Capital Cities of Latin America: New Approaches and Scales

Abstract

This special section reexamines the study of capital cities in modern Latin America with implications concerning the history of urban planning and urban imaginaries more broadly. The articles explore the dynamics of infrastructure, visual representation and imagination, designing and building university cities, and illegal settlements on closed landfills. The cities in question include Bogotá, Lima, Mexico City, Quito, and Santiago and the time periods studied range from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. While each piece offers an individual case study, when read as a collection, they also probe the meanings ascribed to and developed by capital cities and their inhabitants across different scales and eras. Our brief introductory essay places the special section into an historiographical context and poses some questions about where the issue may take the field in the future.

Proposing a special issue on capital cities in modern Latin America may seem an odd venture. The historiography on urban Latin America has tended to lean toward large, capital cities more so than other urban environments. A recent essay on the topic in The Americas by Douglas McRae mentions this trend while also noting that his piece will try to “emphasize scholarship on second cities, precocious towns, and ascendant regional hubs in the hopes of sparking interest in cities outside” of major capital cities. ¹ And almost thirty years ago, Diego Armus and John Lear wrote in the Journal of Urban History of a similar trend in focusing on capital cities. ² Indeed, this special section on capital cities in Modern Latin America was born out of a session at the 2024 meeting of the American Historical Association in which we directly explained our focus on Andean capital cities as partly driven by a desire to differentiate the region’s urban experience from “the more widely studied cases of metropolises like Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City.” Still, we think this collection of four articles offers new insights into the history of Latin America and urban history more broadly, even if Mexico City has made inroads into our regional focus.

Armus and Lear and McRae point to a tension in their essays with respect to seeing the city as a space within which the historical narrative or argument plays out—“histories within cities,” as Armus and Lear call it—and taking the city as a central part in the analysis itself. ³ While this tension may still be present in urban histories, many historians have tried to tell both their history within the city and deploy the city as part of the analytical framework. In U.S. history, late nineteenth-century Chicago is much more than background when it comes to understanding the how and why of immigration, labor, and state repression in James Green’s Death in the Haymarket. ⁴ Barbara Mundy, when thinking about how to frame her history of Aztec Tenochtitlan, pulls from both Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to propose an urban history in which the city is “not just . . . a collection of people, or buildings, but also to focus on those daily practices as fundamental to that creation of the social space that constitutes the city.” ⁵ The essays in this collection point toward histories that are important for the field not only because they happen “within cities,” but also because the urban structures the how and why of the histories themselves.

This bidirectional relationship between people and city has been a useful part of recent urban histories in Latin America, even if it is not always placed front and center. One could read, for instance, James Brennan’s work on Córdoba, Argentina, simply as a history of labor and the Left and walk away perfectly satisfied. But labor also helped to make the city function and used their knowledge of the urban infrastructure to further their movement; as much as it is a labor history, it is also a spatial history of labor. ⁶ Denisa Jashari’s recent article on Popular Christian Communities (Comunidades Cristianas Populares; CCPs) during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile places the city and its relation to the movement at the center of her analysis by detailing how they planned their processions to interact with specific sites of state violence and resistance in Santiago. The CCPs linked their social movement with memory and Liberation Theology through circulation within the city. ⁷ They were, in other words, reconstructing the spaces of the city through their itinerary.

These recent approaches to Latin American urban history offer a pathway for rethinking the role of the capital city and specifically the history of planning in capital cities as a lived, iterative, and dialogical experience. This might contrast with the emphasis on “transference” of European models onto the plan of the Latin American metropolis as was regularly emphasized in the 1970s and 1980s, itself strongly influenced by the dependency school of economics and perhaps encapsulated by the emphasis on imperial mimesis found in the work of Manuel Castells or Richard Morse’s description of parasitic capitals. ⁸ This frame continued to be echoed through the turn of the century. Even works like Arturo Almandoz’s widely cited study of planning Latin American capital cities, which attempted to focus upon the pathways of the “transfer of urbanism,” offered minimal questioning of the representation of urbanism as an essentially elite process divorced from the social reality of the inhabitants of the capital cities under question. ⁹ While a generation of scholars began to provide a sociocultural history of urban images and urban experiences that moved beyond this framework, the logics undergirding the Latin American capital city as a whole remains under theorized, in particular with regard to the ways in which local populations challenged, wrestled with, imagined, and redefined those urban forms, plans, and spaces supposedly imported and inculcated wholesale onto Latin American capital cities. ¹⁰

