UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation approaches Latin American integration through the Pan American Highway. While integration, the process by which communities are imagined and social collectivities take shape, has often been understood as a regional economic and political process, this dissertation uses ethnographic insights to understand how people's lived experiences on the Pan American Highway inform integration at national, regional, and hemispheric scales. Based on fieldwork in eastern Panama, the only location where the highway has yet to be completed, as well as archival research in Panama and the United States, this study traces mobility practices along the highway: the migrations, displacements, travels, and everyday commutes it facilitates, and also the planning, construction and maintenance activities that make the highway possible. Engaging postcolonial studies, science and technology studies and the anthropology of mobility, this dissertation charts how the highway creates connections between people and landscapes, enables the movement of tangible and intangible things, and produces encounters across difference that nonetheless create common, if unequal, ground. Understanding integration through the Pan American Highway offers a way to make sense of the multiple and competing dreams and desires that, through movements and encounters, create uneven forms of togetherness.

By arguing that large-scale modern projects such as the highway may be traced through their linkages to other projects operating at other scales (such as nation-building projects) in order to understand their power and lively heterogeneity, and by arguing that connections and movements across the Americas must always be situated within a material landscape (that is, by arguing that social processes in Latin America cannot be understood as culture exclusive of nature), this dissertation contributes to understandings of modernity and coloniality in America, and of how these configurations--best illustrated by the idea of a smooth, straight road to progress--may change, just as the movements, surfaces, and landscapes of the Pan American Highway are also in constant and lively transformation.