UrbanizationinColonialLatinAmerica

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Urbanization in Colonial Latin America
Article  in  Journal of Urban History · November 1981
DOI: 10.1177/009614428100800102
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27
URBANIZATION IN
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA
SUSAN MIGDEN SOCOLOW
Emory University
LYMAN L. JOHNSON
University of North Carolina
The nations of modern Latin America are dominated politically
and economically by large, rapidly expanding cities. In many
countries-Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru, for example-nearly
a third of the total national population lives in the capital city.
Despite the obvious importance of the region’s cities today and
the subsequent development of a large, if uneven, body of
scholarship dealing with the problems of contemporary urbaniza-
tion, relatively few scholars have studied the colonial antecedents
of Latin America’s urban development. In general, however, the
existing scholarship, although limited in geographical and tem-
poral coverage, does provide a strong foundation for future work.
In this article we will provide a brief overview of the
development of the colonial system of cities. After reviewing the
model for sixteenth-century urbanization, the chronology of
town founding in the New World, and the physical prototype of
the colonial city, we will discuss topics such as class structure,
economic function, and urban political life. Although this essay is
not intended as a traditional historiographical review, it will
provide a broad, if not comprehensive, review of the existing
scholarly literature. I
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 8 No. 1, November 1981 27-59
@ 1981 Sage Pubhcattons, Inc
28
ORIGINS OF THE COLONIAL CITY
Spain, the preeminent colonizer of the sixteenth century,
brought to America a culture in which the city and civilization
were coterminous. Drawing from the Latin tradition of cities,
from the experience of a rich Moslem urban civilization, and
from the strongly urban Mediterranean culture manifested in
great cities like Venice, Genoa, and Constantinople, Spaniards in
the New World could only conceive of conquest, settlement, and
colonization in terms of the founding of cities. The idea of city
and its intrinsic link with civilization, culture, and colonial
expansion would remain central to Spanish colonial society from
the era of Columbus until the beginnings of the independence
period in the nineteenth century.2 2
Spaniards had a peninsular tradition which virtually pre-
determined that the Iberian colonies would have a strong urban
component within a few years of their initial discovery of the New
World. In addition, they came into contact with, and shortly
thereafter conquered, three distinct Indian civilizations in which
important levels of urbanization were developed. Although the
Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas all conceived of their cities as
primarily ceremonial centers, an Indian tradition of urbanization
spanning two thousand years reinforced the conqueror’s pre-
disposition to settle in and organize cities. The compatibility of
Spanish and Indian assumptions and experiences gave Spanish
colonial society a profoundly urban character. These early
colonial settlements were not necessarily large or populous, but
they were certainly omnipresent. Between the founding of
Navidad by Columbus in 1492 and the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, it has been estimated that the Spaniards founded
thousands of cities and towns, placing them among the most
urban-minded of all colonizing peoples.
The foundation of towns and cities in Hispanic America can
best be described in chronological terms. Early efforts at urban
settlement were attempted in the first area to be discovered,
conquered, and colonized-the circum-Caribbean zone. Colum-
bus proved himself to be a far better navigator than city planner,
29
and both of his efforts to found settlements, Navidad (1492) and
Isabela (1493), failed. His brother Bartolome, however, relocated
the Spanish colonization effort in Hispanola to the more
accessible south coast with the initial foundation of the city of
Santo Domingo. As was the case with many Spanish and
Portuguese cities in America, Santo Domingo was soon relocated
to a more protected site by Governor Ovando after being
destroyed by a hurricane in 1502.3 Like Santo Domingo, the
history of many of these early towns reflects the instability of
original urban settlements. Of the scores of urban settlements
made in the Greater Antilles and on the Caribbean coast of
Central America and Venezuela, the majority were ultimately
abandoned because of the absence of sufficient Indian labor,
attacks by hostile Indians, or natural disasters. Many of the
settlements that survived had to be moved at least once before
more propitious conditions were secured. In the case of both
Hispanola and Cuba, ambitious efforts by early governors to
create a centrally imposed settlement pattern with Spanish towns
linking the disparate geographic regions into a coherent political
and economic system failed completely.4 Two concurrent events
in the early sixteenth century-the catastrophic loss of Indian
population to epidemic disease and flight and the opening of new,
more attractive opportunities in Mexico and Peru-left the
Caribbean Islands littered with ghost towns and failed enter-
prises.5 But one city, Santo Domingo, escaped this general
pattern of decay and abandonment and maintained a small,
stable Spanish population into the seventeenth century. Santo
Domingo’s survival is explained primarily by the rapid accretion
of imperial political functions, rather than autonomous agricul-
tural or commercial development.
With Cortes’s discovery and subsequent conquest of the Aztec
Empire, the Spanish experience in America was altered funda-
mentally. On the periphery of Lake Texcocoin the Valley of
Mexico, the invading Spaniards confronted for the first time
highly urbanized Indian societies. As recorded by Bernal Diaz,
one of Cortes’s followers, the Spaniards coming from the poor,
sparsely settled Caribbean Islands were impressed by these well-
30
ordered cities with their enormous populations.6 Tenochtitlan,
the Aztec capital, had a population of between 150,000 and
300,000, and many other Indian cities located in the region
(Cholula, Tlaxcala, Tzin Tzun Tzan, and Cempoala) had urban
populations comparable to many of the largest contemporary
European cities. As a result, the Spanish tendency to emphasize
the city as the instrument of conquest and colonization, present in
the Caribbean phase, was reinforced and given new momentum in
Meso-America.
In Meso-America the pattern of Spanish settlement was
initially determined by the preconquest organization of the
Indian societies. Spanish cities were either founded on the
remains of Indian cities (as in the case of Cortes’s decision to build
his capital on the ruins of Tenochtitlan) or were placed near
existing Indian cities so that the political and economic organiza-
tion of Indian life could be bent to Spanish ends (as with Puebla,
Oaxaca, and Guatemala). Even where Spanish towns were
founded away from large Indian populations, a closer examina-
tion reveals that they were so situated to defend the more
important cities or to serve as launching pads for Spanish attacks
on distant unpacified Indian civilizations. Charles Gibson has
pointed out that virtually all of the Spanish expeditions of
discovery and conquest were aimed at an Indian city, real or
imagined.7 He has further suggested that this tendency was
promoted not only by the desire of the conquerors to capture
large Indian populations and replicate Iberian feudal institutions,
but also by the symbolic power inherent in the capture of a city
and the resultant transfer of sovereignty.
The swift redirection of the conquest away from Meso-
America toward the Andean highlands was precipitated by
Pizarro’s rapid conquest of the fabulous Incan civilization.8 The
Incan capital of Cuzco, while considerably smaller than Tenoch-
titlan, had an estimated population of 100,000 and politically
dominated a vast empire with a well-developed urban system.
Violence and factionalism divided the conquerors and disrupted
the Spanish occupation of Peru, but Spanish authority was
quickly extended throughout the Incan realm and beyond,
31
despite the death of Pizarro and many first settlers. As in the
Meso-American case, Spanish settlers and Spanish colonial
government again tended to be located in or near Indian urban
settlements. Quito, Bogota, Cajamarca, and Vilcas were all sites
of large Indian population prior to contact. Lima, on the other
hand, was founded by Pizarro in 1535 as a new city without an
antecedent Indian population.9
The early years of Spanish colonization, then, beginning with
the establishment of Spanish towns in the Caribbean Islands and
continuing with the conquest of the Meso-American and Andean
regions, were characterized by rapid urbanization. The Spanish
founded 191 towns and cities before 1620 and 57 percent of these
foundings occurred before 1550. Two decades, 1530-1540 and
1550-1560, were the peak of town foundings.’0 Although the
colonization process in the Meso-American and Andean regions
proved less volatile than in the Caribbean, many early settlements
in these areas were also abandoned or relocated. Ralph A.
Gakenheimer has pointed out that &dquo;most of the towns of Peru
were changed in location at least once, some several times, soon
after their establishment.&dquo;&dquo; This was also true of Central
America and Mexico, particularly in the frontier areas and
mining regions.
