Urban History (Latin American Studies)

Introduction

Latin American urban history is a capacious field. “Urban history” can refer both to the history of cities and to history that unfolds within cities, encompassing a broad spectrum of methodological and thematic concerns. Latin America is a diverse region, and nearly every Latin American country has its own rich urban historiography. And historians have been analyzing cities for a very long time, often in intense dialogue with social science and cultural studies, leaving in their wake multiple strata of research and insight. Given this richness and diversity, any single bibliography necessarily excludes much. This article aims to introduce an international readership to the categories, methodologies, and themes that have shaped the evolution of Latin American urban history. This bibliography defines urban history broadly, but generally it includes only works in which the city itself assumes a central role. It favors more recent studies, but it includes multiple generations of works in subfields where important perspectives have fallen by the wayside. Most of the books listed are available in English, and accessible even to readers who lack extensive grounding in national historiographies. But the article also includes outstanding works in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and the English-language works discuss national historiographies at length. The list tends to emphasize those countries where urban historiographies are densest—especially Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina—but it also integrates studies from across the region. Historians wrote most of these works, but social scientists and cultural scholars also appear, especially when the historiography has yet to tackle crucial questions and recent developments. The thematic subcategories include both well-developed and emerging historiographies. The list begins with general works, bibliographical essays, interdisciplinary collections, and “biographies” of particular cities. It continues with a long series of thematic subfields that have shaped the field over time: cultural and intellectual history, planning and spatial geography, Atlantic world connections, economic life, public health, slavery and freedom, race, migration, gender, poverty, politics, social movements, labor, citizenship and informality, crime and violence, consumption and the middle classes, and urban disasters. The books assembled here do not constitute the last word on Latin American urban history. Given the sheer variety of perspectives and methodologies encompassed by the field, this would be impossible. But this list does aim to serve as a first word, a preliminary representative guide to a dense, complex, sophisticated field that has long been central to Latin American historiography.

General Works and Bibliographical Essays

Recent synthetic works on Latin America’s urban history are relatively few, a fact that perhaps reflects the field’s sprawling and fragmented evolution. For the colonial period, Morse 1984 creatively synthesizes the then-extant historiography. Hoberman and Socolow 1986 contains an array of strong social history essays. Gilbert 1994 provides a good undergraduate-level introduction to demographic, spatial, and political history from the mid-20th century to 1990s. Modernists may garner the most from successive generations of historiographical essays: Scobie 1986, a contribution on demographic and social history; de Oliveira and Roberts 1994, an essay on the impact of mass urbanization and industrialization on urban social structures; Armus and Lear 1998, a brief but sweeping piece on Latin America’s urban historiography; and Rosenthal 2000, an intelligent reflection on public space in Latin American urban historiography. Almandoz Marte 2008 returns to the tradition of Richard Morse, providing a sweeping overview of Latin American intellectual production with its own historiographical compass.

Almandoz Marte, Arturo. Entre libros de historia urbana: Para una historiografia de la ciudad y del urbanismo en América Latina. Caracas, Venezuela: Equinoccio-Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2008.
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A welcome recent reflection on Latin America’s urban historiography. Almandoz focuses mainly on Spanish America (with some attention to Brazil) and highlights the historiography’s embeddedness in international intellectual currents. A strong introduction to classic works by scholars such as Jorge Hardoy, Richard Morse, José Luis Romero, and Roberto Segre, as well as an insightful critical analysis of more recent scholarship.
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Armus, Diego, and John Lear. “The Trajectory of Latin American Urban History.” Journal of Urban History 24.3 (1998): 291–301.
DOI: 10.1177/009614429802400301Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Brief but comprehensive, this article traces the trajectory of Latin American urban history, in the process interrogating its coherence as a field of study. Armus and Lear’s incorporation of the early phases of the recent boom in urban cultural history is especially useful, as is their periodization of the field.
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de Oliveira, Orlandina, and Bryan Roberts. “Urban Growth and Urban Social Structure in Latin America, 1930–1990.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. 6, Latin America since 1930: Economy, Society and Politics. Part 1: Economy and Society. Edited by Leslie Bethell, 253–324. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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Considers the sociological impact of urbanization between 1930 and 1990, and especially the ways in which Latin America’s distinct patterns of economic development shaped the form and impact of mass urbanization. Oliveira and Roberts give particular attention to questions of class structure and inequality.
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Gilbert, Alan. The Latin American City. London: Latin American Bureau, 1994.
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Well suited for undergraduates, this remains a strong socioeconomic, political, and geographical overview of Latin American urban development in the second half of the 20th century. Based mostly on English- and some Spanish-language publications, with relatively thin coverage of Brazil. The demographic tables are especially useful.
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Hoberman, Louisa, and Susan Socolow. Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
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Focused mainly on social groups and power structures, this collection’s chapters range across the social spectrum, investigating everything from the basis of urban economic, political, and military power to the roles of urban clergy to the structures of artisan guilds and the history of the urban poor.
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Morse, Richard. “The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. 2, Colonial Latin America. Edited by Leslie Bethell, 67–104. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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This essay displays the creative erudition of a remarkable and eclectic urban historian, even as it introduces readers to the most significant works of colonial urban history. Those seeking an overview of an important period in intellectual history will also appreciate Morse’s “Los intelectuales latinoamericanos y la ciudad, 1870–1940.”
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Rosenthal, Anton. “Spectacle, Fear, and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in Latin America.” Social Science History 24.1 (Spring 2000): 33–73.
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This is a thoughtful overview with special emphasis on the question of urban public space. Specific sections focus on the history of urban social protest, writings on the social spaces of streets and plazas, and accounts of urban spectacle.
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Scobie, James. “The Growth of Latin American Cities, 1870–1930.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. 4, c. 1870 to 1930. Edited by Leslie Bethel, 233–266. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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Scobie’s article provides a clear synthesis of Latin American urban history as it was practiced in the mid-1980s. Scobie emphasizes demographic change, economic function, and the impact of both on urban space, society, and politics.
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Interdisciplinary Urban Studies

Latin American urban history has developed in intense dialogue with other fields. The following collections demonstrate the evolution of those conversations. Hauser 1961 is a pioneering work in the genre. Morse 1971, a two-part work, covers enormous interdisciplinary territory. Hardoy 1975 highlights work by Latin American scholars especially concerned with history, urban inequality, and planning. Morse and Hardoy 1989 (first published in Spanish) integrates new concerns and old. Portes, et al. 1997 is an edited volume on the Caribbean that brings much-needed interdisciplinary attention to the Caribbean Basin and treats the impact of neoliberalism. Portes, et al. 2008 assesses the cumulative impact of globalization and neoliberalism on six cities. Biron 2009, a volume on the “cultural scene,” injects an interdisciplinary cultural perspective, and Joseph and Schuzman 1996 provides a collection of compelling chronicles for classroom use.

Biron, Rebecca, ed. City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
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An intriguing product of the “cultural turn” in urban studies, this volume brings together leading scholars in Latin American anthropology, philosophy, architecture, and cultural studies to consider the role of Latin American cities as “sites of creativity.”
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Hardoy, Jorge, ed. Urbanization in Latin America: Approaches and Issues. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975.
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This volume, originally published in Spanish, contains twelve chapters by an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars. It emphasizes the intersection of history, geography, and contemporary policy, and reflects its era’s concern with dependency theory. The book concludes with case studies of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo.
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Hauser, Philip, ed. Urbanization in Latin America. Paris: UNESCO, 1961.
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The product of a pioneering 1959 seminar co-sponsored by Economic Commission fo Latin America (ECLA), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and other international organizations, this volume assembles articles by leading social scientists and planners from across the Americas. These writers focus especially on the hot topics of the day: migration, industrial development, rapid urban growth, informal housing, and planning.
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Joseph, Gilbert, and Mark Schuzman, eds. I Saw a City Invincible: Urban Portraits of Latin America. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.
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A collection of urban portraits, mainly written by contemporaries but occasionally reconstructed by scholars. Provides compelling portraits of particular historical moments; especially good for classroom use. For more in-depth chronicles, see Ruben Gallo, The Mexico City Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
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Morse, Richard. “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965–70 (Part 1).” Latin American Research Review 6.1 (Spring and Summer 1971): 3–52.
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See also “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965–70 (Part 2),” Latin American Research Review 6.2 (Spring and Summer 1971): 19–75. Morse’s essays offer a learned and wide-ranging consideration of an especially fruitful and influential generation of interdisciplinary scholarship, useful for anyone interested in the mid-20th-century city or the history of Latin American urban studies.
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Morse, Richard, and Jorge Hardoy, eds. Rethinking the Latin American City. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1989.
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An apt companion to Hardoy 1975, this book brings new attention to questions of law, rights, citizenship, and social networks. Authors include politicians and planners as well as academics; chapters by Richard Morse, Jorge Hardoy, Bryan Roberts, and Larissa Lomnitz are especially strong.
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Portes, Alejandro, Carlos Dore-Cabral, and Patricia Landolt, eds. The Urban Caribbean: Transition to the New Global Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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This book is valuable for its focus on the often-neglected Caribbean, for its careful consideration of globalization’s impact on urban life, and for its attention to rich case studies in smaller countries. Informality, globalization, and citizenship receive particular attention. Case studies include Costa Rica and Guatemala in addition to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
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Portes, Alejandro, Bryan R. Roberts, and Alejandro Grimson, eds. Ciudades latinoamericanas: Un análisis comparativo en el umbral del nuevo siglo. Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrua, 2008.
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This volume takes a comparative approach to assess the urban impact of neoliberal policy. In addition to Portes and Roberts’s historically sensitive introduction and concluding chapter on collective action, the book includes six case studies (Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Mexico City, Lima, and Montevideo) written by leading Latin American social scientists.
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Biographies of Cities

Latin America’s urban historiography grew from the ground up, beginning with chroniclers and antiquarian local histories. Many of the classic works in the field conceptualized urban history mainly through the stories of individual cities. Although studies of this kind have largely given way to more theoretically and thematically driven endeavors, these often fascinating texts are still important touchstones, especially for those interested in longue-durée trajectories or broad syntheses. Morse 1974 and Scobie 1974 are classics of their respective generations. Hardoy and Gutman 2007, Cluster and Hernández 2008, and Ward 1998 are more recent takes on the biographical approach. Latin American cities have also often been the subjects of exciting collective biographies, massive compilations of essays that usefully introduce readers both to a city’s history and to the variety of intellectual production surrounding it: Garza 1987; Romero and Romero 1983; and Porta, et al. 2004 are outstanding examples.

