A los cuatro vientos: Las ciudades de la América Hispánica (review)

This book is a welcomed synthesis of recent and not so recent works on the history of Spanish American cities in a variety of languages and approaches. The author covers a wide span of time, places, and spaces in an engaging narrative of the historical development of urban centers in the Americas.

A los cuatro vientos begins with the establishment of towns and villages immediately after the discovery and during the Spanish conquest of the New World. The book then traces the establishment of municipal governments or cabildos, settling of jurisdictions and building of walls as well as the establishment of cities proper with privileges or fueros. The first chapter charts the large number of urban spaces established in the sixteenth century, many of which never obtained the rank or official title of city remaining simply villas or pueblos. These original urban settlements bore the names of saints, kings, and queens as well as those of cities and towns in the Old World. The second chapter deals with the Spanish American city as a cultural and social space where identities and habits were developed through a ritualized life style that understood/viewed the life lived in city or civitas as the center of civilization and cultural production. Chapter 3 deals with the Creole metropolis, or the mature Spanish American city, while Chapter 4, “El simulacro del orden” charts the enlightenment city of the eighteenth century. A short Epilogue recounts the centrality of the city and its destruction during the nineteenth-century wars of independence that, according to Lucena Giraldo, marked the end of the first great era of the Spanish American city.

The book opens with a fruitful discussion of the limited historiography on Spanish American cities, product in part of a prevalent but misinformed vision—at least since the nineteenth century—that Spanish American societies were or are primarily “rural” in nature. The magnitude of urbanization and the historical centrality of cities in the Spanish imperial project in the New World (and in the nation-states that ensued after Independence) has, as a result, not captured a commensurate interest among historians. Understood primarily as a rural space, the study of cities in Spanish American was long relegated to art historians, archeologists, and sociologists. The demographic changes ca. 1940, however, stimulated the well-known studies of Richard Morse, Jorge Hardoy, José Luis Romero and Graziano Gasparini, but also George Kubler, Antonio Bonet Correa, Enrique Marco Dorta, Angel Rama, and Gabriel Guarda, among others. In spite of this original corpus of urban studies, the city in Spanish America faded once again as a topic of research during the heyday of social history, and has only recently seen a new lease on life in works such as that of Richard Kagan (2000) and others cited in this volume.

While the vast bibliography contained in this study certainly points to a new zenith in the study of Spanish American cities, most of the “new” works date only to the 1990s, and many are articles rather than monographs. As Lucena Giraldo rightfully points out, the urbanization process that took place in the New World between 1492 and 1810 was enormous and, as Richard Morse once noted, Spanish colonization in the New World created a vast system of administration, justice, and evangelization cemented in a complex urban base. This volume has an invaluable bibliography and will appeal to those interested not only in the history of cities in Spanish America, but also general processes of urbanization and empire building.