Description:

Speaker

Edisson Aguilar Torres - Sociology, Northwestern University

Title

The Delegatory State: Water infrastructure, Community and State Formation in 20th-century Colombia

Abstract

What needed to happen so that a Colombian peasant in the 1970s could open the tap and have access to running water? This talk will offer an account of the complex set of processes, decisions, policies, practices and materials on different scales that converged to that end, following the struggle of Luis Acosta, a Colombian farmer, and his community to build and maintain a small-scale water supply system. Through that case, broader questions about the relationship between infrastructure and forms of state power will be explored, arguing that there is not a necessary relation between the size of infrastructure, state centralisation, and authoritarianism.

Biography

Edisson Aguilar Torres is a historian of technology and Latin America. His research explores the interconnection between state formation and the construction of small-scale infrastructure for water supply systems in the Colombian countryside during the 20th century, as well as the global history of water treatment technologies.
His book manuscript, Pipes for the Community: Water, Infrastructure, and State Formation in Colombia, 1942–1989, challenges notions of the state as an overly centralising project that destroys local knowledge and practices by imposing large-scale infrastructures. Instead, it shows how the Colombian state decided to partially delegate water provision in rural areas to local communities, using a system that relied on state engineering, small-scale water supply systems, local management and maintenance, and Indigenous and peasant labour traditions. The rationale behind that decision combined ideals of citizenship participation with more practical concerns about the costs for the state of providing public goods directly. Insufficient investment, though, hindered full access to drinking water in the countryside, creating water inequalities that persist today. Pipes for the Community addresses the socio-technical system that came to dominate water supply in the Colombian rural areas as a way to understand the importance of small-scale technology in the landscape of modernity. Dr. Aguilar Torres has received several scholarly awards and grants, including the MA in Modern History Prize - King’s College London (2021), the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) Postgraduate & Postdoctoral Research Support Award (2022), the Hans Rausing scholarship (2020-2024) and the Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship, 2024-2025.