Trends in Recent Studies of Colonial Latin American Cities

Any attempt to encompass the body of writing on Latin American cities, even if confined to recent years and ’ the colonial period, encounters the difficulties so succinctly summarized by Richard M. Morse in 1965: “A comprehensive survey of recent research on Latin American urbanization would be a large task for a team of specialists, especially if it were to include local as well as comparative studies, the working papers which circulate through government and academic circles, and all the scholarly disciplines which now contribute to the topic.”¹ Writing has greatly increased in volume since 1965, at the same time that new concepts and techniques have extended our ideas of what should enter into urban history. Moreover, even if one confines examination to published studies and the doctoral theses available on microfilm or photocopy, the appearance of books in so many countries and the dispersal of articles in so many journals, many of them of such limited diffusion that they are not collected by university libraries in the United States, make location of items far from certain; our indexes, despite computers, are far from handling the difficulty. Accordingly, I shall examine trends as they appear in research published in the past decade, perhaps liberally construed, and as they are available in major libraries of the United States.

The more important centers of contemporary impulse and innovation for studies of colonial Latin American cities reach back beyond our decade. The most influential figure undoubtedly has been Jorge Enrique Hardoy of the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. Since 1966, in collaboration with Richard P. Schaedel and Richard M. Morse, Hardoy has organized a series of symposia and conferences on cities, very often as part of the meetings of the International Congress of Americanists. These symposia have brought together scholars from many countries and disciplines to analyze and discuss aspects of an overarching general theme, varying with each set of meetings. The approach, which allows relatively systematic exploration of problems, has meant enormous advances in our knowledge of urban history; and the publication of the papers, both in the proceedings of the congresses² and in special volumes in Spanish,³ as well as republication in various collections, has made the results readily and widely available. Only a part of the studies by Hardoy and his collaborators, it should be made clear, has concentrated on the colonial period or on history.

Another influential and dynamic center, prominent in the application of geographical and statistical techniques of analysis to the relatively abundant parish registers and religious and civil padrones of the later Bourbon period, is in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University, where David J. Robinson has developed a network of students and colleagues of similar mind and interests in the United States and elsewhere, in geography, anthropology, and history. Their analyses appear in the working papers and Dellplain series of Syracuse University and in symposia at national and international meetings, including the International Congresses of Americanists.⁴

One must list other prominent figures and centers that have given and are giving substantial impulse to urban studies of colonial Latin America. At Stanford, Richard M. Morse, in addition to his collaboration with Hardoy, has carried out innovative studies of cities, with special emphasis on Brazil and on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has monitored the development of urban studies of Latin America in a series of essays.⁵ For Santiago de Chile, one cannot write of a unified center but rather of the presence of two remarkable figures of much influence. Gabriel Guarda, O.S.B., has devoted the scholarly part of his life to the urban history of colonial Chile in a notable series of studies, reaching synthesis in the Historia urbana del reino de Chile (1978),⁶ but still continuing. At the Universidad de Chile, Armando de Ramón has published a series of innovative studies of the urban history of Santiago.⁷ In Mexico City, a center of urban historical studies, organized under Alejandra Moreno Toscano in the Dirección de Investigaciones Históricas of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, after a promising beginning⁸ has moved to a lower level of activity in history, perhaps because of the departure of Alejandra Moreno to other posts. In Madrid, in recent years, Francisco de Solano and the Revista de Indias at the Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo” have entered this promising field⁹ and encouraged scholars like Alfredo Moreno Cebrián. Last, one should point to a diffuse but important development in the number of doctoral theses that in recent years, especially in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany, examine the history of chosen colonial cities or aspects of such history. Even though the reason for the selection of topic and kinds of analysis is difficult to trace, the dissertations constitute a major addition to the growth of our knowledge of colonial Latin American cities, one made easily accessible by the techniques of photocopy and quick publication.

