“Where the Air Is Clear”: Geographic Imaginaries in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Santiago at the Dawn of the Motorized Age

Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Santiago, Chile, share similar geographies and risk from urban air pollution. They are located in basins, surrounded in whole or part by mountains that prevent toxic air from dispersing. They also experienced rapid car-based urban growth in the twentieth century, exacerbating smog challenges. Their arid or semi-arid climates mean that rain cannot wash the pollutants from the sky, and the abundant sunshine in each locale mixes with exhaust to form photochemical smog. These three cities are emblematic of one of the biggest public health threats of our time: air pollution, which causes seven million premature deaths around the world each year.

Drawing on cultural sources such as literature, art, photography, and the press, this paper asks how the local and regional geography of each site influenced perceptions, thinking, and discourse about the air from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. This period is bookended by population growth and urbanization (1890s-1900s) and the emergence of air pollution as a major public health crisis in the 1940s. While factors influencing each site vary, and the scale of each city is different, I argue that in each place, the natural setting and geography instilled a sense of local pride, which carried over into perceptions of the air in each site. Even as each city faced specific environmental challenges related to the air (the Santa Ana winds in California; dust storms in the Valley of Mexico; smoke and dust in Santiago), this period was characterized more by boosterism and pride in each city’s natural setting. Local and regional identity would go on to shape how air pollution was perceived.