Living near the 'death train'. Understanding how transport infrastructures shape political subjectivities

Keywords: conflict, infrastructures, energy, Latin America, political subjectivities
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 12:25 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 32

Abstract

This paper address the question of how infrastructural projects do shape political subjectivities and in which ways do these subjectivities differ when living in environmentally devastated areas. I focus on the municipality of Zona Bananera, in the Caribbean Colombia. Zona Bananera is a particular place, there took place the so-called Banana Massacre, a massacre of United Fruit Company workers after a strike that turned into the labor movement ever witnessed in the country until then and so well depicted in a fiction version by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez in his One Hundred Years of Solitude. Today, 150 wagons trains speed by at 80 kilometers an hour, with nothing covering the 160,000 tons of coal that pass through this area daily. The so-called “death train” passes every 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most. The doors and windows shake, there are houses that are cracked and many have been killed. In collaboration with the local University of Magdalena, Santa Marta, we conducted, in August 2019, a survey using World Value Survey scales on political views around environment and development as well as other ad hoc questions regarding attitude toward the train and multiple socio-demographic variables. The 302 responses were also georeferenced and thus allow us explore proximity to the infrastructure as variable. In these grounds, this article sheds light on the socio-political factors explaining the perception of transport infrastructure.