Nevertheless, by 1600 virtually all of the major urban centers of
Spanish America had been founded-although, as in the case of
Buenos Aires (1580), some of these future urban giants were
barely surviving. Mexico City, Bogota, Quito, Lima, La Paz,
Asuncion, and Santiago were established before 1550, while
Caracas was founded in 1567. Although the network of towns
was to remain fluid within the area of Spanish settlement, the
skeleton of the region’s urban hierarchy was in place and
functioning within a short time after initial contact. Montevideo,
founded in 1726 to deter Portuguese encroachment in the Rio de
la Plata region, is the only capital city of a Spanish American
nation founded after 1600.12
Portuguese America presented a very different picture. Be-
cause of the weaker Lusitanian city culture, the dense jungles, and
the hostile Indian populations, no true cities were founded in
32
Brazil by the Portuguese until the middle of the sixteenth century,
despite discovery of the region at the turn of the century. During
the first fifty years of Brazilian experience, the period when the
primary economic activity was the exploitation of palo brazil
(Brazilwood), Portugal planted a series of &dquo;factorias&dquo; along the
coast from Pernambuco to the Rio de Janeiro area. These
outposts were little more than isolated fortified depots, rather
than even rudimentary cities. 13 Not one survived into the second
period of Brazilian colonization in the seventeenth century, the
period when plantation agriculture and cattle raising would
produce the commercial and administrative centers of the
northeast, Bahia and Pernambuco.
Most of the major cities of Spanish America were founded by
the end of the sixteenth century, while those of Portuguese
America continued to be established into the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, throughout Latin America the entire colonial
period was marked by a great degree of flux as smaller new cities
were founded and urban areas changed in relation to each other,
and in relation to the metropolis. In conceptualizing the devel-
opment of any one city or the colonial system of cities, the period
when the city reached a position of regional or interregional
dominance, or &dquo;coming of age,&dquo; is more important than the date of
its foundation. The traditional viceregal capitals of Mexico City,
Lima, and Bahia came of age in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century. To a great degree in their internal structure, urban
distribution of property, socioeconomic hierarchy, racial pat-
terns, and architecture they bore the stamp of these epochs. By
contrast, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo,
and Sao Paulo were all eighteenth-century cities. Regardless of
the date of their official founding, these cities responded to and
reflected the new economic and administrative order of the
Bourbon world or the Pombaline reforms. Because they came of
age at a later date, they never were stamped with the rigid
socioeconomic and racial hierarchies which marked even second-
ary cities that were at their apogee in the sixteenth century, such
as the viceregal capitals of Lima and Mexico City.
33
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Observers have been struck with the apparent similarity of
Spanish colonial settlements in the Americas, regardless of the
date of foundation or geographic location. The most striking
physical characteristic of these cities is their &dquo;grid-plan&dquo; or &dquo;chess
board&dquo; design, featuring square or rectangular-shaped blocks,
and streets that intersect at 90 degree angles. This gridiron plan
has been identified as one of the major characteristics of the
&dquo;classic model&dquo; Spanish American colonial city. 14 Another
important element of this model is a central plaza, composed of
one or more of these blocks and located near the geographical
center of the city. The major civic and religious buildings, the
cabildo (town council), the cathedral or church, the treasury in
administrative centers and, in some cases, arcades where retail
trade was conducted were all located on the periphery of this
plaza. Small secondary plazas (plasoletas) located in front of all
churches within the city also served as centers of commerceand
public rituals in larger towns and cities.15 Recent research by
Jorge Hardoy and others indicates that while this physical plan
was prevalent in most colonial cities, several important variations
of this classical model existed, as did other more spontaneous
models. 16
Among those cities which failed to conform to the &dquo;classic
model&dquo; were early settlements in present-day Venezuela, urban
centers which came into existence without any formal recognition
of title (such as Valparaiso), and mining centers such as Potosi
and Taxco located in terrain which made the application of the
model difficult, if not impossible. 17 The origin and development
of the gridiron plan has been much debated by scholars, and it
appears unlikely that additional work will alter significantly
current opinion. 18 The first example of a gridiron pattern is the
1502 Ovando city plan for Santo Domingo. 19 By the time of the
conquest of Mexico, the gridiron was well on its way to being
universally accepted by Spaniards as characteristic of a &dquo;proper
town,&dquo; although the model would not be fully codified until the
34
1573 Ordenanzas de Descubrimiento y Población.2° This devel-
opment was clearest in Spanish cities founded in new areas, like
Lima, or in those cases where the preconquest Indian city had a
grid layout that conformed generally to the Spanish pattern.
Conversely, frontier cities in Chile or in the northern area of
Mexico, confronted with sustained Indian military threats, were
fortified and therefore lacked the space necessary to sustain the
development of the rectilinear grid plan.21
Another factor influencing the physical nature of the colonial
Latin America city was the type of architecture adopted.22 In both
Spanish and Portuguese America, architectural styles as well as
the development of other plastic arts tended to reflect European
models. However, the fact that Spanish settlers in America did
not necessarily come from the same region of the mother country
produced architectural styles which juxtaposed and mated influ-
ences from a variety of peninsular regions. Over time these
influences fused into a generic style, but one scholar has suggested
that the architectural styles found in these colonial cities can be
studied in a manner similar to the use of strata by archeologists to
identify successive waves of new immigrants.23 The uniqueness
and value of both the art and architecture that evolved in the
major urban centers of colonial Latin America is a topic still
being debated by art historians, but plastic forms were clearly
influenced by European models.24 It is clear that the viceregal
capitals and other major cities served as cultural diffusers
spreading and imposing styles and fashions that were then
accepted in smaller regional centers within the viceregal juris-
diction.25 There is general agreement that the art and architecture
of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of America were
derivative and often pedestrian. However, given the unstable
nature of the region’s urban development, the investment of
limited, often scarce resources in monumental buildings for civic
and religious purposes indicates clearly the sense of purpose and
mission that characterized the creation of these cities.
At least as important as Latin American physical plans and
architectural styles is the question of the internal spatial relations
which characterized the towns and cities. Clearly, the colonial
35
urban agglomeration had a well-defined center, usually a plaza,
where the outward manifestations of local power were repre-
sented by the largest, most imposing local constructions. But
beyond this core, how were the residents of the area divided? Who
lived in the centers of towns, and who on the periphery? Were
barrios segregated by race, class, or occupation, or was residential
heterogeneity the rule?26
In areas of dense Indian population the Spaniards originally
intended to create two distinct urban groupings, ciudades de
espaiioles and pueblos de indios. Their success in implementing
this racially dichotomous urbanism varied greatly from region
to region and changed over time in response to demographic
changes. Economic factors, demand for readily available Indian
labor, and the decline of Indian population in the region all
worked to modify the ideal symmetry of these two worlds.27 Even
in those Spanish cities with large Indian populations, early
attempts were made by royal authorities to segregate Indians
from Spaniards. Mexico City, for example, was initially divided
into a central traza where Spaniards resided, and a group of
outlying barrios containing Indian inhabitants.28 This plan failed
to accommodate the rapid growth of the casta population
(mixed-bloods), who became increasingly important as the
Indian populations declined precipitously in the sixteenth cen-
tury.29 The appearance of these castes naturally undermined the
dual city, creating a far more complex spatial distribution by the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Ongoing research based on
the Mexico City census of 1811 suggests that by that date the city
had at least three markedly different zones: the center of the city,
comprised of large homes (ostensibly owned by wealthy Spaniards
and creoles); an intermediate zone characterized by tenement
constructions and high population density; and the zone of
traditional Indian communities on the outskirts of the city
marked by shacks, livestock enclosures, and saltpeter works.30
The gradual emergence of a primitive class-based society by the
end of the eighteenth century also produced important modifica-
tion in the spatial structure of Latin American cities. Recent
work on areas as geographically diverse as Panama City and
36
Buenos Aires suggest that a type of racial-social and occupational
segregation existed in urban centers. In general whites (both
peninsular and creole), their slaves, and those mixed-bloods
engaged in skilled artisan occupations inhabited the central
sections of the city, while the poor, often free castes or blacks
involved in more menial occupations, lived in semirural zones
which ringed the centers of the city.31
Closely related to the question of spatial organization in
colonial cities and towns is the study of the distribution of urban
property. Questions such as Church ownership of urban land, the
concentration of urban property holdings, and the economic
position of various segments of society and their ability to own
their own homes are, of course, contained in this larger rubric. To
date little research has been done on this topic. Nevertheless, the
recent publication of a study of property ownership in colonial
Mexico City by Morales should encourage new interest among
researchers.32 Morales finds that property ownership in late
colonial Mexico was highly skewed as a result of the tremendous
inequalities in this society. In general the population of Mexico
City had minimal possibilities of gaining access to property (only
1.68 percent of the Mexico City population owned any real
property). Even within this small property-owning group there
were great disparities, with a relatively large group of small
property owners and a very small group of important individuals
who controlled up to 100 different urban properties. The Church
was, to the end of the colonial period, a near monopolist of urban
property, although there is some indication that the cumulative
effects of the Bourbon reform had begun to undermine the
Church’s economic power. Conversely, secular governmental
institutions controlled a relatively small percentage of total urban
property in Mexico City.
