Aesthetic and Design of Latin American Technology

Pete Soland, “A Bird’s Eye View of Latin America: Aviation Technology and High Modernism in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru”

• Summary: The innovation of aerodyne flight at the end of the nineteenth century sparked popular enthusiasm worldwide, and inspired modernity-obsessed nation builders across Latin America to reimagine their countries, quite literally from the top-down. Aeronautics technology provided wealthy playboys, revolutionary fighters, artists, intellectuals, and even city-planning bureaucrats an empowering vantagepoint from which to re-order their world. Aviation not only promised a speedier means of traversing terrain where it was difficult to build roads and railways, but also, as James Scott noted, the view from the cockpit “flattened the topography as it were a canvas” and “encouraged new aspirations to ‘synoptic’ vision, rational control, planning, and social order.” Political leaders, in particular, viewed airplanes as tools for achieving national unity by overcoming geographic obstacles like the Amazon frontier, the Andes mountains, and the ruggedly diverse landscapes of Mexico. The technology’s war-time applications also earned it admirers among military circles, during a time when armies frequently wielded significant influence in the national affairs of their respective countries. 
• In this essay I examine how the development of aviation in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru contributed to the aesthetics of so-called high modernism throughout Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of airplanes across Latin American skies made a bird’s-eye view of the region possible, which proved crucial to national modernization efforts that relied on the visual simplification of both land and people. I argue that the aviation aesthetic tended towards a homogenizing effect that typically rewarded the authoritarian impulses of state-builders, regardless of political ideology.