Cluster, Dick, and Rafael Hernández. The History of Havana. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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Jointly written by an American novelist and a prominent Cuban political scientist, this book provides a brief, smart, highly readable introduction to Havana’s history, though it tends to skim over issues of space, planning, services, and municipal politics.
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Garza, Gustavo. Atlas de la ciudad de México. Mexico City: Departamento del Distrito Federal y El Colegio de México, 1987.
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This compilation covers topics ranging from Mexico’s precolonial settlement to its economic and spatial growth to its experiences of urban planning and seismic disaster. Garza published a similar compilation on Monterrey, and his Cincuenta años de investigación urbana e regional en México (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1995) is a comprehensive bibliographical guide.
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Hardoy, Jorge, and Margarita Gutman. Buenos Aires: Historia urbana del area metropolitana. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Infinito, 2007.
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Originally published in 1992, this is an excellent Spanish-language introduction to the history of Buenos Aires. It covers the entire metropolitan region and highlights the interactions of space, demography, culture, politics, and economics from the colonial period to the present. The 2007 edition includes a chapter on contemporary Buenos Aires.
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Morse, Richard. From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil. New York: Octagon, 1974.
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First published in 1958 (reprinted with a new epilogue in 1974), this remains a classic study of the interplay of ideas, culture, economics, and urban growth. Some will find Morse’s anecdotal style, focus on elite sources, and reliance on normative mid-century sociological models old-fashioned.
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Porta, Paula, Antonio Arnoni Prado, Alzira Campos, et al., eds. História da cidade de São Paulo. 3 vols. São Paulo, Brazil: Paz e Terra, 2004.
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A collection of essays by leading scholars, covering a wide variety of topics from São Paulo’s colonial origins to the mid-20th century. An effective introduction to Brazilian research on the country’s largest city.
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Romero, José Luis, and Luis Alberto Romero. Buenos Aires, história de cuatro siglos. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editora Abril, 1983.
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Includes more than sixty essays by leading lights in urban studies, ranging from the founding of Buenos Aires to the late 20th century and touching on nearly every aspect of the city’s history and development. A very useful introduction to the monographical work of a wide array of prominent Argentine scholars.
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Scobie, James. Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
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Some of this book’s conclusions have now come into question, and language and thematic concerns can seem somewhat dated. But his account of the interaction of economics, social geography, space, and politics in the early boom years of Buenos Aires is still the classic English-language work of Latin American urban social history.
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Ward, Peter. Mexico City. New York: Wiley, 1998.
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Focused mainly on the second half of the 20th century, and concerned especially with planning, politics, and equity, this is a strong introduction written by one of Mexico City’s leading scholars.
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Urban Cultural History

The meaning of “cultural history” has shifted greatly over generations. The term once suggested works focused on the intellectual tastes and aesthetic practices of the lettered, cultura in its most narrow iteration. In modern historiographies, cultural history is a more capacious term, enveloping the study of virtually every intellectual and aesthetic form as well as the mentalities and symbolic structures that infuse social, political, and intellectual life. Many of the works listed in other sections of this article deconstruct mentalities and symbolic systems to illuminate social, political, legal, and economic histories. The works here represent a variety of approaches to the study of urban cultural and intellectual production per se. Rama 1996 presents a widely influential argument about the linked significance of lettered and urban culture over Latin America’s longue durée. Reis 2003 defines death practices as both culture and politics, analyzing funerary cultures to uncover the fascinating internal dynamics of a 19th-century slave society. Needell 1987 emphasizes the internal workings of the elite in an age when their cultural choices were especially consequential. Tenorio 2012 and Sevcenko 1992, intellectually voracious, multifaceted cultural tours, elucidate the volatile urban condition of Mexico City and São Paulo, respectively, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Karush 2012 and Podalsky 2004 highlight different aesthetic forms and successive political generations, but both works are concerned with the cultural dynamics of populism and inequality in Argentina. Finally, Birkenmaier and Whitfield 2011 traces the interaction of urban culture and urban history in Cuba’s post-Soviet age.

Birkenmaier, Annie, and Esther Whitfield, eds. Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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A multidisciplinary examination of Havana’s physical and cultural cityscape, especially since the crumbling of the USSR. Authors are attentive to the ways in which history embeds itself in urban landscapes, and the essays provide fascinating insights into architecture, urban planning, urban slums, literature, music, and the aesthetics of urban sociability.
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Karush, Matthew. Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
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In this history of Argentine cultural production in the decades before Peronism. Karush argues that Argentina’s movies and radio broadcasts displayed a marked populist streak from the 1920s and 1930s, and that the polarizations depicted in popular mass culture laid some of the groundwork for the Peronist politics of inequality.
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Needell, Jeffrey. A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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Unlike the vast majority of contemporary urban histories, Needell’s valuable study focuses on the urban elite and the culture that helped to create and sustain their class identity at the apogee of European cultural and urban influence.
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Podalsky, Laura. Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–1973. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
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Podalsky’s ambitious book explores a period in which extraordinary cultural dynamism coexisted with high levels of political and social tension, often provoked by the clash between “modernization” and older corporate and populist notions of hierarchy and social justice. For Podalsky, urban culture both expressed and created these contentious dynamics.
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Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
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Rama’s much celebrated text equates the city with lettered culture, and both with colonialism and the distance between ideals and context that has helped to perpetuate Latin America’s many inequalities and disjunctures over time. Originally published in Spanish in 1984.
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Reis, João. Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
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In Reis’s book, the cultural rites of death serve as a window into the sociocultural dynamics of the living, shedding light on social hierarchies, patriarchal networks, ethnic and racial solidarities, and the genesis of urban social protest in Salvador, Brazil’s second-largest 19th-century city.
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Sevcenko, Nicolau. Orfeu Extático na metrópole: São Paulo, sociedade e cultura nos frementes anos 20. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1992.
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A kaleidoscopic account of São Paulo’s encounter with urban modernity in the 1920s, drawing mainly from print sources. Few aspects of urban high or popular culture escape notice; Orfeu can also double at points as a social history of the city. For Rio, see Sevcenko’s fine “A capital irradiante: Técnica, ritmos e ritos do Rio.” In Historia da vida privada no Brasil. Vol. 3. Edited by Nicolau Sevcenko (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1998), pp. 513–619.
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Tenorio, Mauricio. “I Speak of the City”: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
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A “multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City” that marshals Tenorio’s deep erudition and literary sensibility to portray the mutable and multiple realities of urban modernization at a critical historical juncture.
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Histories of Urban Planning, Geography, and Architecture

Particularly in Spanish America, cities have long been planned, often with reference to imperial aims or foreign models and nearly always in conflict or tension with some sectors of the urban population. The following books, only a small sample from a voluminous literature, trace the interaction of urban planning and urban socio-spatial evolution over many centuries and from several disciplinary and generational perspectives. Hardoy 1992, Almandoz 2002, and Fraser 2000 are all concerned with the Latin American transfer and transformation of European and US American urbanisms. The rest of the listed works constitute narrower case studies: Segre, et al. 1997 documents Havana; Tenorio Trillo 1996 considers Mexico City in the belle époque; de Abreu 2006 traces several centuries of urban planning and policy in Rio; César de Quieroz Ribeiro and Pechman 1996 are compilations of essays analyzing Brazilian urbanism; Holston 1989 offers an ethnographic reading of Brasília as a modernist utopia unable to shake the legacies of Brazilian inequality; and Low 2000 brings ethnographic insight to the social production of space and inequality in Costa Rica.

Almandoz, Arturo. Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950. London: Routledge, 2002.
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A general overview with specific essays on Buenos Aires, Rio/São Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City, Lima, Havana, Caracas, and San José. Traces the influence of European planning in the Latin American context. The authors are mostly leading Latin American scholars, and these articles are excellent introductions to their broader research.
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César de Quieroz Ribeiro, Luiz, and Roberto Pechman, eds. Cidade, povo e nação: Gênese do urbanismo moderno. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira, 1996.
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A strong collection of articles focused on 20th-century Brazilian urbanism, with special emphasis on the transfer of European ideas to the Brazilian context and on planning’s sociopolitical embeddedness.
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de Abreu, Mauricio. Evolução urbana do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Instituto Municipal de Urbanismo Pereira Passos, 2006.
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Abreu’s classic Evolução, reissued in 2006, focuses mainly on Rio’s historical geography, and it is a basic text for anyone wishing to understand the city’s spatial and demographic evolution. Abreu’s masterful Geografia histórica do Rio de Janeiro (1502-1700) (2010) extends this socio-geographical approach to the colonial period.
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Fraser, Valerie. Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960. New York: Verso, 2000.
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This book brings an art historian’s sensibility to the study of modernist architecture during its Latin American apex. Emphasizes Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil; especially notable for its comparative perspective, its careful attention to significant architects and monumental projects, and its recognition of Latin America’s innovative engagement with modernism.
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Hardoy, Jorge. “Theory and Practice of Urban Planning in Europe, 1850–1910: Its Transfer to Latin America.” In Rethinking the Latin American City. Edited by Richard Morse and Jorge Hardoy, 20–49. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1992.
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This classic essay outlines the application of classic schools of European urbanism to the Latin American context. A useful starting point for students wishing to investigate the European roots of specific aspects of Latin American urban planning and design, though the essay provides little in the way of critical analysis.
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Holston, James. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
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Built in less than five years, with a spectacular modernist design, Brasília has long attracted disproportionate attention and criticism. Holston’s book is a now-classic critique of the contradictory strains of planning and politics that went into creating Brazil’s national capital and the paradoxical social and political results of Brasília’s construction.
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Low, Setha. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
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An outstanding analysis of plazas in San José, Costa Rica; this is at once an ethnography, a history of the plaza as an urban form, a reflection on the spatial politics of inequality, and a highly innovative theoretical analysis of the social production of space. This book is anthropological rather than historical in its approach, but it provides key insights to anyone wishing to understand the urban politics of space in late-20th-century Latin America.
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Segre, Roberto, Mario Coyula, and Joseph Scarpaci. Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis. New York: Wiley, 1997.
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A history of urbanism, architecture, and planning in both the pre- and post-revolutionary eras.
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Tenorio Trillo, Mauricio. “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario.” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996): 71–104.
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A kaleidoscopic perspective on links between urban space and elite urban imaginaries at the centenary of Mexico’s independence struggles. Topics range from spatial transformation to city planning to the imagined city and nation embodied in historical monuments and public buildings.
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Latin American Cities and the Atlantic World

