UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines progress and decay in Argentina through an analysis of the social and material life of railroads. Investigating a protracted railroad crisis materialized in branch closures and frequent accidents, it explores how, in the wake of neoliberal policies and the largest sovereign default in world history, everyday life has been remade around dilapidated trains and tracks. During the course of this research, and after a series of high-profile train crashes, the national government launched a "railroad revolution," predicated on the purchase of new rolling stock from China, the modernization of obsolete infrastructure, the renationalization of the network, and the re-education of the traveling public. This dissertation maps the uneasy meantime, the ambivalent anticipation and awkward arrival of modern trains amidst the patchy reconstruction of aging railroad infrastructure. Through an itinerant ethnography of the city and province of Buenos Aires, it shows how railroads are being (re)mobilized as machines of progress, inhabited as sites of uneven risk, and claimed as affective heritage.

Railroads have often been portrayed as a quintessential symbol of modernity, as much for their promise of progress (the speed of connectivity, the shrinking of distance, the circulation of people, goods, and ideas), as for their spectacular failures, with train crashes and derailments conjuring specters of technology gone awry. Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, including participant observation onboard trains and in train stations, railroad clubs, museums, and repair workshops, as well as interviews with commuters, activists, railroad workers, and train enthusiasts (ferroaficionados), this dissertation charts the long-reaching effects of the concessioning of the metropolitan railroad system amidst neglect (desidia), and situates these within a longer genealogy of railroad decay. Attending to the sedimented traces of movement and the layered histories etched onto tracks and rolling stock, this dissertation argues that railroad infrastructure can be approached as an archive, a material repository of memory that shapes the experience and affordances of mobility.

While railroads have often been theorized as having compressed time and space, in Argentina, I argue, unreliable trains and their obsolete infrastructure brought about time-space dilation, as locales were rendered further apart by infrequent trains and pervasive uncertainty. I trace how the haphazard modernization of rolling stock by concession companies produced monstrous trains (formaciones engendro), and examine how passengers and railway workers grappled with a railway system that was falling apart, acquiring an embodied knowledge sedimented ride after jolting ride. Railroads, I propose, have functioned as a racializing infrastructure, through the uneven distribution of risk. Finally, charting the arrival of new rolling stock and the renovation of infrastructure, I show how infrastructural modernity is haunted by the obduracy of decay, requiring a constant labor of translation, tinkering, (re)assemblage, and care. This dissertation thus contributes to the anthropology of infrastructure, and to contemporary debates in the social sciences and humanities around new materialisms, affect theory, and the "turn to ruins."