“El camino reluciente”: Carolina Coronado and the Promise of Infrastructure

Abstract: This article examines the first significant example of Carolina Coronado’s poetics of infrastructure. By means of a close and contextualized reading of the poem “A la Empresa del Ferrocarril de Extremadura,” I illuminate the multiple ways in which the author inserted herself into political, economic and cultural debates around the introduction of the railroad in her native region. A reading of the poem attentive to latent anxieties about the colonial subjugation of Spain to more technologically advanced nations reveals Coronado’s ambivalence toward infrastructural development, which brings about powerful hopes of emancipation but also fears of external domination. The author negotiates such ambivalence by imagining a socially-minded modernity wherein Extremadura becomes a global point of reference by supplementing industrial development with altruism, thus transcending the extractivist modernity and imperialism advanced by Britain and France—as well as the centralist articulation of Spain advanced by the country’s incipient national railroad network. In this way, Coronado reimagined the promise of infrastructure and dared to go beyond hegemonic interpretations of it. Lastly, the present article offers an example of the promise of infrastructure for cultural studies—i.e., the hermeneutical potential of reading for infrastructures in our examination of cultural production alongside history, politics and society—by illuminating the role of infrastructural imaginaries in advancing and/or challenging dominant narratives of progress and national unity in Spain.