The early history of the city of San Carlos de Bariloche (Argentina) in the northern Patagonian Andes serves as a window into national endeavors to settle a frontier space. Initial colonial attempts to establish a colony on the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi (Argentina) can be traced to Jesuit missionary efforts from the Island of Chiloé (Chile). After their independences, Chile and Argentina sought to claim Patagonia as their own. Embedded in this nationalizing mission was the negotiation of the international borderline as well as the violent removal of Mapuche and Tehuelche from territories in the south. In Argentina, the government launched a genocidal campaign (1879–1884) in northern Patagonia. Behind the soldiers followed explorers gathering data about the Andes, in the hopes that nature would reveal the boundary.
As border negotiations unfolded in the 1890s, non-Indigenous settlers came to Nahuel Huapi. One of them, Chilean Carlos Wiederhold, established a store in 1895 on the southeastern shore of the lake and sold imported goods from Chile and exported cattle on the hoof across a trans-Andean pass. Business grew, as did the village around it. In 1902, a presidential decree officially founded the colony of Nahuel Huapi and the town of San Carlos, pinpointing the reach of the national government on the frontier. While authorities imagined the cordillera as a space devoid of social tension (presumably because land was available), violence in the form of feuds and crime sprinkled frontier life. Local elites soon depicted Nahuel Huapi as a dangerous space and blamed Chileans and Indigenous people for such violence. In the 1930s, the creation of a national park in Nahuel Huapi sought to resolve this by portraying Bariloche as a tourist site by transforming the Bariloche space through a specific aesthetic that would evoke an idyllic Argentine landscape.
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Settling Bariloche: Explorations, Violence, and Tourism in the Argentine Frontier
María de los Ángeles Picone
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The Pan American Highway
Eric Rutkow
The Pan American Highway, a successor project to the unfinished Pan American Railway, originated as an interwar initiative among member nations in the Pan American Union and is generally considered to comprise the longest road in the world. The highway network’s longitudinal through-route—complete save for the sixty-mile “Darien Gap” between Panama and Colombia—crosses eleven countries and, with the inclusion of its unofficial northernmost leg, covers more than 12,500 miles in total, from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay to South America’s Tierra del Fuego. Additional spur roads in the pan-American network radiate to the capitals of other South American nations, adding an additional four thousand miles to the system. While the nearly finished Pan American Highway never achieved the hoped-for goal of linking the Americas (and still faces constant maintenance challenges), it stands as a concrete symbol of pan-Americanism and a “trunk line” for the Western Hemisphere, an overland corridor for trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and migration throughout the region.
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Travel and Transport in Mexico
J. Brian Freeman and Guillermo Guajardo Soto
In his 1950 study, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread, historian Frank Tannenbaum remarked that “physical geography could not have been better designed to isolate Mexico from the world and Mexicans from one another.” He recognized, like others before him, that the difficulty of travel by foot, water, or wheel across the country’s troublesome landscape was an unavoidable element of its history. Its distinctive topography of endless mountains but few navigable rivers had functioned, in some sense, as a historical actor in the larger story of Mexico. In the mid-19th century, Lucas Alamán had recognized as much when he lamented that nature had denied the country “all means of interior communication,” while three centuries before that, conquistador Hernán Cortés reportedly apprised Emperor Charles V of the geography of his new dominion by presenting him with a crumpled piece of paper. Over the last half-millennium, however, technological innovation, use, and adaptation radically altered how humans moved in and through the Mexican landscape. New modes of movement—from railway travel to human flight—were incorporated into a mosaic of older practices of mobility. Along the way, these material transformations were entangled with changing economic, political, and cultural ideas that left their own imprint on the history of travel and transportation.
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Civilian Aviation in Mexico
Peter Soland
The Mexican government’s civil aviation program implemented elite development strategies during a period of national reconstruction. In the decades following the revolution, political leaders and industrialists attempted to strike a balance between preserving a unique national identity and asserting their country’s place in global affairs as a competitive, modern nation. Nation builders were primarily concerned with improving the nation’s communication and transportation capabilities, although they quickly learned to exploit the spectacle of aviation through the mass media and in public ceremonies, as well. The symbolic figure of the pilot proved an adept vessel for disseminating the values championed by the country’s ruling party. Aviators validated the technological determinism underpinning the government’s development philosophy, while projecting an image of strength abroad.
This article traces the trajectory of aviation development from 1920s through the 1950s. In the process it demonstrates how the social and cultural significance of technology in Mexico changed over time. The establishment of the Department of Civil Aeronautics under the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP), in 1928, reflected the ambitions of reform-minded officials who were intent on modernizing the country. Although the onset of the Great Depression slowed aviation development for about a decade, policymakers recommitted to the technology during World War II. President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–1946) used it to achieve two of his primary goals: securing the country from the threat of international fascism and shifting the nation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Wartime aid alleviated material obstacles hamstringing national aviation development, and the rapid growth of tourism to the country in 1940s and 1950s benefited commercial airlines. Presidents Miguel Aléman (1946–1952) and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958) touted the success of the aviation industry as a consequence of their development policies. The near financial collapse of the country’s largest airline, Compañía Mexicana de Aviación (CMA), at the end of the decade nevertheless hinted that the country’s sustained economic growth was less miraculous than officials and foreign observers liked to believe.