Many of Latin America’s cities are creations of the Atlantic world, founded and sustained to channel the power, goods, and laborers of Atlantic empires. Urban Atlanticism is not only, or even mostly, a colonial phenomenon, but the best studies of Latin American cities as Atlantic cities still concentrate on the colonial period. The works listed here reflect this. Knight and Liss 1991 brings together essays from across the Americas and highlight the interplay of Atlanticism and urbanism. De la Fuente 2008 takes on the economic and social life of early Havana, emphasizing emerging patterns of racialized thought and governance. Bicalho 2003 examines imperial competition and insecurity, arguing that many aspects of Rio de Janeiro’s early development were conditioned by colonial fear. Schultz 2001 details the interplay of local and Atlantic politics during Brazil’s ephemeral stint as a center of empire. Osorio 2008 analyzes the performance of imperial urbanity in colonial Lima. Finally, Johnson and Frank 2006 examines two Atlantic port cities in the decades surrounding independence, grounding its argument in extensive primary research and a comprehensive bibliography of recent economic research.

Bicalho, Fernanda. A cidade e o império: O Rio de Janeiro no século XVIII. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira, 2003.
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This innovative book explores the role of colonial fear in shaping Portuguese governance in Rio de Janeiro, ingeniously linking the precariousness of imperial control to the dynamics of the city’s early urban evolution.
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de la Fuente, Alejandro. Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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A vivid, insightful, compact social history of Havana’s rise as an Atlantic port city, which long preceded Cuba’s emergence as a global sugar producer. De la Fuente masterfully weaves economic and sociocultural histories, and he has much to say about Havana’s Afro-descendant population and the early emergence of racialized laws and social relationships.
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Johnson, Lyman, and Zephyr Frank. “Cities and Wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before 1860.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.3 (2006): 634–668.
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A comparative analysis of wealth-holding in two Atlantic cities before the late-19th-century expansion of Atlantic commerce. Johnson and Frank argue that a combination of internal and international trade drove a widespread expansion of wealth-holding that was no more unequal than its North Atlantic counterparts. A terrific bibliography of recent Brazilian and Argentine economic history, much with an urban focus.
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Knight, Franklin, and Peggy Liss. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
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These essays take a comparative approach to the development of Atlantic port cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus is mostly economic and on the ways in which ports shape urban development; the authors emphasize both the positions of the port cities vis-à-vis their hinterlands and their place in larger Atlantic networks.
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Osorio, Alejandra. Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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An engaging account of Lima’s emergence as Spain’s South American nerve center, attentive not only to the city’s economic networks, but also to consciously deployed symbolisms of power, religion, and imperial submission.
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Schultz, Kirsten. Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821. New York: Routledge, 2001.
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Schultz’s book artfully chronicles the ways in which Rio’s emergence as an Atlantic imperial capital marked the beginning of the end of Portuguese imperial rule. Wonderful accounts of Rio’s emerging political culture and of the daily dissonance of colonial rule upturned.
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Urban Economic Life

Urban economic history is an eclectic field, one that is divided between rigorous quantitative studies and more descriptive works that aim to situate economic history in a broader urban context. The works listed here belong to the latter category, emphasizing the economy’s role in shaping the sociocultural dynamics of urban life. Socolow 1978 and Kicza 1983 trace elite economic and social networks in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, respectively, and Kicza is especially effective in placing those networks in a vibrant urban context. Mangan 2005 emphasizes the other end of the commercial class in a fascinating study of gender and commerce in colonial Potosí. Graham 2010, an examination of food provisioning in Salvador, effectively unveils previously underemphasized socioeconomic networks in a complex slaveholding society. Frank 2004 draws surprising conclusions about the relationship between slavery and social mobility in Rio de Janeiro. With a narrower focus on political economy, Dean 1969 and Garza 1985 document, respectively, the emergence of São Paulo and Mexico City as industrial centers. A biographical postscript on urban economic life appears in Buechler and Buechler 1996, a narrative account of one woman’s experience navigating La Paz’s late-20th-century commercial economy.

Buechler, Hans, and Judith-Maria Buechler. The World of Sofía Velásquez: The Autobiography of a Bolivian Market Vendor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
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A history of one woman’s life in La Paz, focused especially on her experience as a market vendor, assembled from in-depth interviews, self-recorded depositions, and written musings. A highly accessible book that illuminates strategies of survival and limited social mobility among poor, mostly indigenous rural-to-urban migrants.
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Dean, Warren. The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1900–1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.
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A straightforward analysis of São Paulo’s evolution from a sleepy coffee hub to an industrial powerhouse. Dean focuses especially on industrialists and their social and political networks, and on the global context of São Paulo’s industrial growth.
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Frank, Zephyr. Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.
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Antonio José Dutra was an African-born slave who accumulated considerable wealth before his death in 1849, mainly through slave ownership. In telling, and rigorously contextualizing, Dutra’s story, Frank illuminates patterns of social mobility and offers a counterintuitive argument about abolition’s detrimental impact on the economic prospects of the middling free classes.
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Garza, Gustavo. El proceso de industrializacón en la ciudad de México, 1821–1970. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1985.
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Summarizes industrial development in Mexico from the post-independence period to 1970, focusing especially on the process of industrial concentration in the post-revolutionary period and its interaction with Mexico’s urban development.
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Graham, Richard. Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
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Graham uses food—its procurement, commerce, politics, and culture—to understand Brazil’s second-largest 19th-century city. He reaches innovative conclusions about the links between countryside and city, urban political conflict, and Salvador’s complex social networks and hierarchies: Graham insists especially on the importance of middle sectors among Afro-descendant populations.
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Kicza, John. Colonial Entrepeneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.
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Kicza’s study is, in some ways, a companion to Socolow 1978: the focus here is Mexico City’s merchant class, its economic and family networks, and its strategies for continued prosperity. Kicza also devotes considerable space to manufacturers, artisans, petty commerce, and spatial geography.
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Mangan, Jane. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
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Mangan’s study explores the fascinating world of female vendors and creditors during the height of Potosí’s silver boom. Mangan finds surprising room for social mobility and documents fascinating social networks. She also illuminates the structure of popular commerce as well as issues of race, gender, and urban regulation.
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Socolow, Susan. The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511759826Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study of the wholesale merchant class of Buenos Aires in the Age of Revolution is especially notable for its attention to family networks, routes of social mobility, and the sociocultural trappings of class.
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Urban Public Health

The history of urban public health illuminates far more than the epidemiological or scientific trajectories of diseases and medical practices; it can also explain much about the institutional, economic, political, and spatial dynamics of Latin American cities. Brazilian historians of medicine have contributed disproportionately to this emerging field. The wide range of this contemporary historiography is showcased in Chalhoub 1996, an engaging account of the socio-racial politics of epidemic disease, Engel 2001, a study of urban insanity, and Bertucci 2004, an analysis of the Spanish flu and popular medical practices. Agostoni 2003 ably investigates links between public health, engineering, and early urbanism in Porfirian Mexico City, while Bliss 2002 explores the interaction of public health, gender, and politics in shaping Mexican prostitution policies in the decades after 1910. Armus 2011 constitutes a cultural history of tuberculosis in Buenos Aires. Scheper-Hughes 1992, an historically grounded ethnography, documents the societal effects of poverty and infant death in Brazil’s urban northeast. Brotherton 2012, a study of health practices in contemporary Cuba, illuminates much about Havana’s experience in the post-Soviet age.

