Driving Growth: Roadways and Automobiles in Mid-20th-Century Latin America

AHA Session 174
Conference on Latin American History 38
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
María de los Ángeles Picone, Boston College
Papers:
Public–Private Collaboration and the Rise of Automobile Urbanism in Mexico City, 1930s–40s
Andrei Guadarrama, Boston College
Representative Roads: The Political Significance of Constructing Peru’s Central Highway and Pan-American Highway, 1930–45
Mark Rice, Baruch College, City University of New York
Prosperity, Performance, and Leisure: Marketing Automobiles in Mid-20th-Century Argentina
Jennifer L. Schaefer, University of Connecticut

Session Abstract

Roadway construction and expansion in Latin America integrated regions into a national whole, created employment, and grew economies by facilitating the movement of people and goods across the twentieth century. Perennially popular across the political right and left for these reasons, roadway development nonetheless was fraught with unanticipated or ignored consequences: social disruptions as roads charted paths through cities and towns and environmental degradation from runoff and erosion. Likewise, support for industrial growth crossed both the political right and left in Latin America across the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the region, automobile assembly and manufacture emerged as a policy priority for Latin American governments across the political spectrum from the 1930s through the 1960s even as it increased air and noise pollution and encouraged consumer cultures.

This panel brings together a focus on these two political and economic projects: expanding roadway construction and increased automobile manufacturing in Latin America. The geographic range of the panel, with papers focusing on Mexico, Argentina, and Peru, encourages attention to the specificities of national context as well as regional similarities.

Panel topics will include conflicts over the use of urban and rural space, the transnational movement of technology, capital, and car cultures, and the politics of development. Papers will also address changing technologies for roadway construction and automobile manufacturing and social disruptions caused by the expansion of roadways and increased availability of cars. The papers will consider several shared questions: how did regionalism and urbanization shape the formation of roadways and car cultures during the mid-twentieth century? How did the construction of new roadways deepen tensions between urban centers and rural communities? Who were the intended and actual users of new or expanded roadways and increasingly available automobiles, and how were these infrastructure projects and automobiles marketed to an expanding consumer base?

Roadway construction and automobile manufacturing are not new topics of inquiry for Latin American history. Scholars convincingly have shown why infrastructure and manufacturing projects expanded during the twentieth century and the impact they had on economic development. Likewise, they have demonstrated the cultural and economic impact of increased automobile availability. And yet, scholarship purportedly on histories of global highway development and automobile manufacturing continues to minimize the importance of Latin America. For example, the recently published monograph Global Fordism describes Germany’s production as “even lagging behind Argentina.” Certainly, another way to interpret this claim is that Argentina’s automobile manufacturing industry in the postwar period was even larger than Germany’s. This panel centers Latin America more broadly in a global history of roadway construction and automobile manufacturing through attention to the transnational flows of investment and technologies, examination of emerging manufacturing and construction sectors, and analysis of changing ideas around highway travel and car cultures.

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