One of the problems with these assumptions of mimetic transfer concerns a flattening of the historical circumstances that over the course of the nineteenth-century would establish the current capital cities of Latin America as capital cities. In an evocative recent essay linked to a Getty exhibit on cityscapes and photographs of the Latin American metropolis, Germán Rodrigo Mejía Povony reminds us of the extensive post-independence rivalries, conflicts, and civil wars between cities in the nascent Latin American republics which bely the conceit of stasis frequently ascribed to the region’s sociopolitical and cultural order. ¹¹ Only following this trial by fire were the new capitals able to begin to rise above the second cities of the new republics and begin to consolidate national services, establish emblems of citizenry, or develop synecdochal national images within their streets, plazas, and monuments. That is to say, to become a capital city was not preordained but necessitated superseding the challenges of nation-state construction processes.

The essays in our special section on Latin American capital cities begin at this liminal moment in which the capitals under discussion—Bogotá, Lima, Mexico City, Quito, and Santiago—had established themselves unquestionably as the capital city but were nevertheless facing key challenges to articulate their platial and spatial identities. Each essay attempts to wrestle with the intertwined challenges of urban planning, urban living, and the particular process and nature of urbanization for cities operating as the capital of a nation-state.

This special section is organized chronologically. Daniela Samur’s essay introduces the central question of the relationship between urban planning and the agency of ordinary citizens by focusing on how denizens of Bogotá sought to deploy the language of planning in order to better their local circumstances. She shows that this phenomenon operated in a dialogical fashion in which municipal authorities were frequently pushed to follow the lead of the city’s inhabitants, particularly those along Calle 6ta, thus inherently challenging the top-down narrative of capital city development. Leopoldo Prieto Páez provides a comparative approach of urban imagery in Bogotá, Lima, and Quito in the early twentieth century, focusing on automobile advertisements elaborating imagined spaces of urban modernity and satirical cartoons questioning the reach of spaces of the modern. Prieto’s work highlights the transnational development of a visual language of urban modernity while highlighting the local specificity of these images, both aspirational and lampooning. This emphasis on the imaginary continues in Jessica Mack’s article tracing the many frustrated attempts to design Mexico City’s University City in the first half of the twentieth century which demonstrate shifting notions of institutional architecture and urbanism that were explored prior to the mid-century high modern campus ultimately built. Her essay reveals that the pathways not taken matter as much to the imaginary of a capital city as the ultimate realization of major projects. Finally, Alison Bruey brings us full circle to underscore the continued presence of everyday demands for urban services and visible legitimacy by inhabitants of the Lo Errázuriz landfill in Santiago, a reclaimed neighborhood established through a land invasion which again forced municipal actors to the table through pressures from below.

As a collection on capital cities, the essays leave us with questions about urban history, especially the relationship between capital and regional cities. By placing a section of Santiago within the context and history of Haiti, Bruey’s article forces the reader into an “interscalar” framework in a similar way as Raymond Craib has argued that Santiago was in the world and “the world was . . . in Santiago.” ¹² What is less clear in these essays, though, is how capital cities relate to other cities within the same country. For all of the pushback against centralist historical analyses, of works which imply that history begins and ends in the capital, do these essays return us to a previous generation of scholarship? Or—and we think this is much more likely—do they help to shed light on new ways of conceptualizing capital cities and, in turn, urban history in general?

The articles here also ask us to think through the specifics of capital cities. On the one hand, Prieto’s contribution makes clear that the types of representations and imaginings of Quito, Lima, and Bogotá are produced precisely because they were capital cities. Similarly, Mack’s article reveals the nationalism (and internationalism) built into the ciudad universitaria in Mexico City. On the other, are the histories of Calle 6ta in Bogotá and of the Lo Errázuriz landfill in Santiago important and telling because they happen (and are happening) in capital cities? Do they bring more attention to themselves because they were/are close to political and economic elites and, because of this, their requests and actions reconfigure the relationship between their space and that of those political and economic elites? ¹³ Is this the “practicing of place” in a capital city to which Doreen Massey called attention? ¹⁴