Agostoni, Claudia. Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910. Calgary, AL: University of Calgary Press, 2003.
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A history of public health, engineering, and urban reform in Mexico City during the Porfiriato, emphasizing changing understandings and discourses of disease as well as the overlap between health policy and social policy.
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Armus, Diego. The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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The experience of tuberculosis in Buenos Aires becomes a vehicle for a city’s cultural history. In Armus’s rendering, tuberculosis was a sickness to be treated, an imperative for public health infrastructure, a thorn in the side of urban modernization during the belle époque, and a metaphor for the anxieties and insights of an age.
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Bertucci, Liane Maria. Influenza, a medicina enferma: Ciência e prática de cura na época da gripe espanhola em São Paulo. Campinas, Brazil: Unicamp, 2004.
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An account of the Spanish flu epidemic in the city of São Paulo, which emphasizes the popular experience of the disease, links between disease control and urban planning, and the contested rise of scientific medical practice.
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Bliss, Katherine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
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As much a history of gender and social policy as a history of public health, Bliss’s book explores prostitution in Mexico City before, during, and after the revolution, illuminating much about the intersection of health policy, moralizing discourses, and urban change.
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Brotherton, P. Sean. Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
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An evocative account of changes in Cuba’s health-care system since the end of the Soviet Union, constructed around close ethnographic research in Havana. Brotherton writes vividly about the city, its people, and the links between physical and political experience.
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Chalhoub, Sidney. Cidade Febril: Cortiços e epidémias na Corte Imperial. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1996.
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Chalhoub’s beautifully written work explores the histories of disease, poverty, housing, public policy, and race in Rio de Janeiro during the last decades of slavery and the Brazilian Empire. Some of Chalhoub’s arguments appear in English in “The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (1993): 441–463.
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Engel, Magali Gouveia. Os delírios da razão: Médicos, loucos e hospícios: Rio de Janeiro, 1830–1930. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Fiocruz, 2001.
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A study of the insane and understandings of insanity, interlaced with the history of a modernizing city. Engel writes with verve about the presence of the mentally ill on Rio’s 19th-century streets, and about the emerging consensus that urban modernization required their reclusion in specialized institutions.
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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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Scheper-Hughes’s classic and controversial book is anthropology with a historical dimension. Scheper-Hughes covers enormous ground, but the physical suffering of poverty—embodied in hunger and astronomical rates of infant and child mortality—is at the center of this account of shantytown life.
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Urban Slavery and Urban Freedom

Urban slavery was once widespread throughout Latin America; indeed, the relative importance of urban slaves and slaves for hire were distinguishing markers of Latin American slavery. Yet only Brazil possesses a well-developed historiography of urban slavery; elsewhere, some outstanding monographs notwithstanding, research remains overwhelmingly rural. This list reflects that imbalance. Readers wishing for an overview of Latin American urban slavery will find it scattered throughout Klein and Vinson 2007. The monographs that follow dig deeper. Velázquez 2006 provides a rare window into the experience of female Afro-descendants in colonial Mexico City. Aguirre 1993 and Hunefeldt 1994 both hone in on questions of agency and liberty in Lima during the waning decades of slavery. Soares 2011, Karasch 1987, Carvalho 1998, Chalhoub 1990, and Reis 1995 all highlight facets of Brazil’s sophisticated historiography of urban slavery, with a common interest in issues of ethnicity and agency and close attention to the ambiguities of slavery and freedom.

Aguirre, Carlos. Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993.
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An excellent account of slave life in Lima, as well as a strong argument for enslaved people’s agency in securing their own freedom in Lima and its hinterlands.
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Carvalho, Marcus. Liberdade: Rotinas e rupturas do escravismo no Recife, 1822–1850. Recife, Brazil: Editora Universitária, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1998.
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Adds valuable perspective to a Brazilian historiography too often mired in Bahia and the Brazilian southeast. Notable demographic and spatial analysis of Recife and fascinating analyses of the Afro-Brazilian experience of slavery and freedom. Based on Carvalho’s English-language doctoral dissertation (University of Illinois, 1996).
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Chalhoub, Sidney. Visões da liberdade: Uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1990.
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An account of the last decades of slavery in Rio de Janeiro, which emphasizes the agency of the enslaved and their understandings of the freedom they sought. Chalhoub links both, compellingly, to urban life.
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Hunefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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A terrific English-language companion to Aguirre 1993. Paying the Price of Freedom likewise argues for the importance of Afro-Peruvian agency in pre-abolition freedom struggles, with closer attention to gender, migration, and the church. Illuminating judicial material on the dynamics of urban life under slavery and Afro-Peruvian “visions of freedom.”
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Karasch, Mary. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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Karasch’s encyclopedic book documents nearly every conceivable aspect of the slave experience in Brazil’s capital city; a basic touchstone for anyone interested in slavery’s urban history.
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Klein, Herbert, and Ben Vinson. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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A comprehensive synthesis of slavery’s Latin American historiography; no specific section deals with urban slavery, but it is well represented throughout.
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Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
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A landmark study of Afro-Brazilian social and ethnic networks in Salvador, Bahia, and of the ways in which they shaped one of Brazil’s most important slave rebellions. A revised and expanded version was published in Portuguese in 2003.
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Soares, Mariza de Carvalho. People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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This elegantly translated study of Afro-Brazilian ethnic solidarity and religiosity masterfully embeds the 18th-century history of Rio de Janeiro’s Mahi Congregation in its urban and Atlantic contexts. A good starting point for those interested in the history of black lay brotherhoods in Brazil and the Americas. Originally published in Portuguese in 2000.
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Velázquez, María Elisa. Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006.
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Documents the lives of Afro-descendant women in Mexico, both slave and free, emphasizing their roles in service and petty commerce and their strategies for attaining freedom and some socio-racial mobility.
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Race and the City

The history of urban race relations in Latin America has emerged mostly from studies of a few cities; as in the case of slavery, those cities are disproportionately Brazilian. Since the late 19th century, and especially from the 1930s forward, Salvador de Bahia, São Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro have been the subject of repeated studies from multiple methodological perspectives; the result is a contentious but deep historiography that is unmatched elsewhere, and particularly where race was long silenced as an official social category. The suggestions here include only a sampling of the Brazilian debate. Fernandes 1969, Andrews 1991, and Butler 1998 each both advance and synthesize the study of race in São Paulo. Sheriff 2001, an outstanding ethnography of race in a 1990s Rio favela, shows deep understanding of that city’s somewhat different historiography, and it is compelling reading for undergraduates. Readers interested in mining Brazilian debates further should consult the bibliographies of those works, which serve as an excellent guide to the emergence of the early literature. Beyond Brazil, Murillo, et al. 2012 is a valuable anthology that will introduce readers to the most important scholarship on urban indigenous peoples in colonial Spanish America. Cope 1994 explores race, ethnicity, and patronage networks in colonial Mexico; Kinsbruner 1996 takes a social science approach to 19th-century San Juan; de la Cadena 2000 provides a rich and multifaceted approach to race, mestizaje, and indigenismo in Cuzco; and Moore 1997 examines Afro-Cuban culture in Havana.

Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
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A deeply researched book about the economic, social, and political experiences of African Americans in São Paulo. Complicates the analysis in Fernandes 1969 on numerous points; provides the most comprehensive study of long-term race relations in any Latin American city. Andrews’s books on black Buenos Aires and Montevideo also mark the field.
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Butler, Kim. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-abolition São Paulo and Salvador. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
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A comparison of the Afro-Brazilian experience, emphasizing cultural and political mobilization in two cities often considered to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of Brazilian racial politics. Treats issues ranging from migration and family life to the black press, black religious expression, and popular culture.
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Cope, Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
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This concise and elegant study interrogates the street-level operations of Mexico’s sistema de castas, emphasizing its interaction with systems of power based on patronage and social networks. A vivid portrait of everyday life, with especially compelling portrayals of moments of rebellion.
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de la Cadena, Marisol. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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A fascinating study of Indians, indigenismo, racial thought, and mestizaje in Cuzco, based on deep ethnographic and archival research. At once intensely rooted in Cuzco’s local dynamics and attuned to national and theoretical implications of racial microhistories.
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Fernandes, Florestan. The Negro in Brazilian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
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Foundational history of urban race relations in Brazil, not because it was the first (it was not) or because its conclusions still stand (many are not), but because it is a touchstone that most scholarship goes back to, a fascinating early example of Brazilian engagement with US-American sociologies of race and a strong introduction to the ambiguities of Brazil’s racial politics. Originally published in Portuguese in 1965.
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Kinsbruner, Jay. Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
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Based largely on census and notarial sources, this book argues for the importance of color and the prevalence of racial prejudice in urban Puerto Rico before slavery’s abolition. A useful perspective on “racial democracy” debates. Readers seeking more qualitative finesse should look to Findlay 2000 (cited under Gender and the City).
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Moore, Robin Dale. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
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An absorbing study of the production, commercialization, nationalization, and consumption of Afro-Cuban music in 20th-century Havana, especially concerned with the contradiction between widespread acceptance of Afro-Cuban music and persistent racism and cultural repression.
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Murillo, Dana Velasco, Mark Lentz, and Margarita R. Ochoa, eds. City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530–1810. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012.
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An up-to-date anthology of research on the indigenous presence in Latin American cities, covering a range of urban topics in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. Readers will also appreciate the introduction by John Chance, a pioneering scholar of race in colonial Oaxaca, and the conclusion by Kevin Terraciano.
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Sheriff, Robin. Dreaming Equality: Color, Race and Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
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A sophisticated ethnography well attuned to its intellectual and historical context, Sheriff’s study of racial understandings in a Rio de Janeiro shantytown views the tangle of racial democracy from the perspective of those with the most at stake in current debates. Would be an excellent companion for classroom use with de Jesús 2003 (cited under Urban Poverty).
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International Migration

In Latin America, as elsewhere, studies of urbanization have long intertwined with research on migration. Literature on international migration is especially rich and varied, and has effectively engaged and contributed to some of the classic debates in North Atlantic historiography. The following books are but a sample of that literature: Readers should also look for the migration-focused essays in Porta, et al. 2004 and Romero and Romero 1983 (both cited under Biographies of Cities). Ribeiro 2002 documents the unusual experience of Portuguese migrants to Brazil in the decades after independence; the book is especially innovative in its analysis of ethnic and racial currents in the forging of Brazilian nationality. Moya 1998 employs both quantitative and qualitative techniques to write a wide-ranging history of Spanish Buenos Aires. Baily 1999 reaches counterintuitive conclusions about the relative prosperity and assimilation of Italian migrants in New York and Buenos Aires. Fausto 1997 offers a quirkier microhistorical perspective on the urban experiences of Jewish migrants in São Paulo. Sánchez 1993 and Hoffnung-Garskof 2010 highlight the continued importance of transnational migration: Sánchez 1993 documents the foundations of Mexican Los Angeles, and Hoffnung-Garskof 2010 illuminates the transnational character of urban Dominican culture.

