Latin American and Latino Studies Spring Lecture Will Arrive With a 'Bang!'

The U of A Latin American and Latino Studies Program will host a Spring Lecture on Tuesday, March 17, about the role of dynamite in shaping the capitalist infrastructures of past and modern Peru. The event features Javier Puente's work, titled "Governing the Vertical: Dynamite, Infrastructure and the Technopolitics of State (Un)Making in Andean High Altitudes," which will take place from 4-5:15 p.m. in Physics Building 0133.

Puente, associate professor and chair of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Smith College, will address how the Andes have long been stereotyped as a "hostile" environment, where everyday people challenged state authority and capitalist extraction in postcolonial Peru. After 1866, dynamite became a mediating technology that reconfigured relations between humans and landscapes. In the Andes, explosives enabled the large-scale reengineering of its topography, opening mining frontiers, reshaping mountains through tunnels and cuts, and intensifying extractive regimes with lasting ecological consequences.

These interventions produced what Puente terms a regime of high-altitude or topographic governance, in which technological control over vertical terrain underwrote state power and extractive capitalism in the Andes. Yet dynamite's material affordances exceeded their original technopolitical intentions. By the late 20th century, the same explosive infrastructures that sustained mining and transportation were repurposed as tools of insurgency, exposing the environmental and political limits of infrastructural power in mountainous ecologies. Dr. Puente demonstrates that Andean people and geography are not a passive backdrop to political engagement but active assemblages in which geology, altitude, explosives, labor and governance create new forms of territory and power.

This event is free, open to the public and generously co-sponsored by the International and Global Studies Program and the Departments of Anthropology, History and Political Science. All students, faculty and community members interested in these areas of study are encouraged to attend.