Spanish-American City Research Articles

A New Key Port in America: The Fortification of Buenos Aires in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract The outcome of the 1640 Portuguese rebellion against Spanish rule instantly turned Buenos Aires into a new key port in Spanish America, given its location on the frontier with now-Portuguese Brazil. Consequently, the Spanish imperial bureaucracy focused on its fortification in the second half of the century. That case was part of a larger process during that century of fortifying Spanish American cities with walls and more complex elements. The present article will focus on the role of the local authorities and their response to the crown’s plan, illuminating the difficulties and mistakes in that ultimately unsuccessful effort, such as hiring a lack of skilled workers, especially engineers, and the misconceiving of the territory and its resources. For that purpose, the research will be based on unpublished documents from the Archivo Histórico Nacional and Archivo General de Indias, as well as various plans for the projects.

Communicating an Empire and Its Many Worlds: Spanish American Mail, Logistics, and Postal Agents, 1492–1620

AbstractThis article examines the principles underlying Spanish American mail during the government of the first Hapsburgs. I propose that this mail system, in which official and unofficial postal services coexisted, allowed for an intense communicational experience; rather than restricting correspondence, mail circulated at unprecedented levels. To understand this system's rationale I focus on the figure of the correos mayores, who were responsible for the distribution of official information (or information of interest to the crown) within certain Spanish American cities. Using sources in American and European archives, I question the premise that Spanish American communication was chaotic during this period. I also argue that the exceptional circulation of mail within Spanish America and overseas during the sixteenth century is essential for understanding European expansion and the early modern world.

Uses of Tridentine Artistic Theory in Spanish America: Imaging the Christian Painter in Colonial Hagiography

This article examines the migration of artistic theory from Europe to Spanish America in the early modern period and, more specifically, the way in which these ideas served to fashion the role of artists in colonial society. In the seventeenth century, Counter-Reformation ideas about the devout painter entered hagiographies written in Lima, Quito, and Santa Fe, which praised the artistic skill of religious artists as visible manifestation of their piety. As exemplars of Christian virtue, these artists stood as the spiritual capital of Spanish American cities and thus were instrumental in the shaping of local pride and identities. Tridentine artistic theory acquired a new meaning in colonial Spanish America, in the sense that it legitimized a view of Spanish American urban communities as Christian corporations. The figure of the Christian painter was particularly important in Jesuit narratives written in Spanish America, since it grounded the order’s ideas regarding the moral end of pictures and of artists.

Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 by Dana Velasco Murillo

<i>Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810</i> by Dana Velasco Murillo

Persuasion Strategies: Musicians, Music and Theater (in the Archives of Two Spanish-American Cities)

Studies on music of the Conquest and the Colonial Period in Spanish America usually favor information obtained from ecclesiastical sources or about religious topics while frequently neglecting other sources and documents which would allow assumptions about the relationship between music and the development of the earliest Spanish-American theater. To question this behavior, in the first part, I comment on some data related to the Archive of the Town Council of the City of Mexico, an outstanding secular source as it records a great deal of data about Spanish music in sixteenth-century Mexico. In the second part, I comment on a jacara kept in the archives of the Cathedral of Bogota, which is interesting because the popular character of the composition goes beyond what is strictly liturgical.

La plaza hispanoamericana Siglos: XVI, XVII y XVIII. Caso de estudio como análisis tipológico

La ciudad hispanoamericana debe ser estudiada a partir de los elementos que la componen, desde su antepasado hasta su compleja trama urbana actual. Uno de los elementos clave del desarrollo y transformación de la ciudad fue su inicio fundacional, desde aquel espacio tácito que terminó convirtiéndose en un centro urbano con un elemento clave: la plaza. Este fue el elemento de significación de la ciudad colonial y el ordenador de cada conjunto urbano de la fundación hispanoamericana, y tal generalidad es común y se consolida como un patrón que va repitiéndose en todos los núcleos de población. El análisis tipológico de la plaza es trascendental para entender su evolución y transformación no solo como elemento independiente sino también de la ciudad que la compone. La investigación se centra en consolidar y caracterizar la plaza como un “tipo” y sus variables (forma, ubicación, usos y arquitectura a su alrededor). Escoger este espacio para el análisis demuestra la trascendencia de aquel vacío dentro de las ciudades densas actuales, la escogencia de estos tres siglos limita el ejercicio en la búsqueda de parámetros de comparación y clasificación como herencia de la cultura española dentro del territorio. Esta clase de estudios tipológicos demuestran la relevancia de la formación de centros urbanos inéditos que transformaron para siempre el territorio indígena, y que aún hoy son imprescindibles en la lectura de la ciudad, que se siguió configurando a través de aquel patrón.

