This is a $35.00 committee-report-got-up-to-look-like-a-book, by an urban sociologist (Mundigo), a planning historian (Garr), and an architectural historian (Crouch). Enhanced by George Kubler’s 400-word foreword and several groupings of apt illustrations, the text is divided into three parts.
The first (pp. 1-65), mostly by Mundigo, presents a translation of 57 of the 148 “Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias” of Philip II (1573) and a commentary, neither of which betrays a particularly firm grasp of Spanish colonial institutions. Until now, the authors proclaim (p. xviii), the only access in English to the document has been a partial and inadequate translation in “an obscure periodical”—the Hispanic American Historical Review.
Getting down to cases, the second part (pp. 66-188), mostly by Crouch, treats “Three American Cities”: Santa Fe, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. I found Santa Fe in such disarray— built on uncritical use of limited materials, indiscriminate mixing of data from different periods, and omission—that I only skimmed St. Louis and Los Angeles. “Disintegration in California,” 1769-1850 (pp. 189–283), the last and best part, draws on Garr’s 1971 Cornell dissertation.
More revealing than funny is the authors’ acknowledgment (p. xiv): “To all those who might have granted us awards to pursue these studies but didn’t.”
