The purpose of this article is to understand geography as a field of knowledge that is shaped by the different interests of a social group in a given moment. The desire for reaching that longed-for national progress and making it part of the curricula for the public school generated a complex web of processes that were not necessarily similar between them, nor convergent in their intent. This study undertakes the analysis of some scholar manuals of geography in the primary school as hints of a nodal problem: the configuration of a disciplinary field that can be understood from many different perspectives that meet in the need of shaping of the citizens required for making of Mexico a modern nation.