Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia (review)

Abstract

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• Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia
• Mario Peters (bio)

Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] Edited by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia. Buenos Aires: Teseopress, 2022. Pp. 308.

Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica is an important contribution to the study of infrastructure in Latin America, a field that has been flourishing over the last decade or so (M. Lasso, Erased, 2019; S. W. Miller, The Street Is Ours, 2018; F. Schulze, Wissen im Fluss, 2022). The book includes fourteen chapters by historians and scholars from neighboring disciplines. It brings together essays on transportation infrastructure—including railways, roads, and airports—water infrastructure, and urban infrastructure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This broad approach to infrastructure and the focus on the past and the present in a single volume is indeed something new. In regional terms, the book focuses largely on South America, especially Argentina, while Mexico and Central America figure less prominently.

The book is of interest to historians of technology because the authors aim to explore how infrastructures create relations between society, technology, the state, culture, politics, and nature. Naturally, some chapters achieve this aim more fully than others. The authors all focus on the role of the state in the planning and administration of infrastructures, which gives the volume coherence. One strength of the book lies in the profound examination of tensions, conflicts, and failures. This is important because in Latin America, [End Page 693] infrastructures have long been promoted as harbingers of modernization and progress, while in fact the often-precarious state of infrastructure reflects pressing problems like poverty and extreme social inequality.

The chapters written by Anahí Ballent (ch. 8) and Melina Piglia (ch. 13) explicitly address the gap between the promise of infrastructure and reality on the ground. In her essay on the Río Tercero Dam (Argentina), Ballent analyzes how in 1910, early proposals described the dam as a key instrument in socio-territorial transformation, promising to make irrigation in an arid region possible, which in turn was supposed to stimulate settlement and agriculture. By 1935, it was clear that such plans had not worked out, and the dam was now promoted as important to produce hydropower. In her essay, Piglia shows that the modernization of airports became a priority in Argentinean politics in the 1960s, while conditions on the ground remained precarious. Runways, illumination, communication technologies, and meteorological services did not correspond to the needs of increasing air traffic, which led to fatal accidents and threatened the project of national integration.

In the introduction, the editors highlight the importance of applying a transnational approach to the study of infrastructure in Latin America. Again, some chapters in the book follow this call more than others. Dhan Zunino Singh's chapter on the history of subways in four Latin American cities stands out in this respect (ch. 4). Taking Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, and São Paulo as case studies, Zunino Singh shows that international influences in the making of urban subway systems found expression in the hiring of foreign experts, the purchase of technological equipment, and financing from abroad. At the same time, the history of Latin American subways is also a history of domestic technological innovation, adaption, and ingenuity, as local engineers used their knowledge of local soil conditions in the construction of tunnels and stations. Other chapters touch upon important international aspects without developing a truly transnational analysis. Valeria Gruschetsky, for instance, shows that highways in other corners of the world inspired the design of the Acesso Norte, a road that helped transform the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires into weekend getaways for wealthy city residents in the 1920s and 1930s (ch. 7).

Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica speaks to the concerns of historians of technology, especially the parts of the book that explore how infrastructures were expected to transform Latin American societies by solving problems like unchecked urban growth, regional inequality, poverty, and traffic congestion. Readers can get a good idea of the different approaches and perspectives...