The focusing of studies by scholars from many countries and disciplines through symposia and the application of new techniques derived from geography, statistics, and demography create powerful combinations for exploring problems and for posing hitherto unasked questions. These new techniques involve essentially the charting of the data on maps as in the more accurate placing of the Plano de Maguey by Calnek through more sophisticated ideas of patterns of occupations of urban space in preconquest Tenochtitlán,¹⁰ or more often in the creation of maps of late colonial cities from the detailed religious and civil Bourbon padrones. Patient and sophisticated reconstruction from the data permits analysis of the occupation of space, with determination of residential density by blocks and barrios, patterns of ownership, turnover in holding of property, household size; racial, social, and economic characteristics of the occupants; and random or prestige factors in the siting of households relative to the central square. To such analyses may be joined examination of the vital characteristics of the population through data from parish registers and the padrones: baptisms, marriages, and burials, brought to rates by further analysis, periods of epidemic and famine, and the extent to which the town inhabitants were locally born or immigrants. (The matter of outmigration is more difficult.)¹¹ Alongside the new techniques, the kinds of questions and analyses they generate, and the focusing of effort by symposia, exist still the older interests and kinds of topics that have infused much study of Latin American cities in the past, such as interest in the founding of the patria chica, the stories of its heroes, the genealogy of prominent families, and even the history of streets. In some studies, the old themes continue to appear unchanged; in many, the new techniques and approaches bring change.

As a result, writing on colonial Latin American cities today covers a range from episodic chronicles of an earlier age to highly statistical analyses and does not easily fall within a single general category. One can point to a fairly well defined core but one that shades easily into other topics and covers extensions of territory involving far more than urban entities. A study of a city within its region, for example, can be declared urban history, but one is considerably more hesitant at including studies of longdistance trade even though it operated between urban nodes. In the end, one must accept the certainty of much disagreement. Within the core, I shall classify topics and studies to be discussed under two basic headings, it being understood that the treatment by the authors may be in terms of older concepts, newer ones, or some combination of both: accordingly, I shall deal with traditional themes still pursued and still viable, and newer themes of undoubted viability.

Traditional but still viable categories of themes form a long list: the founding of a city or cities, histories of cities, histories of streets, urban layout and ways of expansion, public and private buildings, forms of construction, economy and aspects of it, government, and the perhaps specialized theme of relocation of the natives into compact, urban settlements. Many studies, of course, cover more than one category, and treatments vary widely.

Originally a form of local patriotism, studies of the founding of cities have become far more attuned to the perhaps more sophisticated urban history favored in Europe and the United States. They range from concentration on single cities or no more than a few, as in Eduardo Arze Quiroga on the Villa de Oropesa (Bolivia),¹² Julia Hirschberg’s articles on the founding of Puebla (Mexico) with their careful probing of intentions and results,¹³ Jorge Luján Muñoz on the founding of Salcajá and San Carlos Sija (Guatemala),¹⁴ and Agustín Zapata Gollán’s account of the establishment of Santa Fe in Argentina,¹⁵ to mention only a few, to wider-ranging studies of the nature of early foundings and the establishment of towns in entire provinces. Of the wider-ranging group, María Antonia Durán Montero’s study of beginnings of Spanish cities in colonial Peru is based on extensive archival research, with plans of the cities;¹⁶ León Borja de Szasdi’s study of shifting sites in Nueva Castilla proves the durability of cities’ legal entity despite changes of location;¹⁷ and Markman’s essay on Dominican influence in the relocation and founding of Indian towns in Chiapas stresses a process of trial and error through which the Dominicans developed an orderly plan.¹⁸ The role of the rural parish in the emergence of new towns because of the later colonial growth of population provides the core of Gary W. Graff’s study of urban expansion in New Granada.¹⁹ A thoughtful essay by David J. Robinson and Teresa Thomas deals with the founding of new towns in northwest Argentina in the eighteenth century, stressing the social, economic, and defensive functions of the new towns and the changes from villages to incorporated entities.²⁰ Roberta Marx Delson performs a parallel function for eighteenth-century Brazil.²¹

Histories of cities may be of two kinds: of individual ones or of urban experience in a larger territorial context. We have a noteworthy and remarkable example of each. Sidney W. Markman’s superb study of 1966 examines Antigua (Guatemala) in a breadth of analysis that goes well beyond its somewhat limited title.²² It remains a broadly informed, competent, humanistic essay yet to be surpassed. Equally praiseworthy in its competence and breadth, and covering an entire region, is Guarda’s study of cities in colonial Chile,²³ which represents the fruit of a lifetime of research. It is a model of informed inquiry, setting the development of Spanish cities in the conceptions of European and Hispanic culture, examining much of the functioning of the urban entities, the unusual story of the cities of the south, the changes of the eighteenth century, forms of layout and construction of buildings, education and intellectual life, and so forth. It is completed with a lengthy series of illustrative photographs and reproductions as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

