Javier Puente, associate professor and author of ‘The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra.’
(Photo: Submitted)
The U of A Latin American and Latino Studies Program will host their Fall Lecture Guest on Monday, Oct. 26, 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 3:30- 5 p.m. in J.B. Hunt Center of Excellence, room 207.
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 large-scale reengineering of the landscape, opening mining frontiers, reshaping mountains through tunnels and cuts, and intensifying extractive regimes with lasting ecological consequences.
These interventions produced what Puente calls 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.