Baily, Samuel. Immigrants in Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
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Brings a rich comparative approach to Italian immigration in Buenos Aires and New York. Baily concludes that Argentina’s Italian immigrants were more prosperous, mobile, and easily integrated into the host city’s sociocultural and economic fabric. Baily makes brief reference to Italian experiences in other American cities, notably São Paulo.
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Fausto, Boris. Negócios e ócios: Histórias da imigração. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1997.
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A personal memoir by one of Brazil’s leading historians, which places the history of his Jewish family in the context of São Paulo’s immigrant worlds across the 20th century. For a general (if outdated) guide to São Paulo’s immigration historiography, Boris Fausto, Historiografia da imigração para São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil: IDESP, 1991) is also useful.
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Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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An innovative transnational study of migration to the city, based in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood and the barrio of Cristo Rey in Santo Domingo. Highlights continuities between rural-to-urban and international migration, shows the interplay of imperialism and migration, and portrays the transnational construction of distinctively Dominican urban cultures.
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Moya, José. Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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This book sets the standard for the subfield, meticulously tracing migration patterns, carefully documenting migrants’ social geography and economic trajectories, reconstructing social institutions and networks, and incisively and wittily analyzing both migrant culture and immigrants’ cultural interactions with the larger city.
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Ribeiro, Gladys. A liberdade em construção: Identidade nacional e conflitos antilusitanos no Primeiro Reinado. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: FAPERJ/Relume Dumará, 2002.
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A complex and remarkable study of Portuguese permanence and migration in the era of Brazilian independence. Delves into the lives of Portuguese migrants and their interactions with Rio’s Afro-descendant free and slave populations: in Ribeiro’s view, those interactions forged the meaning of both independence and liberty for the first generation of Brazilians.
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Sánchez, George. Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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A landmark study of Mexican immigration to Los Angeles, remarkable for its careful attention to migrants’ Mexican origins, its nuanced investigation of the construction of Mexican-American culture, and its engagement with the urban context.
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Internal Migration and Urbanization

Historians have yet to fully engage cityward migration in Latin America. The histories of migrants are embedded in other historical fields, especially labor history, the history of race relations, the history of slavery and abolition, and the history of popular culture, but we still do not possess a well-developed historiography of Latin America’s “great migrations,” equivalent to that surrounding the urbanization process in Europe or the United States. However, a vast anthropological and sociological literature on rural-to-urban migration does exist. This scholarship reached its apex along with the peak of actual migration, during the third quarter of the 20th century. Most of the works that follow (Redfield 1947, Lewis 1952, Hauser 1961, Durham 1973, Leeds and Leeds 1978, Cornelius 1975, Roberts 1978) shaped a central debate in that literature, which focused on the relationship between migration and social, economic, and political marginality. Collectively, those works give readers a sense of the history of rural to urban migration as it unfolded in real time. Fontes 2008 is a welcome postscript to that debate: a rare historical study of mid-century migration that aptly demonstrates migrants vital involvement in metropolitan São Paulo’s economic, political, and social evolution.

Cornelius, Wayne. Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.
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Cornelius’s book encapsulates the findings of a generation of social scientists who dismantled theories of migrant anomie, radicalism, and backwardness after 1960. It is also a valuable fine-grained portrayal of urban politics among the poor.
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Durham, Eunice Ribeiro. A caminho da cidade. São Paulo, Brazil: Perspectiva, 1973.
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This text helped shift Brazilian debates about migration away from debates about “marginality,” “development,” and “modernization.” Durham emphasizes the importance of family and social networks and questions dominant dichotomies. Larissa Lomnitz’s Networks and Marginality (New York: Academic, 1977) (in English translation) made similar arguments for Mexico City.
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Fontes, Paulo. Um nordeste em São Paulo: Trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945–66). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Getúlio Vargas, 2008.
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A pioneering history of migration and work in Brazil’s industrial boom city, Fontes’s study gives serious historical treatment to Brazil’s massive 20th-century internal migrations and fully integrates the study of work and the study of community. He also contests any lingering notions of immigrant marginality or rural backwardness.
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Hauser, Philip, ed. Urbanization in Latin America. Paris: UNESCO, 1961.
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Many of the essays in this seminal collection articulate a then-emerging debate about the differences between migrants and the urban-born, aspects of which were fundamental to critical arguments about migrant “marginality” and anomie. See, especially, the essays by Gino Germani, Juarez Rubens Brandão Lopes, and J. Matos Mar.
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Leeds, Anthony, and Elizabeth Leeds. “O Brasil e o mito da ruralidade urbana: Experiência urbana, trabalho e valores nas ‘áreas invadidas’ do Rio de Janeiro e de Lima.” In A sociologia do Brasil urbano. By Anthony Leeds and Elizabeth Leeds, 86–143. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Zahar, 1978.
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This essay strongly contests the notion of marginality as applied to rural-urban migrants. See also William Mangin, “Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution,” Latin American Research Review 2.3 (1967): 65–98. First published Arthur Field, ed., City and Country in the Third World (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1970).
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Lewis, Oscar. “Urbanization without Breakdown: A Case Study.” Scientific Monthly 75.1 (1952): 31–41.
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This brief article is one of the foundational essays in the field of Mexican migration studies. The author compares the experience of Mexican rural-urban migrants favorably with that of their US counterparts, thus questioning much received wisdom. The article can be read in some contrast with Lewis’s more extended work on and with urban migrants, notably Five Families (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
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Redfield, Robert. “The Folk Society.” American Journal of Sociology 52.4 (1947): 293–308.
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This brief article summarizes many of Redfield’s historically important arguments about the differences between rural and urban, traditional and modern, indigenous and Western; these arguments would be foundational to several generations of scholarship about rural to urban migration in Latin America. Much of the article’s empirical base is condensed from Redfield’s widely influential The Folk Culture of the Yucatán (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).
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Roberts, Bryan. Cities of Peasants: The Political Economy of Urbanization in the Third World. London: Edward Arnold, 1978.
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Distills many of the 1970s migration and urbanization debates, engaging dependency perspectives, the breakdown of the rural-urban duality, and the importance of social and family networks. Roberts’s The Making of Citizens: Cities of Peasants Revisited (London: Edward Arnold, 1995) reworks the earlier volume with new theoretical perspectives.
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Gender and the City

As gender studies have evolved, so has the history of gender in urban Latin America; the field began with studies of women in cities and has since expanded to include consideration of urban masculinities and sexualities as well as the influence of gender dynamics on law, public policy, work, race relations, and urban culture. The books listed below are culled from the more recent scholarship. Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera 1998 exposes readers to an array of excellent work on honor, most of which directly engages urban gender relations. French and James 1997 brings together outstanding scholarship on women and work, mainly in the city. Chambers 2004 emphasizes issues of law and citizenship in colonial and early national Arequipa, Peru. Guy 1991 is authored by one of the first scholars to study urban prostitution with an eye toward broader issues of policy and power. Findlay 2000 and Putnam 2002 share a Caribbean focus and both stress the intersection of race and gender. Caulfield 2000, a study of sexual honor in Rio, also explores popular influence on legal transformation. Finally, Green 1999 is a pioneering study that traces the emergence of male homosexuality as a personal and political identity in urban Brazil.

Caulfield, Sueann. In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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Caulfield’s study of Rio’s defloration suits examines changing patterns of gender and sexuality; it is also a perceptive history of Brazilian jurisprudence, a sharp account of the popular roots of legal transformation, and a convincing argument about honor’s central role in 20th-century urban life.
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Chambers, Sarah. From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
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A wide-ranging exploration of political culture in the city and region of Arequipa. Chambers’s work is especially impressive for its recognition of the intersection of politics, gender, class, and honor and for its fine treatment of the porous borders between the rural and the urban.
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Findlay, Eileen. Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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Mostly focused on Ponce, this book analyzes gender ideology, race, sexuality, and colonialism in a provincial urban context. Should be read in conjunction with Félix Matos Rodríguez, Women in San Juan, 1820–1868 (Princeton, NJ: Weiner, 2001), which gives a comprehensive and fascinating portrait of women’s engagement with urban modernization in 19th-century San Juan.
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French, John, and Daniel James, eds. The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to Union Hall and Ballot Box. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
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Highlights women’s experience of work, neighborhood, household, and politics in 20th-century Latin America, mostly in urban contexts; an excellent introduction to some of the strongest monographs in 20th-century gender history.
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Green, James. Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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Perhaps Latin America’s definitive historical study of male same-sex desire, its place in urban society, and its development as a category of identity and political activism; like Caulfield’s book, it leaves little doubt that changing gender politics were intimately related to urban transformation.
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Guy, Donna. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
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A study of prostitution, sexuality, and their links with urban life, nationalism, and public policy. For a glittering São Paulo comparison that illuminates the city’s culture at the turn of the 20th century, see Margareth Rago, Os prazeres da noite: Prostituição e códigos da sexualidade feminina em São Paulo, 1890–1930 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Paz e Terra, 1991).
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Johnson, Lyman, and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
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An excellent edited collection focusing centrally on the intersection of honor and power, for both men and women, in colonial Latin American cities. A valuable introduction to the authors’ longer monographical studies and a cogent and engaging undergraduate text.
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Putnam, Lara. The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
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This beautifully rendered book weaves multiple strands: gender, migration, race, imperialism, and urban life are inseparable here, as they undoubtedly were in Port Limón, the port town where Putnam’s action unfolds.
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Urban Poverty