Histories of individual cities further exhibit the range from celebration of the patria chica to studies informed by the ideas of historiography. Examples of the first kind are Oscar Beaujon’s tribute to Coro,²⁴ Luna’s short essay on Nata de los Caballeros,²⁵ and Olga Portuondo Zúñiga’s article on Santiago de Cuba.²⁶ Much closer to standard, somewhat old-fashioned volumes are Raúl de Labougle on colonial Corrientes²⁷ and Augusto Meira Filho’s lengthy, well-documented work on Belém do Grão Pará.²⁸

Newer approaches, both of technique and of ideology, invigorate many of the other studies of individual cities. For Bolivia, Josep M. Barnadas’s studies of Charcas and of Cochabamba have a strong socioeconomic orientation.²⁹ That of J. de Mesa and T. Gisbert on eighteenth-century La Paz reflects the authors’ interest in art.³⁰ For Venezuela, Ermila Troconis de Veracoechea’s history of El Tocuyo is a model of archival research and careful analysis, covering multiple facets of the city and its region.³¹ For Brazil, Lobo’s volumes on Rio de Janeiro, 1760-1945, dealing only in part with the colonial city, concentrate on changes in economy and social structure.³² In contrast, Nahon Omegna’s article on Niteroi³³ examines the town’s atypical experience until it became submerged as a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. It stresses the importance of religious institutions and observance in popular life. For Chile, René Martínez Lemoine’s short book on urbanism and the colonial city in Spanish America turns out to be a careful, detailed examination of the founding and growth of Santiago as a model of colonial city planning.³⁴ A sophisticated essay in method is that by Middleton on Manta, Ecuador, through the centuries.³⁵ For Peru, Katherine Coleman provides us with an unusual study of Trujillo.³⁶ For Mexico, with its many local histories, perhaps a good example is J. Romero Quiroz on Toluca.³⁷ Finally, in this category, we should notice David R. Radell and Parsons on Realejo,³⁸ a historico-geographic evocation of a once flourishing port and shipbuilding center.

Essays on streets, or rather blocks, as cultural and social entities within cities have a long tradition in Hispanic America. They are often tinged with sentimental and historico-fictional evocation. Among recent examples, that one might call echte Geschichte are O. Kalisen on the streets of Asunción (Paraguay)³⁹ and Guillermo Porras Muñoz on the single street of La Cadena (now part of Venustiano Carranza) in Mexico City. Porras Muñoz gives a detailed study of the family that gave its name to the street.⁴⁰

Urban layout has also attracted much attention in recent years. Although scholars have long been struck by the checkerboard pattern of streets, usually centering on a major square of many Latin American cities, the question of exact origin, transmission, and diffusion received serious attention only in recent decades. Inquiries and studies of more than two decades have determined the conceptual basis of partial application to early Spanish American cities, the perfecting of the plan, most probably in Mexico, the rapid spread of the idea to other regions in Spanish America, and the enactment of the concept in the Ordenanza de Pobladores of 1573. The major impulses here have been the symposia organized by Hardoy and his collaborators, which have devoted much attention to the problems. A brilliant essay by Guarda pointed the way.⁴¹ More recent studies by Durán Montero on early Peruvian foundations,⁴² Martínez Lemoine on Santiago,⁴³ Guarda on all of Chile, and Swann on Durango,⁴⁴ to mention but a few, have continued the study of colonial urban layout in the last decade. A further view that Portuguese towns in America were laid out much more haphazardly than those of Spanish America and in terms of other conceptions has been challenged for the eighteenth century by Delson, who points to approximations of the checkerboard plan in some governmentally sponsored new foundations, with the added feature of tree-lined roads beyond the towns.⁴⁵ The more recent, innovative analysis of town layout in terms of density of population, nature of households, and prestige factors will be discussed in another context.

