Date
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Presenter 1: Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College, “A Postcard View of Progress:” Pemex’s Visual Propaganda and the Aesthetics of Mexico’s Technological Nationalism, 1950”

  • Summary. The 1938 Mexican oil expropriation has been the subject of substantial study among scholars of post-revolutionary Mexico. In addition to the legal and labor conflicts that prompted it, academics have begun to pay more attention to the propagandistic efforts that the Cardenista state, through the Department of Press and Publicity (DAPP), carried out to increase the authority of the government and build support for its proposed economic nationalism. According to these studies, there were two different discourses that animated this nationalist oil propaganda: one "radical and anti-imperialist" (emphasizing the nation’s need to break with economic subjugation and exploitation) and the other "traditional and patriotic" (emphasizing the nation’s integrity and sovereignty). While these studies have enriched the literature on oil nationalism, the state's invocation of technology has nevertheless received little attention, even though the visual materials produced by the DAPP demonstrate that the revolutionary regime made a concerted effort to transform oil infrastructures into icons and actors in the nationalist spectacle that would frame the expropriation of the oil industry and its subsequent expansion by the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).
  • This chapter analyzes how, after the disappearance of the DAPP and the Cardenista project, the postrevolutionary regime continued to invest materially and ideologically in oil infrastructure developments and, in doing so, fabricated a distinctive "technological nationalism." To determine how this process developed and how it acquired affective purchase by midcentury, my analysis focuses on PEMEX's corporate advertising and propaganda. Through consumer ads, pro-government articles, and touristic brochures, PEMEX sought to reinforce the notion that drilling rigs, storage tanks, and refineries were visible symbols and conduits of revolutionary achievements: emblems of national progress, modernity, and development. By exposing the representational strategies of PEMEX's publicity campaign I will demonstrate how the technological nationalism that PEMEX fueled through it, prompted Mexicans not only to be consumers and spectators of an industrial-driven modernity but also to overlook its human, environmental, and political costs.

 
Presenter 2: Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.

  • Summary: Eating animal meat is an act inseparable from human history, topologically dispersed, immersed in different historicity, and by a multitude of things: evolutionary, biological, gustatory, cultural, technological, aesthetic, economic, ecological, ethical, and perceptual elements. It was throughout the 19th century that public slaughterhouses emerged, places built by the State where killing animals for human consumption was regulated and conducted. Public slaughterhouses were also environments of constant interaction with the biophysical world and spaces constituted by the insertion and development of technologies, techniques, and gradual recognition of aesthetic elements that combined, aligned with the production and distribution of meat in Rio de Janeiro. 
  • My essay explores three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1854 and 1882. It was during this period that Rio de Janeiro underwent intense transformations and where we can find three public slaughterhouses in operation. Analyzing this junction illuminates how the State, conceptions of modernity, technology, and aesthetics played a significant role in the history of one of the activities most rooted in Brazilian culture and still neglected in Brazilian historiography, in the history of technology and the history of Brazil."