The Urban Landscape of Mexico

The urban landscape of Mexico is old and sophisticated. Its major city embodies a broad national ethos: the great Temítistín or Tenochtitlan, capital of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire, major administrative center for the viceroyalty of New Spain, and Federal capital of the United States of Mexico. Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Teotihuacanos, Toltec, and many other civilized nations lived, worked, and prayed in cities that were destroyed or that have been renewed and refounded at different times in history. The Spanish Conquest could not have been accomplished without the creation of a new urban landscape of novel cities different from their Indian predecessors and with skins that could only be shed anew after Independence.

Mexico's urban centers were founded in three cultural, political, and social moments of the nation's past: the preHispanic, colonial, and post-Independence periods. The earliest cities can trace their origins to pre-Hispanic settlements built and designed in accordance with the cultural formations of the Indian civilizations that appeared in Mesoamerica for over 2,000 years. Some were administrative and religious centers, others were living communities; yet all planned differently from those built after the Conquest.

Spaniards founded many new cities between the sixteenth and early nineteenth century. The conquistadors used these cities to colonize the new lands and to control the rural environment and its population. The Spaniards constructed these cities based on traditions of urban architecture and military life found in Renaissance and Modern Europe. Although these cities were modeled on foreign urban ideas, they were immersed in a New World context that affected their planning and objectives. Over 60 Mexican cities, among them Puebla, Taxco, Guadalajara, Michoacán, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Querétaro, have retained historical monuments of the colonial era. These churches, monasteries, and public and private buildings now are protected by nongovernmental, state, and federal organizations in an effort to preserve a legacy of New Spain's viceroyalty and the greatness of its political creation.

A third group of cities, founded after Mexico attained its Independence in 1821, are called, in the words of Argentine historian José Luis Romero, the "national" cities of Mexico. Among them are Tampico, Ciudad del Carmen, Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Ciudad Madero, and countless others varying in size and importance. Most have had a precarious life until recent years, when population growth or their location—whether on the coasts or frontiers—gave them unexpected importance. These "national" cities have played an important role in the life of the country, especially for their contribution as urban centers where local and regional political life has developed within the context of the nation and as immediate paradigms of the true life of the nation's people and their problems. In addition to these three broad groups of cities are thousands of villages and hamlets, tiny centers of urban-rural life deeply immersed in their natural environments. The great historical classic of Luis González y González, Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Garcia, studies one of these small centers.