Interpretations from Cuyo about geography in Brazil

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to investigate, from the reading of the Boletín de Estudios Geográficos, published by the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Mendoza), how Brazil and the geography produced in Brazil stimulated interest among Argentinian geographers in the 1950s and 1960s. The University of Cuyo was the epicenter of foreign academic relations in Argentina, a place that will be occupied by the University of Buenos Aires in the 1970s. In the Boletín numbers we identified comments, notes and articles that show the movement of Brazilian and Argentinian geographers between Mendoza and institutions/places in Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística and Associação dos Geógrafos Brasileiros. Argentinian geographers wanted an increase of their lines of research from the perspective of insertion in planning as an instrument to overcome the underdevelopment of Latin American economies. The texts of Boletín also demonstrate strong influence of the French geography. This contact with Brazilian and French productions marks theoretical paths of geography in Argentina, permeated by rubrics such as applied geography, tropical geography, etc., which point achievements and impasses in local geographical reflections, corroborating a rich transnational geographic exchange, often full of theoretical and political-ideological contradictions.