Session Abstract

Urbanization was among the most transformative processes in Latin America during the twentieth century, especially during the decades after World War Two, yet the region’s urban history has often been characterized as underdeveloped. Diego Armus and John Lear even suggested in 1998 that Latin American urban history was simply a “site for varieties of economic, social, and cultural history,” and that “urban history has become a tributary field of historiographical efforts with agendas that are only indirectly centered on the city.” Our panelists, in contrast, are among those who have recently made cities and the lives of their inhabitants central to their academic work, and who have interrogated the meanings, practices, and significance of “the urban” in postwar Latin America, a time period still relatively unexplored by historians.

            Engaging with an interdisciplinary body of work in cultural geography, urban anthropology, and other fields as well as existing historiography, panel members focus on the following issues:

1. Migration to and within metropolitan areas;
2. Discourses of “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural,” and how these ideas interact with those related to class, ethnicity, and gender;
3. The simultaneously local, national, and global nature of urban planning and urban-rural interfaces;
4. Struggles over urban infrastructure, services, and quality of life, and how such struggles are related to labor and social movements;
5. How urbanization and segregation have affected residents’ sense of place in society and notions of citizenship;
6. The relation between “the urban” and “the modern”;
7. How all of the above have reshaped Latin American politics, culture, and economies.

      Chilean historian Angela Vergara, a specialist in company towns, labor, social movements, and public health, among other topics, will chair the session. The panel covers four of Latin America’s largest and most important metropolitan areas—Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Caracas. Mark Healy explores how an Organization of American States urban housing agency based in the Colombian capital was unexpectedly influenced by local, rural projects in the 1950s. Tyler Ralston and Kenneth Maffitt examine growth, modernization, and political culture in working-class suburbs near Rio and the Mexico City, respectively, with Ralston covering 1945 to 1964 and Maffitt 1974 to 1984. Finally, Alejandro Velasco utilizes his ethnographic fieldwork and other highly local sources to reassess the question of how important support in Caracas’s urban neighborhoods was to the rise of Hugo Chávez.

            We are honored that one of Latin American urban history’s most important trailblazers, Richard Walter, professor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, has agreed to serve as commentator.