Connecting the Americas explores the history of Pan-American mobility infrastructure from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Juxtaposing the history of Pan-Americanism with Mobility Studies and the History of Knowledge, the project examines the significance of mobility for United States-Latin American relations and the cooperation, conflicts, and exchange of knowledge between international experts working on the Inter-American Railway and the Pan-American Highway.
Historians of inter-American relations have described Pan-American infrastructures as tools of US imperialism. Overall, they have paid little attention to these infrastructures and mobility. Connecting the Americas aims at a fuller, more nuanced, and rounder understanding of inter-American mobility, exploring the interactions between US-Americans and Latin Americans and recovering the intersection of local, regional, national, and international ambitions.
Proponents of better transportation focused on mobility in a broad sense. Goods, people, information, and ideas were supposed to become more mobile and circulate across the Americas. While many considered trade and the faster transportation of goods to be of utmost importance, early writings on the railway also included visions for intercontinental travel and tourism. With the rise of car culture in the 1920s, the Pan-American Highway came to play an important role in the development of early automobile tourism within and across national borders.
The planning of inter-American transportation infrastructure included various forms of knowledge production, which, in turn, involved varying degrees of United States-Latin American cooperation. The importance of knowledge, expertise, and information gathering increased over the years. While the earliest publications on the railroad were mostly written by North Americans in North America who hardly identified their sources of information about Latin America, inter-American transportation soon became a subject of transnational scientific study. Planners realized that they needed multiple sets of knowledge and the questions of how, where, and when to acquire information often caused conflicts, not only between US-Americans and Latin Americans but also between and within professional groups.
The poster will have three sections titled ‘Pan-Americanism,’ ‘Mobility,’ and ‘Knowledge.’ Each section will present a research question and the main conclusions in two separate text boxes. The poster will feature a geographical map of the projected Inter-American Railway from the 1890s, illustrating how planners envisioned a route through largely unknown territory. It will also include a midcentury pictorial map of North and South America and the Pan-American Highway, illustrating material and cultural products that were considered typical of each region. Attendees will view contemporary newspaper reports, travel advertisements, and photographs of the Pan-American Highway Congresses and highway construction illustrating the cooperation among experts at conference tables and in the field.