Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America

About this book

Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America Edited by Louisa Schell Hoberman and Susan Migden Socolow The Spanish and Portuguese world in the Americas centered on cities. Exploration and conquest quickly gave way to settlements and some 222 towns existed as early as 1580. In these urban centers the most documented activitiesand consequently the most studied by historianswere the affairs of government and commerce. But long neglected was the daily lives of those residing in cities throughout Latin America and that social history is described and analyzed for the first time in this collection of eleven original essays. The groups composing colonial cities were a tiny elite a small middle class and a large lower stratum--well over 50 percent of the total populationcomprising laborers and the urban poor. Each essay here is a synthesis of archival research secondary information and new interpretation of how those groups acted and interacted during the colonial era. All students and specialists of colonial Latin America will nd this a rst-rate anthology. Brought together here are overviews of the important social groups present in colonial urban Latin American history composed by authors who are individually distinguished for their writings on this topic."-John Kicza Louisa S. Hoberman a specialist on colonial Mexico and Susan M. Socolow an authority on colonial Argentina have written extensively in their elds.