Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This is the third event in a four-part lecture series on “Mobilities and Migration across the Americas,” organized by Albert Manke (Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington at the University of California, Berkeley) and Mario Peters (GHI Washington). The series aims at providing a platform for engaging and inspiring interdisciplinary debates by bringing together scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean, Anglo-America, and Europe.
In this session, historian Andra B. Chastain (Washington State University Vancouver) discusses the history of the metro system in Santiago de Chile where French-Chilean collaboration played an important role. Shaped by local and global Cold War dynamics and the social and cultural history of the city, she argues that the metro was a hybrid system, a result of French prestige and funding as well as decades of Chilean research and promotion.
Sociologist and historian Dhan Zunino Singh ((National University of Quilmes)) addresses the introduction of underground railway systems for urban public transport in Boston and Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a cultural-historical and transnational perspective. Analyzing the circulation and reception of ideas, capital, experts, technologies, and materials, he reconsiders the role of external forces in the making of local mobilities. Both presenters explore the place of national and international expertise and invite us to understand mobility infrastructure projects as attempts to respond to the challenges of rapid urbanization, congestion, and transportation crises.
The session is moderated by Bianca Freire-Medeiros (Universidade de São Paulo).
This is the third event in a four-part lecture series on “Mobilities and Migration across the Americas,” organized by Albert Manke (Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington at the University of California, Berkeley) and Mario Peters (GHI Washington). The series aims at providing a platform for engaging and inspiring interdisciplinary debates by bringing together scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean, Anglo-America, and Europe.
In this session, historian Andra B. Chastain (Washington State University Vancouver) discusses the history of the metro system in Santiago de Chile where French-Chilean collaboration played an important role. Shaped by local and global Cold War dynamics and the social and cultural history of the city, she argues that the metro was a hybrid system, a result of French prestige and funding as well as decades of Chilean research and promotion.
Sociologist and historian Dhan Zunino Singh ((National University of Quilmes)) addresses the introduction of underground railway systems for urban public transport in Boston and Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a cultural-historical and transnational perspective. Analyzing the circulation and reception of ideas, capital, experts, technologies, and materials, he reconsiders the role of external forces in the making of local mobilities. Both presenters explore the place of national and international expertise and invite us to understand mobility infrastructure projects as attempts to respond to the challenges of rapid urbanization, congestion, and transportation crises.
The session is moderated by Bianca Freire-Medeiros (Universidade de São Paulo).
