“A la Panamericana se le dice la Calle Principal”: Perspectives on Development from an Incomplete Road That Keeps Falling Apart

• In Event: Transportation, Progress, and Decay

Abstract

Like many roads extended into frontier regions, the section of the Pan American Highway constructed in eastern Panama in the 1970s was meant to integrate the nation by promoting the migration of settlers who would convert the forest into modernized pastures and agricultural fields. These dreams of progress soon fell apart. The highway never reached the border with Colombia, as intended. Abandoned by the state, the highway turned into a mess of mud, preventing the transport of agricultural products and hindering local mobility. Even after its resurfacing in 2009, the highway continues to deteriorate. And the development projects that attached to the highway in the 1970s and 2000s failed to assuage many of the structural difficulties of living in Panama’s poorest region. Many explanations of these failures locate the problems in faulty project design or uncooperative people, but these explanations fail to address the assumptions and impulses of the modern discourses that inform these development projects to begin with. This paper engages perspectives critical of modernity and its relation to coloniality and capitalism to offer a different approach to understanding the experiences of living on a road to progress that is in a constant state of decay. Oral histories and ethnography of the settlers for whom the Pan American Highway is their Main Street point to other histories, subordinated but not outside of modernity, that work alongside and confound the timeline of progress that purports to be singular and universal, smooth and straight like an ideal road.

Author

• Rosa Elena Ficek, Wesleyan University