The degree to which other cities in colonial Spanish America
replicated the limited access to property ownership found in
Mexico City has still not been investigated. Some preliminary
research on property ownership in eighteenth-century Buenos
Aires, one of the late-developing urban centers, suggests that the
Church never evolved into a major urban property owner. Not
37only did most urban real estate remain in private hands through-
out the colonial period, but ownership of property was accessible
to a large segment of the urban population. According to the 1744
census of Buenos Aires, 56 percent of the families residing in the
city owned their own homes.
In addition to research exploring the residential patterns of
colonial cities, work in family history has also added to our
knowledge of urban society by providing new insights into family
composition within a metropolitan framework. For example,
recent historiography on eighteenth-century urban families sug-
gests that single-family households were far more prevalent than
multiple-family households, although the size of these house-
holds tended to be larger than those found in Western European
cities.33 Studies of the colonial family in urban settings has also
generated new information about race relations, intermarriage,
and the socioeconomic role of women in cities. Much of this
research indicates a greater heterogeneity in family and house-
hold composition than we had previously imagined, both within
individual cities and throughout the system of cities. Many cities
in Latin America seemed to have had a female majority in their
populations, although the ability of these women to live alone or
head a household varied greatly, often depending on the race of
the woman. Probably older and more established cities had a
greater percentage of females in their population, while new
agricultural-dependent cities and mining towns were predomi-
nantly male.34
CITY TYPES
In the circum-Caribbean region, Spanish settlers and explorers
evolved the basic structural and institutional framework for
urban life. Initially most Spanish towns were little more than
temporary encampments located to exploit the labor of Indian
populations in the region’s alluvial gold deposits. In areas
vulnerable to attack by the ferocious Carib Indians, Spaniards
were forced to erect basic fortifications, or at least to fortify the
38
church or some other public building in the town center. Those
Caribbean settlements that survived the volatile period of frontier
expansion and the contemporary decline of the Indian popula-
tion tended to be centers where political and ecclesiastical
authorities were located. The Spanish experience with the rough
temporary settlements on Hispanola and Cuba, however, was put
to use in Mexico by Cortes and others. By founding a city and
creating a civic authority, the cabildo, Cortes was able to
legitimize his rebellion against the governor of Cuba and establish
more completely his authority over his followers and his Indian
allies.
The vast majority of Spanish settlements founded between
1492 and 1560 were mechanisms for the extension of central
political authority. On the symbolic level they were emblems of
Spanish domination and Indian subjugation, while on the
practical level they were military strong points from which the
conquest was pursued into uncontrolled regions. In regions where
the Spanish confronted stiff resistance from the indigenous
population, these early towns took on a decidedly military
character, erecting walls and towers. Gabriel Guarda has noted
that 50 percent of the 104 Spanish settlements founded in Chile
during the entire colonial period were military in character.35 The
Northern frontier of Mexico, where Spanish mining and stock
grazing efforts were subjected to numerous attacks by Chichi-
meca Indians, had a similar character.36 Whether fortified or not,
early Spanish settlements were characterized by informal politi-
cal authority concentrated in the hands of a caudillo like Cortes
or Pizarro, and by a primitive economy of gross spoilation and
expropriation of Indian wealth and Indian labor. The institu-
tionalization of authority and the development of regulated and
predictable mechanisms of economic exchange occurred slowly
and haltingly in the backwash of military expansion.
In a minority of cases early settlements established during the
expansive period achieved permanent status and evolved impor-
tant political and economic functions. Vera Cruz, founded as a
launching pad for Cortes’s attack on the Aztec state, became
Mexico’s major port, and during periods when the fleets arrived
the city functioned as a major commercial entrepot.
39
After the work of destruction was finished and the major
Indian societies were subjugated, many Spanish settlements
founded during the military period were relocated and reorga-
nized and the institutions of state power and church authority
were put in place. Spain divided its vast American empire into
two viceroyalties headquartered in Mexico City and Lima. These
enormous jurisdictions were, in turn, divided into ten audiencias
(royal courts), each located in a regionally dominant city. In
general all of these cities, whether initially Indian cities or
founded near Indian cities like Mexico City and Guatemala,
respectively, or new cities like Lima, have remained the most
populous and important urban centers in Spanish America.
Towns and cities, regardless of their physical size and total
population, were at the heart of Spanish and Portuguese colonial
administration. It was in urban agglomerations that the Spanish
and Portuguese stationed the representatives of royal govern-
ment and justice, that the Church centered its multifaceted
functions, and that educational institutions, hospitals, convents,
and monasteries were located.37 The level and number of secular
and clerical officials present were related directly to the status of
the city within the colonial empire. Mexico City, Lima, and the
newly created viceregal capitals of the eighteenth century differed
greatly from secondary or tertiary cities in the number and rank
of administrative officials, but all colonial cities housed some
representatives of metropolitan political authority.
In addition to these representatives of imperial authority, and
as a local extension of this same royal power, every city and town
also had agencies charged with a degree of municipal self-gover-
nance.38 The degree of autonomy experienced by these cabildos
and other agencies seems to have varied greatly according to
locale, proximity to other authorities, and changes in imperial
policy. There is little doubt, however, that the Bourbon reforms
of the eighteenth century diminished local political authority and
further centralized power in the hands of imperial officials. The
centerpiece of these reforms was the creation of the Intendent
system that improved tax collection and fiscal administration.
The gradual emergence of a police officer, as well as tighter
40
restrictions and / or new building codes, also can be traced to the
work of local Intendents.39
Although some exceptions are to be found, the commercial
organization of Spain’s empire imitated and was subordinate to
the administrative structure. The accretion of imperial adminis-
trative power, the collection and disbursion of tax revenues, and
the economic weight of bureaucratic and military payrolls
attracted population-Indian and European-and induced com-
mercial activity. As a result, there were no true, commercial
centers in the Spanish empire, and merchants and producers
played roles subordinate to the political cadre of empire.40
Royal authority moved early in the sixteenth century to
formalize the parallel development of state and commerce by
creating monopolistic merchant guilds, consulados, in Mexico
City and Lima. Legal statutes originating at the imperial center
hindered, limited, or banned outright the local production of
goods that competed with Spanish production and circumscribed
broad areas of intercolonial trade. The combined result of this
developmental process initiated by self-serving commercial classes
in the viceregal capitals and imposed by imperial policy empha-
sized artificially the trans-Atlantic exchange of European luxuries
for American minerals and exotic goods. Local commerce and
local production failedto develop adequately, and those cities
not tied to the trans-Atlantic trade were subordinated and
marginalized until the economic reforms of the eighteenth
century.41
Mining centers, although tied to these centralizing tendencies,
represent a special urban type. The most successful examples of
the mining center (Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Potosi) shared many
characteristics with administrative centers. Most specifically, the
size of the urban population, the complexity of the urban
occupational structure, the size and scale of the economy, and the
European cultural domination of city life were found in both
types of colonial cities. Mining centers, on the other hand, often
shared the volatile fluid character of the military/ entrada urban
type characteristic of the Caribbean region, because mineral
production was subject to cycles of rapid expansion and unexpec-
41
ted collapse.42 The cyclical nature of the basic economic activity
in these settlements produced wide fluctuations both in popula-
tion and levels of commercial activity. An extraordinary mineral
strike, such as that of Potosi in the sixteenth century, produced a
rate of urban growth virtually unmatched by other cities in the
region. During the period 1557-1610, the urban population of
Potosi grew from 12,000 to 160,000, making it the largest city
in the Americas.43 Just as dramatically, a significant decline in
productivity could produce rapid population contractions, or, in
some cases, the near abandonment of sites such as Congonas and
Sabara in Brazil. Even the more permanent, more populous Vila
Rica (Ouro Preto) in Brazil experienced a significant drop in
population from 20,000 to 9,000 when the gold mines declined in
the middle of the eighteenth century.44 The contribution of
mining centers to the development of Latin American urban life
was more ephemeral than was the case with administrative
centers. However, in numerous cases (Zacatecas, Guanajuato,
San Luis, Potosi, and Taxco) colonial mining centers developed
secondary-level administrative authority and regional commer-
cial functions, thus overcoming some of the cyclical tendencies in
mining by creating ancillary local economies that could survive
fluctuations in mining production.
