This book is both a history and an interpretation of the colonial Spanish-American city. So far as I can tell, it is the first book of its kind in English, and there are precious few in Spanish. This is probably because the problems attached to writing such a book are many. A definitive rendering would require volumes, and a relatively short synthesis based upon secondary sources raises myriad decisions about style, vocabulary, and what to exclude at every turn. Like V. S. Naipaul, I too wish my prose to be transparent, so the reader will see what I have to...

An appreciation of the city, the apotheosis of modern civilization to many—and there is no argument to the contrary in this book—demands an understanding of the term ʺurban.ʺ What constitutes an urban aggregation, and what distinguishes the urban from the rural, should be the point of departure for an inquiry into the character and course of the colonial Spanish-American city. As is so often the case, the geographer offers us succinct and meaningful guidance: ʺSize and administrative status are not essential criteria of true urban character. Function and form are the essentials of the matter.ʺ¹ When the U.S....

There were cities in the Western Hemisphere centuries before the Europeans arrived. However, this was not the case in the Caribbean. The Taino Arawaks, the largest Indian culture in the Caribbean, resident on virtually all the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, frequently lived in towns with a few to several hundred or even a thousand houses and as many as several thousand inhabitants. The houses, generally straw-roofed huts calledbohíos(a term still used in parts of the Caribbean), were grouped around a ceremonial ball court. But there were no streets as understood in an urban habitat, nor...

The title of this chapter conveys multiple meanings. First, it refers to the royal decrees during the first decades of the sixteenth century that delineated the physical structure of towns and cities to be founded in the Spanish Empire in America. Second, it refers to the ordination of a hierarchical socioeconomic structure acknowledged and sustained by the differential distribution of the initial physical assets of those towns and cities. The various decrees for urban organization were issued in concert with the Crownʹs desire to institute systematic royal authority in the empire; and the grid plan, with its central core plaza...

Colonial Spanish-American towns and cities were often much larger geographically than their North American counterparts. With regard to area under their jurisdiction, Spanish-American cities were rather more like North American counties than cities. The city of Quito held jurisdiction over an area that ran approximately 200 miles in length and 75 to 90 miles in width. In frontier regions the jurisdiction was commonly imprecise and subject to local interpretation and the capability of a municipality to exert an effective claim. Accordingly, with no nearby city to contest its reach, Buenos Aires exerted jurisdiction over an area 300 miles northwest to...

In multiple ways the towns and cities of colonial Spanish America were dissimilar, a consequence of such factors as geographic location, including terrain, altitude, climate, and annual rainfall. They also varied according to their demographic character: whether they contained large numbers of slaves, Indians, andcastas, as well as according to the male/female ratio, the incidence of young and the incidence of old. Other factors also differentiated urban habitats and induced varying urban cultures within the empire. Nevertheless, fundamental similarities predicated upon the ordained morphology and the commercial enterprise were conspicuous and have captured the attention of contemporaries as well...

It bears repeating. It was about the economy, and the economy was one of commercial capitalism. This is central to an understanding of the colonial city and this book generally. The city and capitalism were tied inextricably together, and at any given point along the historical continuum it is sometimes difficult to assign greater value to one or the other. The question of which phenomenon caused the other, or which abetted the growth and development of the other, is susceptible to close analysis only when the run of history is interrupted and we ponder an isolated moment. Where urban life...

What society was wrought by the economy we have just seen? The answer is in two parts. The first has to do with racial prejudice and its consequences, the second with perception and its consequences.

Spanish-American society was formed around a legally defined cognitive caste system—the society of castes (sistemaorrégimen de castas), which placed whites at the top and African or American-born slaves at the bottom. Following is the general schema of this racial hierarchy:

Whites (including others who passed for white)

Indians

Mestizos (of white-Indian mixture)

Free people of color (of African descent)

Slaves (of African...

Colonial Spanish-American society was organized by imperial policy into castes, as we have seen, but it was also divided into socioeconomic classes through the actions of the marketplace, even when this was distorted in favor of some and to the prejudice of others. Classes formed within the castes. Among whites, for instance, some were very rich, some were very poor, and they were not in the same socioeconomic class. Similarly, among the free colored some had achieved wealth and social status manifestly higher than others. Notwithstanding legal discrimination and racial snobbery, the dynamic of the economy sometimes breached the restrictive...

Colonial Spanish-American society was organized in law and custom around the conjugal nuclear family. However, many families formed through consensual unions, and indeed there were many single-parent families (overwhelmingly single female–headed families). Each member of the conjugal family was assigned specific rights and responsibilities. Some familial rights greatly benefited women and children, as we shall see, while others did not. The protective benefits of religiously sanctified marriage did not apply to women and children of consensual families or of single female–headed families. This was unfortunate, especially since the incidence of consensual families, concubinage (amancebamiento), and single female–headed...

Once people came together and constituted the urban habitat, set out its form, fulfilled its function, and benefited from its immediate possibilities, the city and town as well were defined in reality and in our imaginations also. But there was more to it, as Lewis Mumford exquisitely conceived and eloquently expressed. Mumford understood that in its highest definitional aspects what distinguished the city most importantly was the opportunity it provided for significant conversation (or dialogue).¹ By this he did not mean anything casual, but rather the profound and fundamental ʺdiscussionʺ by peoples and groups and classes about rights, status, place,...

Let us go back to the beginning. The colonial Spanish American urbanformderived from the Roman ideal, even in the walled variant of port cities such as Havana, San Juan, and Cartagena. The urbanfunctionderived from the western European commercial enterprise of the early modern period. The urban function fructified the commercial capitalism which in almost all instances justified and sustained its existence. The urban habitat, whether village, town, or city, gave promise of a better life, which could mean more educational, occupational, commercial, bureaucratic, and marital opportunity than was possible in the rural regions of the Spanish...

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The place where a great city stands is not the stretchʹd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely . . .

Nor the place of tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth.

Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,

Nor the place of the most numerous population . . .

Where the slave ceases, and...