Criterios para la conservación y revalorización del urbanismo colonial hispanoamericano. Estudio de caso

Las ilaciones entre España y América en el ámbito urbanístico, en tanto soporte de un diálogo cultural continuo llevado a cabo durante siglos, deja una impronta marcada como patrimonio que aún se sostiene como legado de ultramar. Las experiencias urbanizadoras llevadas a cabo en lo que Hardoy llamaba “modelo clásico de ciudad hispanoamericana”, el continuo intercambio cultural, y el vínculo entre las ordenanzas y los fueros que marcaban sus directrices son claros exponentes de la fuerte influencia americana sobre las urbes peninsulares y viceversa, un diálogo continuo llevado a cabo desde ambos lados del Atlántico. Esta ‘identidad urbana’, que abarca también lo intangible, persiste hasta la actualidad como un elemento común que forma la base sobre la que se van amoldando los fragmentos de un complejo mosaico (sociedades dependientes, yuxtaposiciones culturales, etc.). La conservación de estas estructuras urbanas como señas de identidad cultural, pasando por el reconocimiento de los elementos patrimoniales existentes, es una premisa para establecer criterios para la puesta en valor de los mismos.

Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Spanish America

AbstractHoly women and hagiography (autobiographies and biographies of saints and holy persons) were defining features of the “spiritual renaissance” that flourished in Spanish American cities during the 17th and 18th centuries. Recently, scholars have expanded their traditional focus upon nuns and convent literature to consider hagiographical texts about pious laywomen, or beatas, among them non‐elite, native, African, and mixed‐race holy women. This article considers recent approaches to holy women and hagiography, which rethink the “marginal” or “subversive” position of beatas and non‐Europeans within colonial Spanish Catholicism. These studies also challenge historiographical narratives about the uniformly repressive nature of Counter Reformation Catholicism and illustrate how priests diversely responded to the intersection of Universal Catholicism and local religion in colonial Spanish America. The scholarship under review suggests that the evangelizing spirit of the Counter Reformation and enthusiastic lay female religiosity, which crossed racial and class lines, fostered more flexible ideals of feminine and non‐European piety than previously imagined. More broadly, these studies rethink approaches to religion that emphasize paradigms of domination versus resistance, dichotomize official and popular Catholicism, and isolate religious experience and practice from broader and more complex colonial contexts.

Changes in the Socio-Economic Pattern of Spanish-American Cities With Special Reference to Colonial Town Centres

This paper outlines some of the key changes in the spatial distribution of functions and social classes in Spanish-American cities, with Puebla, Mexico, used as a case study. Among the factors which influence the future of the cities is the changing social structure of the inner zone. Upper class families have moved into modern residential areas while their large colonial patio-houses have been transformed into lower class multi-family quarters known as vecindades.

The Cities of Spanish America 1825-1914: Economic and Social Aspects

The paper distinguishes three stages in the history of Spanish- American cities in this period. The first (1825-1850) is one of slow and uneven urban growth; it is also one of social readjustment to the new political and economic realities of independence, republic and comparatively free external trade. The urban upper classes are deeply fragmented in the process; the largely peninsular mercantile group is replaced by a much more isolated and smaller one, dominated by the British; the base of political power becomes less urban, and the city elites linked with Church and state suffer in their income and prestige; the progress of egalitarian ideas corrodes traditional deference. The lower groups are affected by the decadence of slavery and in the middle of urban society free trade brings about a crisis of many traditional crafts and the flowering of other artisanal and trade activities. The second stage (from 1850 to the seventies) continues, under a veneer of modernization in the urban lifestyle, the trends of the previous quarter-century. Urban growth quickens, but is again very uneven; the role of the state begins to gain in significance in comparison with that of an expanding trade. During the third stage large cities finally receive the full impact of the development of the new economies, based in the growth of exports and the gradual unification of the internal market: the completion of railway systems, from Mexico to Chile and Argentina, is of course a decisive factor in this change. Demographic growth and a new mode of social differentiation (which includes the creation of a larger dependent middle class and a modern working-class of wage earners in large enterprises, in transportation and services rather than in manufacture) bring about a change in residential patterns and the use of urban space. Even so, Spanish-American cities retain many elements from their past, and are usually quite far from the model of the growing capitals of continental Europe during the same years.

