Connecting Latin American fiction through infrastructure and transit

The 1867 novel “María” by Colombian author Jorge Isaacs tells the tragic story of two lovers, María and Efraín. When Efraín leaves for medical school in London, the couple parts reluctantly. But when María falls ill, Efraín’s journey home to reunite with her proves too arduous, and he arrives to find she has already died.

Considered a cornerstone of Latin American literature, “María” has been analyzed by scholars for more than a century. But sixth-year Arts & Sciences Spanish & Portuguese Ph.D. student Valeria Seminario urges readers to revisit it through a different lens: transportation and infrastructure.

“I’m supplementing material history into stories like these to see how it structured the plots,” she says.

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More broadly, her dissertation reimagines 19th- and early 20th-century Latin American fiction through the real and unrealized roads, railways, and canals of the region. Born and raised in Peru, Seminario first encountered these themes during her master’s at New York University, where she noticed that early Latin American science fiction often revolved around utopian visions of infrastructure.

“María”, she says, is a striking case. The novel never explicitly mentions infrastructure, yet Efraín’s doomed return unfolds across Colombia’s rugged, undeveloped coast. “It’s just 26 pages of obstacles and suffering,” says Seminario, who is advised by associate professor of Spanish & Portuguese Ericka Beckman, who is also department chair.

Seminario found that Efraín’s route—climbing mountains, fending off snakes, paddling a broken canoe—mirrored a real-life desired transportation route for sugar and coffee, the region’s most valuable exports. At the time Isaacs was writing the novel in the 1860s, a company was struggling to build a road along the same corridor, and Isaacs himself had labored for that company.

“When you restore all that history to the novel, you can see the tragic implications of not having a road that connected those two points,” Seminario explains. “The literature allows us to see the emotions, anxieties, and fears that were tied to export routes in Latin America.” 

For Seminario, infrastructure offers a systematic lens that connects historical research with literary analysis. “It’s a key to opening up literary texts that have been read over and over again,” she says. “When you read a story through this perspective, it makes it completely new.”

Read more at Omnia.