Latin American urban poverty has an oddly segmented historiography, largely because the “urban poor” virtually disappear as a category of analysis after the turn of the 20th century, replaced, most often, by North Atlantic–inspired groupings of class, race, and gender. For the colonial and early national periods, a handful of excellent works focus explicitly on the urban poor: Milton 2007 and Arrom 2000 are excellent examples. Martínez-Vergne 1999, an account of the spatial politics of charity in 19th-century Puerto Rico, analyzes the discourse and policies that shaped elite attitudes toward the urban poor. Studies of family and welfare institutions also settle their glance on the “poor”: Blum 2009, a study of Mexico City, is a case in point. From the 1960s forward, any number of social science works zeroed in on the new “urban poor,” debating culture of poverty theories and attempting to understand the relationship among “modernization,” “development,” and poverty. It would be impossible to list even a representative sample of this extensive literature, but Lewis 1961, Perlman 2011, and de Jesús 2003 are among its most iconic English-language texts. Valladares 2005 is a terrific analysis of the intellectual history of the favelas, nicely integrating larger social science trends with the particularities of the Brazilian experience. De la Torre 2008 reveals much about the history of porteño urban policy in tracing the history of popular housing from the mid-19th to the late 20th centuries. Kowarick 2009 places contemporary ideas about urban poverty in sociohistorical context. Readers interested in the urban poor may also wish to consult works listed in other sections of this article, particularly Scheper-Hughes 1992 (cited under Urban Public Health), Fischer 2011 (cited under Citizenship, Law, and the Informal City), and virtually all of the literature on informality, migration, informality, social movements, and race.

Arrom, Silvia. Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House, 1774–1871. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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This important institutional study sheds light on the lives of Mexico City’s poorest classes and the elite attitudes and policies that attempted to shape their lives.
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Blum, Ann. Domestic Economies: Family, Work and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
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As much a history of gender and welfare as a study of the urban poor. Like Nara Milanich’s Children of Fate, Blum’s book argues convincingly for an intimate relationship between family status and socioeconomic standing, while giving great insight into poor people’s everyday worlds of work and family.
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de Jesús, Carolina Maria. Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. New York: New American Library, 2003.
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More than a half-century after its publication, the account of Carolina Maria de Jesús (culled from her personal diaries by a Brazilian journalist) remains one of the only book-length testimonials of a 20th-century shantytown dweller. Instructive for undergraduates, though it should be read in combination with critical literature on the culture of poverty. Originally published in Portuguese in 1960.
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de la Torre, Lidia. Buenos Aires: Del Conventillo a la Villa Miseria, 1869–1989. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad Católica Argentina, 2008.
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An excellent book on the evolution of poor people’s housing throughout the modern history of Buenos Aires. Also valuable as a guide to the extensive previous literature on housing in Buenos Aires.
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Kowarick, Lúcio. Viver em risco: Sobre a vulnerabilidade socioeconômica e civil. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora 34, 2009.
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A reflection on the recent historical experience of São Paulo’s urban poor, which incorporates theories of social exclusion and vulnerability as well as experiences of globalization and violence, from the perspective of a scholar who has been at the forefront of São Paulo’s urban studies for more than thirty years.
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Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Vintage, 1961.
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Lewis’s theses about “cultures of poverty” are highly controversial, but Children of Sánchez was a pioneering ethnography, and it is still required reading for anyone interested in the history of 20th-century urban poverty.
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Martínez-Vergne, Teresita. Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
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An insightful account of the impact of emergent elite ideologies about poverty and charity in the 19th century and their impact on the social and spatial organization of Puerto Rico’s capital city.
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Milton, Cynthia. The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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This elegantly written book yields insight into everything from the daily lives of the poor in colonial Quito to the intersection of poverty and colonialism in the realms of policy and ideas.
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Perlman, Janice. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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This book, researched in the early 2000s, is an often-pessimistic reconsideration of issues raised in Perlman’s influential 1976 study, The Myth of Marginality (Berkeley: University of California Press). She now argues that certain forms of marginality have become widespread, thanks in part to the drug trade and persistent underemployment.
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Valladares, Licia. A invençao da favela: Do mito de origem a favela.com. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora FGV, 2005.
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A concise, elegantly written intellectual history of Brazilian favelas, by an author who herself penned important works in the field. Valadares’s account focuses on Brazil, but it will be useful to students of the history of sociology from across Latin America.
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Urban Politics

Latin America’s urban political histories have mostly favored the 19th and 20th centuries, when Latin America’s cities became both sites for experiments in self-governance and stages for national struggles over issues such as slavery, citizenship, property rights, access to public goods, labor conditions, and housing. The works listed below stand out for their explicit focus on formal politics, the public sphere, and the relationship among states, cities, and citizens. Along these lines, Warren 2001, Sábato 2001, and de Carvalho 1987 scrutinize the nature of public participation in Latin America’s 19th-century republics. Suriano 2010 analyzes Argentine anarchism well beyond its interaction with the labor movement. Walter 2005 and Conniff 1981 explore municipal politics per se; the latter seeks the roots of populist political practice in the daily dynamics of urban life. Eckstein 1977 and Auyero 2001 represent distinct moments in the evolution of social science models of urban mass politics. Susan Eckstein, writing in the 1970s, places innovative primary research in the context of a generation of pioneering social science scholarship, documenting how Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) systematically transformed urban demands into political loyalty. Javier Auyero, writing in the late 1990s, explores the political networks and quotidian needs that underlay popular loyalty to Peronist political networks in a Buenos Aires shantytown. Ippolito-O’Donnell 2012 details the complex and conflictual grassroots politics of another poor porteño neighborhood, and it is an apt contrast to Auyero 2001 and Eckstein 1977.

Auyero, Javier. Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Like the Peronist politicians he studies, Auyero takes poor people’s material needs seriously, and he insightfully analyzes how those needs shape clientelist political structures and practices in a Buenos Aires shantytown. Auyero’s subsequent work addresses subjects ranging from violence to environmental poverty to the shortcomings of Argentine welfare institutions.
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Conniff, Michael. Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925–1945. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.
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Conniff’s book is most effective at detailing the innovative form of urban populism that developed in Rio during the 1920s and 1930s and greatly influenced subsequent political patterns. Perceptive descriptions of the connections between urban transformation and political innovation.
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de Carvalho, José Murilo. Os bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a república que não foi. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1987.
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Carvalho sets out to explain the exclusion of Rio’s popular classes from formal politics in Brazil’s early First Republic and to lay out the motivation and character of popular reaction to such exclusion. He sees in this period the roots of the perceived illegitimacy of public institutions as well as an amorphous and reactive form of popular resistance, epitomized in the 1904 Vaccine Revolt.
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Eckstein, Susan. The Poverty of Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
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Eckstein’s qualitative political science analyzes how Mexico City’s gritty and intricate politics reproduce inequality over the long term. Still provides key insights into the nature of Mexico’s 20th-century PRI and the particular brand of populist politics that grew from the revolution. Can be paired with works by Wayne Cornelius, Alejandro Portes, and Peter Ward.
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Ippolito-O’Donnell, Gabriela. The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
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This book analyzes neighborhood activism and popular politics in Villa Lugano, a poor neighborhood in Buenos Aires. This is political ethnography rather than history per se, aimed at explaining the role and fate of urban popular movements in the decades following Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. But it includes a historical analysis of popular politics and devotes great attention to the historical evolution of urban space.
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Sábato, Hilda. The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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Sábato inverts traditional hand-wringing; rather than asking why the Argentine masses failed to act out the script of formal active citizenship, she investigates the ways in which they did choose to act politically, thus uncovering unexpected patterns in electoral politics as well as a dynamic civil society and public sphere. First published in Spanish in 1998.
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Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890–1910. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010.
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The most complete account of anarchist politics in the city where they were arguably most influential. Suriano focuses on anarchist activity in associational and cultural life and in the public sphere. He exposes the political and ideological infrastructure of the anarchists, and with it much about the golden age political culture in Buenos Aires. First published in Spanish in 2001.
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Walter, Richard T. Politics and Urban Growth in Santiago, Chile, 1891–1941. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
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This book is similar to Walter’s work on Buenos Aires in its concern with the political history of urban expansion during a critical period. Walter focuses especially on the political dynamics of the municipal council and on questions of transportation and urban service provision.
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Warren, Richard A. Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001.
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This book deals with the issue of popular political participation in Mexico City during the decades surrounding independence. A fine portrayal of Mexico City and a strong account of the interplay of social prejudice and politics, though sources force somewhat speculative conclusions about political agency.
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Riots, Protests, and Urban Social Movements

Despite attempts by Manuel Castells and many others, there is still (perhaps fortunately) no widely accepted paradigm of “popular protest” or “urban social movements,” and few agree as to what they have signified in Latin America’s urban political history. The works here reflect this eclecticism. Both Arrom and Ortoll 1996 and Pineo and Baer 1998 portray disparate social movements, similar mainly in their engagement with processes of economic change or urban modernization; both volumes will point readers toward their contributors’ more detailed studies. Teresa Meade’s monograph (Meade 1997) explores popular engagement with issues of housing and urban modernization in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s First Republic. Kowarick 1994 is a collection that gathers some of the strongest scholarship on popular mobilization over work and urban space in 20th-century São Paulo. Braun 1985, a classic book on Gaitán and the Bogotazo, links the intricacies of class and party politics to the emergence of Colombia’s most monumental popular riot. Schneider 1995 places the emergence of Santiago’s consequential shantytown social movements in the historical context of leftist ascendance and right-wing repression. Burt 2010 explores the troubling relationships among insurgents, community organizations, and shantytown residents during Peru’s Sendero Luminoso struggles. Fernandes 2010 considers Hugo Chávez’s brand of urban political organization from the perspective of poor residents and grassroots organizers in Caracas.

