AHA Session 20
Conference on Latin American History 4
Conference on Latin American History 4
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Continental Ballroom 1 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Zephyr L. Frank, Stanford University
Papers:
Comment:
Zephyr L. Frank, Stanford University
Session Abstract
During the twentieth century, rural landscapes in the Americas were re-envisioned and employed to build the modern state in myriad ways. This panel analyzes four examples in which Latin American engineers, surveyors, conservationists, and scientists, often in conjunction with foreign experts, wielded technology to transform their natural and imagined environments. In Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, technocratic elites deployed technologies and discourses of modernity that sought to imbue often contested physical spaces with a new nationalist character. As these people and projects performed the work of state-building, they ultimately reshaped perceptions of nature and nation in ways both intended and unintended, with far-reaching consequences for society and the state. In “Defining the Planalto Central: Surveying the Site for a New National Capital in Brazil, 1946–1956,” Frederico Freitas analyzes the surveys carried out by the Brazilian state on the site chosen for the building of Brasília, Brazil’s new capital city, after 1956. He shows how these surveys introduced the Brazilian hinterland to a crop of policymakers with no knowledge of the environment in that part of the country, framing it as a landscape rich in natural resources that would support the population of Brazil’s soon-to-be-built modernist capital. In “Progress or Environmental Politics? Mexico’s Indigenous People, Technocrats, and River Basin Projects, 1947-1978,” James Mestaz delves into how key Mexican state modernization initiatives improved the agricultural capacity of formerly stagnant regions, yet transformed the relationship between increasingly defiant Indigenous groups and their ecosystems. In “Erasing Rurality: Conservation and Modernity in Patagonia (Argentina),” Ángeles Picone examines how erasure and conservation, two seemingly contrasting practices of spatial transformation, served the modernizing of 1930s Argentina. And, in “Revolutionizing Rural Mobility: Technology, Engineers, and Modernity in Mexico, 1925-1940,” Mateo Carrillo explores how engineers deployed road and water technologies as well as nationalist ideologies to build Mexico’s postrevolutionary state. In their drive to modernize rural landscapes and peoples, these ‘técnicos’ politicized and mobilized the rural built environment, establishing the initial physical (and ideological) foundations for mass migration to the United States after 1940.
While this panel is focused on twentieth-century Latin America, the ideas and methods debated by the participants appeal to a diverse group of scholars. The four panelists draw from different disciplines, including spatial and environmental history, agricultural and tourism history, technology and engineering, rural and urban development, as well as borderlands, indigenous, and migration studies.
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