RAILWAYS POLICY, ECONOMIC REALITY AND SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS: FROM THE EVE OF PERONISM TO THE ALFONSÍN YEARS. A LOOK AROUND “ESTACIÓN PERICO”, JUJUY, ARGENTINA

Abstract

The inhabitants of Perico Community, and also those of the province of Jujuy, were witness of a railway reality that was the result of the conjunction of national policies applied to the sector, the mark of historical process in the region and the typical particularities of these spaces. Although for more than a contemporary man the early 1990’s outcome took shape of an “announced death”, they were not few those that, throughout the years, betted for a change and directed efforts to identify the obstacles and to measure the problem, looking for receptivity in public opinion and/or in the spheres of government. On the basis of the identification of individual and collective social actors voices contained in written sources (official discourses and reports, newspapers and reviews, requests lodged to public power since civil society) and also based on fragments of “railway memoirs” that subsist in some inhabitants of “Perico City”, in Jujuy, this article proposes an approximation to the impact of railways policies on singular regional economic and social realities and to the representations weaved around the situation of railway in the northern province, in a period of time that covers since the years that preceding Peronism irruption –still marked by the after-effects of global economic crisis- until the end of 1980’s, before the setting up of liberalism, without reserves, in the political and economic horizon of a great part of the leading sectors along the country, that put an end to any hope of recovery and shoring-up of the rail transport.