As Spanish and Portuguese authorities succeeded in inte-
grating their American colonies more completely within an
imperial structure, and as the colonies themselves moved away
from the violent and short-term expropriation of Indian wealth
and Indian labor, settlements of all sizes throughout the region
took on a more regulated, better-organized economic life.
Regular commercial activity appeared in settlements of every size
and function. Colonial commerce was dominated initially by two
components. First, the need to supply Spanish settlements with
basic provisions that could be produced by Indian communities
was met by reorganizing indigenous rural labor systems and
landholding patterns, and by introducing new products to
complement the specialized exchange structures of the dominant
Spanish settlements.45 Second, Spanish merchants and their
agents located in the cities and towns created in the wake of the
42
conquest organized capital and labor to produce goods for the
trans-Atlantic exchange with Spain.46
The commercial problems caused by the vast expanse of
territory acquired by the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the
sixteenth century were compounded by the topography and
climate of the region. Goods traded in both colonial and
international markets had to be moved great distances over
difficult and often nearly uninhabited terrain. Thus, Spanish and
Portuguese merchants instituted an American version of the
European trade fair and other highly organized monopolistic
structures to cut losses, reduce competition, and curtail overhead.
As a result, Cartagena in Colombia, Porto Bello on the Isthmus,
and Vera Cruz went through cycles of booming trade and thriving
populations when the fleets arrived, followed by months or years
of near abandonment.47
Another form of urban development-religious settlements-
also emerged in colonial Latin America. These were basically of
two types: ecclesiastical administrative centers that housed the
ecclesiastical bureaucracy of the spiritual conquest, and mission
centers created in frontier zones. The geographic location of the
administrative structure of the Church was developed in a
symbiotic relationship with the expansion of the secular political
structure. As a result the great administrative centers of the
Spanish and Portuguese empires were centers of religious power
as well.48 This meant that rapid changes in the size of local Indian
populations occasioned by epidemics and flight, or in the
productivity of local mineral resources, could trigger the removal
of both secular and religious administrative functions. Frontier
mission centers seldom developed into important administrative
or commercial centers, although the well-organized and agricul-
turally productive Jesuit reductions of Paraguay gave economic
life to Spanish towns on their periphery until the suppression of
the order in 1767. In the area that now constitutes the Southwest
of the United States, however, mission towns developed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as defensive posts did
become significant major commercial and administrative centers.
This transition in function and scale only occurred as the U.S.
43
economy expanded westward toward the Pacific, thus providing
these small settlements with enhanced opportunities associated
with supplying the freight wagons and pack trains of the Pacific
coast trade from St. Louis.49 With the exceptions of these
missions and the early commercial importance of the Jesuit
missions in the region of Paraguay, the mission settlements of
Latin America produced no major urban centers and, along with
surviving Indian towns, provided instead the organizational
bases for rural village life.50
The secular equivalent of the mission settlement was the
presidio or frontier fort. These small garrison settlements, usually
inhabited by a handful of irregular troops, their families, and
often petty retailers dealing in Indian goods and inexpensive
luxuries like tobacco, common cloth, and rough implements such
as knives, proliferated on the Northern border area of Mexico
(Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Texas), in the pampean area of
Argentina (Pergamino, Chascomus, Lujan), and in Chile. Few of
these military settlements developed into cities of any real
significance before the nineteenth century.
The development of cities in colonial Brazil followed a
different pattern. Brazil lacked larged sedentary Indian popula-
tions, and early colonists found no well-developed Indian
production and trade network that could be redirected and
expropriated for their benefit. By the middle of the sixteenth
century, Portuguese settlers began to develop plantation produc-
tion, especially of sugar in the Northeast. The plantation
economy favored the development of a few coastal ports, which
also served as administrative centers, such as Salvador da Bahia.
Urban places in Brazil also tended to be dominated politically by
the planter class. Paradoxically, because of their coastal location,
with its easier accessibility to British, French, and Dutch
shipping, urban-based Portuguese merchants never enjoyed
either the social ascendency or commercial monopoly of their
Spanish contemporaries. 51 In Brazil, as in the United States, cities
developed during the process of occupation by gradual settle-
ment, rather than following a dramatic conquest. The geography
of Brazil presented relatively fewer obstacles to settlement, and
44
cities were located so as to exploit land and mineral resources or
to develop trans-Atlantic trade. Early settlements, except those
engaged in mining, experienced less of the violent pressures of
growth and contraction so characteristic of the Spanish Carib-
bean, the Caribbean coast of South America, and Mexico. City
plans in Brazil showedlittle of the careful planning and organiza-
tion found in Spanish colonial cities. Instead of grids and plazas,
Portuguese settlements in Brazil rambled up hillsides and around
shorelines. The more anarchic tendencies of the settlers were
compounded by the absence of any effort by the Portuguese
crown to make the urbanization process more uniform and well
ordered.52
In both Portuguese and Spanish America, another variation of
urban settlement, the runaway slave community, was also
found.53 By definition, these slave strongholds were outside of
the Iberian colonial world, for they were communities set up
beyond the fringes of the colonial power structure in areas where
runaway slaves hoped to evade recapture. Nevertheless, these
communities were numerous, widespread, and often long-lasting.
Runaway slave communities appeared in the Hispanic world
within the first thirty years of colonization, and were eventually
found throughout the Caribbean and in Brazil, Peru, and
Mexico. Although the most famous maroon community, Pal-
mares in Brazil, was destroyed during the seventeenth century,
some runaway towns successfully thwarted Spanish efforts to
destroy them for more than two hundred years.
An understanding of the development of the system of colonial
cities in Spanish and Portuguese America requires knowledge of
the region’s demographic history. Demographic development in
this region was characterized by cyclical and secular features that
often controlled the location and subsequent growth of urban
centers. There is much disagreement among scholars of pre-
conquest demography about the size of the Indian populations
that inhabited the Americas prior to first contact. The Amerin-
dian population of Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean
clearly experienced a traumatic and precipitous decline from 1492
on, occasioned by the introduction of European diseases, war,
45
and famine. Within fifty years of the first European contact in
1492, the indigenous population of the Caribbean had virtually
disappeared.54 In Mexico the preconquest population of 25
million declined to under a million in less than a century.55 A
similar, but less catastrophic, decline also took place in the Incan
realms of Andean South America.56
Regardless of the actual size of the precontact population and
the precision of the estimates of the surviving populations, the
sixteenth century decrease in Indian population was catastrophic.
The loss of Indian population affected every area of colonial life.
