From Point Four to the Peace Corps: Cultural Encounters at Colombian Agricultural Field Sites

• In Event: Locating Extractive Development in Latin America

Abstract

In the late 1920s, the Colombian government established a series of three regionally and agro-ecologically specific agricultural experiment stations in the highland zone, mid-altitude zone, and tropical lowlands, respectively. In their first three decades, these original three stations grew and changed significantly with the global economic crisis, World War II, and political transformation and violence in Colombia. By the 1950s, as international development finance and personnel gained a footing in the country, these stations became important field sites and training grounds for ambitious new projects. This paper examines agricultural research facilities and field sites as spaces of cultural encounter. It analyzes the cultures of science and scientific production while situating these in the study of the cultural Cold War in Latin America. In these spaces, culture, science, and politics were tightly interwoven. As scientific sites became staging grounds and hosting facilities for cross-cultural exchange, these once regionally oriented experiment stations became collaborators in broader hemispheric patterns of environmental transformation of rural landscapes through the commercialization and industrialization of agriculture in the mid-twentieth century.

Author

• Timothy Lorek, College of St. Scholastica