Technology in an Expanded Field: A Review of History of Technology Scholarship on Latin America in Selected English-Language Journals

InOne Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez uses technology to tell the history of a fictional Latin American town named Macondo.¹ The novel begins with gypsies bringing “great inventions” such as ice, magnets, a telescope, and false teeth to the tiny town. Technological innovations connect the isolated town and the outside world throughout the story, most notably through “the innocent yellow train” that brings a foreign-owned banana company, rational forms of production, armed troops, and later a massacre. García Márquez uses technology as a trope to explore solitude and connection, changing social and economic relationship, ideas of knowing