From the study of urban layout to the examination of buildings and their construction is a logical step. Here one should mention George Kubler’s brilliant study of 1948⁴⁶ and that of Sidney Markman of 1966, both earlier than our decade, and Gabriel Guarda’s model history of cities in colonial Chile of 1978. The indefatigable Guarda has complemented his earlier book with one on buildings in Valdivia.⁴⁷ Kubler’s fine study is complemented by Robert J. Mullen’s on Dominican building in Oaxaca in the sixteenth century.⁴⁸ Two other essays, by no means the only ones, are Jorge Bernales Ballesteros on the monuments of Lima⁴⁹ and María Luisa Villalba de Pinto on the convents of Trujillo (Venezuela).⁵⁰ Since the topic of buildings, public and private, is much studied in schools of architecture, the literature is relatively abundant and is growing. On the whole, such studies concentrate upon public buildings and much less upon private ones. Equally, the methods of construction, which are far more varied for private construction, receive little attention.

The theme of urban government, also traditional, continues to be examined in such works as that of Aida Caro,⁵¹ but acquires the added dimensions of exploring recruitment to office, oligarchic dominance, economic and social perquisites, and nature and degree of authority in the studies by Reinhard Liehr,⁵² Peter Marzahl,⁵³ Manuel Alvarado Morales,⁵⁴ Hildegard Krüger,⁵⁵ Nwasike, Porras Muñoz,⁵⁶ and Webre.⁵⁷ Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof in her article on eighteenth-century São Paulo finds that family and clan ties replaced much of the functioning of town government.⁵⁸ A special aspect of the operation of city government in a period of disaster is studied at some length by Richard Boyer⁵⁹ and Louisa S. Hoberman,⁶⁰ who examine the somewhat ineffectual response of Mexico City authorities to the catastrophic floods of the early seventeenth century, the social ramifications of disaster, and the technological difficulties of dealing with water levels in the Valley of Mexico.

A subtheme in the operation of city government has attracted the attention of Moreno Cebrián in his article on the balance of revenue and expenditure in Lima at the close of the eighteenth century.⁶¹ The influence of the Enlightenment on municipal government may be seen in two disparate articles, one by Moreno Cebrián on the institution of formal subdivisions in Lima, the numbering of houses on streets, and the implementation of new ideas on paving, lighting, water supply, and police,⁶² the other by Lira González on the meaning of the implementation of formal legal equality in the fate of the Indian parcialidades of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco under the new order.⁶³

A further subtheme, which could easily become a major theme far transcending urban studies, is that of crime and punishment within cities.⁶⁴ The subtheme easily shades into an analysis of poverty and its repercussions in the form of crime and repression of the criminal poor.⁶⁵ Clearly, study of municipal crime in its many and varied aspects receives inadequate attention relative to other themes and invites much more research.

A theme so fundamental to man’s existence that it shows up in older and newer writing is the urban economy, the underpinning that enabled the urban population to live. The theme so pervades others that it may be found in general histories and in analyses that carry other and different headings. In the specialized form of the city and its region, recent writing will be treated separately since it arises in response to new impulses. These, though, have had such a profound influence that they have affected even the writing I mention here as more traditional.

We are not yet in command of sufficient writing on individual cities, crafts, and craft guilds for informed work of synthesis covering all of Latin America or even present-day national entities. Current thinking and research still focus on a single city or aspects of the economic activity of a single city or a single industry. Again, doctoral dissertations represent significant contributions. Karl Frederick Graeber examines Buenos Aires in its change from the end of the colonial period to the early stages of the newer economy and society resulting from the end of Spanish restrictions and political dominance.⁶⁶ Donald Lloyd Gibbs analyzes the economic activities of Cuzco in a thirty-year period, 1680-1710, an even shorter span.⁶⁷ A far more ambitious study by an experienced historian is that by Lobo on Rio de Janeiro, 1760-1945, which in its first part deals with the period of Rio as viceregal capital and a center of commercial capital.⁶⁸

Under studies of aspects of urban economic life, one would single out Ramon’s remarkable article on crafts, trades, and services in Santiago de Chile, 1650-1700. It is a model of analysis based upon his detailed reconstruction, lot by lot, of ownership and occupants for the city in those years.⁶⁹ A brief sketch by Pohl, Haenisch, and Loske on the development of textile workshops in colonial Puebla contains data on the existence of such workshops, conditions in them, their owners, and wages.⁷⁰ Another brief essay by Rivera Serna deals with viticulture, the production of wine and chicha and their consumption, and vain attempts to regulate it in Lima in the sixteenth century.⁷¹ A somewhat parallel study by Kicza analyzes the production and trade in pulque to supply Mexico City in the later colonial period;⁷² the study arises as part of a wider interest in the investments and fortunes of prestigious urban families. On production by artisans organized in craft guilds, we have Dorothy Tanck de Estrada’s paper on the abolition of such guilds at the close of the colonial period. Upon examination it turns out to be based on the municipal archives of Mexico City and views the topic as refracted through those documents, but, nevertheless, covers the political and economic rationale for the abolition arising from the changes in the European world.⁷³

