Colonial Mexican Cities

As the Spaniards moved into the north starting in the 1540s to establish communities based around silver mining or ranching—plus a scattering of agricultural marketing centers-they founded cities within vast regions previously uninhabited by sedentary Indians. Querétaro, Guanajuato, and León in the extensive Bajío region to the near north of Mexico City, and Guadalajara and Zacatecas yet farther to the north grew to notable size without any significant indigenous population clusters near them. Most colonial Mexican cities had been settled by 1580 (although in some cases they did not receive Crown recognition as towns or cities until some decades later), and the overwhelming majority of these endured and increased in size. Of course, mining communities continued to spring up even later than this as ore deposits were discovered. Also, as the arid north developed much later in the colonial period, some new cities emerged, Chihuahua and Durango being the most prominent of these.

Mining towns were the primary exception to the Spanish pattern of laying out colonial cities in a grid-like fashion. First, silver deposits tended to be found in rather rugged country that was not conducive to geometrically regular town plans, and the settlers of these towns anticipated that the ore and hence their residence would be quite temporary. Thus such important cities as Zacatecas and Guanajuato were laid out in very disorderly fashion, with streets following the terrain and wandering hither and yon. While the Spanish in Mexico rarely established themselves in preexisting Indian towns, they understandably situated themselves overwhelmingly in the sedentary Indian zone of central Mexico. Despite the demographic catastrophe, great numbers of natives survived to provide an inexpensive labor source. And central Mexico contained most of the immediately arable soil in the colony. Thus the earliest, largescale commercial agriculture proliferated in this region.

Mexico exported rather little agricultural produce during the colonial period. The cities of the society itself, with their large wage-earning populations, overwhelmingly constituted the markets for these rural enterprises. The development of any colonial city immediately reverberated through its hinterland, stimulating a vast increase in production and improvement of the land. The strip of territory stretching from Mexico City through Puebla to the port of Veracruz quickly emerged as the colony's trunk line, the central network of production and exchange with the rest of the world. The discovery of a major silver deposit in Zacatecas in the mid-sixteenth century established that city as the northern extreme of a new branch of the trunk line. Other mining centers gradually emerged, primarily in the arid, sparsely settled northern part of the colony, but like their predecessors they funneled their production and commerce through Mexico City and then on to Veracruz.