In this article, we seek to re-evaluate the experiences of inmates at the La Castañeda General Mental Hospital (Mexico City) in the 1910s and the Pinel Sanatorium (São Paulo) in the 1930s. We draw on patients' correspondence with family members and staff, autobiographical records, as well as medical records and the written press. The analysis of the practices of political construction of freedom in territories of memory marked by violence in different periods of dictatorship in Latin America (Porfirio Díaz and Getúlio Vargas) pointed to resistance inside and outside those institutions. From different places and moments of articulation between rational medical knowledge and forms of control of social and political space, we sought to highlight contradictions, dreams and human desires that point to other historical possibilities.