Two essays on opposite ends of Hispanic America analyze the specialized topic of indios de servicio, or indios de tanda, as suppliers of urban labor: Hirschberg on the early allocations to the Spanish settlers of Puebla,⁷⁴ and Guarda on labor service to the southern Chilean frontier cities of Valdivia and Osorno in the last half century of Spanish rule.⁷⁵ Indians and lower-class elements as suppliers of labor and the functioning of artisans in production remain topics demanding much more exploration.

Finally, under the heading of traditional themes, would fall a group covering intellectual and cultural life and education. José Luis Romero, the prestigious Argentine intellectual historian, has published Latino-américa: Las ciudades y las ideas (1976), an attempt at a synthesis of Latin American urban history in terms of prevailing socioeconomic conceptions and organization by periods characterized as settlement, hidalgo, creole, patrician, bourgeois, and mass. Interesting as Romero never fails to be, the treatment follows current ideologies, rather than forming them, without providing new insight or any analytical tool. Far more modest and more successful are the specialized essays by Graziano Gasparini⁷⁶ and Erwin Walter Palm⁷⁷ on the radiation of ideas of architecture and art forms among the colonial cities; their treatment gives insight into cultural relationships. So does the condensed but careful essay by Guarda on the cultural life and nature of education in the cities of colonial Chile.⁷⁸ An even more highly specialized essay by Tanck de Estrada describes the escuelas pías of Mexico City, a church-sponsored system of schools, which notably expanded education but led to conflict with the teachers’ guild.⁷⁹ Histories of culture, architecture, art, and education undoubtedly contain much material of interest for urban studies, but these groups quickly move into fields that only impinge on the reach of this essay.

The new conceptions and methods that have become prominent in the past decade and a half have already been described. From what I have written, it should be clear that they affect treatment in many, perhaps most, of publications that I have classified as dealing with traditional themes. They infuse and dictate the writing on themes that I classify as new. One group, drawing inspiration directly from France and England, deals with historical demography. Like its models, it tends to concentrate on data from parish registers, which lead to a focus on the territorial unit of the parish,⁸⁰ or material from civil and religious padrones, which permits focus on larger expanses, even to a fairly large city.⁸¹ The emphasis usually remains demography, and the reason for including such studies in urban history is merely the focus. One might hold that only with dimensions beyond historical demography do they qualify as urban studies. Specialized kinds of writing, within the rubric of historical demography, deal with age at marriage,⁸² death and burial⁸³ (already adding social dimensions), women and their role in family life,⁸⁴ an outgrowth of the women’s rights movement so that the parallel topic of males and family life remains essentially unexplored.

For the study of cities, historical demography easily leads into the use of padrones, either a single one or several giving greater breadth in time, for the charting of occupation of urban space, and density of population, but moves further into housing, occupational structure, racial composition, the relations of race to class, and elements determining and maintaining social ascent and position. Notable recent studies on the occupation of urban space and density of population are those carried out directly by Robinson or instigated by and published under his inspiration.⁸⁵ Studies of occupational structure, social structure, and the not easily separated out element of race include those by David A. Brading,⁸⁶ Oakah L. Jones,⁸⁷ David Jickling,⁸⁸ Christopher H. Lutz,⁸⁹ Maria Beatriz da Silva,⁹⁰ Swann,⁹¹ and Dennis Valdes.⁹² Four doctoral dissertations give exceptionally thorough analyses of social structure: that by Super on early colonial Querétaro, still unpublished,⁹³ and those by Marzahl on seventeenth-century Popayán,⁹⁴ Inge Langenberg on late colonial Guatemala City (i.e., after the shift in location),⁹⁵ and Swann on Durango, although Swann’s study in many chapters focuses on the region rather than the city.