Arrom, Silvia, and Servando Ortoll. Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.
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Collects previously published articles about Latin American urban protests through the early 20th century in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. Framed by useful comparisons with European historiographies of crowds, riots, and protests, the essays illuminate urban politics, social networks and hierarchies, race relations, work experiences, and cultural dynamics.
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Braun, Herbert. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
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Still the strongest English-language account of what was arguably the most consequential urban insurrection in 20th-century Latin America; places events in the context of urban transformation as well as national politics.
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Burt, Jo-Marie. Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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In-depth research in Lima shantytowns uncovers the violent and complex interactions of Sendero Luminoso, local community organizations, and residents during and after Peru’s bloody late-20th-century insurgency. Interesting for students of revolution and authoritarianism, the urban poor, demagogic politics, and the complex geography of “the left.”
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Fernandes, Sujatha. Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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This ethnographic account explores Hugo Chávez’s politics in the context of the recent cultural and political history of a Caracas barrio, emphasizing tensions between vertical political networks and local grassroots organizing.
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Kowarick, Lúcio, ed. Social Struggles and the City: The Case of São Paulo. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994.
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This collection emphasizes popular struggles over housing, work, and urban space in 20th-century São Paulo. Despite its somewhat outdated conceptual framework, it still provides an extremely valuable English-language introduction to the history of social conflict and urban-industrial expansion in Brazil’s largest city. First published in Portuguese in 1988.
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Meade, Teresa. Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
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Meade’s book argues for the importance of urban and consumption-based demands in shaping Rio de Janeiro’s class dynamics during the First Republic. Valuable for its linkage of seemingly disparate social protests and its overview of urban reform during the belle époque.
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Pineo, Ron, and James A. Baer, eds. Cities of Hope: People, Protests and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998.
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This volume explores popular engagement with the intersecting histories of urban modernization and social reform. Strong individual contributions focus on Bogotá, Montevideo, Mexico City, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, Lima, Valparaiso, Panama City, Colón, and Rio de Janeiro, highlighting issues such as health, race, urban services, housing, and labor conditions.
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Schneider, Cathy Lisa. Shantytown Protest in Pinochet’s Chile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
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An account of shantytown politics in Chile from the 1960s to the 1980s, which aims to explain the mass shantytown mobilizations of the 1980s through the political trajectories of communities and their residents. Especially strong in its use of extensive interviews and oral histories.
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Work, Workers, and the City

Labor history and urban history frequently overlap in Latin America. But it is only in the past few decades that Latin American historians have begun to explore the dynamics of class formation outside the workplace and radical politics and to analyze more closely the ways in which the political cultures of work and the city interact. The works that follow—only a small sampling of the rich available literature—exemplify this trend. Johnson 2011 and Lear 2001 both examine the intersection of work, urban transformation, and revolution. Chalhoub 2001 (first published in 1986) reconstructs working people’s lives from tattered judicial records, illuminating post-abolition social dynamics in a rapidly changing Rio de Janeiro. Farnsworth-Alvear 2000, a history of women and textile industrialization, shows the intersections of urbanization, industrialization, and changing gender dynamics in Medellín. French 1992 fruitfully explores industrialization, rapid urbanization, and popular politics in São Paulo. Brennan 1994 and Winn 1986 integrate urban, political, industrial, and economic history, documenting consequential labor mobilizations in the years leading up to military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile. Levenson-Estrada 1994 chronicles labor politics amid terror in the context of Guatemala’s distinct urban and industrial environments. Finally, Fortes 2004, an account of work, neighborhood life, and class formation, exemplifies some of the most dynamic trends in Brazilian labor historiography.

Brennan, James P. The Labor Wars of Córdoba, 1955–1976: Ideology, Work, and Labor Politics in an Argentine Industrial City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
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This dense and penetrating study of the mobilizations surrounding the monumental Cordobazo yields insight into multiple dimensions of Argentine society and politics in the decades before the Dirty War. Among its major contributions is Brennan’s appreciation of Córdoba’s distinctive context as a provincial industrial power.
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Chalhoub, Sidney. Trabalho, lar e botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da belle époque. Campinas, Brazil: Unicamp, 2001.
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Chalhoub’s compelling study was among the first social histories to consider the history of Rio’s working people outside of the workplace, to consider their historical importance beyond the politicized working class, and to integrate studies of Afro-descendants and European immigrants. Exceptionally well written, with significant focus on leisure, housing, and gender. First published in 1986.
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Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
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An excellent study that integrates the histories of gender and industrialization and gives significant attention to the urban and regional history of Medellín.
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Fortes, Alexandre. Nós do quarto distrito: A classe trabalhadora porto-alegrense e a era Vargas. Caxias do Sul, Brazil: Editora da Universidade de Caxias do Sul, 2004.
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Fortes is part of a dynamic group of labor historians who have collectively expanded the study of Brazilian labor beyond the industrial workplace and left-wing politics. In his book, he pays special attention to ethnic and neighborhood dynamics, and his bibliography is a valuable introduction to the Brazilian literature.
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French, John. The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
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John French was among the first to seriously question then-dominant narratives of working-class cooptation and passivity during Brazil’s turbulent mid-century decades; he also pays valuable attention to populist and communist politics in São Paulo’s most important industrial region.
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Johnson, Lyman. Workshop of Revolution: Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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This study links the histories of work, urban working people, and Argentine independence, all while portraying daily life in “plebian” Buenos Aires in vivid detail. Those wishing to pursue histories of urban ironies should also seek work by Carlos Illades for Mexico City and Iñigo García-Bryce for Lima.
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Lear, John. Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
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An expansive analysis of the politics of urban workers before, during, and immediately after the Mexican Revolution. Lear understands that workers were more than the “working class,” highlighting differences between women and men, migrants and natives, skilled and unskilled workers, and those with stronger or weaker ties to the “modern economy.” He skillfully places these in the context of a rapidly transforming city, and he manages, in the process, to explain much about urban workers’ experience of, and role in, the Mexican Revolution.
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Levenson-Estrada, Deborah. Trade Unionists against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
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Levenson-Estrada’s book is a rare study of industrial labor in a sparsely industrialized country ruled by a terrorist state. It recounts the histories of Guatemala’s labor movement, of industrialization and its impact on the city, and of political terror, all based on a series of remarkable oral histories.
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Winn, Peter. Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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One of the many great strengths of Winn’s classic study of working-class activism under Allende is its linkage of grassroots labor activism and a changing urban context. An excellent text for advanced undergraduates.
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Citizenship, Law, and the Informal City

Informality has accompanied Latin America’s urban development at every stage, and it is integral well beyond the favelas and barrios that draw the most attention from politicians and intellectuals. Although most scholarship continues to associate informality with poverty, many researchers have begun to view it within the wider context of lawmaking and citizenship. The resulting studies consider informality and weak access to citizenship as integral elements in larger structures of power, inequality, and governance. One of the first studies to adopt this perspective, albeit within a now-dated Marxist framework, was de Souza Santos 1977, an essay on organic lawmaking and quasi-legal practice in a Rio shantytown that deeply influenced scholars of legal pluralism. A decade later, de Soto 2002, a globally influential work, approached poor people’s informality from a radically different neoliberal political perspective, blaming state bureaucracy—rather than material lack—for restricting social mobility among the poor. Even as de Soto 2002 sparked worldwide debate, scholars, in works such as Azuela de la Cueva 1993 and Rolnik 1997, developed deeply grounded and sophisticated studies of urban law and its influence on citizenship. In recent years, much historical debate about informal cities has focused on Brazil: Holston 2008 and Fischer 2011 have placed urban informality and poor people’s struggles for citizenship at the center of broader historical accounts of Brazilian inequality, and Soares Gonçalves 2010 traces the evolving legal status of the favelas. With a broader Latin American range, contributors to Hernández, et al. 2012, an interdisciplinary volume, expand the idea of “the informal city” and bring an array of perspectives on its contemporary history.

Azuela de la Cueva, Antonio. “Los asentamientos populares y el orden jurídico en la urbanización periférica de América Latina.” Revista Mexicana de Sociologia 55.3 (1993): 133–168.
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A concise synthesis, with an excellent if bibliography, of the work done through the late 1980s on the legal status and struggles of poor “informal cities” in Latin America’s more studied countries (especially Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil). Interested readers will want to refer also to Azuela’s extensive work on the subject, much of which has a significant historical dimension.
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de Soto, Hernando. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
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De Soto’s book is less history than historical: globally influential and controversial, it sparked a generation of urban reform aimed at alleviating urban poverty (and national underdevelopment) through legalization. Any reading of this book (especially at the undergraduate level) should be paired with readings of the critical literature now surrounding it. First published in 1986.
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de Souza Santos, Boaventura. “The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada.” Law and Society Review 12.1 (1977): 5–126.
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Souza Santos’s work analyzes the practice of informal law in a storied Rio de Janeiro favela, emphasizing the intersection of formal and informal practices and interrogating the nature of legal pluralism in a capitalist and authoritarian society. Foundational for anyone interested in the history of legal pluralism, both as an idea and as a practice.
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Fischer, Brodwyn. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
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A study of poor people’s citizenship in Rio de Janeiro that traces the links between poverty and weak citizenship during a time of rapid legal and urban expansion. This book especially emphasizes the histories of Rio’s informal cities, but much space is also devoted to poor people’s experience of expanding economic citizenships and criminal law.
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Hernández, Felipe, Peter Kellett, and Lea K. Allen, eds. Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America. New York: Berghahn, 2012.
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This collection ranges across contemporary Latin America, and it is notable for extending the definition of the “informal city” beyond poor settlements and for its attention to architecture and urban planning. Originally published in 2010.
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Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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This widely influential book couples exploration of the deep history and anthropology of citizenship in Brazil with insightful ethnography of land conflicts in the São Paulo periphery since the 1970s.
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Rolnik, Raquel. A cidade e a lei: Legislação, política urbana e territórios na cidade de São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Studio Nobel: FAPESP, 1997.
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Raquel Rolnik, now a prominent figure in Brazilian and international policy circles, aims here both to trace the history of urban legislation in São Paulo since the late 19th century and to understand that legislation’s function in delimiting spaces of citizenship and subcitizenship in the city. Readers seeking a broader and more contemporary urban perspective should also seek Edésio Fernandes’s many landmark publications.
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Soares Gonçalves, Rafael. Les favelas de Rio de Janeiro: Histoire et droit, XIX et XX siècles. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010.
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A compelling study of the of the evolution of the favelas vis-à-vis Brazilian law and legal practice, which will appeal especially to students of legal history and invite comparative study far beyond Brazil.
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Crime, Policing, and Urban Violence

