A Portrait of imagined hemispheric power relations: Contested visualities in archival photographs of the Pan-American Highway

Abstract

Constructed from the 1930s onward, the Pan-American Highway was envisioned as a massive artery connecting the American continents. In addition to its practical uses, the road also served as a reflection of the often-conflicting aspirations and self-representations of the United States on the one hand and the Latin American countries on the other. This article explores how the power relations and conflicting aspirations and goals embedded in the Pan-American Highway were constituted through, and given expression in, the thousands of photographs taken during the road’s construction in Central America between 1930 and 1960. The article draws on two corpora. The first belongs to the US Bureau of Public Roads, and is housed in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The second actually comprises two separate corpora, both initially belonging to two Costa Rican men who were involved in the construction of the road and archived in the Costa Rican National Archive. Considering photographs taken by agents of various nationalities, ethnicities, and classes enables us to extricate the road from its consideration as a US initiative and underscores its Latin American and transnational framing. While acknowledging the US imperialism inherent in the PAHW initiative, the article brings to the fore the complexities within the dichotomy of an imperial visuality vs. countervisuality that is based on a division between US American images vs. Latin American ones, in favour of a more nuanced examination of relations of power that takes into account inter-Latin American relations of power and coloniality.