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This paper proposes to examine the legacy of scientific traditions in Mexican engineering by analyzing fluxes between Mexico and the international centers of engineering education. We show that, like other disciplines, training in engineering is somehow increasingly endogenous in Mexico: the engineer researchers trained abroad decline from generation to generation. However, the historical ties between Western countries (USA, France, England) and Mexico remain, as do the close relations between Mexican and foreign training institutions. These relationships have traits of "knowledge chains", maintained through successive exchanges of students from different generations of Mexican engineers. Thus, mobility for studies in this field are more "institutionalized" or historicized to European countries than to the United States. Of course differences prevail from one sub-discipline of engineering to another. With the statistical data analysis, extracted from the database of the National System of Researchers (SNI), supported by in-depth interviews, we cannot speak of simple reproduction patterns of training trajectories, but of an increasing complexity of training circuits. The comparison of these two data sets lead us to comprehend how individual trajectories are "embedded" in social and political logics of mobility and training or the international division of scientific work. The analysis between generations shows that individual trajectories are increasingly associated with social and political mobility and training logics, or even more so, to the scientific international division of labor. These trajectories challenge, in certain areas of specialization, the tradition of scientific heritage following the paths of previous generations.

This paper proposes to examine the legacy of scientific traditions in Mexican engineering by analyzing fluxes between Mexico and the international centers of engineering education. We show that, like other disciplines, training in engineering is somehow increasingly endogenous in Mexico: the engineer researchers trained abroad decline from generation to generation. However, the historical ties between Western countries (USA, France, England) and Mexico remain, as do the close relations between Mexican and foreign training institutions. These relationships have traits of "knowledge chains", maintained through successive exchanges of students from different generations of Mexican engineers. Thus, mobility for studies in this field are more "institutionalized" or historicized to European countries than to the United States. Of course differences prevail from one sub-discipline of engineering to another. With the statistical data analysis, extracted from the database of the National System of Researchers (SNI), supported by in-depth interviews, we cannot speak of simple reproduction patterns of training trajectories, but of an increasing complexity of training circuits. The comparison of these two data sets lead us to comprehend how individual trajectories are "embedded" in social and political logics of mobility and training or the international division of scientific work. The analysis between generations shows that individual trajectories are increasingly associated with social and political mobility and training logics, or even more so, to the scientific international division of labor. These trajectories challenge, in certain areas of specialization, the tradition of scientific heritage following the paths of previous generations.