Across the twentieth century, Latin America’s urban population expanded prodigiously make it the most urbanized region in the world. On one level, these changes were fundamentally local and national scope: mass rural-urban migration, the horizontal expansion of cities, struggles over basic urban infrastructure, and the formation of public and cultural life, among many others. At the same time, this momentous urbanization placed Latin America and Latinx/o/a populations in the United States within overlapping global processes and networks: immigration and diasporas, discourses on modernization, and transnational literary, cultural intellectual circuits, to name but a few. In recent years, Latin American and Latinx/o/a urban history has made important strides drawing connections to global processes with excellent work on topics such as state projects in the Cold War and immigration and identity formation in cities. Here, our panel builds on these developments by exploring the convergence of the local and global across diverse kinds of urban space situated throughout the Americas while expanding the thematic focuses of this burgeoning literature. Accordingly, this panel brings together four historians exploring the intersection of the global and local in cities ranging from large metropolises in South America, Latino neighborhoods in the US, to small cities tied to the agro-export economy across the United States, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil.

The diversity of thematic foci matches the variety of locales examined with focuses on sport and identity, literature and the public sphere, the environment and Cold War dictatorship, and labor conflict and global Catholicism. Daniela Samur explores how bookstores enmeshed in global book trade in turn-of-the-century Bogotá, Colombia shaped not only consumption practices but patterns of real estate speculation. Daniel McDonald traces how the spread of the Juventude Católica Operária (JOC), the urban workers’ branch of Catholic Action, to cities in the Amazon and Northeastern Brazil helped transform Catholic internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Catalina Vásquez-Marchant re-thinks Santiago as a “hydroscape” through an examination of the legal and institutional transformation for urbanization and water management during Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990) amid the Cold War. Celso Thomas Castilho looks at how Latino communities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles embraced Brazil’s national side in the 1994 World Cup to expand our understandings about Latino urban cultures and its formations relative to Latin America. Taken together, these papers comprise a useful starting point from which to generatively rethink the intersection of the global and local within urban history in the Americas and elsewhere in the twentieth century.