Abstract

This chapter delves into Latin American research on infrastructures, where focus has been on the dysfunction of infrastructures and the ways in which they can turn into infrastructures of despair. Breaking with analytical frames from the global North, this chapter shows how local infrastructures might be better thought to deal with contexts characterized by institutional and financial scarcities, extractivism, and creative appropriation and transformation. It provides an overview of previous studies regarding the role of infrastructures in State formation in the Latin American continent. It then explores three key themes that Latin American STS scholars have highlighted: the need for constant repair, issues of scaling in often extractivist transnational settings, and, finally, the processes of decay and ruination at the heart of these infrastructures. These contributions are only enabled through the region’s focus on how infrastructures attempt but critically often fail to deliver modernist projects and promises, and thus create forms of disrepair and local despair. The chapter concludes with reflections on contributions that Latin American approaches can make to global scholarship regarding whether the demarcation between infrastructures of the North/South is worth being made to begin with.