The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada
urban in their morphology. Colonial order results from the conquest of an
alien and hostile world, a conquest that is first military and then cultural,
and that always moves outward from the colonia, the more or less fortified
plantation of the European order. This is a concentrated settlement, which,
because it is defined as central rather than peripheral, must in some ways be
urbanistic. All such plantation settlements are thus identical remakings of
civilization: colonialism entails cloning. All the chartered settlements in
the New World had the potential to repeat Mexico City, itself a utopia. 4 So
the European vision of a functional, morphological, and moral hierarchy of
settlement, with great cities at one end and villages and farmsteads at the
other, did not apply to the Spanish New World.
But this New World homogeneity between the capital and the
pueblos had been breaking down for a century before Posada. In the second
half of the eighteenth century, the vision of Mexico City as a utopia was
quite suddenly replaced by one that gave it the modern urban vices of
poverty, social and economic disorder, and disease. 5 Mexico City became the
capital of a recognized nation-state in 1821: but a half century of invasions
and annexations, and of civil wars over the control and role of the capital,
delayed the emergence of successful representations of Mexico City as metropolis.
The first half century of independence also eroded the corporate
status of the pueblos, which had given them a stable civil existence, and increased
the competitive pressure on pueblo culture from hacienda-based
agribusiness. The pueblo had for the most part long ceased to be a bridgehead
for a cultural conquest; it had become a settlement in relationships
with other similar settlements, in competition with another form of rural
settlement and exploitation, and in symbiotic contact with regional urban
centers and even with the national capital.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a range of influential
cultural forms, produced in Mexico City for the elites living there, came to
represent the relationship between the capital and the rest of Mexico in ways
that resembled the country-city division familiar to the cultural world centered
on Western European cities. Such articulations of this new version of
urban culture and its relationship with a rural “other” include the range of
satirical and “society” illustrated periodicals produced in Mexico after
1880, the celebrated landscape paintings of Mexico City in its valley produced
by José Maria Velasco, and the spectacular town planning of the Paseo
de la Reforma, a boulevard that linked the edge of the old city with what
emerged as a recreational park, zoo, and observatory, in the former viceregal
palace/Aztec ceremonial site of Chapultepec.