An airport in the Conurbano. For a historic and cultural reading of a territory in dispute

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th Century the landscape of El Palomar combined farms, smallholdings, and dairy farms, with an urban center close to the railway station. As in the rest of Buenos Aires’ suburbs –but especially here, given the relative remoteness of this town to the capital city of the district- it was the neighborhood institutions who managed the provision of urban services to the locality. Since its inception, two military institutions were key to the structuring of the territory of El Palomar, its political life and sociability patterns: the National Military Academy (Colegio Militar de la Nación) and the First Air Brigade (Primera Brigada Aérea), founded in 1912, and known since 1949 as “la Base” (“the Base”). One hundred years later, a project to inaugurate there the El Palomar Airport, for commercial air navigation, altered the local political climate. This article analyzes the disputes this project generated among the local society from a historical and cultural perspective. Through local primary sources and in-depth interviews with local inhabitants, it seeks to reinstate in the debate the socio-cultural history of la Base as a central trait of the district’s identity.