De la selva brasileña a la capital de las ciencias sociales: proyectos modernizadores de la fundación ford en américa latina, 1927-1965

The aim of the article is to reflect upon the role played by the Ford Foundation, a giant of American philanthropy in Latin America. The time frame spreads itself over four decades: since the first contact established by Henry Ford in Brazil in 1927, before the very birth of the Foundation, until the opening of the first official branch in Latin America at the beginning of the 60s. The analysis of the archive sources allows us to focus on two main issues, which are worth special attention. On the one hand, the type of «modernizing» interest of the Foundation with respect to the American subcontinent, which did not consist of one simple transfer of American know-how orientated towards «development», but which had a more global objective of the exportation of the American way of life in a cultural, social and political sense. On the other hand, it highlights the broad context of the Cold War, in the sense of the multiple intersections that were showed by this modernizing interest with strictly political dynamics.