The present work proposes to analyze the changes that occur in the role of the intellectual within the framework of the process of modernization of Social Sciences in Latin America from the controversy held by newcomers to Mexico in 1942 José Gaos and José Medina Echavarría, two Republican exiles who will be referents of the Latin American Social Science. From a perspective that links the history of ideas and discursive analysis we dive into the two letters that make up the controversy presenting the historical, social and intellectual context that our authors lived, their biographical situation marked by exile and the conditions of production in which the letters are inserted. This exercise allowed us to illuminate two models of modernization of the Social Sciences and of exercising the intellectual work that each of them puts in motion in the very process of enunciative construction of the controversy.