Populist infrastructures: The aesthetics and semiotics of how obras do politics in Lima, Peru

Abstract

Obrismo, or the exchange of public works projects (obras) for popular goodwill, is a fixture of politics in Latin America. In Lima, Peru, various politicians use aesthetic-semiotic forms like bright colors and snappy hashtags to highlight their concrete contributions to municipal governance. This article examines the specific aesthetic and semiotic operations behind the political alchemy that aims to transform material infrastructures into popular legitimacy. Through digital anthropology of social media, I argue that the aesthetics of obras reveal a populist logic underpinning how infrastructures do politics in Lima. I also suggest that using aesthetic forms to articulate a political constituency like “the people” is a fundamentally unstable political practice. Through colors and hashtags, obras that promise popular legitimacy may instead be resignified, resulting in widespread disapproval. This article therefore uncovers the open-ended populist possibilities of obras to underscore the need to collectively rethink how populism and infrastructures operate in Latin American politics, online and offline.