Introduction 3 Andra B. Chastain and Timothy W. Lorek 

• 3 – We contend that, beneath the conflicts waged by diplomats and militaries, the Latin American Cold War was conducted by experts. Scientists and engineers, doctors and social workers, agronomists and architects— as well as the webs of expertise they wove— made material the political ideologies of the era. Indeed, the intertwined dreams of development and modernization that animated the Latin American Cold War relied on an army of highly specialized experts whose influence reverberates across the hemisphere and around the globe.
  • 1
• 5 – The ongoing transformation of the role of experts in government demands new histories of expertise, specifically ones that focus on the Latin American laboratories where Cold War knowledge was generated, applied, and contested.
  • 1 – the landscape as a laboratory for testing the knowledges of those who claim to know it
• 6 – This volume grows out of a conviction that the perspectives of two important and growing subfields— science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history— can help us rethink the Latin American Cold War in productive ways. Both fields have grappled with how to understand increasing human control over nature and the consequences this has wrought for both the natural and built environment over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, both STS and environmental history have posed new questions about the relationship between human and nonhuman actors, the intersection of technology and power, and the often-unseen processes by which individuals and communities produce new knowledge.
  • 1, 2, 4 – another connection between STS and Enviro hist. Co-control. Knowledge. Agency
• 7 – but to probe the interactions between “high” and “low” expertise, between state officials and the grassroots, and between national or international actors and local forms of knowledge.
  • 1 – local knowledge
• Until relatively recently, some environmental historians characterized scholarship on Latin America in terms of one-sided narratives of degradation, declension, and exploitation while increasingly robust historiographies in the United States and other regions dissected nature, culture, and the state through complex webs of interaction.
  • 4 – one-dimensionality of declension – linearity – as its defining feature
• 8 – That is, specialized knowledge and technologies did not always flow from the Global North to the Global South, or from the United States and Europe to Latin America; the center– periphery model of development is insufficient to account for the transnational exchange of expertise within Latin America and between Latin America and the world.
• 10 – Yet, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has argued, both the colonial expeditions sent from the metropole and their nineteenth-century republican descendants masked the parallel existence of a domestic Latin American scientific tradition. European transplants, such as Claudio Gay in Chile and José Celestino Mutis in Nueva Granada; homegrown Latin American scientists and intellectuals; and the countless denizens of “local knowledge” influenced the work of their more famous European counterparts.
  • 1
• 12 – As Joseph observes in his contribution to this volume, new research that goes beneath superpower conflict to examine grassroots encounters highlights “a history of the Latin American Cold War— rather than just a history of the Cold War in Latin America.”
  • PhD why
• 13 – But others acquired their expertise through hands-on experiments, practical experience, and other forms of local knowledge beyond the bounds of elite university training. Rather than presuming that expertise was necessarily outside or foreign, or that experts arrived in Latin America from the Global North, the following chapters trace how the ideals of development and modernization were negotiated on the ground by local, national, and transnational actors.
  • 1

 

1. Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies 29 Gilbert M. Joseph 

 

1. Agrarian Antecedents and Rural Development 

 

2. Transplanting “El Tenesí”: Mexican Planners in the US South during the Cold War Era 71 Tore C. Olsson 

 

3. Strange Priests and Walking Experts: Nature, Spirituality, and Science in Sprouting the Cold War’s Green Revolution 93 Timothy W. Lorek 

