Monster Trains: Rogue Infrastructure and Precarious Mobility in Buenos Aires

MC CALLUM, STEPHANIE

San Jose

Congreso; American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting; 2018

American Anthropological Association (AAA)

For several decades, the commuter rail system in metropolitan Buenos Aires was served by aging Japanese trains. In the aftermath of Argentina´s 2001 default, railroad concession companies sought to stretch state subsidies through deferred maintenance, precarious repairs, and the experimental modernization of rolling stock. The resulting haphazard suturing of spare parts became known by train activists and enthusiasts as formaciones engendro, monstrous assemblages. As a form of "rogue infrastructure" (Kim 2016), monster trains were prone to break down, run late, catch fire, and crash. Train conductors and commuters learned to navigate dilapidated trains and the risks of daily travel through certain bodily dispositions and an attunement crafted over time. After a large-scale train crash in 2012, the national government embarked on a purported railroad revolution predicated on the renovation of track and station infrastructure, the purchase of new rolling stock from China, and the reeducation of the traveling public. Drawing from ethnographic research with railroad workers, commuters, and train enthusiasts, this paper traces the awkward arrival of new rolling stock and the ambivalent responses to railroad modernization. It shows how, as new trains entered into service, glitches (such as disorderly automated communication systems and derailments) fueled anxieties over the incompatibility of foreign technology and "local" infrastructure and the obduracy of decay. Cast, once more, in terms of monstrosity, these trains and their ambivalent reception raise provocative questions about the translational work of infrastructure and the rogue nature of capitalist modernity.