"...I will talk a little about my trajectory. The privileges refer to those I had in my life as a student, and as a trained professional, including almost 40 years of work at this Institution. I will follow my notes, because I don't trust – almost nothing – in my memory.

These privileges began when I entered the Department of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in 1961. I was in the fifth class; the department had been created in 1957 and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. In the 1960s, the Department of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, created by Gino Germani with the support of José Luis Romero, went through its golden age; These were the early years, but it was a golden age. It was, together with the departments of the University of São Paulo (USP) and UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the Colégio de México, one of the most important centers of Latin American Sociology at the time.

Among the most prominent teachers I had, I can mention Gino Germani himself, who was the pioneer of Sociology in Argentina; the historian José Luis Romero, who I just mentioned, a great medievalist, and who held the chair of General Social History; Jorge Graciarena, who worked in Development Sociology and Political Sociology; Túlio Halperin Donghi, who many of you know. I took three subjects on Argentine Social History with him. Gregório Klimowsky, an epistemologist, later collaborated with Ernesto Sábato on the report Nunca Mais, about the disappeared during the last dictatorship in Argentina, and is now professor emeritus at UBA. Another great teacher I had was Horacio Giberti, an agricultural engineer who taught a fantastic subject, in which I learned a lot, which was Economic Geography of Argentina. Giberti, today, is also professor emeritus at UBA. In addition to Torcuato Di Tella and other very good masters, who I will not mention here so as not to abuse them.

The dream ended at the hands of a general of few lights, named Juan Carlos Ongania, who carried out a coup in June 1966, dismantled the university and, in particular, the area of Social Sciences, throughout the country, but, mainly, in University of Buenos Aires.

I was lucky, or, again, privileged, to be recruited by Gláucio Soares, then director of Flacso (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales), to do postgraduate studies in Santiago de Chile, in 1966 and 1967. At Flacso, I was subjected to another wave of great masters. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto had finished, or were finishing, the book Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina, one of the main books in sociological literature of the 1960s and 1970s.

With Fernando Henrique I took a course on Capital, which could, perhaps, have been named after a book by a well-known Chilean Althusserian Marxist, Marta Harnecker, called Para Leer El Capital. Also teaching at that time, at Flacso, were Alain Touraine, Johan Galtung and Manuel Castells, a prodigy in Sociology, who you all know. He was born in the same year as me, 1942, he had been a disciple of Touraine and was already a professor at the University of Paris. Around this time, Castells, in his early twenties, visited us in Flacso; He then worked with Urban Social Movements and Urban Sociology, before moving on to the topic of network society, the information society, which he concluded with the famous trilogy.

Given the situation in Argentina, in 1967 I ended up at Iuperj on the recommendation of two Brazilian colleagues and friends, Vilmar Faria and Carlos Estevam Martins, and I stayed here until December 2005, when I decided to retire..."