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

Chapter 2: The Pre-Columbian City

chapter 2 The Pre-Columbian City G 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 called bohíos (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 central marketplace for the exchange of goods produced both within and outside the town. Furthermore, almost all residents were involved mainly in agricultural pursuits. These were truly rural rather than urban towns. The situation was different on the mainland. All of the great cities of preColumbian America grew spontaneously from origins as agricultural communities or ceremonial centers. In this sense they were unlike the great contemporaneous European cities where castles and/or transportation possibilities such as roads, rivers, or large bodies of water provided the impetus for urban growth.Whether agricultural or ceremonial in origin, the great American cities were located near permanent sources of potable water. The only planned cities were in Peru, and none grew to political or commercial eminence. teotihuacán The first great urban center in the Americas was Teotihuacán, located about thirty miles northeast of Mexico City in the Valley of Mexico. A ceremonial center situated in a densely populated agricultural valley capable of pro13 the colonial spanish-american city viding products and visitors, it grew to become the paramount political and commercial center of a large geographical area, with a trading network that reached the Gulf coast and Central America. Thus the resident urban population was composed of clergy, political leaders and bureaucracy, artisans, servants, and traders. At the height of its glory, between a.d. 450 and 650, Teotihuacán supported a very large resident population, reaching perhaps 200,000 in an area of about 20 square kilometers. Teotihuacán is well known for its two great pyramids, the Sun and the Moon, and the Avenue of the Dead. Let us follow Jorge Hardoy’s description and analysis of the city’s urban form: . . . the builders of Teotihuacán established two enormous axes in the shape of a cross, serving as the basis for a grid that not only defined residential areas but also permitted easy displacement and drainage of water. The civic-ceremonial center was distinguished by the complex of buildings and plazas bordering the Avenue of the Dead, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant monumental conceptions in urban history. Although conceived for a population of pedestrians, spatially it was a true urban street.1 This was a great urban habitat in form but also in social structure, which was ‘‘hierarchical, heterogeneous, and specialized in a way none of its predecessors had been.’’ A hierarchical street network is an essential characteristic of an urban habitat, and in this regard too Teotihuacán was an urban center.The Avenue of the Dead was a ‘‘main street’’ of sufficient width to permit the movement of large numbers of people and great quantities of goods in what was then one of the largest cities in the world. And as a mature urban center, it supported a network of secondary streets. The size of the population and the network of streets permitted the existence of secondary residential areas, where artisans and perhaps the lesser bureaucrats resided in more modest housing than the extravagant and complex dwellings, often referred to as palaces, along the Avenue of the Dead. tenochtitlán The other great city of Mesoamerica was the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325 on a small islet in the southwestern part of Lake Texcoco also in the Valley of Mexico and long after Teotihuacán had been largely abandoned. Two years later Tlatelolco, a second Aztec city, was founded 14 the pre-columbian city nearby on another small islet. The two cities were rivals until Tlatelolco was defeated in 1473 and annexed to Tenochtitlán.The Aztec capital was the center of a vast Mesoamerican empire that was founded and maintained by harsh military prowess and a system of tribute and long-distance trade. Tenochtitlán was not initially formed according to any rational plan. It was not until the second...