The article analyzes the work of the Argentinean Public Works Ministry's National Road Department (Dirección Nacional de Vialidad) during its earliest years, from 1932 to 1943, with a focus on formation of a technical bureaucracy composed of engineers and on the technical and political representations constructed around the field of engineering. The hypothesis is that creation of the Department represented both a culmination and a turning point in engineering's role as a scientific and professional field in the government public works structure, within the framework of the close ties between engineering and the state that had developed from the final decades of the nineteenth century.
history; engineering; public works; bureaucracy; Argentina