Trends in Recent Studies of Colonial Latin American Cities

Abstract

NY attempt to encompass the body of writing on Latin American cities, even if confined to recent years and the colonial period, encounters the difficulties so succinctly summarized by Richard M. Morse in 1965: A comprehensive survey of recent research on Latin American urbanization would be a large task for a team of specialists, especially if it were to include local as well as comparative studies, the working papers which circulate through government and academic circles, and all the scholarly disciplines which now contribute to the topic.' Writing has greatly increased in volume since 1965, at the same time that new concepts and techniques have extended our ideas of what should enter into urban history. Moreover, even if one confines examination to published studies and the doctoral theses available on microfilm or photocopy, the appearance of books in so many countries and the dispersal of articles in so many journals, many of them of such limited diffusion that they are not collected by university libraries in the United States, make location of items far from certain; our indexes, despite computers, are far from handling the difficulty. Accordingly, I shall examine trends as they appear in research published in the past decade, perhaps liberally construed, and as they are available in major libraries of the United States. The more important centers of contemporary impulse and innovation for studies of colonial Latin American cities reach back beyond our decade. The most influential figure undoubtedly has been Jorge Enrique Hardoy of the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. Since 1966, in collaboration with Richard P. Schaedel and Richard M. Morse, Hardoy has organized a series of symposia and conferences on cities, very often as part of the meetings of the International Congress of Americanists. These symposia have