Mecila
30 Apr

[2021] Flying Down to Rio Aviation, National Identities, and Hemispheric Relations in the Americas

GHI | Mecila

Virtual

About the event

Mecila is supporting a four-part lecture series on “Mobilities and Migration across the Americas,” organized by Albert Manke (Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington at the University of California, Berkeley) and Mario Peters (GHI Washington). The series aims at providing a platform for engaging and inspiring interdisciplinary debates by bringing together scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean, Anglo-America, and Europe.

In this session, Leonie Schuster will address the transcontinental flight from New York to Rio de Janeiro undertaken by the U.S. aviator Walter T. Hinton and his Brazilian counterpart Euclydes Pinto Martins in the early 1920s. She argues that contemporary visual, cartographic, and textual representations of this event served not only to highlight U.S.-Brazilian cooperation but also to assert Brazil’s position as a regional power in South America. Peter Soland will explore the development of Mexican aviation against the background of Mexico’s Second World War alliance with the United States and its post-war economic expansion. He contends that the same processes that buoyed commercial airlines also reinforced cultural stereotypes that were exploited to attract U.S. tourists to Mexico. Focusing on the ‘Peronist Years’ (1946-1955), Melina Piglia invites us to understand the formation of Argentinian aviation policy as a strategy to limit U.S. influence in South America.

To participate, please register here!
Sponsors:
Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley, Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, Global International and Area Studies, Center for Latin American Studies,
CALAS – Center for Advanced Latin American Studies, The International Research Training Group (IRTG) “Temporalities of Future” and Mecila.