Many Spanish cities and towns organized in the sixteenth century
to exploit the surplus product and surplus labor of Indian
populations were permanently damaged by this demographic
collapse. The decline of Indian population was clearly com-
pounded and accelerated by Spanish efforts to urbanize the
Indian populations in reducciones or towns. Concentrated in
these hostile locales and subjected to overwork and inadequate
diet, Indians quickly fell victim to epidemic disease. In the
Caribbean zone, only those predominately coastal towns that
could be reorganized to serve the needs of trans-Atlantic trade or
that had well-established administrative and ecclesiastical func-
tions remained significant urban places after the decline in Indian
population. The decline also worked to enhance the competitive
advantages of administrative / commercial centers like Mexico
City and Lima and mining centers like Potosi and Zacatecas with
their large European and mestizo populations. As the Indian
economy declined, the colonial economy increasingly specialized
in mining production, export agriculture (sugar, cacao, dye
stuffs), and local production that serviced these export areas
(mules, provisions, ships’ stores). As a result the system of cities
that emerged in the seventeenth century after population leveled
off was more streamlined and hierarchical in terms of rank size,
function, and political power.
The loss of Indian population increased, in turn, the propor-
tional political and economic importance of the rapidly expand-
ing caste population. In the face of these changes in the racial
composition of the colonial population, Spanish intentions to
46
create and sustain separate Indian and Spanish communities were
abandoned, as were labor systems like Indian slavery and the
encomienda that required abundant Indian populations. Efforts
to codify racial hierarchies, the Régimen de Castas, were
overwhelmed by the proliferation of racial types, the homoge-
nizing process of religious conversion, and, most important,
cultural assimilation. At least in the colonial urban centers of the
Spanish New World, a single economy and a single culture
organized and controlled the lives of phenotypically diverse
groups. Only in rural areas where large Indian populations
survived in near isolation from the colonial economy and culture
(Andean highlands, Chiapas) did heterogeneous, binary eco-
nomic structures and cultural forms remain intact.57
In the circum-Caribbean area, in Brazil, and in the coastal
zones of Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, plantation labor needs
were met by importations of African slaves. Increasingly Negro
slaves were used also in mining centers such as Potosi and in the
Mexican Bajio as Indian population declined. By the mid-
seventeenth century Africans and their various creole succes-
sors-mulattoes, zambos, ladinos-were important population
components in every major city of Latin America.58 The decline
of Indian population reached its nadir by the middle of the
seventeenth century, and from that point on Indian, European,
and caste populations in general entered a lengthy period of
growth that through the process of rural migration sustained the
urban populations of the regions despite high mortality rates. In
response to the dynamic economic expansion of the eighteenth
century, a new wave of Spanish immigrants and a massive new
level of slave imports entered and contributed importantly to the
urban growth of Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Santiago.59 In
Brazil, by contrast, the eighteenth-century expansion of the
mining frontier into Minas Gerais was met both by the relocation
of existing population away from the declining plantation zone of
the northeast and by the importation of additional slaves.
Africans and their creole and miscegenated progeny, however,
always represented a larger, more important sector of urban
society in Brazil than in the Spanish colonies, with the possible
exception of the Caribbean.
47
There is substantial disagreement about the colonial urban
social stratification system which developed in Latin America.
The early literature tended to identify vestiges of feudal organiza-
tion and view social organization as precapitalist. The counter-
point to this analysis has been provided by Marxists, who have
argued for a clear class system organized by relationship to the
means of production. More recently, important new contribu-
tions to our understanding of race relations and the role of race
in determining social relationships have been made, but there is
still no fundamental agreement on the general social structure or
the ordering or functioning of the component parts.
Part of the disagreement about the nature of urban society
results from a failure to appreciate the diversity of colonial cities.
Nevertheless, some common patterns are emerging. Clearly the
early stratification system in Latin America was imposed by the
violent impact of the conquest itself. The initial structure, defined
by culture and race, was one of conquerors and conquered.60
Even in those areas where Africans were an important factor in
the early period, the basic social dichotomy was pervasive. Urban
places, however, quickly overwhelmed this dichotomous strati-
fication system. While the strict social dichotomy survived to the
end of the colonial period in the countryside, the social reality of
the cities reflected greater complexity. The simultaneous explo-
sion of miscegenation and rapid cultural assimilation created
middlegroups in the urban stratification system, groups that were
given function and permanence by the development of the urban
economy with its need for specialized producers, domestic and
service sectors, marketing, and trans portatio n.61 The importation
of the sixteenth-century Iberian corporate structure to the
viceregal capitals of Lima and Mexico City succeeded in trans-
planting the stable social order of the Old World and provided
a means of identifying the racial and cultural components
of these cities with functional roles in the economy. In these
cities, service and domestic needs were filled by Indians and
Negroes; transportation and petty retailing by mestizos; and
lower levels of artisan production were dominated by mulat-
toes.62 The major cities of the Hispanic colonial world were the
48
foci of the myriad institutions which reflected the corporate social
ideal. The Consulado, gremios, urban militia units, religious
organizations such as cofradias, Hermandades, and Third Orders
all tended to be located in important regional centers.63 As cities
grew or constricted, and then became more or less important
within their regional nexus, their role as centers of this type of
corporate activity also changed. In addition, those cities which
experienced great growth during the late Bourbon period were
often more constrained in the rapidity with which secular
corporations were put into place, in part because of the hesitancy
of the Bourbon centralizers to grant semiautonomous authority
to any group of individuals, in part because these secular
corporations no longer reflected the socioeconomic realities of
the newer cities. Most secondary cities, such as Buenos Aires,
Caracas, Havana, Bogota, and Asuncion, received less perfect
versions of the social corporate order and consequently were
always more open to mobility by those who could accumulate
wealth. In these cities historians have found the best evidence for
class, as opposed to corporate or racial, organization.
By the eighteenth century, however, cities in Latin America
were universally discarding vestiges of corporate organization,
even in Mexico City and Lima. The economic expansion of this
period produced a stratification system based more openly on
wealth and consumption.64 This is not to suggest that anything
approaching an open, competitive society evolved. Positions at
the top of the religious, political, and economic hierarchies
continued to be held by white Europeans, although some
positions of real importance in the economy (particularly in the
agricultural sector) were held by creoles and even some light-
skinned castes.65 The legal authority and economic power of the
functional components of the corporate order like guilds and
consulados, however, were decaying rapidly.66 As a result,
wealth, not membership in a corporate body, increasingly defined
status in urban places. As arenas where contestants openly sought
place and advantage, these cities were increasingly violent and
unpredictable places as the colonial period ended.67 One mani-
festation of this process of social and economic damage was the
49
obvious decay in legally sanctioned labor systems that organized
and controlled Indian and Negro workers-the repartimiento
system and chattel slavery-and the rapid development in cities
of wage labor.
These changes-the decay of corporate forms, the increased
importance of wage labor, and the development of a stratification
system organized by the distribution of wealth-developed most
quickly and most completely in those cities on the periphery of
early colonial development and expansion, such as Buenos Aires,
Santiago, Caracas, and, less obviously, Havana. The preeminent
cities of the sixteenth century, Lima and Mexico City, and the
provincial commercial and administrative centers like Cordoba,
Oaxaca, and the cities of Central America developed these
tendencies more slowly because the corporate structures were
more firmly implanted and because the generally dynamic
expansion of the colonial economy in the eighteenth century was
felt less directly.
The overwhelming urban-centric nature of the Iberian New
World should not lead us to an overly optimistic view of life
within these cities. Despite the grandeur of some churches and
municipal buildings, and the opulence of the homes of the leading
citizens in the area’s viceregal capitals, the vast majority of city
dwellers in colonial Latin America lived in shabby dwellings, the
casitas de un cuarto, lacking rudimentary sanitation and hygiene.
