Conquistadors of the Sky

This book provides a much-needed overview of the development of aviation in Latin America. It examines military and civil aerial endeavors and captures the seductive glamour of the commercial air industry. It both reminds us that air power is intimately connected to political power and motivates us to take the transformative work of artificial flight seriously.The romance of the air colors most aviation histories. Narratives tend to focus on the seemingly magnificent feats of pilots, planes, inventors, and entrepreneurs from the United States and Western Europe. In Conquistadors of the Sky, Dan Hagedorn centers his analytical lens on Latin America to draw attention to the important ways that historical agents from the global South helped to give rise to “one of the greatest technological developments of humankind” (p. xi). For example, the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, and not the noted Wright brothers, was the first to successfully lift and sustain in the air a heavier-than-air craft in public.Interrogating agents such as Santos-Dumont alongside actors such as the Wright brothers illuminates the monograph’s point. Hagedorn wants to augment, boost, and disrupt dominant narratives, but he does not want to dismantle and topple them. In other words, he tries to alter historiographic conventions by inserting the aerial accomplishments of Latin American men and women into established frames. As he puts it, “This work is intended as a chronological account of the growth of aeronautics in a region, a long-overdue addition to the literature, and, hopefully, an enrichment of the understanding of the subject as a whole” (p. xiii).Conquistadors of the Sky complements and challenges other aviation histories with its comparative and regional approach. Its chronological scope is extended and linear, which allows the narrative to progress from myths and legends through pioneers, world wars, and into the beyond. Histories of aviation often open with the failure of Icarus and close with the promise of space tourism. Shaking the foundations slightly, this book begins with pre-Columbian belief systems, including references to wind gods and the Nazca Lines. These are “added to the pantheon of aeronautical legend and mythology” (p. 4). It ends optimistically, as Hagedorn hopes that the airplane will eventually undo what it currently helps to enable: the movement of “illicit cargoes through well-developed distribution systems” (p. 540).Each chapter examines how a particular theme unfolds in different, seemingly discrete national contexts. For example, chapter 4 highlights the development of commercial carriers and foreign interests in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, Panama, Venezuela, and Paraguay. While other works tend to focus solely and deeply on one or two national contexts, this book’s regional commitment ensures that readers receive a wide-ranging review of a complex transportation and communication network.Notwithstanding its rewards, the regional perspective raises questions. How does one define and delimit the contours of a region? Are the contours historically contingent? Do the constituent countries change? What is Latin America? Where is Latin America?These questions are about elision and distortion. In this book, the Caribbean appears and disappears. Island nations such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and colonies such as Trinidad and Jamaica surface and fade under the rubric Latin America. Maps from the 1930s and 1940s show airline routes that used Caribbean places to link North, Central, and South America. A postwar map depicting the shortening of travel times between the 1920s and 1950s erases the islands; literally, they are no longer there. A foregrounded and sustained consideration of the Caribbean would prompt analysis of the competing imperial agendas that shaped how aviation developed in the Americas. Relentless oscillation between the centering tendency of regional frames such as Latin America and the sideways glance of diasporic optics such as the Atlantic World would help us glimpse racially, economically, and politically oppressed people affecting aeronautics. These are things that this book does not but should do. A compelling book, Conquistadors of the Sky urges us to realize that the history of aviation does not have to embody the image of the artifact it remembers. It does not need to appear boundless and groundless like an elevated airplane in motion. The stories we tell about the evolution of artificial ascent can start in different places and have other heroes

Art · Art history · Aviation · Latin Americans · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Wright · Engineering · History · Law · Space exploration and regulation

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