Some Characteristics of Latin American Urban History

Abstract

THE important and integrative role that the study of urban development has played in the historical analysis of European institutions suggests a similar approach to the history of Latin America, an approach that has not received adequate consideration. We may assume that the quest for a theory of town origins will not dominate Latin American urban historiography as it has European, for in the New World it is relatively easy to determine when and why a given town was founded. Towns created formally and ex nihilo in a moment of time, such as Santo Domingo, Lima, or, to take a contemporary example, Brasilia, are distinct from those which grew out of the soil, around garrisons, transportation break points, centers of production, and places of religious pilgrimage. In the Indian areas, one can classify towns or villages having a preColumbian origin and those formed by the resettlement of Indians by the Spaniards. This essay is not an inquiry into origins, which would entail description and quantification, but it is rather a search for hypotheses toward a theory that will have special explanatory value for Latin America. T'his theory would be functional rather than genetic in its emphasis, clarifying the relation of the Latin American city to the settlement of the land and to the forms of economic production. The striking incongruity of the institutional history of Latin America is that the most important job of production has been that of extracting commodities from the soil and subsoil, though the persons who settled the area, as well as the immigrants of later centuries, crossed the ocean with the idea of the city in their minds. The number of European small farming communities transplanted to Latin America was almost negligible, nor was such transplantation crowned with success. By and large, the rural emigrant to the New World was sufficiently exposed to city life, at the two terminal points of the crossing if nowhere else, to change whatever peasant outlook he may have had. To find anything resembling peasant communities in Latin America one must look principally among the non-European groups: among

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