Crime stories shaped urban chronicles long before the advent of scholarly histories, and fear of crime and disorder has always been fundamental in shaping urban and social policy. In recent decades, as social and cultural historians have drawn increasingly from court records, criminal cases have become windows into the lived experience of gender, race, citizenship, and class formation, and historians have engaged Foucaultian notions of regulation and punishment from myriad perspectives. Since the 1980s, the drug trade and spurts in urban violence have inspired a new wave of scholarship linking violence, neoliberalism, and disjunctive democratization. The works listed below reflect all of these trends. In Aguirre 2005, the object of study is the prison, but the author places prison society in its urban context, writing of it as a microcosm of urban experience and social regulation. Holloway 1993 constitutes both a history of police institutions and an account of social control in an age of abolition. Chazkel 2011 documents the sociocultural history of a wildly popular and influential illegal numbers game, even as the author interrogates the genesis of its illegality. Piccato 2001 explores multiple facets of crime, criminality, and urban policy in early-20th-century Mexico City. Caldeira 2000 delves into the fraught intersection of crime and socio-spatial segregation in late-20th-century São Paulo, with particular attention to cultures of fear and the contradictions of Brazilian democratization. Both Goldstein 2004, an ethnography, and O’Neill and Thomas 2011 analyze urban life in the age of neoliberalism from the perspective of less-studied cities in Bolivia and Guatemala.

Aguirre, Carlos. The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
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Explicitly focused on Lima’s prisons and the social and power relations within them, Aguirre’s excellent book also sheds light on issues of policing, race, poverty, and social control in Lima. The individuals and relationships within the prison walls are portrayed as suggestive microcosms of larger patterns.
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Caldeira, Teresa. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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A study of the emergence, spread, and consequences of urban fear in late-20th-century São Paulo, grounded in deep ethnography, impressive socio-spatial analysis, and an erudite command of international literatures on everything from the body to citizenship. Provocative material for undergraduates, with a historical sense culled from decades of research.
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Chazkel, Amy. Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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Amy Chazkel’s evocative study details the emergence and criminalization of Brazil’s most popular numbers game in Rio de Janeiro; her story has much to say about Brazil’s relationship to European patterns of urban modernization as well as about the social construction of illegality.
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Goldstein, Daniel. The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
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Goldstein places two Cochabamba “performances” of community solidarity—one celebratory, one violent—in the context of neighborhood struggles for rights to the city and citizenship. Discusses race, ethnicity, migration, and informality; a compelling book for undergraduates wanting a contemporary perspective on historical issues. Current issues of citizenship and protest are also explored in Sian Lazar’s El Alto, Rebel City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
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Holloway, Tom. Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th-Century City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
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Traces the institutional history of Rio de Janeiro’s police force, reconstructs patterns of policing and arrests, and details the intersection of policing and social control. Portuguese readers can also seek Marcos Bretas’s Ordem na cidade: O exercício cotidiano da autoridade policial no Rio de Janeiro, 1907–1930 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Rocco, 1997).
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O’Neill, Kevin Lewis, and Kedron Thomas, eds. Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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Explores Guatemala’s experience of neoliberalism, emphasizing not only urban crime and social fear, but also urban economic strategies, religion, and the links between countryside and city. Unusually attentive to history and adds an important (and dark) perspective to international debates on urban neoliberalism.
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Piccato, Pablo. City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Piccato’s study of crime, criminology, and policing demonstrates the inextricable connection of these topics to urban history; it also illuminates issues of honor, gender, poverty, and social thought. Especially insightful exploration of the intersections and discontinuities between popular and professional conceptions of crime.
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Urban Disasters

One of the more interesting recent surges in urban studies has focused on natural disasters, the reactions to them, and all that they can reveal about urban societies and governments. Buchenau and Johnson 2009 provides a good overview of this emerging field. Walker 2008 links imperial politics, religion, and urban policy. Healey 2011 ingeniously links disaster relief to the rise of Peronism and the transformation of urbanism. Oliver-Smith 1986 brings an ethnographic approach to the study of disaster and rebuilding in a smaller urban setting. Poniatowska 1995 provides a classic assembly of testimonials that reveal the experience of the moment in both concrete and political terms. Farmer 2011, an account of Haiti’s 2010 disaster, is history in the making rather than historiography. Farmer links the earthquake to deeper currents of Haitian history and highlights issues likely to feature prominently in future histories of the event.

Buchenau, Jürgen, and Lyman Johnson, eds. Aftershocks: Earthquakes and Popular Politics in Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
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Concise, generally excellent essays on earthquakes in Lima, Caracas, Valparaíso, San Juan (Argentina), Managua, Guatemala, and Mexico City explore the interplay of disaster, religion, politics, poverty, and urban policy.
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Farmer, Paul. Haiti after the Earthquake. New York: Public Affairs, 2011.
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A self-described “first draft of history,” Farmer’s book features a long historical introduction and a significant focus on Port-au-Prince. The book’s collage of perspectives also yields insight into issues of health care, nongovernmental organization (NGO) activity, misgovernment, concentration of resources, and mass poverty in an urban environment unlike any other in the Western Hemisphere.
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Healey, Mark. The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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Healey’s smart and insightful book demonstrates how San Juan’s earthquake accelerated the incorporation of urban issues into 20th-century mass politics and provides a fascinating account of the earthquake’s impact on national Peronism, local politics and social geography, and the practices of urban planning, architecture, and engineering.
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Oliver-Smith, Anthony. The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
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An intimate ethnography of disaster and reconstruction in the small Andean city of Yungay, where a massive earthquake and landslide destroyed most everything in 1970. Yields insight into governance, politics, migration, and sociocultural networks.
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Poniatowska, Elena. Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
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An artfully deployed collection of testimonials, giving insight into both the horror of the event itself and the impact it had on politics and grassroots organization. Could be usefully paired for undergraduates with Louise Walker’s contribution in Buchenau and Johnson 2009. First published in Spanish in 1988.
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Walker, Chuck. Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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An excellent analysis of the 1746 earthquake and tsunami that reveals much about the relationship between the secular and the sacred, the state of Spanish imperial rule on the cusp of the Bourbon reforms, and the everyday interplay of survival and urban practice in Lima.
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Consumption and the Urban Middle Classes

As many of the authors of the works listed below note, the urban middle classes have often been neglected in Latin America’s urban historiography. The studies cited here mark the departure from that trend. While most of the authors connect the experience of the urban middle classes to larger thematic and theoretical concerns—the nature of class formation and citizenship, the historical role of consumption and consumer cultures—these works are also fundamentally urban studies, which leave no doubt that the middle class has both emerged from and shaped the urbanization process. Parker 1998 highlights white-collar workers in Peru. Owensby 1999, links an emerging middle class to the central dynamics of mid-20th-century Brazil. Elena 2011 makes a compelling argument that consumerism was central to urban citizenship and Peronist politics. Zolof 1999 takes on the more radical dimensions of urban middle class culture in the form of a pioneering study of Mexican rock “n” roll. O’Daugherty 2002 captures the anxieties and aspirations of a Brazilian middle class enmeshed in the economic disasters of the 1980s and early 1990s. Weinstein and López 2012 places Latin American experiences in a transnational context and also gives readers a valuable first glimpse of emerging work.

Elena, Eduardo. Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
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This rich study explores links among Peronism, social citizenship, and changing consumer cultures and economies in mid-20th-century Argentina, arguing effectively that Peronism was as much about dignifying consumption as it was about dignifying labor. “Argentina” is the putative subject, but consumption was primarily an urban phenomenon and the book focuses most evocatively and comprehensively on Buenos Aires.
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O’Daugherty, Maureen. Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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O’Daugherty’s engaging ethnography explores changing practices of middle-class formation and identity in São Paulo during Brazil’s most severe modern economic crisis (1981–1994). Consumption garners the most attention, though O’Daugherty ably links it to issues of nation and race.
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Owensby, Brian. Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
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This pioneering history of Brazil’s urban middle classes focuses primarily on Rio and São Paulo and explores everything from the precarious material circumstances of middle-class life to issues of consumerism, politics, education, associational life, sport, and culture.
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Parker, David S. The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900–1950. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.
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One of the first historical studies of Latin America’s urban middle classes. Here, the focus is on white-collar empleados in Lima and Callao, and on the ways in which they formed a self-conscious class, acted on those class solidarities, and, thus, came to shape Peruvian labor law and populist politics.
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Weinstein, Barbara, and A. Ricardo López. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
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The focus here is global, but Latin America’s middle classes are represented in excellent essays on Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. A strong introduction to recent work, with added depth from the transnational approach and the thoughtful commentaries.
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Zolof, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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Zolof’s study is about much more than the urban middle class: It is about Mexican rock ‘n’ roll, transnational youth culture, 1960s social movements, imperialism and Mexican cultural nationalism, changing gender dynamics, and the nature of Mexico’s post-revolutionary state. But Zolof also memorably portrays a young urban middle class in the making.
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