• 95 – Heeding Mark Carey’s suggestions for Latin Americanist environmental history, this essay activates Latin American actors and their culturally constructed mentalities. This move shifts the focus away from the loss of ahistoric Edens to a deeper and more localized appreciation for how Green Revolution agroenvironments were created and negotiated.
  • 2, 4
• 101 – In one example, he wrote an article advocating that the sprawling branches of the samán, or rain tree ( Albizia saman ), gain recognition as the national tree of Colombia. His purpose in publishing such a treatise was ecological and educational. These large trees provided shade for livestock, contradicting the prevailing practice of clear-cutting pasture. They also provided for a properly balanced agroecosystem, offering shade under which smaller coffee, cacao, tea, and nutmeg could flourish. Their roots and leaves regenerated organic life and restored nitrogen to the soil, filtered carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminished the risk of plagues, provided habitat for pest-eating birds, and conserved precious rainwater during the dry seasons.
  • 2
• 101 – The intermediaries to the divine work of God’s nature, priests of technical expertise, he charged, would produce a “harmonious plan, scientifically studied . . . which will allow us to reach the heights at which we have seen other nations [ pueblos ], less favored by nature than us.” 36 Favored by nature, the valley held the promise of a chosen land. State-sponsored agronomists would lead the way to its full realization.
  • 1

 

4. “Communication for Change”: Radio Sutatenza/Acción Cultural Popular, the Catholic Church, and Rural Development in Colombia during the Cold War 114 

 

1. Cold War Scientific Exchanges Mary Roldán 

 

5. Challenging Climate and Geopolitics: Cuba, Canada, and Intensive Livestock Exchange in a Cold War Context, from the 1960s to the 1980s 137 Reinaldo Funes-Monzote and Steven Palmer

 

6. A Tale of Four Laboratories: Animal Disease, Science, and Politics in Cold War Latin America 159 Thomas Rath 

 

7. NASA in Chile: Technology and Visual Culture 178 Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola 

 

III. Infrastructures of the Built Environment 

 

8. Planning, Politics, and Praxis at Colombia’s Inter-American Housing Lab, 1951– 1966 199 Mark Healey 

• 200 – Thus this chapter, like some intriguing work on postwar architecture and planning, is focused particularly on connections between the urban and the rural, and between the formal, state-sanctioned city of modernizing discourses and the two worlds that seemed to threaten it, the rapidly growing urban periphery and the declining world of rural settlements. In particular, CINVA was an important early space for thinking about the now-familiar practices of autoconstruction, and in ways historians are only beginning to explore, an early forum for attempts to deploy autoconstruction as a state-promoted strategy for development.
  • 2
• 204 – Drawing on a series of small-scale programs in Puerto Rico during the 1940s, where he had been a housing official, he proposed instead what he termed “aided self-help”—schemes for community development in which the state provided sites, materials, and basic infrastructure, but the housing itself was built by the group labor of community members.
  • 2
• 207 – These houses were a matter of transplanting urban models into the countryside, rather than building on the traditions, experiences, or capabilities of rural communities. Their outside design, expensive labor, and quality materials made them too costly for the vast majority of the rural population. Indeed, by the time the ICT turned to urban projects, it was beginning to make this explicit. In 1947, for example, the ICT held a design competition for a standardized “economical home.” Though the ICT specified attached housing, each home was also two stories, with multiple bedrooms and a carport. The winning entries came from all the leading young Colombian modernists;
  • 1 – so they’ll be soliciting the labor of rural people for the production of the landscape but only using the knowledge of the urban educated elites

 

9. Dams and Hydroelectricity: Circulation of Knowledge and Technological Imaginaries in South America, 1945– 1970 217 Fernando Purcell

