Work-in-Progress talk by Javier Velasco, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, University of Oregon

“Cars, Trains, and Trolleys: Infrastructures of the Urban Space in the Andes (1900-1952)”
Javier Velasco, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow
In my dissertation on the discursive construction of the Andean urban space, I explore how literary writing and other cultural texts represented, decoded and re-imagined the physical infrastructure of the city of La Paz during the years of formation and consolidation of the hegemonic project of the “criollo” elites between 1900 and 1952. From the category of “infrastructure,” referred to physical networks that constitute the underlying framework of a social system, I analyze the way in which the city’s infrastructures (railways, trains, trolleys, telegraph wires, roads and more) were as important in the physical actuality of the city as they were in shaping the economic, cultural and aesthetic modernity at the base of the literary production of the criollo elites. I refer to this process as the infrastructural construction of the “seignorial” space.