The analytical study of the relations of race and class has resulted in one fine book and a number of articles by John K. Chance, one jointly with William B. Taylor,⁹⁶ and a challenge to their approach by Robert A. McCaa, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Arturo Grubessich.⁹⁷ The controversy has generated vivid language and perhaps some heat. A recent study by Seed suggests that declarations of race were flexible, demonstrating the point by checking those in the padrón of 1753 for Mexico City against those in marriage declarations and registrations, and working out a classification of probable careers open to the various racial groups, then going on to show that deviation in occupation from expected norms led to racial reclassification nearer social expectations.⁹⁸

The additional racial element comprising people of whole or part African ancestry has received less attention than one might expect from writing on the more restricted reach provided by urban studies. Emilio Harth-terré, in a volume summarizing his previous research and writing, deals with Negroes and Indians in El Cercado de Lima⁹⁹ and Christine Hünefeldt deals with the Negroes of Lima, 1800-1830.¹⁰⁰

A perhaps specialized dimension of the study of families and occupations in cities is prosopography, which in recent decades has greatly influenced European historiography. The same tendency appears for Latin American cities, in a series of studies, such as Christiana Renate Borchart de Moreno’s on the members of the Consulado of Mexico City,¹⁰¹ the broader examination by John E. Kicza of business and society in late colonial Mexico City,¹⁰² Ann Twinam on eighteenth-century Medellín,¹⁰³ Stephanie Blank on seventeenth-century Caracas, this last with emphasis on the need for adequate knowledge of sources and precise meaning of terms for understanding the results given by computers,¹⁰⁴ and Susan Socolow on the merchant families of the flourishing new viceregal capital, Buenos Aires.¹⁰⁵

Since cities and their hinterlands, or their regions, form an interreacting whole, a series of studies has concentrated upon regions, of which cities are the economic node, or upon cities within an even larger context of the emerging primate city. Although dealing largely with postindependence phenomena, Hernán Asdrúbal Singer’s general essay¹⁰⁶ easily can be applied to the colonial city in Latin America; its emphasis is upon the securing of a surplus that can be sold in world markets. For Ecuador, we have two essays: Middleton on Manta in its urban, regional, and national context;¹⁰⁷ and Michael L. Conniff on Guayaquil, in a multifaceted exploration explaining why coastal society was more open and enterprising than that of the highlands.¹⁰⁸ For Argentina, Robinson has published a sophisticated reconstruction of Córdoba and its hinterland about 1779, demonstrating the rich possibilities of techniques of mapping data and statistical analysis.¹⁰⁹ Mexico, again, is endowed with studies of cities within their regions. Taylor examines town and country in the Valley of Oaxaca with a wealth of data. The volume in which the essay is printed is essentially devoted to a study of cities in their regions, containing, inter alia, essays on Toluca, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, Zacatecas, and Querétaro.¹¹⁰ Swann’s recent book presents a laboriously achieved, sophisticated study of settlement and society in Durango and its region.¹¹¹ Perhaps the best studied city in its region is Guadalajara, which is covered in the able and surprisingly complementary essays of Ramón M. Serrera Contreras¹¹² and Eric Van Young.¹¹³ These set new standards for regional studies. Their work is supplemented by Linda L. Greenow’s geographical study of the spatial dimensions of the credit market in Nueva Galicia.¹¹⁴

The larger question of the relations of cities to each other has been handled by Hardoy and Aranovich in a thoughtful, suggestive essay, much republished and revised, on urban scales and functions in Spanish America around 1600.¹¹⁵ It is complemented by Frédéric Mauro¹¹⁶ and by John V. Lombardi’s study of the early rise of Caracas to primate status, 1750-1850, as a process both of endowment with special functions and denial of opportunity to competing centers.¹¹⁷

A group of topics that should perhaps be classified under the new, although the methodology employed is essentially appropriate to the traditional, concerns urban services, the control and distribution of food, water supply, lighting, disposal of sewage and garbage, police, the protection of health and provision of medical services, and measures and institutions of public welfare. Interest in such studies obviously derives from concern with them in the contemporary world. On many of these themes we have few or no studies; on police, lighting, paving, disposal of sewage and garbage, there are merely references rather than formal examination. On water supply, the deficiency is underscored by the one study of Luis Luján Muñoz on the fountains of Antigua Guatemala, with its map of the location of the fountains so that the reader understands their role in providing water.¹¹⁸ For urban services as a whole, Boyer studies the near collapse of such services in Mexico City during the great floods of the early seventeenth century¹¹⁹ and Liehr covers the ordinary functioning of such services in Puebla.¹²⁰ For the control and distribution of food, Solano provides a suggestive typology for the colonial Latin American city.¹²¹ Other studies focus on specific cities: two papers by Hernán Asdrúbal Silva on the supply of fat and tallow and of lumber and firewood to Buenos Aires;¹²² María del Carmen Calvento’s essay on politics and policies in legislation on bread for late eighteenth-century Mexico City;¹²³ Enrique Marco Dorta’s study of meat supply for Cartagena de Indias;¹²⁴ and the unusually sophisticated and competent study by Ward Barrett of the meat supply of Cuernavaca, this last with a suggestive examination of the movement of prices.¹²⁵ A special aspect is the study of drinking, taverns and outlets, and the virtually inevitable corollaries of abuse and crime.¹²⁶

