The America we call Latin has lived under an obsession with the future and facing a hard time to consolidate its national communities since the second half of the 19th century. Distinct modernizing thoughts, including scientism, faced nationalist ones concerned about identity, with the past being represented by Indian and Iberian cultures. It is within this historical-cultural framework that relations of identity and differentiation between Brazil and the other countries in Latin America are approached. The article will focus on 1950s and 1960s sociology as a development of the CEPAL matrix, and the constitution of two variants of sociological making: the Mertonian and the Mannheimian Conceptions. Finally, CLAPCS and the América Latina Magazine are presented, relating to FLACSO as a space for action and circulation of an elite of Mertonian sociologists.
Latin America; modernization; Mertonian sociology in Latin America; CLAPCS; América Latina magazine