The title of this anthology reflects the motivations basic to the 1984 conference from which the collection is drawn: a concern for the decay of urban areas that in the colonial era had exercised primary functions as cultural, economic, and political centers. The objective is to analyze the urban phenomenon and its roots, while pointing to its contemporary crisis.
The contributors include historians, the architects, and art historians. Among the authors are well-known figures such as Francisco de Solano, Pedro A. Vives, Jorge E. Hardoy, George Kubier, Rolando Mellafe, Paulo O. de Azevedo, María Luisa Cerrillos, and Graziano Gasparini.
These papers are designed largely as summaries of historical tendencies and overviews of a descriptive nature. Kubier, for instance, makes the point of differentiating the spatial configurations and the disposition of urban elements evident in New Mexico and California missions. The mission town in California tended to complexity, with its grid pattern better established and the centrality of the church obvious. By contrast, New Mexico Indians had more success in imposing their own traditions on the mendicants’ architecture.
The contribution by Solano also builds such categories and provides summary descriptions. It offers a useful periodization of urban settlement, along with a ranking of colonial cities comparable, say, to Jorge Hardoy and Carmen Aranovich, “Urban Scales and Functions in Latin America” (Latin American Research Review, Fall 1970, pp. 57-110). Finally, Mellafe provides perspectives on the way that Spanish American cities modernize through changes in their residents’ habits of mind. Mellafe begins to conceptualize this process by coining the term desruralización. His point merits consideration: in the course of the nineteenth century, the cultural boundaries that separated the Europeanizing cities from the tradition-retentive countryside were sharpened. In sum, these studies will prove useful both to urban specialists and to beginning graduate students in Latin American history.
