Public Spheres, Crónicas, And Heterogeneous Landscapes: New Works in Latin American Urban History

At the core of the narrative of Latin American colonialism lies the figment and figure of the city. Beginning with the founding of Santo Domingo, in what is now the Dominican Republic, in 1502, urban settlements revealed and made present the civilizing mission of the Iberian conquerors while serving as fortresses against the dangers of a wilderness perceived as barbaric. These cities were nevertheless influenced by the landscape in which they resided, an environment that Europeans would struggle to map, zone, and dominate across two continents and several centuries.

Latin American cities inspired extensive inequities, which have greatly expanded within the discord of today's megacities. Whereas traditional visions hailed urban centers as the locus of civilizing power networks, the modern sociological theory elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s by scholars such as Manuel Castells instead framed the city as an instrument of domination. ¹ The analyses of elite urban culture and power simultaneously initiated by José Luis Romero, Richard Morse, and Ángel Rama constructed an image of the city as both beacon and leviathan, whose very stratification helped breed poetry and a progressive political public sphere.² Such studies of the mechanisms of cross-class power largely faded during the following two decades, until, at the turn of this century, urban historians took them up anew, moving beyond portrayals of deluded elites seeking to inculcate European modernity into American soil, trampling over civil liberties in the process. This has led to new treatments of criminality, subaltern responses to urban reform, and the articulation and creation of urban collective identities.³

The works under review in this essay lie at the proverbial crossroads between broader scholarly trends and exemplify both the continued importance of interrogating elite forms of exclusion and the potential of alternative methodologies, including the mechanics of formulating public spheres, the importance of landscape, the nature of urban-rural dichotomies, and the means of collective association within fragmented urban settings. To a greater or lesser extent, each study also seeks to locate cultural heterogeneity at the center of urban character, that is, to rehabilitate the idea of the city as a locus of possibility rather than as a dystopia rife with mismanagement, besieged since the colonial era with pervasive and incurable problems.

The Latin American Urban Crónica, by Esperança Bielsa, exemplifies the latter tendency perhaps more than any other work under consideration. Bielsa, a research fellow in comparative cultural studies at the University of Warwick, has written a deeply researched and provocative book focused on the urban crónica, a genre that resides in the liminal space between journalism and literature. In her estimation, the crónica occupies "the contact zone between high and low culture" (xiv), which gives it an interstitial character that speaks to a cross-class audience and has the potential to articulate resistance to dominant cultural norms. Crónicas are first- or third-person narratives, often semifictionalized, situated within the public sphere in settings that...