The Latin word infra, related to infernus, was used as both an adverb and as a preposition, meaning “below” or “beneath.” Separately, the Latin word structura, related to struess, was used as a noun to mean “a fitting together; a mode of building.” It was the French who saw fit to join these together, and, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as telegraphs and steamboats and locomotives began to propagate the geopolitical and military scenes, English followed suit. Infrastructure now exists by definition as the underlying foundation or framework of a system. In the public imagination, it encapsulates the engineering and machinations we have come up with to connect places and peoples; it conjures images of railroads, highways, government buildings, telephone wires.
I thought heavily of infrastructure as I drove up from Miami, Florida to Chicago, Illinois this past week, moving boxes and canine companion in tow. This is the fourth time I’ve driven this particular route, as I have lived in Miami for the past five and a half years, but spent my Summers with my parents in the exburbs of Chicago. This trip would be my last one, at least for the foreseeable future. This past Spring I made the difficult but necessary decision to leave my teaching position in North Miami Beach to migrate upwards.
Between the audiobook speed switching and playlist hopping, as I felt the full speed of my 2013 VW Beetle on the I-75 North, I thought of infra, and I thought of structure. I thought of the definition of this compound word I had given my AP Human Geography students last March: “the basic support systems needed to keep a society and economy running smoothly.” Our class talked about hospitals, sewage systems, power lines; how strong networks of hospitals can encourage social development; how smooth transportation routes encourage economic development. I thought about how empty those definitions and discussions sounded as I put miles of distance between myself and the city that held my hand as I took my first steps toward adulthood.
Like many diasporic families, while mine shares a singular territorial hearth, we do not have a clean or linear geographic narrative. The migration patterns of my Puerto Rican family began decades before my birth and include typical and atypical locales pertaining to our ethnicity: New York, Orlando, Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Jersey, Rochester, Buffalo, Madrid, Washington, D.C. As I grew into young adulthood and sought academic and career opportunities, I tacked more cities onto my list: Philadelphia, San Francisco. As I fell in love and allowed myself to whole-heartedly pursue a life worth settling down for (to varying degrees of success), the list grew still: Miami, Los Angeles. As such, I am intimately familiar with the infrastructure and architecture of a diasporic life: airports, layovers, gas stations, highways, railroads, busses, FaceTime, Zoom, iMessage, Instagram reels. These form the web of my lived experience, the concrete foundation on which I play hopscotch, the wires and cables I weave together to form a roof over my head.
The basic support systems needed to keep a society and economy running smoothly.
The sterility of this original definition, to me, lies in how devoid it is of the romantic and familial reality of infrastructure. Sure, the cynic in me will argue that we lined the ocean floor with cables and burned coal and cleared roads to support an economic boom, create jobs and make rich men richer through war and commerce. This is, of course, undeniable But there is a yearning in the waves and wires that carry our messages over the ocean. We built these structures - the ones that run underneath and above and around us- to shrink the time between the messages we received to tell us our family members were okay, to decrease the distance between ourselves and our beloveds.
Susan Leigh Star - distinguished American sociologist - observes that infrastructure is “frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms.” Additionally, rather than confine it to just electrical grids and sewers, she gives the term a set of properties. Among these are the following: learned as part of membership, built on an installed base, and becoming visible upon breakdown. I have experienced all three of these properties not in an academic sense, but in a personal one.
Regarding the first, learned as part of membership, she notes that “the taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice.” In other words, members of a community take for granted the rituals, routines, and objects that make up an infrastructure; there are non-spoken, agreed-upon patterns that contribute to the invisibility of the foundational systems we use. In my family, it is taken for granted that none of my closest members, the people who watched me grow up and who knew me before I was born, live in my same city and have not for quite some time now. This is true for many of us. The Instagram and WhatsApp groups, the phone calls, the routine morning and night text messages are thusly taken for granted - they are not habits we actively think about but reels we send automatically, voice notes that go without saying are to be listened to on our commutes.
Regarding the second, built on an installed base, she notes that new infrastructure builds upon the existing one: “Optical fibers run along old railroad lines.” Having inherited a migratory family tree, my networks of home are founded upon those of my predecessors. My grandmother wrote letters across oceans, I write text messages; my grandfather worked night shifts at the Long Island Railroad in the 60s working on the transit that decades later I would benefit from as I roamed the state of New York. When you grow up watching your mom pick up the landline to call her mother in Puerto Rico and spending six hours trekking the highways between Illinois and Ohio, it becomes almost embedded in you to do the same as an adult.
Regarding the last, becoming visible upon breakdown, she notes: “The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.” Long-distance relationships - whether romantic, platonic, or kindred - require consistency and intention. The weight of them, the pain of them, and the effort required for them are most noticeable when things break down: the power goes out in Puerto Rico, the signal is unstable so the text message doesn’t send, the FaceTime freezes and I cannot call you back.
When I packed up most of my worldly possessions in two suitcases and nine boxes last week, I craved a meaning I wanted to assign to my past few years in Miami, one that was more concrete than the trite, I will miss it here or this is not a good-bye, but a farewell. I settled on infrastructure. My years in Miami– driving down Biscayne, teaching in a public school built along Oleta River State Park, walking along the Miami River downtown- taught me that along with the intangibility of love coexists a concrete structure built with iron, sweat, and hands.
I miss you.
Not as in I’ll see you one day, vaguely.
As in there are 750,000 miles of sea cables on the ocean floor that make up 99% of internet traffic and allow me to FaceTime you during the mundane, the boring. The kitchen clean up and the traffic jams.
I am here even if you can’t see me right now.
Not as in I am a ghost or a poltergeist.
As in the electromagnetic waves that exist above and around us are carrying my voice over the air to your phone so you can hear me say goodnight.
I love you.
Not as in we will make plans one day.
As in the way roads exist, concretely, I will come back to you, concretely.
I love you, Miami. Not as in I will be back someday. As in the wires and iron and asphalt and glass and sand and pavement that were tenderly placed across the span of decades and centuries have made it so that I will never really leave you.