An expansive and subversive history of the Pan-American Highway.
A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America, historian Shawn William Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance.
This book journeys to the early 1920s when everyday Americans invented the idea of a road that would spread fraternity, democracy, and prosperity across the hemisphere. It looks at the commercial and geopolitical interests that shaped the highway—often with little concern for those living along its margins—and explains why the road became an escape route for millions of migrants rather than a corridor for tourists. Miller contends that the highway’s troubled past points to an unresolved future, offering insights into the growing costs of continuing down well-worn paths.
Shawn William Miller is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and author of An Environmental History of Latin America and The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro.
"What does it mean to dream a highway linking the Americas from tip to toe? Environmental historian Shawn Miller takes us there as expert guide as we make our way through Mexico, Central America, and the high Andes in vintage automobiles, on horseback, and even on foot. Somehow, we all get stuck in Panama's Darien Gap. Miller shows how the once and future Pan-American Highway has intersected with border-dissolving dreams and nationalist chest-thumping, but also with personal desires for self-realization that often end in heartbreak. Along the way, Miller reminds us how important Latin America's roads have been 'in aggregate,' that is, how successively paving nature with rocks and tar has induced profound and lasting environmental change. Dream roads rarely end in rainbows and pots of gold."—Kris Lane, editor of Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell
"Shawn Miller’s new book is both a rollicking tale of a motley collection of car dealers, congressmen, con men, and adventurers in pursuit of impractical dreams and a serious, impressively researched analysis of the politics, diplomacy, finances, and ecological impact of an incomplete, but nonetheless gigantic, infrastructure project."—J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University
"Written with clarity and subtle humor, Miller’s book provides a penetrating analysis of this unfinished continental project, examining the interplay of US geopolitical aspiration, financial corruption, transnational mobility, and the paradoxical political significance of the ecological 'gap.'"—Edward Simpson, author of Highways to the End of the World: Roads, Roadmen and Power in South Asia
"Hemispheric integration was to be materialized in the idea of a vast asphalted roadway stretching from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. At a moment when the intensive processes of horizontal infrastructure integration in South America are ongoing, and conflictual relations between North and South America have never been more acidic, this detailed, elegant history of ideas, ideologies, and the geopolitics of transportation distilled into the moving signifier of the Pan-American Highway is a landmark. Transportation history here becomes as vibrant as transnational history gets."—Susanna Hecht, coauthor of The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon
376 pp.5.5 x 8.5Illus: 29 b/w images; 1 map
9780520416932$29.95|£25.00Hardcover
May 2026