• 217 – The analysis focuses on South America during the early Cold War, when the construction of hydroelectric plants surged to its greatest magnitude in the region. In order to explain the success of this revolution, the chapter studies the roles that experts and technical knowledge, as well as the circulation of ideas and cultural representations, had in terms of constituting imaginaries favorable to the dam-building process.
  • 1, 2 – imaginaries as the linkage between who gets to know nature and who gets to produce it
• 222 – Moreover, technicians from the United States who provided technical assistance in other countries gained crucial knowledge from their experiences. The expertise consolidated in these American institutions derived from their accumulation of data throughout their country and the world, leading to what I would refer to as a dense internalization of local knowledge that was generated in different parts of the world; it was then spread in a universal sense through technical assistance.
  • 1 – modernizing technocratic engineers come to know nature in universalizing ways through the agglomeration of individual localized labors
• 222 – Not all engineers played the same role. Although we should avoid simple notions of core– periphery diffusion and pay attention to the interactions between South Americans and North Americans— and to the historical forces and initiatives generated in South America— it is also important to recognize the clear asymmetry in the handling of complex technological knowledge that has to do with power imbalances.
  • 1 – contests about who gets to know nature and decide how to intervene in it are primarily about power asymmetries
• 223 – This knowledge included relationships with geography, climate, geology, soil, and idiosyncrasies of the multiple local actors involved in the hydroelectric projects, including the residents of often remote construction areas who understood, better than anyone, rivers and the flow of water.
  • 1 – this universalizing agglomeration of localized knowledge apparently also included the knowledge of the people resident in the locales
• As a result of vast and numerous projects related to the environment, the Cold War profoundly altered humans’ understanding and appreciation of the biosphere, leading to ambitions that ranged from efforts to “industrialize nature,” 36 as in the case of hydroelectric dams, to attempts to control the weather
  • 2 – co-control
• 225 – The magazine defended the idea that “what Peru needs, now more than ever, are men of action, captains of industry, engineers and mathematicians, men who are able to build. In sum, leaders who combine intellectual and constructive capacities. They are the conductors of the economic revolution of our time.” 45 The industrialization of nature, then, was a job for engineers. It was highly valued; it represented the triumph of human interests over the environment.
  • 1, 2

 

10. Planning the Santiago Metro in Cold War Chile Fernando Purcell 237 Andra B. Chastain IV. Toward New Regimes of Expertise 

 

11. Middle Modernisms: Collecting and Measuring Nature in the Peruvian Amazon 261 Emily Wakild 

• 262 – In addition to the larger trends of conservation biology and tropical field research development, the Manu area provides particular insight into the connection between expert and popular forms of science by exposing different ways of knowing nature exemplified in individual lives. To understand these connections, I borrow from the historian of science, Robert Kohler, who has articulated the importance of residential knowledge as a lens through which historians might understand the accumulation of expertise in one place over a long period of time.
  • 1
• 263 – This is not to say that the middle provides a pure space, simply that as sites of expertise and premier locales for experts, parks provided a place for middle-class individuals to engage in producing knowledge not directly tied to projects of low or high modernism.
• To understand the historical creation of these parks and the science within, we must set aside the mythic straw men of pristine nature and wilderness, the manufactured competition between conservation and development, and the skewed disciplinary historiography highlighting only cosmopolitan elites or enlightened native people; we must instead probe the center where scientists, collectors, and residents lived and contributed to the process of understanding how the natural world works.
  • 1, 4
• 264 – For many field scientists, the more they could prove as new knowledge about monkeys, birds, plants, or the forest itself, the more they could speak for nature and morally resist development at all costs.
  • 1, 2 – knowledge of environment as currency for right to produce environment:     1 —> 2 

 

12. Privatizing Expertise: Environmental Scientists and Technocrats in Chile’s Transition to Democracy 282 Javiera Barandiarán 

 

Conclusion. New Narratives of Technology, Expertise, and Environment in Latin America: The Cold War and Beyond 303 Eden Medina and Mark Carey Contributors

• 305 – This body of scholarship works to refine narratives of Latin American landscapes, natural resources, and environments to show that the region was not simply the “backyard” for the imperialists from the North to conquer, contaminate, extract, and destroy— but rather were landscapes constructed and produced through complex interchanges among a host of historical actors, even when imperialism did, in fact, deplete physical environments.

 

1. Knowledge politics and labor: how did different groups and individuals know nature through their labor (a la Richard White)? How did different actors develop knowledge and skills and what kinds of contests emerged among them over how to intervene in non-human nature? Who gets to decide what landscapes and waterscapes are produced? What were the consequences of these contests for nature itself?

 

2. Human-non-human-nature relationship: how do people produce nature? what role does non-human nature play in these stories? Is it an actor, acted upon, co-production?

 

3. Relationship between time and space.

 

4. Declensionism: early environmental histories were often declensionist narratives, often about deforestation. How have these environmental historians of Latin America attempted to move beyond declensionism since the 1990s?

—- David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakology