The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by the integration of physical, digital, and biological systems and the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and 3D printing (Schwabb, 2015), is transforming notions of humanity and demanding an informed consideration of the social and environmental impact of industrial transformations. While the long-term effects of these changes may still be hard to predict, there is much to be learned from the cultural archives of previous Industrial Revolutions, which can help us direct our attention as we assess the changes, opportunities, and risks of today’s world. The unique features of industrial development in the Hispanic world, including its regional unevenness, dependence on primary exports, reliance on foreign investment and challenges to labor rights (Miller and Gray, 2019), make its examination particularly useful to investigate the human and environmental footprint of large-scale technological transformations. Cultural representations of industrial processes yield novel diagnoses of society, thus suggesting ideas on race, postcoloniality, and environmental crisis.
Recent studies on capitalism and the Atlantic world have explored the formation of an efficient workforce in adapting indentured labor to the exigencies of industry (Barragan 2021, Lightfoot, 2015); and environmental studies have retraced the twentieth-century implementation of industrial models and its repercussion on the delicate ecosystems that constitute the social fabric in post-colonial Latin America (Anderson and Bora, 2021). However, more scholarship is needed to bridge our understanding of the history these technological, economic, and social transformations and that of their contemporary footprint, both material and ideological. In other words, how has the history of industrialization in Hispanic countries structured the present in which new industrial transformations take place? And how can we mobilize these historical insights to better comprehend and affect change in our present moment? Our panel will address these questions by exploring extended and novel archives of cultural practices within the context of Hispanic industrial development.
To promote discussion, we propose a panel with three 15-minute presentations. Panelists will establish a conversation around the social, economic, and environmental dislocations of industry in the nineteenth and twentieth century across Latin America. Anayvelyse Allen-Mossman will open the discussion by relocating Argentina’s marginal planter economy within the visual narratives of sugar production. Drawing from Los ingenios de Cuba (1857) and Memoria histórica y descriptiva de la provincia de Tucumán (1882), her analysis will contrast representations of the plantation in Cuba and Argentina to show how industrial automation problematized national constructions based on racial categories and indentured labor. Whereas the visual rhetoric of sugar in colonial Cuba insistently advertises technology in relation to its known dependence on enslaved laborers, Argentina’s visual rhetoric reveals anxiety about the way in which representations of the sugar industry could undermine the myth of a white nation.
Questions ensuing from this presentation will provide a theoretical backdrop to discuss extractivism in relation to categories of race and social difference. In her analysis, Jaime Hanneken identifies the roto as the Chilean figure of the working-class hero. Traditionally describing poor itinerant laborers, the roto was reimagined in treatises such as Nicolás Palacios’s Raza chilena (1904) as a mestizo. The roto is praised by Palacios as the true face of the Chilean nation, a country characterized by its humble, loyal, and above all “native” people. This gesture, as Hanneken will explain, works ideologically to support schemes of neo-imperial dependency on mining during the twentieth century. By comparing this rhetoric to that present in representations of two simultaneous national crises in 2010—the rescue of the 33 miners trapped in a San José mine and the concurrent hunger strike of 32 mapuche activists in various southern prisons—the presentation will offer evidence of a new “unearthing” of the roto under Chile’s recent neoliberal regimes.
To conclude, in her presentation Tess Renker will analyze José María Arguedas’s posthumous novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971), to show how it registers the particular challenges faced by Andean migrants in Chimbote, Peru. Famous for its massive fishpaste factories, the coastal town presented racialized, working-class migrants with a series of false promises, first among them socioeconomic mobility. Yet beyond the misery imposed by inhumane living and working conditions, Chimbote’s rapid industrialization and corporatization paved the way for ecological disaster, anticipating future climate crises. The presentation will focus on the conjugation of racism, financial imperialism, and environmental destruction present in Arguedas’s diagnosis to build a literary-theoretical apparatus from which to evaluate contemporary Peru’s struggles with extractive mining, logging, and petroleum within the framework of neoliberal industrialization.