The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism

Chapter 11: Conclusion: The Paradox

chapter 11 Conclusion: The Paradox G To think about the city is to hold and maintain its conflictual aspects: constraints and possibilities, peacefulness and violence, meetings and solitude, gatherings and separation, the trivial and the poetic, brutal functionalism and surprising improvisation. —henri lefebvre, Writings on Cities Let us go back to the beginning. The colonial Spanish American urban form derived from the Roman ideal, even in the walled variant of port cities such as Havana, San Juan, and Cartagena. The urban function derived 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 colonies. The city as metaphor for all urban habitats represented hope and opportunity. But it was not unimpeded hope and opportunity, since the urban marketplace was unemotional and harsh. Although the Church provided charity and some health care, and the state provided pawn shops and (in service of its moral authority) attempted to assure affordable bread, corn, and other basic necessities, life on the urban periphery of maturing Atlantic capitalism was, to put it simply and succinctly, hard. It was hard and punishing in the urban economy of colonial Spanish America, but it was varyingly similar in New York, London, Paris, or anyplace else where capitalism prevailed and the marketplace determined. Urban life was unforgiving for those who 130 conclusion: the paradox lacked capacity and perhaps not a little luck. But for those with the resilience to suffer the rigors and inconstancy of a market economy, and also perhaps with some luck, the economy could be forgiving. The trajectory of success or failure in the urban context often did not follow a straight line in either direction. In many ways the great urban opportunity was flawed, even paradoxical . Single women had greater opportunity in the towns and cities than they did in the rural regions; but often there were too few men of marriageable age for them, so they frequently headed their own families, a largely urban phenomenon that led to a high incidence of illegitimacy and child abandonment . Slavery was essentially a rural phenomenon, but many towns and cities held fairly large numbers of slaves. They worked as domestics, street vendors, laborers, and artisans and in bakeries, in tanneries, on the docks, and in most other occupations. The urban slave tended to enjoy greater freedom than the rural slave, if only marginally. Some masters permitted slaves to reside in urban areas and work on their own, with the requirement that they send money back to the owner. Such slaves sometimes were among those able to purchase their own freedom and the freedom of family members . However, many female slaves were coerced into prostitution by their owners, again something we would associate with urban life. The urban opportunity was mitigated, clearly. And to this we must add the intense morbidity that resulted from the concentrations of people set on woefully unsanitary infrastructures. It was density of population and closeness of residence that made all of this possible. At bottom it was a division of labor, with the widespread possibility of specialization (and all of society’s attendant institutions in support of this), that resulted in an urban character, an urban mentalité. The possibility of social dialogue was much greater in the urban habitat than it was in the rural. The quotidian negotiation of one’s place in society, from street, to home, to store, to the bureaucracies, to the institutions of government, conferred upon the urban setting perhaps its most significant characteristic. Life was broader and deeper in its possibilities in the towns and cities of colonial Spanish America than it was in the farmlands. Educational opportunities also were greater in the urban areas, whether at the practical, occupational level or the scholarly. The great universities of colonial Spanish America were urban institutions, first in Mexico City, Lima, Santo Domingo, and Havana and then in other cities, as were the many colleges and seminaries.1 Opportunities for basic primary education were overwhelmingly urban. But there was always a price to pay. This having been said, then what percentage of Spanish Americans were 131 the colonial spanish-american city urbanized by the end of the colonial period, roughly 1810...