs, and regulator of professions. A final chapter offers general conclusions for the volume as a whole.Narratives driven by analytical aggregation have fallen out of fashion, but the effort to make final calculations of the supply and demand of engineers in Bolivia is a notable contribution. Moreover, the volume's organization allows the reader to identify the transition from an engineering education focused on the global mineral market to one heavily marked by the state's growth in civil infrastructure. Other Latin American nations certainly had technical schools before Bolivia, but the Oruro school appears to have been one of the most globalized engineering schools in the continent. Contreras shows that the elite school had a considerable amount of resources to provide scholarships for students and to employ foreign experts; it continued to prefer European professors until the 1940s. This predilection was connected with earlier efforts by the Bolivian state to train nationals in Europe and the United States and also attracted nationals from neighboring nations to study at the Bolivian mining schools. By the end of the period studied by Contreras, though, and in spite of much opposition from the school's authorities, the students did not enroll in mining engineering and studied instead civil engineering. Moreover, engineering institutions such as the Oruro school struggled in the middle decades of the century to try to maintain autonomy on their own terms, as they avoided becoming linked to specific political projects and lamented their absorption into autonomous universities.While aggregation effectively provides a general overview of engineering in Bolivia, the book could benefit from a more integrated narrative and a better connection between the arguments and the discussion of the initial chapters. Furthermore, a nonnegligible portion of the book uses the vocabulary of “advancement” and “progress” in discussing the country's engineering education. This vocabulary was contested during the era. Moreover, as the book shows, the construction of an engineering profession in those years implied a series of global exchanges between the North Atlantic and the global South, and professionalization and technical expertise did not go hand-in-hand with the ownership and control of technology.With its limits, Contreras's book is one of the most comprehensive evaluations of engineering education nationally in Latin America. The book successfully connects different waves of commodity-based globalization with the development of technocracy and conflicts over authority. Finally, the book's regional-global approach could inspire similar exercises in the rest of the continent. The volume, in short, is an excellent contribution to the history of engineering in Bolivia and the general historiography of engineering in Latin America

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