Periodic epidemics occurred often in larger cities and small
towns, while a high level of endemic disease also seems to have
been present in most urban centers.68 Some cities were plagued by
natural disasters, often the result of their location close to active
volcanos or along flood plains, while others experienced civil
disorders or other internal breakdowns provoked in general by
technological or bureaucratic mismanagement. Recent research
on Mexico City has uncovered a series of seventeenth-century
episodes in which some form of social or economic stress
produced urban breakdown or riot.69
Although incidents of urban breakdown in large urban centers
seem more evident in the seventeenth century, smaller cities also
experienced repeated outbreaks of urban violence during the
50
eighteenth century. The root causes of these disturbances varied
greatly from one incident to the next, but most outbreaks were
ultimately related to either problems of food supply and resultant
food shortages or mistreatment of Indian and / or black popula-
tions. Fear of social unrest and problems in the supply and price
of basic commodities ran like a liet-motif through the cabildo
minutes of virtually every Spanish American city. Municipal
authorities, because they lacked the power or desire to funda-
mentally change the colonial socioeconomic system, seemed
unable to deal effectively with these threats. Recurrent agricul-
tural crises, disruptions in transportation, or manipulation of the
marketplace aggravated the basic problem of provisioning urban
centers. As a result, sporadic attempts were made either to
reorganize the supply system itself or to tighten municipal control
over those groups charged with producing, processing, or
marketing basic foodstuffs.70 Periods of rapid growth in urban
population, especially in the eighteenth century, compounded the
structural problems of foodstuff supply. In responding to this
vital problem, municipal authorities usually relied on one of two
traditional solutions: establishment of public granaries and / or
establishment and attempted control of baker’s guilds. Needless
to say, both expedients were failures.71
Questions of supply of basic foodstuffs are closely related to
the function of the colonial city as a primary market for the
products of a city’s hinterland. Demographic growth of cities
triggered an increase in the production in those rural areas tied to
the city, the so-called food sheds which supported all urban
centers. The relationship between a city and its hinterland also
involved the movement of capital, credit, manufactured articles,
political decisions, cultural influence, and people themselves. 72
Clearly urban growth or shrinkage could serve as a major
influence in the future of entire regional economies.
Intrinsic to the above discussion is the idea of change. From the
end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth,
Spanish America gradually evolved from a world peppered with
cities and towns in which two capitals (and later one mining
center) clearly outranked and overpowered all else to a continent
51
with many competing centers of power. Paradoxically, the
proliferation of powerful local centers was a result of the same
series of Bourbon administrative and economic reforms which
were also perceived as depriving moribund city corporations of
their independence. While attempting to improve and centralize
control of Spanish America, the Bourbon reforms shatteredthe
overwhelming preeminence of the old viceregal capitals, multi-
plying their number. We suggest that, unwittingly, the late
Bourbons were also creating a number of cities that, once they
became centers of political discontent, became far more difficult
to control. This is, in part, what happened after the Napoleonic
invasion of Spain. In the seventeenth century, to control its
colonies the Crown had only to control Mexico City and Lima.
Threat of a revolt from a peripheral city such as Buenos Aires
would have posed little danger to the survival of the Empire, since
cities of the size and position of Buenos Aires were by definition
of little importance. But by the early nineteenth century, the
fracturing of imperial power among a series of medium-size cities
made each one a more potent threat. What is striking about the
role of cities in the Independence Period is that the movement
begins in Buenos Aires, spreads to other similar cities such as
Santiago, Caracas, Bogota, Guayaquil, and is well on its way to
complete success before Mexico City or Lima become involved.
The city was clearly a pivotal factor in the development of
colonial Latin America. Additional research into the economic
and social dynamics of the city would be much welcomed. We
believe that this work should concentrate on the social, economic,
and physical structure of individual cities and groups of cities.
The idea of a system of cities is a relatively new one in Latin
American history, and one that should be fully explored. Not
only cities which were in close geographical proximity, but cities
which shared economic and social characteristics should be
viewed in conjunction with one another. In addition, more
attention must be given to the development of the colonial city
over time, to its growth and / or contraction, to the emergence of
new social groups, new property owners, and new economic
patterns. We have attempted to present city &dquo;types&dquo; and a new
52
periodization which emphasizes the rise of cities to local pre-
dominance. We look forward to a continuing discussion on the
history and role of the city in colonial Latin America.
NOTES
*Notes provided with this text are not intended to corroborate or prove the opinions
and suggestions offered by the authors. The sources noted here are relevant materials for
readers who wish to pursue further the topics covered in the text. These listings are not
comprehensive; rather, they have been selected because they are novel, important, or likely
to have been missed by the nonspecialist.
1. The most up-to-date bibliographies for colonial Latin American urban history
include Martin H. Sable, "Urban History," in Latin American Urbanization (Metuchen,
N.Y., 1971), 201-246; Francisco de Solano, "El Proceso Urbano Iberoamericano desde sus
orígines hasta los principios del siglo XIX: Estudio Bibliográfico," in Francisco de
Solano, ed., Estudios sobre la ctudad iberoamericana (Madnd, 1975), 727-866. Richard
M. Morse’s forthcoming article, "The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America,"
in the Cambridge History of Latin America provides a good overview and bibliographic
essay.
Since 1966 much of the ongoing research in Latin American urban history has been
presented at Symposia on Latin American Urbanization from its Origins to Our Time held
concurrently with meetings of the International Congress of Americanists. In addition to
brief synopses which appear in the published proceedings of the Americanists’ meetings,
papers dealing with urban topics have also appeared in individual volumes: J. E. Hardoy
and Richard P. Schaedel, EI proceso de urbanización en América desde sus origmes hasta
nuestros días (Buenos Aires, 1969), papers from the First Symposium (37th Americanists
Congress) held at Mar del Plata, 1966; Jorge E. Hardoy, Erwin W. Palm, and Richard P.
Schaedel, eds., "The Process of Urbanization in America since its Origins to the Present
Time," in Verhandlungen des XXX VIII Internationalen Amerikanisten Kongresses, Vol.
4 (Stuttgard-Munchen, 1972), papers from the Second Symposium (38th Americanists
Congress) held at Stuttgart, 1968; Richard P. Schaedel et al., Urbanización y proceso
social en América (Lima, 1972), papers from the Third Symposium (39th Americanists
Congress) held in Lima, 1970; Jorge E. Hardoy and Richard P. Schaedel, eds., Las
ciudades de América Latina y sus áreas de influencia a través de la historia (Buenos Aires,
1975), papers from the Fourth Symposium (40th Americanists Congress) Rome, 1972;
Jorge E. Hardoy and Richard P. Schaedel, eds., Asentamientos urbanos y organización
socioproductiva de la historia de América Latina (Buenos Aires, 1977), papers from the
Fifth Symposium (41st Americanists Congress) Mexico, 1974; Jorge E. Hardoy, Richard
E. Morse, and Richard P. Schaedel, Ensayos histórico-social sobre la urbanización en
América Latina (Buenos Aires, 1978), papers from the Sixth Symposium (42nd
Americanists Congress) Paris, 1976. Publication of the papers from the Seventh
Symposium held in Vancouver in 1979 is planned. In addition, papers selected from the
first four symposia have been published in Richard P. Schadedel, Jorge E. Hardoy, and
53
Nora S. Kinzer, eds., Urbanization in the Americas from its Beginnings to the Present
(The Hague, 1978).
Other collections which contain essays on colonial Latin American urban history
include Francisco de Solano, ed., Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana (Madrid, 1975);
Edward E. Calnek et al., Ensayos sobre el desarrollo urbano de México (Mexico, 1974).
Historia Mexicana 21 (January-March 1972) is devoted to demographic history, but many
of the articles also relate to colonial urban history. Historia Mexicana 22 (October-
December 1972) is a special issue on urban history.
2. José Luis Romero, Latinoamerica: las ciudades y las ideas (Buenos Aires, 1976);
Richard M. Morse, "A Prolegomenon to Latin American Urban History," Hispanic
American Historical Review 52 (1972), 359-394; Frédéric Mauro, "Preeminence Urbaine
et Reseau Urbain dans l’Amerique Coloniale," in Schaedel et al., Urbanizacidn y proceso
social en América, 115-131.
3. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley, 1966).
4. J. M. Houston, "The Foundation of Colonial Towns in Hispanic America," in R.
P. Beckinsale and J. M. Houston, Urbanization and Its Problems, Essays in Honour of E.
W. Gilbert (Oxford, 1968), 352-390.
5. Sauer, Spanish Main; James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca (Austin, 1972).
6. Bernal Diáz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain (London, 1963).
7. Charles Gibson, "Spanish-Indian Institutions and Colonial Urbanism in New
Spain," in International Congress of Americanists, 37, Mar del Plata, 1966, Actas y
Memorias, Vol. I, 225-240.
8. John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York, 1970); James Lockhart,
Spanish Peru, 1532-1560 (Madison, 1968).
