Culture and Politics in the "Latin American" City

The Mobility of Workers under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States. By Ramona Hernández. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Pp. 227. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Capital City Politics in Latin America: Democratization and Empowerment. Edited by David J. Myers and Henry A. Dietz. (Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002. Pp. 410. $65.00 cloth.)

Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico. By Valentina Napolitano. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. 256. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Linking Civil Society and the State: Urban Popular Movements, the Left, and Local Government in Peru, 1980–1992. By Gerd Schönwälder. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. 244. $50.00 cloth.)

Latino Metropolis. By Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Pp. 248. $18.95 paper.)

The contemporary human condition is urban. The majority of Latin Americans reside in urban areas; cities make a disproportionate contribution to economic well-being and are increasingly understood as the incubators of innovation, as well as the strategic arenas for citizenship and the principal influences on consumption. More than physical locations, cities are windows into every aspect of the human condition such that, as Ed Soja has claimed, "to an increasing degree we are all urbanists" (2003, 269). Embracing the positive possibilities of such a claim, however, is constrained by the narrow field of vision offered by scholars of the Latin American city. The dominant optic is to write about cities through representations of "familiar" urban spaces, a reliance on established categorizations of human agency (the informal sector being perhaps the most pervasive), and on framing narratives through concerns for reform and planning. Few attempts consider how the meanings and representations of spaces are contested by different social and political groups, and fewer still consider everyday spatial practices.

Yet the opportunity for accounts of the urban condition in Latin America to hold explanatory value to social, political and cultural change is immense. Latin American cities may be perceived as fractal or fragmented spaces, physically and metaphorically divided by "walls" and gates, organized into corridors and micro-zones, run by city managers and private security companies. To García Canclini (1995, 3), urban designs aspire to a mimicry of those bits of the "non" or "disintegrated" U.S. city, the malls, ex-urbs and pastiche downtowns, or to follow what Marc Augé (2000) detects as a shift for cities to resemble airports and other "supermodern" non-places. Littered with unfinished or never-started projects, buildings that no longer serve their primary purpose, cities in Latin America reflect the lost aura of modernity that, according to Rem Koolhaas, failed to deliver on its promise to transform quantity into quality. We are left, following Koolhaas again, with a condition in which urbanity is not recognized as a cultural concept since it would appear that people can be "miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything" (Koolhaas 1995, 961). But is the recourse to embrace postmodernist nihilism, reject urbanism and consider only architecture, or adopt the autarky that is suggested by some notions of the sustainable city?

A possible direction for thinking about the Latin American city is to afford less attention to those agents who think that their decisions are capable of bearing influence, despite, of course, the ever-growing evidence of the informal, illegal or vernacular city. Considering everyday life warns against dismissing places as superficial and generic, and the fault of developers, architects and politicians, conducive only to diminished face-to-face encounters, anomie and depleted collective memory. As Koolhaas (1995) notes, the urban spaces that academics decry as superficial urbanism are invested with complex meanings and identities by those who work, shop and live in them. As a raft of interesting studies have shown, it is vital that we understand how people "make do" in spaces no longer...