Manuela Garín

Manuela (Mane) Garín Pinillos de Álvarez (1 January 1914 – 30 April 2019) was a Spanish-born and Cuban-raised mathematician who became one of the first women to study mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Their son, Raúl Álvarez Garín [es] (1914–2014), was also a prominent activist, one of the leaders in the Mexican Movement of 1968 and later a professor of economics at UNAM.

[3][4] She studied chemistry there, encouraged by her mother to aim for career as a pharmacist, as engineering work was not open to women at that time.

[2][3] There was at that time an arrangement that ENP chemistry students could enter the science program at UNAM, but Garín had to overcome bureaucratic opposition to her entry, which she did in 1937 with the intervention of geophysicist Ricardo Monges López,[2] entering alongside Enriqueta González Baz,[3] and becoming the first women in the UNAM Faculty of Sciences.

[3] In 2020, a science contest for primary and secondary school girls was named in honor of Garín by the government of Mexico City.