9. Juan Bromley and José Barbagelata, Evolucidn urbana de la ciudad de Lima
(Lima, 1945).
10. See Carlos Meléndez Chaverri, "Ciudades fundadas en la América Central en el
siglo XVI," Anuario de estudios centroamericanos 3 (1977), 57-80 for a detailed listing of
cities founded in this part of Spanish America; and A. C. van Ocs, "Comparing Colonial
Bishoprics in Spanish South America," Boletin de estudios latinoamericanos y del Caribe
(Amsterdam) 27 (1978), 27-66 for a quick summary of the process of settlement.
For more detailed studies on the founding of cities see Julia Hirschberg, "La fundación
de Puebla de los Angeles—mito y realidad," Historia Mexicana 28 (1978), 185-223; and
Gabriel Guarda, "Tres reflexiones en torno a la fundación de la ciudad indiana," in de
Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, 89-106.
11. Ralph A. Gakenheimer, "Decisions of Cabildo on Urban Physical Structure," in
Hardoy and Schaedel, El proceso de urbanización en Américadesde sus origenes hasta
nuestros días, 243.
12. L. M. Zawiska, "Fundación de las ciudades hispanoamericanas," Boletin del
Centro de Investigaciones Histdricas y Estéticas (Universidad Central de Venezuela) 13 
(1972), 88-128.
13. Eulalia Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, "El papel comercial by financiero de las ciudades
en la América Latina de los siglos XVIII y XIX," in Hardoy, Morse, and Schaedel,
Ensayos histórico-sociales sobre la urbanización en América Latina, 219-248.
14. George M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage (New
York, 1960), chapter on "Cities, Towns and Villages: The Grid-Plan Puzzle," 34-49.
15. Jorge E. Hardoy, "El modelo clásico de la ciudad colonial hispanoamericana," in
Verhandlungen, 143-181.
54
16. Jorge E. Hardoy, "La forma de las ciudades coloniales en la América española," in
D. Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana 315-344.
17. Horst Hartung, "Ciudades Mineras de México: Taxco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas,"
in Verhandlunger, 183-187; Graziano Gasparini, "Formación de ciudades coloniales en
Venezuela: Siglo XVI," Boletin del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Estéticas
(Universidad Central de Venezuela) 10 (1968), 9-43; Woodrow Borah, "European
Cultural Influence in the Formation of the First Plan for Urban Centers that has Lasted to
Our Time," in Schaedel et al., Urbanización y proceso social en América, 35-54.
18. For a more detailed discussion of "gridiron" scholarship see Richard M. Morse,
"The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America," forthcoming in the Cambridge
History of Latin America.
19. Z. Nuttal, "Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying Out of New Towns," His-
panic American Historical Review 4 (1921), 743-753; E. W. Palm, Los monumentos
arquitectónicos de la Española, 2 Vols. (Santo Domingo, 1955).
20. For an English version of the Ordenanzas see Dora P. Crouch and Alejandro I.
Mundigo, "The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited," Town
Planning Review 48 (1977), 247-268.
21. Gabriel Guarda, "Influencia militar en las ciudades del Reino de Chile," in Hardoy
and Schaedel, El proceso de urbanización, 261-302.
Much of the discussion on the physical plans of colonial cities has been based on the
study of extant plans and maps. For an interesting review of colonial cartography see
Jorge E. Hardoy, "La cartografía urbana en América Latina durante el periodo colonial.
Un análisis de fuentes," in Ensayos histórico-sociales sobre la urbanización en América
Latina, 19-58. Several examples of colonial maps are reproduced in Javier Aguilera Rojas,
comp. Urbanismo español en América. Reports of research analyzing little-known
provincial town plans for sixteenth-century Mexico are Donald Roberton, "Provincial
Town Plans from Late Sixteenth Century Mexico," and Peter Tschohl, "Las Informa-
ciones del Plano de Cholula en la Relación de Gabriel de Rojas de 1581," in Verhandlungen,
123-129 and 141; and George A. Kubler, "The Colonial Plan of Cholula" in Hardoy and
Schaedel, El proceso de urbanización, 209-239.
22. Sidney David Markman, Colonial Architecture of Antigua Guatemala (Phila-
delphia, 1966), and George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 2nd
ed. (Westport, Conn., 1972). Leonardo Benevolo, "Las nuevas ciudades fundadas en el
siglo XVI en América Latina: Una experiencia decisiva para la historia de la cultura
arquitectónica del ’Cinquecento,’" Boletin del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y
Estéticas (Caracas) 9 (1968), 117-136.
23. Erwin Walter Palm, "The Art of the New World After the Spanish Conquest,"
Diógenes 47 (1964), 63-74.
24. Graziano Gasparini, La arquitectura colonial en Venezuela (Caracas, 1965);
Héctor Velarde, Arquitectura peruana (Mexico, 1946).
25. Erwin Walter Palm, "La ciudad colonial como centro de irradiación de las
escuelas arquitectónicas y pictóricas," in Schaedel et al., Urbanización y proceso social en
América, 387-391; Graziano Gasparini, "La ciudad colonial como centro de irradiación de
las escuelas arquitectónicas y pictóricas," in ibid., 373-386.
26. David J. Robinson, "Córdoba en 1779: La ciudad y la campaña," Gaea (Buenos
Aires) 17 (1979), 279-312.
27. For detailed information on the location of Indian towns see Peter Gerhard,
"Congregaciones de indios en la Nueva España antes de 1570," Historia mexicana 26
55
(1977), 347-395; Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain
(Cambridge, 1972); The Southeast Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, 1979). See also
Sidney D. Markman, "Pueblos de españoles y pueblos de indios en el Reino de
Guatemala," Boletin del Centro de Investigaciones Histdricas y Estéticas 12 (1971), 76-97;
and de Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, 241-268.
28. Charles Gibson, "Spanish-Indian Institutions and Colonial Urbanism in New
Spain," Actas y Memorias, 225-240.
29. For an excellent discussion of the role of the city in promoting miscegenation see
Claudio Esteva Fabregat, "Población y mestizaje en las ciudades de iberoamerica: Siglo
XVIII," in de Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad, 551-604.
30. Alejandra Moreno Toscano and Carlos Aguirre Anaya, "Migrations to Mexico
City in the Nineteenth Century: Research Approaches," Journal of Interamerican Studies
and World Affairs 17 (1975), 27-42.
31. Omar Jaén Suárez, "La ville de Panama au XVIIIe siècle: architecture et propiété
urbaine en 1756," Cahiers des Ameriques Latines 7 (1973), 371-398; Lyman L. Johnson
and Susan Migden Socolow, "Population and Space in Eighteenth Century Buenos
Aires," in David J. Robinson, ed., Social Fabric and Spatial Structure in Colonial Latin
America, (Ann Arbor, 1979), 339-368.
32. María Dolores Morales, "Estructura urbana y distribución de la propiedad en la
ciudad de México en 1813," Historia Mexicana 25 (1976), 363-402.
33. Donald Ramos, "City and Country: The Family in Minas Gerais, 1804-1838,"
Journal of Family History 3 (Winter 1978), 361-375.
34. Silvia M. Arrom, "Marriage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811," Journal of Family
History 3 (Winter 1978), 376-39 1; Donald Ramos, "Marriage and the Family in Colonial
Vila Rica," Hispanic American Historical Review 55 (May 1975), 200-225.
35. Guarda, "Influencia militar," 262; Eugene H. Korth, Spanish Policy in Colonial
Chile (Stanford, 1968).
36. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians, and Silver (Berkeley, 1969).
37. Research on specific urban-based institutions include Juan Bautista Olaechea
Labayen, "El Colegio de San Juan de Letrán de Méjico," Anuario de Estudios Americanos
29 (1972), 585-596; Dorothy T. de Estrada, "The ’Escuelas Pias’ of Mexico City: 1786-
1820," The Americas 31 (July 1974), 51-71; Jorge Ignacio Rubio Mañe, "Colegios en
Mérida de Yucatán durante los siglos XVII y XVIII," Revista de la Universidad de
Yucatdn 14 (1972), 36-67; Maria Justina Sarabia Viejo, "Notas Sobre el Hospital del
Amor de Dios de México en el siglo XVI," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 30 (1973),
295-313; Susan Soeiro, "The Social and Economic Role of the Convent: Women and Nuns
in Colonial Bahia, 1677-1800," Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (May 1974), 209-
232 ; Ricardo Archila, "La medicina y la higiene en la ciudad," in de Solano, Estudios
sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, 655-685.
