This issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review features three articles on twentieth-century Latin America in urban, rural, and cultural history, all pertinent to political history.
In “Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906,” Samuel Martland examines how a natural catastrophe conditioned political relationships among the national government, the municipal government, and foreign capital in Valparaíso, Chile’s major port and most important commercial and financial center. Ironically, the intervention of the national government in response to the disaster took place in an era of greater local autonomy after the civil war of 1891 and foreshadowed the intensifying asymmetry of federal-local relations that began in the 1920s. Urban historians will enjoy Martland’s analysis of urban renewal and expansion that rebuilt the city horizontally, rather than up the nearby hills, to merge with the adjacent city of Viña del Mar.
Tanalís Padilla, in “From Agraristas...