Urban medicine and hygiene and their effects on public policy and provision similarly remain largely unexplored except for a few, scattered essays. Ricardo Archila provides a preliminary, suggestive sketch of the colonial Spanish American city as a whole.¹²⁷ For Mexico City, it is fleshed out by Bradley Lewis Chase on medical care for the poor, 1770-1810.¹²⁸ In addition, the studies of individual hospitals and hospices, such as Luis J. Torres Oliver on the Hospital de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de San Germán in Puerto Rico,¹²⁹ David Allyn Howard on the Hospital Real de Indios in Mexico City (essentially a countrywide rather than merely city institution),¹³⁰ and Laima Mesgravis on the Santa Casa de Misericórdia of São Paulo, paralleling the earlier fine study of the Santa Casa de Misericordia in Bahia by A. J. R. Russell-Wood, begin to explore this theme.¹³¹ Clearly, the entire group of themes on urban services, amenities, and welfare, invites further study both of individual institutions and application in a single city and of wider generalizations that may arise from detailed monographs.

The reader of this brief survey may be left with the impression of a pointilliste painting in which most of the features are indicated by a scanty number of dots and in places by no more than one or two. Such an impression is justified, for publication on the colonial Latin American city seldom has reached sufficient coverage of most topics to permit well-founded generalization. Whole ranges of themes like urban crafts, food supply and its distribution, urban services, water supply, and sanitation have been touched lightly. In short, studies of colonial Latin American cities remain characterized by a heavy concentration on the episodes, men, art, and buildings of the individual city and seldom add to reliable portraits applicable to the continent and a half. The newer studies, especially those based on the late Bourbon padrones, afford technically sophisticated analysis that may be extended to generalization, although more instances would be welcome. Research of sophisticated technique and scholarly care tends to be concentrated in the schools associated particularly with David Robinson at the University of Syracuse and Jorge Enrique Hardoy in Buenos Aires, with the two major scholars in Santiago de Chile a notable and anomalous addition. Over the entire field of studies examined here, quality of work, as in most human endeavors, ranges from shoddy through mediocre to good and even brilliant.

What, then, of the future? Prophecy is always a hazardous venture, as the numbers of soothsayers proved wrong demonstrate. Yet some things may be stated with reasonable confidence. First, the vast increase in urban studies reflects two basic interrelated trends: the phenomenal rise in urban concentrations and the equally vast expansion of people and institutions in higher education. On the one hand, the vastly enlarged professional and leisure groups in the urban population display interest in local history that may advance beyond mere curiosity as to episode and figure; on the other hand, the rising horde of students and their teachers need topics for performance of requirements and for acquisition of prestige. So the volume of urban studies is likely to rise yet farther despite temporary budgetary restrictions. Quality obviously will continue to be highly variable. Second, in the search for topics, trends and fads in Europe (the Soviet Union included), in the United States, and perhaps in Japan are likely to determine preference for those seeking to move beyond traditional patterns. One may, therefore, predict that many of the gaps indicated here will begin to be filled. Third, now that models have been formed for sophisticated statistical analyses based upon painstaking accumulation of data from parish registers and civil padrones, the under-taking of further studies, in the absence of conceptual and statistical advance, becomes a routine operation that may be carried out by corps of eager students and faculty, even more handily if they have access to a computer. Such studies are likely to flourish. We undoubtedly shall know a great deal more about colonial Latin American cities in the relatively near future and to that extent more about colonial Latin America and its relation to other Europeanizing regions of the planet. What form will innovation take? Which will be its centers? ¡ Sólo Dios sabe!