The Metropolis in Latin America is a beautiful object to be treasured as a true Wunderkammer extracted from the Getty Research Institute's outstanding collection of historical maps and images of such cities as Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, Santiago, and Lima. It is handsomely produced, with reproductions of hard-to-find daguerreotypes and lithographs. The book is organized into six albums: “Capital Cities,” “Colonial Cities and National Heroes,” “Leisure,” “Infrastructures,” “Debates,” and, finally, “Toward Modernism.” “Capital Cities” includes, for instance, a revealing French color lithograph: an aerial view of Havana in the mid-1850s. In it, the city's traza is clearly distinguishable, as are the plazas and the busy port, and buildings appear with wonderful three-dimensional detail—in a fashion akin to those maps by German American cartographer and lithographer Henry Wellge, who, from the late 1880s to the 1900s, made similar aerial maps of US cities and even Mexico City. The reader will also find rare cosmopolitan urban images of Santiago and Buenos Aires during their rapid makeover as modern capitals.“Colonial Cities and National Heroes” is the less surprising of the albums, maybe because the Getty collection is not as strong in early modern material. It includes, however, a telling image: Plan de projet pour l'establissement de la ville du Port Napoléon dans l'Isle St. Domingue (ca. 1806). Whether the image belongs to the category of Latin America, who cares: it is beautiful and illuminating. In it, we see the planned grid, la rue Napoléon, well-demarcated plazas, and planned parks. The album also includes nineteenth-century photos of well-known patriotic monuments—of José de San Martín, Simón Bolívar, and Cuauhtémoc. Seen together, these cavalry monuments make the reader realize how different the Bernardo O'Higgins monument in Santiago was: he was cast in a peculiar dramatic posture vis-à-vis the stern quality of the other monuments. In the album “Leisure,” this reviewer was absorbed by an 1867 photo of Mexico City's Zócalo, which captures the busy plaza in celebration, with a rare depiction of an ephemeral monument to Benito Juárez's victory over Maximilian that once stood at the Zócalo's center. Equally beautiful and intriguing is a circa 1919 photo of the Cine Pathé in Rio announcing William Farnum films while well-dressed people wait to be fascinated by the new cinematic art. In turn, the album “Debates” includes images of national pavilions in world's fairs as well as of the emergence of neocolonial architecture—developed in tandem with California mission style—and of the appeal of the Maya in Mexican and world architecture. In sum, a Wunderkammer, to which the book's chapters refer here and there but, unfortunately, do not ever pause to truly read its images.The accompanying ten chapters are uneven in their contributions and level of specificity. Across all of them, Latin America denotes the assumed geography and history that the term has conventionally implied. Cities and their images, thus, are incorporated into the texts as belonging to the same cultural matrix, often pinpointed with world urban echoes, seen somehow as un–Latin American models artificially applied to an unspecified authentic locality (Latin America)—as if late nineteenth-century “Latin American” capitals could have been something else than modern capital cities, just as were Washington, DC, or newly created Berlin, or Constantinople as capital of the new nation-state of Turkey. It is not that this reviewer does not see the relevance of, say, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in late nineteenth-century Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro—or, for that matter, that of Ildefonso Cerdà, who is never mentioned. But this reviewer prefers to speak unexotically, un–Latin Americanly, of the cities of the Americas; they were as imitative and innovative as cities throughout the modern world, all within a knotty global milieu where urban ideas and experiences circulated and were transformed without a patronymic sense. For the modern urban has been vernacular—that is, a very local utterance of, as it were, a cosmopolitan urban Latin to whom no one was, or is, a native speaker.Two chapters deal with the general history of capital cities after the collapse of Iberian empires. For Germán Rodrigo Mejía Pavony (whose chapter is titled “The Emergence of Capital Cities in Nineteenth-Century Latin America”), “the capital city is the site from which the history of the nation-state has been written” (p. 35). For him, cities explained both the emergence of nations and the fragmentation of the old imperial administration: “The Spanish Empire collapsed and what was left were cities and their municipal governments” (p. 36). Though the author never makes the parallel, the odd centrality of Rio de Janeiro, and the lack of fragmentation of Portuguese America, could be explained by the continuity of imperial institutions. And yet, Brazil's map of cities was not less powerfully federalist and fragmented. In turn, Arturo Almandoz's “From Postcolonial Cities to the First Metropolises” covers the general path of Spanish American cities, from stagnation and decline during and after the wars of independence to their integration to global markets and the emergence of national bourgeoisies, from the conquest of their respective hinterlands to the late nineteenth-century modernization and beautification of cities, incorporating transportation technology and modern sanitation.Two chapters, tellingly, deal with nature—the lack and emergence of, as it were, a nature attachment within the urban tradition in Latin America—covering sixteenth-century Mexico City's Alameda Central park; Bourbon botanic gardens, paseos, and parks; crowded downtowns as sites of economic and political power; and suburbs and garden cities. In turn, Idurre Alonso examines in “The Visible and the Invisible: The Photographic Images of the Metropolis” the abundant photographic record of late nineteenth-century cities, highlighting the focus on infrastructure, beautification, and elites as well as the lack of concern with the urban poor and chaos. Especially welcome in this chapter is the analysis of Augusto Malta's photographic record of Francisco Pereira Passos's transformation of Rio. In general terms, Alonso's distinction between the visible and the invisible stands, but a careful consideration of each location would reveal that the invisible was visible in the emergence of urban reportage, the criminalistic and sanitary gaze, and even the artistic moment of photography (which was fascinated with images of mendigos and street children).Some chapters are devoted to specific cities: Maria Cristina da Silva Leme compares urban plans in Rio and Buenos Aires, and Cristóbal Jácome-Moreno focuses on how Mexico City recuperated the pre-Hispanic in the era of both massive urban reforms and revalorization of ruins—ruins are naturally appealing to cities, which are always ruinous and always ready to become ruins. A final chapter examines, in very general terms, major urban planning trends and their “transatlantic journeys from Europe to Latin America.”I will treasure The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 as an artistic object, as a Wunderkammer to be viewed and reviewed in search of those secrets that images reveal to those who see them with both aesthetic and uncanny obsession.