Railway Policy, Economic Reality, and Social Representations: From the Eve of Peronism to the Alfonsín Years. A Look at “Estación Perico” (Jujuy, Argentina)

Abstract

The inhabitants of the Perico community, like those of the province of Jujuy in general, witnessed a railway reality that resulted from the conjunction of national policies applied to the sector, the imprint of historical processes in the region, and the particular features of these spaces.

Although for more than one contemporary observer the outcome of the early 1990s appeared as a “foretold death”, many people, over the years, placed their hopes in change and directed their efforts toward identifying obstacles and assessing the scope of the problem, seeking receptiveness in public opinion and/or in governmental spheres.

On the basis of both the identification of the voices of individual and collective social actors recorded in written sources—official reports and speeches, newspapers and magazines, and petitions submitted to public authorities by civil society—and the recovery of fragments of “railway memory” that persist among some inhabitants of the Jujuy locality of “Ciudad Perico”, this article proposes an approach to the impact of railway policies on specific regional socioeconomic realities and to the representations woven around the situation of the railway in the northern province.

The temporal framework extends from the years prior to the emergence of Peronism—still marked by the aftermath of the world economic crisis—to the end of the 1980s, the period preceding the unrestricted installation of neoliberalism in the political and economic horizon of a large part of the leadership throughout the country. This process put an end to any expectation of recovery and support for railway transport.