38. Louisa Hoberman, "Bureaucracy and Disaster: Mexico City and the Flood of
1629," Journal of Latin American Studies, 6 (1976) 211-230. For recent work on cabildos
in Indian towns see Francisco de Solano, "Autoridades municipales indígenas de Yucatán,
1657-1677," Revista de la Universidad de Yucatán 17 (1975), 65-128.
39. Eduardo Báez Macias,"Ordenanzas para el establecimiento de Alcaldes de Barrio
en la Nueva España; ciudades de México y San Luis de Potosi," Boletin del Archivo
General de la Nacidn (Mexico) 10 (1969), 51-125; Delfina López Sarrelangue, "La policia
de la ciudad de México en 1788," in de Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana,
227-240; Jack D. L. Holmes, "Vidal and Zoning in Spanish New Orleans, 1797,"
Louisiana History 14 (Summer 1973), 270-282.
56
40. Louisa S. Hoberman, "Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A
Preliminary Portrait," Hispanic American Historical Review 57 (1977), 479-503; Susan
M. Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires 1778-1810: Family and Commerce
(Cambridge, 1978).
41. Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860 (Cam-
bridge, 1979); Eduardo Arcila Farias, Economia colonial de Venezuela, 2 vols. (Caracas,
1973); Gabriel Guarda, La ciudad chilena del siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires, 1968).
42. Ralph A. Gakenheimer, "The Early Colonial Mining Town: Some Special
Opportunities for the Study of Urban Structure," in Schaedel et al., Urbanización y
proceso social en América, 359-371; Richard Garner, "Problèmes d’une Ville Minière
Mexicaine à la Fin de l’Époque Cononiale: Prix et salaires à Zacatecas (1760-1821),"
Cahiers des Ameriques Latines 6 (1972), 75-111.
43. Kingsley Davis, "Colonial Expansion and Urban Diffusion in the Americas,"
International Journal of Comparative Sociology 1 (1960), 54; Lewis Hanke, The Imperial
City of Potosí (The Hague, 1956); Lewis Hanke, "What Needs to be Done on the History
of Potosi," Verhandlungen, 77-85; Peter J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in
Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1564-1700 (Cambridge, 1976).
44. Donald Ramos, "Vila Rica: Profile of a Colonial Brazilian Urban Center," The
Americas 35 (1979), 495-526.
45. William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford), 1972);
Francisco de Solano, "Política de concentración de la población indígena (1500-1800):
objetivos, proceso, problemas, resultados," in J. E. Hardoy and R. P. Schaedel, eds.,
Asentamientos urbanos y organización socioproductiva en la historia de América Latina
(Buenos Aires, 1977), 89-112; Félix Aubillaga, "Urbanización y labor misional entre los
pueblos de indios nómados del norte de México," in de Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad
iberoamericana 269-290.
46. Josep M. Barnadas, Characas, 1535-1565 (La Paz, 1973); Murdo J. MacLeod,
Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley, 1973).
47. For a discussion of trade fairs see Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and
Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 (Bloomington, 1979); William L. Schurz, The Manila Galleon
(New York, 1959); Allyn C. Loosley, "The Puerto Bello Fairs," Hispanic American
Historical Review 13 (August 1933), 314-335.
48. A. C. van Ocs, "Comparing Colonial Bishoprics," 27-66; Robert Richard, The
Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley, 1966).
49. Alicia Vidaurreta, "Evolución urbana de Texas durante el siglo XVIII," in de
Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, 605-636; Lawrence and Lucia Kinnaird,
"Secularization of Four New Mexican Missions," New Mexico Historical Review 54
(1979), 35-51; Robert Ryal Miller, "New Mexico in Mid-Eighteenth Century: A Report
Based on Governor Vélez Capuchín’s Inspection," Southwestern Historical Quarterly
79 ( 1975), 166-181.
50. Magnus Morner, "The Guarani Missions and the Segregation Policy of the
Spanish Crown," Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (Rome) XXX (1961); Ramón
Gutiérrez, "Estructura urbana de las misiones jesuíticas del Paraguay," in Hardoy and
Schaedel, Asentamientos, 129-153.
51. Stuart B. Schwartz, "Cities of Empire: Mexico and Bahia in the Sixteenth
Century," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs (1969), 616-637.
52. Carmen Aranovich, "Notas sobre urbanización colonial en la América portu-
guesa," in de Solano, Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, 383-398.
57
53. Patrick J. Carroll, "Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave
Community, 1735-1827," Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977), 488-505;
Patrick Carroll and Aurelio de los Reyes, "Amapa, Oax: Pueblo de Cimarrones," Boletin
del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (Mexico) 2 (1973), 43-50; Stuart B.
Schwartz, "The mocambo: Slave Resistance in Colonial Bahia," Journal of Social History
3 (Summer 1970), 313-333.
54. Sherbourne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 3 vols.
(Berkeley, 1971-1979); David Henige, "On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History
as Higher Mathematics," Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (May 1978), 217-237;
R. A. Zambardino, "Critique of David Henige’s ’On the Contact Population of
Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics,’" Hispanic American Historical Review 58
(November 1978), 700-712.
The fragmentary and incomplete sources available for study of the issue limit the
ability of scholars to estimate the populations, and the ideological and methodological
disagreements among the participants in the debate have compounded the problem.
Woodrow Borah, Sherbourne Cook, and Lesley Byrd Simpson have contributed
enormously to our knowledge of the demography of Central America, Mexico, and the
Caribbean.
55. Woodrow Borah and Sherbourne F. Cook, The Aboriginal Population of Cen-
tral Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, (Berkeley, 1963).
56. Angel Rosenblat, La población indígena y el mestizaje en América, 2vols. (Buenos
Aires, 1954); Rosenblat, La población de América en 1492 (Mexico City, 1967); Noble
David Cook, "La población indígena en el Perú colonial," Anuario del Instituto de
Investigaciones Histdricas (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Rosario) 8 (1965), 73-110;
"La población indígena de Végueta 1623-1683: Un estudio del cambio en la población de
la costa central del Perú en el siglo XVII" Historia y Cultura 8 (1974), 81-89.
57. Magnus Morner, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La
Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (Stockholm, 1953).
58. Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967);
Lyman L. Johnson and Susan Migden Socolow, "Population and Space in Eighteenth
Century Buenos Aires," in Robinson, Social Fabric and Spatial Structure in Colonial
Latin America, 339-368; Claudio Esteva Fabregat, "Población y Mestizaje."
59. Lyman L. Johnson, "Estimaciones de la población de Buenos Aires en 1744, 1778
y 1810," Desarrollo Ecónomico 19 (April-June 1979), 107-119; Gabriel Guarda, La ciudad
chilena; John V. Lombardi, People and Places in Colonial Venezuela (Bloomington,
1976).
60. Magnus Morner, Race Mixture; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule:
A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, 1964); Octavio
Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York, 1961).
61. Harry Hoetmk, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas: An Inquiry into
Their Nature and Nexus (New York, 1973); Lyle B. McAlister, "Social Structure and
Social Change in New Spain," Hispanic American Historical Review 43 (August 1963)
349-370.
62. Lyman L. Johnson, "The Silversmiths of Buenos Aires: A Case Study in the
Failure of Corporate Social Organization," Journal of Latin American Studies 8
(November 1976), 181-213; Esteva Fabregat, "Población y Mestizaje."
63. Christiana Borchart de Moreno, "Los miembros del Consulado de la ciudad de
México en la época de Carlos III," Jahrbuch für Gerschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und
58
Gesselschaft Lateinamerikas 14 (1977), 134-160; Christon I. Archer, The Army in
Bourbon Mexico, 1760-1810 (Albuquerque, 1977); Frederick P. Bowser, The African
Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford,