| This study examines technology, modern identity, and history-making on the "periphery." The success of Peruvian pilots in European aviation competitions in 1910 generated tremendous optimism that this new technology could lift the Andean country out of its perceived backwardness. Poor infrastructure, economic woes, a dearth of technical expertise, and a ghastly number of pilot deaths slowed the project after the first flights over Lima in 1911, but by 1928 three commercial lines were transporting passengers, mail, and merchandise from the capital city of Lima to other parts of the country and continent. Flight enthralled politicians, businessmen, military officials, journalists, and especially the ruling oligarchs who gazed toward Europe and the United States as the epicenter of all things modern. I argue that the social, political, and cultural reception of aviation in the Andes generated a script for world history and illuminates why a Eurocentric modernizing vision has served as a powerful organizing force in regions with an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to the West. The fitful development of Peruvian aviation creates a unique window into the seduction of Western modernity, its hierarchizing power and slavish devotion to "progress," and the complicity of self-appointed modernizers who alternately sustained and resisted a Eurocentric historical trajectory.;The development of Peruvian military, commercial, and civil aviation between countryman Jorge Chavez's remarkable 1910 flight across the Alps and the maturation of air travel in the early 1950s illuminates the experience of modernity on the periphery and the power of the Western historical narrative in shaping Peruvian identity. Aviation made sense in Peru as a facile and expedient tool for integrating a geographically and racially divided Andean country, but just as important, acquisition and mastery of flight convinced Peruvians they were modern by all accepted Western criteria. Why that criteria came to carry the weight of natural law is an essential question for this study. Many Peruvians believed aviation bestowed not just technological advancement but also enlightenment, rationality, capitalist enterprise, and democratic leveling, all of which naturalized Western history as almost divinely inspired, Peruvians' perceptions of and engagement with that linear narrative informed their response to change, influenced decisions at important historical moments, shaped views of the majority indigenous population, and even colored how they imagined coastal, Andean, and jungle geography. |
