The Dissonant Clang of the Symbolic Streetcar

The electric streetcar was the pre-eminent urban symbol of modernity in Latin America when it burst upon the cityscape in the late 1890s and early 1900s.  It enabled masses of urban residents to navigate quickly transforming chaotic cities that were pushed by immigration and industrialization into new zones and disorienting configurations.  At once a dazzling spectacle of light and speed, order and progress, the streetcar also was the site of daily accidents and crimes, and the source of an inexhaustible array of passenger complaints and jokes.  This paper draws on poems, short stories, novels, police blotters, illustrations, travel accounts, the worker press, and politicians’ speeches to explore the changing meanings of the tranvía eléctrico from its shiny days of inauguration to its sad retirement at mid-century.  Paying particular attention to the history of Havana, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, it treats the customs and rules of the streetcar as well as its many uses, from moving billboard and gateway to parks and amusements to funeral hearse and target of angry workers during violent strikes.  Often foreign-owned, the streetcar systems came to be connected in the public mind with imperialism, loss of dignity and dehumanization.  The paper also analyzes the intersection of the streetcar with more abstract notions of nostalgia and collective memory in these cities, as the streetcar becomes a ghostlike presence decades after its disappearance.  To accomplish this interdisciplinary investigation, classical and contemporary urban theory from James Donald, John Urry, M. Christine Boyer, Siegfried Kracauer and others will be employed.  The intention is to trace the development of multiple meanings attached to the streetcar over its short history on different planes of understanding, from the concrete and material to the symbolic in order to better ascertain its role in the construction of modernity.