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

Introduction

Introduction G This book is both a history and an interpretation of the colonial SpanishAmerican 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 say. Many times during the writing of this book I imagined what other scholars, often friends, would think when they noticed that my emphasis was not the one they might have assigned. This book has a central theme, which is that the colonial SpanishAmerican city evolved during the age of Atlantic capitalism and was itself a circumstance of that capitalism. This means many things and implies challenges to those who believe that the colonial economy was not essentially capitalist but one in which very few people owned the means of production and distribution (to borrow a phrase) in such form that only a small percentage of the urban population possessed tangible and discretionary wealth, and the rest of the people were the immiserated plebeians (to borrow someone else’s phrase). This dichotomous construct does not allow for much of a middle class, or, perhaps more importantly, a lower-middle class, or for the breadth and depth of generalized economic endeavor that could efficaciously underwrite a colonial society’s entry into the world capitalist marketplace as an independent nation. I have tried to suggest the range and content of my discussion in the book’s title. Colonial and national economies matured according to different rhythms and did so differently. In any event, life in all capitalist societies, regardless of degree of maturity, was hard and generxi the colonial spanish-american city ally unforgiving, perhaps especially so on the periphery, and this was true of Spanish America. There is an unstated subtext in this book. It is that there really were no plebeians in urban colonial Spanish America. The use of the term by contemporaries was disdainful and dismissive (and historically incorrect), and its current usage beclouds rather than edifies our understanding of the social and economic reality.The term and its implications close off inquiry just where we need it to be opened. It is essential that we apply the same degree of historical judgment to terminology that we apply to ideas, actions, and just about everything else in the historical record. As the title of this book might suggest, I argue for a class interpretation, as some others have done even if not overtly.1 Today many scholars attribute an importance to the Latin American city that still surprises me to see in print. Witness the following recent observation by two distinguished historians: Thus, the Latin American city was virtually coterminous with the Columbian encounter. With its precocious establishment came the privileged attributes: the locus of political authority, the hub of ecclesiastical activity, the nerve center of commerce and finance, and the essential venue for conspicuous consumption.2 Hence the current urban piety, assuredly put, and I could not agree more. However, there was a dark side to urban life. The concentrations of people that made the urban habitats possible exacerbated problems of sanitation and indeed morbidity. Prostitution, single female–headed families, children born illegitimate, and children abandoned were all social phenomena intensi fied in the urban milieu to the point that we can consider them largely urban phenomena. Furthermore, social deviance, while present in rural areas, also was magnified in the villages, towns, and cities of colonial Spanish America. Of course, we shall explore the greatness of the urban habitats, as opportunity and shaper of society and economy, but we shall also confront the other reality, the noir side of urban life. A final point: because this book is a synthesis written for a broad audience , endnotes have been kept to a minimum. xii ...