The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

Although you can’t tell a book by its cover, Stephanie Merrim’s study seeking to understand the complexity of Colonial Spanish American urban culture is remarkably illustrated by Cristóbal de Villalpando’s seventeenth-century bird-eye’s view of Mexico City’s main plaza, depicting in minute detail nearly 1,200 people of all walks of life, its busy market place, and a riot-destroyed skyline. It is a spectacular vision, with a rich literary pedigree rigorously documented in Merrim’s book and epitomized in Bernardo de Balbuena’s well-known urban pastoral Grandeza mexicana. How can one tell the multiple stories that unravel in this vibrant, awe-inspiring but contradictory and heterogeneous urban maze? Merrim approaches this question from the vantage point of Spanish Ameri-can literary culture, examining a broad selection of iconic sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that depict the New World city, its festivals, and its wonders. From Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as a number of lesser-studied writers such as Francisco Cer-vantes de Salazar, Agustín de Vetancurt, and Buenaventura de Salinas, Merrim analyzes how Spanish residents (radicados) and creoles write the city, coding its spaces morally, racially, and sexually. As Merrim clearly shows in each text approached, the depiction is not a straight rendition of the city but a thick and coiled discursive thread, rhetorically crafted with and drawing from a burgeoning colonial archive as well as classical, biblical, European, and Amerindian sources. These writers are nonetheless confronted with a rich and heterogeneous reality that resists discursive enclosure.The argument is developed contrasting the Renaissance and the Baroque visions of the city, rightly pointing out that one of the key studies of the colonial Spanish American city conflated both, Angel Rama’s Ciudad letrada (1984). The imperial dream of a transparent, orderly space is present from Cortés’s letters to Philip II’s 1573 Ordenanzas. The colonial city’s heterogeneous society is problematically inscribed and objectified in descriptions of the marketplace, where autochthonous natural produce like guavas, mameys, and sapotes stand in for the Indians (p. 76). The market is also a high point of Balbuena’s poem celebrating Mexico’s greatness as a wonder cabinet offered as a gift to the empire (p. 127). The creole writers will take these renditions and rework them to affirm their place in colonial society and inscribe themselves in the Hispanic world, in what represents a creole cultural nationalism. Carving a space of their own, the key point in the cultural politics of the New World Baroque literary production is how deeply these writers engage the plurality of their own societies on this side of the Atlantic. Merrim recognizes that the colonial writers selected — mostly Spaniards and creoles — ultimately seek to contain the heterogeneous urban space. Another perspective could be presented by looking at the ample archive of postconquest Nahuatl texts, such as the Annals of Tlatelolco, Nahuatl dramas, and local histories written by don Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc and don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin. From another point of view, Merrim’s study shows that an epistemological aperture within Western-based texts is also possible. One of the quintessential preoccupations of the Baroque is precisely the limits of knowledge. Merrim demonstrates this splendidly in her examination of the creoles’ appropriations of Athanasius Kircher’s works, Sor Juana’s in particular, who uses the well-reputed Jesuit’s thought to defend against his embittered confessor and to assert her unlimited desire for knowledge in the Answer. Still, Merrim convincingly argues that Sor Juana distances herself critically from Kircher in Primero sueño by highlighting the impossible quest for truth.As stated above, Merrim looks primarily at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexican literary culture. The thick of the argument concentrates on the Baroque, highlighting nuances brought forth by the New World Baroque. Six of seven chapters are dedicated to Mexico with the last one examining texts from New Granada, Potosí, and Lima, which gives breath to the study without losing coherence. This is high-caliber scholarship that draws from postcolonial and transatlantic studies to underscore the predicament of Latin America’s colonial legacy. In this view, it is not gratuitous that creoles imagined Babel when faced with colonial violence. But, as Merrim optimistically points out, the creole imagination also holds hope for a better world. With no doubt, this conceptually well-defined and rigorously developed project allows us to understand better the intricate discursive web and the cultural politics of colonial writers. In sum, The Spectacular City is excellent reading for colonial Latin American literary and cultural scholars as well as advanced and graduate students.

The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. By Jay Kinsbrunner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 198 pp. $40.00 cloth $18.95 paper

<i>The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i>. By Jay Kinsbrunner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 198 pp. $40.00 cloth $18.95 paper

Considerations Concerning Measurements Relating to the Urban Design of the Spanish-American City

This paper analyzes the measurements regarding the urban elements used by the Spaniards for the foundation and design of the Spanish–American cities created on the American continent over three centuries during the colonial period. The measurements analyzed are from the urban elements of the plaza, streets, and blocks.The study was accomplished based on the following: 1) study of the measurements in the theoretical models and in the reticular main cities of Spanish urbanism until the 16th century, 2) study of the measurements in the Laws of the Indies (1573), and 3) by analysis of the measurements used in the cities created on the American continent, through the study of cartography corresponding to the Colonial Spanish period.In the urban models used during three centuries by the Spaniards on the American continent the use of some particular measurement is evident (besides the common use of urban reticular traces). These measurements have a theoretical and practical base in Spain since the 12th century.

Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xvi + 182pp. 2 line drawings. 4 maps. 1 table. $18.95 pbk

<b>Jay Kinsbruner</b>, <i>The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i>. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xvi + 182pp. 2 line drawings. 4 maps. 1 table. $18.95 pbk

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

As Jay Kinsbruner’s title and subtitle suggest, the focus of his study is colonial Spanish American “urban life” in what he calls the “Age of Atlantic Capitalism.” According to the author’s implicit definition of this time period and the themes on which he concentrates, it seems that this age begins in the mid – eighteenth century, running up to and beyond the late colonial period. This period also coincides with the great majority of the author’s previous research on urban themes, including pulperos (small retail grocers), petty capitalism, and race relations in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico.In the opening chapters Kinsbruner briefly discusses the Iberian origins of Spanish American colonial cities, as well as pre-Columbian urbanism. He also provides some background on the founding of colonial cities and suggests (as with the founding of cities in the Iberian reconquista) that the conquistadors founded many Spanish American cities where they would be most useful to control particular regions, populations, or valuable natural resources. They were not spontaneous urban settlements established solely as a result of economic factors. Many survived over time and gradually evolved over the next two centuries into the eighteenth-century cities that Kinsbruner examines more closely.The author throws down the gauntlet to potential adversaries who may disagree with his assertion that “the colonial Spanish-American city evolved during the Age of Atlantic capitalism and was itself a circumstance of that capitalism.” This apparently “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” (p. xi). He states that it is wrong to believe “the rest of the people were the immiserated plebeians” (p. xi) and that there was almost nobody in between the elite and the plebe or underclass. The author is particularly incensed by the use of the term plebeian in colonial sources and its continued use among modern historians citing these same sources. He argues that, due to market forces and capitalism at work, “[i]n fact, if not in perception, many if not all of the people of urban colonial Spanish America were precisely in a lower-middle or a middle class” (pp. 96 – 97). The author thus appears to impose on late colonial Spanish American cities the misguided contemporary North American belief that almost everyone is part of a large, all-inclusive middle class. His belief, though certainly heartfelt, has not been convincingly demonstrated in this study.Leaving aside his opinions regarding the use of “plebeians” and the demographic dominance of the urban middle class, the author does marshal very illuminating examples of urban middle-sector and upper-class entrepreneurial activity. Especially noteworthy are the brief case studies of small-scale urban shopkeepers in the late colonial period. If these petty capitalists were as numerous as Kinsbruner shows them to have been, however, it raises one’s curiosity as to how this full-blown phenomenon evolved from the earlier centuries of Latin America’s colonial urban experience. What were the socioeconomic and political changes that created this fertile ground for the “age of Atlantic capitalism” to develop and become so prevalent in the late stages of the colonial period? The author relates the end of the story in detail and we are left wondering about the antecedents.Class is the prime focus of this study, while the importance of socio-racial differences in the urban setting is given relatively little attention. For example, the author discusses colonial urban centers’ relationships with their hinterlands from a Spanish-centric perspective, where “[i]n terms of political and social influence the lines between urban and rural early became indistinct” (p. 31). Regarding the Spanish elite, this is indeed valid, but what of the influence of Indian tribute, forced delivery by Indians of specific items to Spanish urban elites, and the varieties of forced native labor that inevitably flowed from rural areas to cities? Elsewhere Kinsbruner does consider regatones (Spaniards and their black slaves or free castas). Although he labels them “resourceful entrepreneurs” (p. 76), my experience with colonial Guatemalan sources suggests their role was more one of interloper and middleman. They often used force to shake down indigenous vendors bringing products to market.While this study might have benefited from looking more at class structure and the early and midcolonial antecedents of urban capitalism that evolved into the urban society depicted, there is much to praise. Kinsbruner is an assiduous collector of useful bibliography and makes excellent use of published late-colonial travel accounts and diaries. This work will be most useful to undergraduates, as they will find the author’s often controversial opinions thought-provoking.

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

Acknowledgments Introduction A Note about the Terms Town Council, Stores, and Shops Chapter 1. The Colonial City by Definition and Origin Chapter 2. The Pre-Columbian City Chapter 3. The Colonial City Ordained and Structured Chapter 4. The Administration of the Colonial City Chapter 5. The City Visualized Chapter 6. The Urban Economy Chapter 7. Urban Society Chapter 8. Caste and Class in the Urban Context Chapter 9. The Urban Family Chapter 10. The Urban Dialogue Chapter 11. Conclusion: The Paradox Epilogue Appendix. A Comparison of Key Elements in the Ordenanzas of 1573 and in Vitruvius Notes Glossary Selected Bibliography Index

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

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

Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), pp. xiii+182, $40.00, $18.95 pb.

Jay Kinsbruner, <i>The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i> (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), pp. xiii+182, $40.00, $18.95 pb.

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

:<i>The Colonial Spanish American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism</i>

The Colonial Spanish-American City. By Jay Kinsbruner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 182. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.

The Colonial Spanish-American City. By Jay Kinsbruner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 182. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.