Nothing captured Peruvians’ imagination during the last century more than aviation. Aeroplanes, aviators and airports populated the dreams and expectations of Peruvians very quickly, who responded accordingly, placing aviators on the national currency, naming streets after them to honour their aerial bravery, and embracing airports as privileged sites of reunion and contestation. More than automobiles, steamships and railways, aeroplanes were seen as true vehicles of progress, obscuring any other previous form of transportation and mobility developed until then and tested in the always challenging national topography. Geography seemed to be no longer an obstacle in the slow and painful integration of the country, and both authorities and citizens felt that, for the first time since Independence from the Spanish empire in the 1820s, they could finally have a sense of the national territory. Peruvians adorned aeroplanes and their human components (aviators) with an aura of invincibility and optimism that for fleeting moments offered the possibility of forgetting the enormous social and cultural barriers that had divided the country for centuries.

Willie Hiatt revives these experiences and expectations in his new book, The Rarified Air of Modernity. Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes. Based on his doctoral dissertation, the book is an original contribution to scholars interested in Latin American history and Science and Technology Studies (STS). It offers new ways to revisit national history from the perspective of the arrival, adaptation and reconfiguration of techno-systems. The chapters move chronologically from the arrival of aviation into the country until the mid-twentieth century, when commercial aviation closed the early phase marked by personal bravura and state initiatives. An epilogue summarises the no less interesting trajectory of Peruvian aviation in the latter half of the twentieth-century, which showcases a grim scenario plagued with drug trafficking, neoliberal suffocation, fatal accidents and lack of national projects. Moving away from the hagiography that has surrounded the history of aviation in the country, the book does not necessarily offer an optimistic vision of the period 1910–50. Instead, it examines how dreadful episodes such as accidents were sanitised by citizens, authorities and entrepreneurs as the necessary costs of modernisation.

One central argument of the book is that aviation was not a ‘neutral’ technology. In refusing an inherent ‘neutrality’ of aviation in Peru, the book joins an ongoing debate about the existence (or not) of agency in technology; a vivid discussion that, for instance, has been recently extended to the web by Evgeny Mozorov, among others. As the book shows, rather than treating it as a ‘neutral’ entity, various actors appropriated aviation to accomplish their personal and collective agendas. And this is where the originality of the book resides: it uses a particular technological development as an analytical tool to rethink the social, ethnic and spatial fractures of the country; fractures that planes, aviators and airports were expected to heal. By revisiting Peruvian modernisation through the lens of aviation, Hiatt brings a more nuanced view of the tumultuous path to Andean modernity while highlighting both historical episodes and actors that had been obscured by economic and political approaches. The historical divide between the coast and the highlands is better understood when we witness how regional elites from Lima and Cusco renegotiated local identities with respect to national and global scenarios through the triumphs, passing, and mourning of aviators like Jorge Chávez and Alejandro Velasco Astete.

Unlike the crowds that gathered in Lima a century ago to witness aerial acrobatics, scholars have not shared the same ‘techno-euphoria’ for the history of aviation in Peru and Latin America. Only in recent years have scholars utilised aviation to produce original and innovative approaches to illuminate local and national history. For example, in Aeropuerto Francisco Carlé de Jauja. Aportes y documentos para su historia (Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, 2003), Carlos Hurtado Ames has unearthed the unknown story of the airport located in Jauja, in the Mantaro Valley, highlighting its construction as the result of a collective effort from the local community (peasants, religious authorities, politicians) to curb isolationism and integrate the region into the emergent network of commercial aviation. Likewise, in Oía mentar la hacienda San Agustín (Convenio Andrés Bello, 2007), Elizabeth Lino Cornejo has collected oral histories from residents expelled from a shanty-town called San Agustín due to the expansion of the Jorge Chávez airport in Lima. As these works, together with Hiatt's book, demonstrate, the history of aviation sheds new light on the participation of actors whose roles in the development of technology is often ignored.

Hiatt's book joins a vibrant literature on the history of science and technology in Latin America published in English in recent years. In a similar manner to Edward Beatty's Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (California University Press, 2015) and Anna Rose Alexander's City on Fire. Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860–1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), Hiatt analyses how technology was experienced by various social groups who projected their expectations and fears in the form of techno-utopias during these decades. The author captures the mixed emotions of Peruvians in the first phase of aviation, and devotes a chapter to examine how this sensorial connection with technology led to a new bourgeois sensibility among passengers. But he is careful not to join the techno-euphoria that permeated most of the narratives on the history of aviation. In a very powerful concluding chapter, Hiatt shows the lethal side of this invention, portraying the stories of the survivors of the first accidents as well as of the civil population exposed to air raids dispatched by the government to attack the rebel city of Trujillo in 1932, four years before Guernica.