The present article intends to describe some significant traces of what could be understood as modernity in Latin America. Such an interest involves the discussion on how the characterization of a particular historic experience of Latin American modernity requires an interpretation of the sense and meaning of the process of institutionalization of sociabilities and cultural disciplination and uniformity. An analysis of modernity in Latin America suggests a focus on those normative mechanisms which refer to the formalization and institutionalization of social experiences. So, one intends to observe that multiple modernizing practices seem to have shown an ambiguous institutionalizing logic: on the one hand, they are characterized by clear signs of fragility along with absence in certain fields of social life, at the same time in which they denote a strong homogenizing and disciplining presence, materialized into an institution, the State, which happens to lie above all the others.
modernity; sociabilities; institutionalization; Latin America.