The Rarified Air of the Modern

In The Rarified Air of the Modern, Willie Hiatt tells the engaging story of powered flight in Peru, from the 1910 flight of Jorge Chávez Dartnell as the first person to fly across the Alps through the jet age. Hiatt examines how Peruvians confronted technological modernity through the pursuit of aviation. Although Peru suffered from poor infrastructure, scant resources, dearth of technological expertise, and mountainous and jungle terrain, Peruvian elites and masses came to understand what the airplane represented in the modern world. The author defines modernity as the language through which Latin America came to experience science, technology, industrialization, and other “Western” trappings (p. 9). According to Hiatt, Peruvians felt a sense of self-imposed backwardness while embracing the rise of this new technology. He asserts that “despite the excitement of aviation's possibility, Peruvians experienced anxiety over economic, technical, and infrastructure inferiority” (p. 58).This book represents a major contribution to the scholarly literature on aviation history and the Andean world. The author underscores how technology played a role in an Andean country that was at the periphery of aviation technology yet connected to developments abroad. Most significantly, the book helps us understand the imagining of the Peruvian nation through the lens of technological change.Peru embraced aviation as early as 1910. Jorge Chávez Dartnell, born in Paris of Peruvian parents, captured what some Peruvians imagined modernity to look like. Hiatt convincingly argues for how the flight of Chávez Dartnell across the Alps in 1910 was more daring than Frenchman Louis Blériot's 1909 English Channel crossing. Sadly, the 23-year-old Peruvian crashed and died four days later, having flown toward a wind-whipped Alpine valley in an underpowered French Blériot XI-1.Hiatt discusses how aviation took a toll on Peruvian authenticity in that it provided an avenue for foreign meddling, favoritism, and scandals. Yet aviation in the Andean country proved remarkably resilient. Its advocates worked hard to tie airplanes to national identity and patriotism. Hiatt effectively uses the story of pilot Alejandro Velasco Astete, a Quechua speaker and native of Cuzco, to demonstrate how technology mediated the indigenista vision for a central role for the city of Cuzco. In 1925 Velasco Astete became the first Peruvian to fly from Lima to Cuzco in a biplane. Fellow pilots knew Velasco Astete as “El Cholo,” a term that referred to a person of highland origin but having Andean traits who adopted Western cultural markers (p. 70). Although it could be a derogatory name, the term allowed for indigenous mobility. According to Hiatt, celebration of Velasco Astete's flight became closely associated with the indigenismo of the 1930s and 1940s.Beginning in 1928, commercial aviation arrived in the Amazon region. The first commercial line in Peru served Iquitos, which underscored the interior region's importance. The image of airplanes flying over the Amazon River “evoked integration, civilization, and access to . . . natural resources” (p. 88). The jungle landscape, according to Hiatt, appeared as an inferior other or exotic outsider, the antithesis of the modern. The dense terrain between Lima and Iquitos enhanced aviation's appeal. Yet accident stories betrayed contradictory perceptions and the precariousness of flying over trees. Despite all its potential and optimism among Peruvians for its future, Hiatt illuminates how aviation developed haphazardly in the Peruvian landscape.Early commercial aviation gave way to travel literature by Peruvian elites. Hiatt details the formation of three commercial enterprises and the press's obsession with anything aerial. Confidence in flight grew steadily as the number of commercial passengers increased from 145 in 1928 to 1,628 in 1929 and steadily climbed to 34,571 in 1937. Dozens of Peruvian writers depicted Indians on the ground as “stick figures,” left behind to be observed but not permitted to be the observers due to the high cost of flying (p. 124).Soon, the deployment of airplanes in domestic and international conflicts exposed deep paradoxes that stirred nationalist sentiments. Peru and Brazil are the only two countries in Latin America that display the portrait of aviators on their currency. In 1991, stunt flyer José Abelardo Quiñones Gonzales and his inverted airplane appeared on Peru's ten-sol note, as a young military pilot whose dramatic death in a conflict with Ecuador in 1939 turned him into a national hero.This is a well-researched, thoughtful, and eloquently written book. My only quibble is that gender was not used as a category of history. Although the author mentions the first female pilot in South America, Argentina's Amalia C. Figueroa, he neglects Peru's Carmela Combe, who flew solo in a Curtiss Oriole south of Lima in 1921. Despite this omission, Hiatt successfully brings to life the history of the impact of the airplane on the Andean modern world and adds new perspectives on a lesser-known aspect of Peruvian indigenismo

Aviation · Economic history · Latin Americans · Modernity · Political science · Engineering · History · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography