Kemper-Royce Urbanization in Mexico: Beyond the Heritage of Conquest

"Urbanization in Mexico: Beyond the Heritage of Conquest"

Robert V. Kemper (Dept. of Anthropology, SMU, Dallas TX) and

Anya Peterson Royce (Dept. of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN)

[Published 1983 in Heritage of Conquest: Thirty Years Later, Carl Kendall, John Hawkins, and Laurel Bossen, eds., Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 93-128.]

Introduction

The first Heritage of Conquest symposium began with the following statement: “We have all seen different parts of the elephant – different parts of Middle America or different kinds of people;… That all of us together may reveal the elephant that none of us had seen, to put our special information into the perspective of the whole – that is the idea of the Seminar” (Tax 1952:8). This paper began with the same goal: to bring together the diverse writings of anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists who have treated distinctive aspects of Mexican urbanization. This synthesis attempts to blend a wide range of scholarship and to do so without abusing the special interests of different disciplines or the particular strengths of competing methodologies. At the same time, we hope that this review of Mexican urbanization reveals something new about the “elephant” and how it has changed since that first Heritage of Conquest symposium three decades ago. If we have been successful, this synthesis tells us not only how urbanization has been linked to broader transformations of Mexican society, especially the waves of external domination throughout the pre-Columbian, Colonial, and National periods, but also how our interest in urban problems reflects important changes in social scientific theories and methodologies in the last thirty years.

The Problem of Urbanization

Urbanization is one of the great themes in the transformation of the region of Mesoamerica into contemporary Mexico. Thus, it is not surprising that anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists have devoted considerable efforts to understanding its many facets during the three decades since the original Heritage of Conquest symposium. In this paper we approach urbanization from two perspectives: on the one hand, we describe the process in terms of its demographic, ecological, economic, political, and sociocultural dimensions; on the other, we discuss the theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and data sources with which scholars try to comprehend the process.

In contrast to those who define urbanization narrowly, we believe that it is best understood as a multidimensional process within a society’s overall historical-structural transformation. In the case of Mexico, this process is understood only partially. The gaps in our knowledge result not only from a lack of key data, but also from distinctive disciplinary orientations. For example, the division of Mexican urbanization into numerous temporal and spatial categories tends to force scholars into describing only fragments of the overall process. Given this emphasis on different periods and different regions among different disciplines, our assessment of similarities and differences in the urban process is necessarily synthetic. It is appropriate, then, to begin by outlining the periods and regions which combine to form the framework within which urbanization occurs.

Following standard practice, we divide Mexican history into pre-Columbian and post-Conquest periods at the point of the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521. The former is divided further into three phases – pre-Classic (before A.D. 1), Classic (A.D. 1 to 900), and post-Classic (900 to 1521)¹ – which correspond to the rise and fall of great urban centers and their empires. The post-Conquest period may be divided into Colonial (1521-1821) and National (1821-present) phases at the point of Mexican independence from Spain. A further subdivision of the National phase into Early (1821-1940) and Contemporary (1940-present) eras not only reflects the transition of the urban system from a “traditional” to a “modern” demographic pattern, but also marks the transition from historical to social scientific research styles. While this temporal scheme is somewhat arbitrary, perhaps obscuring the finer points of debate among archaeologists, historians, and other social scientists, it does provide a useful framework for synthesizing the historical dimensions of Mexican urbanization.

Regarding the spatial aspects of urbanization, one immediately confronts the question of the appropriate boundaries of the region. There is considerable geographical variation – from Mesoamerica as a cultural area defined retrospectively by archaeologists and ethnohistorians, to New Spain as a political territory created by Spain, to Mexico as a nation-state created and sustained by internal revolutions. Perhaps equally important, however, is the regional and local variation within these spatial-temporal units of analysis. Although the major city-hinterland systems shift over the centuries, the pre-eminent region of urbanization over time has been the Valley of México, followed by the Valley of Oaxaca, the Mayan lowlands and highlands,² the western Mexico-Tarascan area, the Bajío, and the northern borderlands.³

The interaction of these regions and the periods described earlier provides a matrix within which scholars from several disciplines investigate urbanization. What we know about pre-Columbian urbanization derives primarily from archaeological and (to a lesser extent) historical-ethnohistorical investigations. Research on Colonial urbanization has been mainly in the hands of historians, with a few important contributions from archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and geographers. Urbanization during the early National period has yielded to techniques used by historians and ethnohistorians, while the contemporary National period has been examined by anthropologists as well as by demographers, economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists. In all of these fields, the bulk of the literature has been composed of case studies rather than comparative research, whether across time periods or geographical regions. Moreover, few scholars have tried to deal with the urbanization process through Mexican history and prehistory. As a result, what we present here has been pieced together from our examination of a variety of analytical units studied by scholars of diverse disciplines in a wide range of temporal-spatial contexts.

Pre-Columbian Period

The study of urbanization has been a major aspect of the archaeological and historical investigations of pre-Columbian Mexico for more than half a century (e.g., Gamio 1922). Despite this long tradition of research, many of the basic features of pre-Columbian culture and society are still veiled in mystery.

One of the major elements of the research on pre-Columbian urbanization involves the determination of what types of settlements can be classified as “cities” or as “urban.”⁴ The long-standing debates regarding the nature of Maya ceremonial centers is a prime example of the problems inherent in treating urbanization archaeologically. Moreover, the emphasis on major sites and spectacular finds has tended to orient research toward specific places and their internal features rather than toward an appreciation of the broader process of city-hinterlands interactions. Only in recent years have scholars given greater attention to the larger regional aspects of urbanization.

Archaeologists and historians have elaborated several temporal-spatial schemes for understanding the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerican history. Although many of these schemes are much too detailed to be discussed here (see volumes in the Handbook of Middle American Indians and a number of recent textbooks and essay collections), there is general agreement that the division of the pre-Columbian period into pre-Classic, Classic, and post-Classic phases is directly related to the rise and fall of urban centers and their empires in different regions of Mesoamerica.

The pre-Classic (or Formative) period ranges from about 2500 B.C. at its earliest manifestations to A.D. 250 at its latest, with a terminal date of A.D. 1 used for the region focused on Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. This period of agricultural innovation was marked by the emergence of permanent, nucleated settlements dominated by local elites. Moreover, interregional trade became common throughout much of Mesoamerica during the latter part of the pre-Classic. In all regions of Mesoamerica the rise of ceremonial centers during this period reflected long-term trends in population growth and wider use of natural resources and/or agricultural potential (Helms 1975:34).

With the Classic period comes the full blossoming of urbanization in Mesoamerica. Although the term classic is often used in a technical sense to refer to styles of workmanship in stone, painting, cloth, clay, mosaics, and even architecture, it also refers to “related sociocultural developments including the rise of urbanism and of states, the elaboration of more intensive agricultural techniques, particularly irrigation, to support a steadily increasing population, and the growth of interregional trade” (Helms 1975:51). These characteristics of the Classic were manifested in different ways in several of the important regional urban centers which evolved during this period. The linkages among these urban systems, in both the highlands and the lowlands, reflect the centripetal and centrifugal aspects of urbanization in the Classic era.

Although a number of reasons have been suggested for the decline of the major Classic urban centers, we still lack definitive explanations for the end of this era between A.D. 700 (the destruction by fire of Teotihuacán) and A.D. 900-1000 (the abandonment of Monte Albán and many of the Mayan ceremonial centers). A variable combination of population pressures, agricultural-subsistence base problems, trading difficulties, political-institutional rigidity, and cultural stagnation were likely involved in the demise of the urban infrastructure and way of life associated with the Classic period.

The post-Classic period, which involved centrifugal urbanization trends in most regions of Mesoamerica, is often characterized as being more militaristic and secular than the earlier periods. These tendencies may reflect the emergence of “states” and alliances. These highly stratified societies were aggressive in military, political, and economic affairs. With some regional variation, the urban network in Mesoamerica expanded to previously marginal or peripheral areas, settlement patterns (nuclear and dispersed) became more complex, irrigation agriculture more common, and population growth was fostered. The northern domination – first by the Toltecs of Tula and later by the Aztecs (Culhua Mexico) of Tenochtitlán – of the rest of Mesoamerica was well established by the latter part of the post-Classic era. This domination is reflected in the military conquests and subsequent political control of the Triple Alliance as well as by the expansion of economic interchanges through a series of ports of trade in southern Mesoamerica (Helms 1975:98-104). Although a number of peoples – the Tarascans and the Zapotec, for example – resisted the encroachment of the Aztecs throughout the post-Classic, one can only speculate on what might have been the future of urbanization in Mesoamerica if the Spaniards had not intervened so abruptly in its history in the early sixteenth century.

Colonial Period

The fall of Tenochtitlán ushered in a new era in Mexican urbanization. Between 1520 and 1820, the Spaniards created hundreds of cities and towns, both on or near established indigenous sites and in newly conquered lands beyond the limits of the former Aztec empire. This considerable urban expansion was not carried out just to assure military and political control of the vast region which came to be known as New Spain, but to create a system for exploiting its human, mineral, and agricultural resources for the benefit of the home country (Bassols Batalla 1979:95-98). The settlement policy of the crown and its representatives reflected therefore what Morse has rightly called the “centrifugalism of the Latin American town as a point of assault on the land and its minerals” (1971:5). In this context, the hegemony of Mexico City reflects an urban system designed to expedite the flow of goods between the hinterlands and the capital and thence through Veracruz to Spain – as well as the reciprocal counterflow of goods and immigrants from Spain to Mexico.

The key to understanding Colonial urbanization is the Spaniards’ imposition of the hierarchical urban system of Castile (i.e., the ciudad, the villa, and the pueblo in descending order) and a parallel administrative hierarchy (i.e., the cabecera, the sujeto, and the barrio or estancia) upon the remnants of the Aztec system of tribal city-states. The urban system of New Spain during the early Colonial period “fitted into a larger imperial calculus of political and fiscal privilege” (Morse 1971:6). The Hapsburg bureaucratic procedures fostered separatism, isolationism, and provincialism within the colony in a misguided effort to strengthen the role of the crown and its representatives.

The political-administrative system was headed by the viceroyalty of New Spain, which had jurisdiction over the audiencias (headed by captain-generals) established in Mexico City (1527), Guatemala (1543), and New Galicia (1548), as well as those of the Antilles and the Philippine Islands. This system was mirrored in the religious-administrative system: the archbishopric was established (1546) in Mexico City and a series of bishoprics were created in provincial cities. As Hardoy and Aranovich (1978:85) have pointed out, “The seats of the archbishops and bishoprics were thus determined by a clear hierarchical concept which corresponded to the relative importance of the political and commercial functions of various cities.” This dual political and religious hierarchy prevailed in New Spain until the Bourbon Reforms of the mid-eighteenth century. Under the rule of Charles III, a new system of thirteen intendencias and internal provinces was created out of the archdiocese and the other nine dioceses, plus three new zones corresponding to Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Veracruz (Unikel et al., 1976:19).

Within this administrative structure, colonial urbanization also had to respond to a variety of local demographic, ecological, economic, and military forces. The Conquest brought in its wake a demographic disaster; the population of the lowlands was reduced to a small proportion of what had existed in those zones and even the highland populations suffered great losses from the effects of diseases and continuing epidemics. While scholars continue to debate the magnitude of population decline in the sixteenth century (see Cook and Borah 1971), there can be little doubt that the fragility of the urban system in New Spain was due in part to the problems of establishing a system which depended on a different ecological strategy than had existed in pre-Conquest times. As a result, the sixteenth-century urban system laid the foundation for what Borah (1951) has called New Spain’s “century of depression” in the seventeenth century (for a contrasting view, see Boyer 1977). The extended transportation and communication networks needed to service a colony of some 4.2 million square kilometers was simply too much for the viceroy, located in Mexico City, to control and maintain. Especially along the frontiers, the urban system reflected the necessity to establish military forts (presidios) to keep local indigenous populations from revolting or harassing the Spaniards’ efforts to establish mining or agriculture in these regions (e.g., the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico successfully revolted in 1680 and held the Spaniards at bay until the “reconquest” in 1692 [Cámara 1979:104]).

The Colonial urban system consisted of a variety of settlement types. According to Unikel et al. (1976:18), we can distinguish three major urban forms: the administrative-military cities such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Mérida; the port towns such as Veracruz, Acapulco, and Mazatlán; and the mining centers such as Guanajuato, Pachuca, Zacatecas, San Luís Potosí, and Taxco. In addition, the urban network of towns in the rich agricultural region of the Bajío stands out as a distinctive component of the urban system, including as it did such cities as Querétaro, Guanajuato, and Zamora, and the subordinate towns of Acambaro, Celaya, León, Silao, Irapuato, Salamanca, and Salvatierra.⁵

In addition to the three urban towns outlined by Unikel, we can define at least three types of city-hinterland relationships for the colonial period: the major urban centers which dominated their respective hinterlands without effective competition from secondary towns (e.g., Mexico City, Guadalajara, Puebla, and Oaxaca City); the development of parallel cities in specific regions (e.g., the symbiotic relationship between Orizaba as a transport, processing, and manufacturing center and Córdoba as a commercial and agricultural storage center); and the case of the Bajío region, which combined agricultural and mining activities among a network of interdependent cities and towns (see Moreno Toscano 1978a; Unikel et al. 1976).

Although Mexico City appears as the dominant point of the Colonial urban system, the available demographic data suggest that a rank-size hierarchy existed during the late Colonial period. For instance, in 1790, Mexico City had 113,000 inhabitants, while the second city (Puebla) had 57,000 and the third city (Guanajuato) had 32,000 (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:95). Of course, this demographic hierarchy was flexible: Guanajuato’s population shot up to 71,000 in 1803 and reached 90,000 in 1809 before falling off rapidly during the revolution to just 36,000 in 1822, while Querétaro’s population swelled to 90,000 by the end of the revolution, more than twice its former size. In sum, population trends were greatly affected by the impact of political events and by the rural and urban dislocations (and epidemics) which followed in their wake.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the urban network of Colonial New Spain was completed. It spread from the hamlet of San Francisco in Alta California to the city of Mérida, with the focus always on Mexico City and thence to Spain. The exploitative, dependent character of Mexican urbanization during the colonial era reflected the institutions – economic, political, religious, and social – that were responsible for building and maintaining the hierarchy of towns, cities, and villages.

The Colonial period was brought to a close by el grito. This shout for freedom spread from the geographically and politically remote frontier until it closed the vital trade routes which linked New Spain to Spain. The war for independence lasted from 1810 to 1821. Just as the Conquest profoundly affected the Aztec-dominated urban system in central Mexico, so the fierce fighting between the loyalists and the independentistas had significant consequences for the Colonial urban system. Mining and agricultural productivity declined sharply, throwing the entire economic system into disarray. Many mestizos and Indians abandoned the villages and towns as unsafe; their massive migrations temporarily swelled the populations of Mexico City, Querétaro, and Guadalajara. New port cities blossomed temporarily along the Gulf Coast and along the Pacific as the loyalists struggled to keep their ties with Spain and the revolutionaries sought to get clandestine supplies from abroad. Although the decade of violence involved great economic disorganization and considerable cityward migration, it did not result in the precipitous population decline associated with the Conquest. The colony had 6,122,000 inhabitants in 1810 and actually grew to 6,800,000 citizens by 1823 (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:95). Ultimately, independence simply pushed the Bourbon administration and economic reforms one step further, thus breaking the restrictive chain between Mexico and Spain and creating the possibility for reorganizing the Colonial urban system and the hierarchy of power which it represented.

This survey of Colonial urbanization reflects our dependence on the historical and ethnohistorical research that has blossomed in recent years. While most studies have focused on the local level (i.e., specific cities or towns), an increasing number of scholars are concerned with regional, colony-wide, or even international analyses of Colonial socioeconomic transformations. Whatever the level of investigation, we are dependent upon surviving archival records (located in Spain, Mexico, and elsewhere), church and civil registers (especially those dealing with births, deaths, and marriages), contemporary travelers’ and scholarly reports (e.g., Humboldt, Lopez de Velasco, and Vazquez de Espinosa), and data on spatial forms and their distributions (e.g., maps, plans, architectural remains) as a data base for describing and analyzing Colonial urbanization. These kinds of data are distributed very unevenly for the different cities and regions of New Spain. This unevenness makes it difficult to construct longitudinal time-series analyses for specific cities and to carry out comparative synchronic analyses of cities and towns (see Wibel and de la Cruz 1971; Borah and Cook 1978).

Not surprisingly, research on Colonial urbanization is dominated by historians. Within that discipline, it is possible to distinguish several approaches to the problem of understanding Colonial developments. First the work of Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah (1971) has provided important insights into the processes of population change in Mexico in the post-Conquest period. Their demographic orientation has been complemented by a growing interest in the economic dimensions of Colonial urbanism, which is reflected in the studies of Alejandra Moreno Toscano (1968) and her students in the Seminario de Historia Urbana at El Colegio de México. The regional focus on colonial life, and its concomitant urban dimensions, is illustrated by the definitive studies by Charles Gibson (1964) on the continuities and changes in Aztec society during the Colonial period. And, finally, the emphasis on case studies is well represented by the works of scholars like Richard Boyer (1977) on Mexico City, David Brading (1971) on the mining and Bajío towns, Brian R. Hamnett (1971) on Oaxaca and Puebla, Philip W. Powell (1944) on frontier silver mining towns, P. J. Bakewell (1971) on Zacatecas, and John Super (1973) on Querétaro.

In contrast to the historians’ interests in the Colonial period, relatively few anthropologists have dealt with that phase of Mexican history and even fewer have concentrated their attention on urban problems. Aside from Gamio’s (1922) global analysis of developments in the Teotihuacán Valley, and Mendizabal’s (1946-47) and Aguirre Beltrán’s (1946,1947) studies of various aspects of pre- and post-Conquest Mexico, the urban focus is a recent interest, perhaps partly stimulated by the first Heritage of Conquest symposium. In contemplating the anthropological contributions to Colonial urbanization studies, one is struck by the broad temporal-spatial framework adopted. Since all of these scholars also have done archaeological or ethnographic fieldwork to complement their colonial researches, the results tend to illuminate not only the Colonial period but also its linkages with the pre-Columbian and National periods of Mexican history. Among the most outstanding ethnohistorical studies are those by Eric Wolf (1955) on cultural integration of the Bajío in the eighteenth century, by Thomas Charlton (1972) on changes in population and settlement patterns in the Teotihuacán Valley, by Grant Jones and his collaborators (1977) on the situation of the Maya in the Colonial period, and by Fernando Cámara (1979) on patterns of migration into the northern frontier territories. Typically, none of these studies focuses on urbanization per se, but rather discusses urban problems in conjunction with broader socioeconomic developments. Perhaps the only anthropologist to deal primarily with Colonial urbanism is John Chance (1975, 1978), who has analyzed problems of race and class in the city of Antequera (Oaxaca) as well as the broader question of whether Colonial cities were “precapitalist” or “industrial.”

In addition to the investigations of the historians and the anthropologists, a few studies have been carried out by scholars in other social science disciplines. For example, geographers Robert West (1949) and Donald Brand (1958) made early contributions to our understanding of northern mining communities such as Parral and developments along the Pacific Coast; art historians George Kubler (1948) and Sidney Markman (1975) have made important studies of Mexican Colonial architecture and townscapes; architect-planner Jorge Hardoy (1978) has authored a number of studies which place New Spain in the broader context of Colonial Latin American urban patterns; and demographer Kingsley Davis (1960) has described the process of Colonial urban expansion in Latin America in which Mexico played such a significant role.

National Period

Independence from Spain did not usher in an era of rapid urban growth. On the contrary, the haciendas – which Eric Wolf (1959:245) has called “the ramparts of power in the countryside” – assumed a central place in the economic and political struggles between the new nation’s liberal and conservative forces. Not until the “Porfirian peace” was established in 1880 did industrial and urban development receive significant encouragement from the government. The overthrow of Díaz in the Revolution (1910-1921) was marked by a call for “land and liberty,” while the Cárdenas presidency (1934-1940) represented the apogee of agrarian reform schemes. Then, beginning in 1940 and continuing to the 1970s, industrialization and urbanization have been the dominant features of the Mexican “miracle” of economic development.

This continuing dialectic between city and countryside can only be understood in the context of international capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The United States has played an important role both as protagonist and partner in establishing the conditions within which the urban system of modern Mexico has developed. Throughout the period 1821-1880, which we may consider an era of “revolution and reform,” Mexico and the United States were in confrontation. The war with Anglo settlers in Texas (1836), the conflicts in California and in the heart of Mexico (1848), and the Gadsden Purchase of La Mesilla in Arizona (1853) fundamentally transformed the national territory. From 4.2 million square kilometers at the time of independence, the nation shrank to less than 2.0 million square kilometers.

Mexico’s urban system changed little between 1821 and the period marked internally by the Reform Laws and externally by the Civil War in the United States. The national population was 8.4 million in 1862 and it was growing at a rate of just one percent per annum. The hegemony of Mexico City (population 210,000 in 1862) was a persistent feature of the urban system, but it was not until this point in Mexico’s urban development that the rank-size hierarchy began to give way to a pattern of primacy (Unikel et al. 1976:22). This transformation can be partially traced to the promulgation of the Reform Laws, especially the disentailing of the holdings of large civil and religious corporations after 1859.

By 1870, Puebla finally fell from its traditional second place in the urban hierarchy, as Guadalajara (with a population of 65,000) prospered as a regional center in the western highlands. Meanwhile, Guanajuato and other cities in the Bajío began to suffer a gradual decline in their relative importance. Although British capital helped to finance the redevelopment of mining in many areas after independence, by the 1860s Guanajuato – located in isolated, mountainous country, its silver mines exhausted, and its population down to 37,000 – was a dying city (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:98-99). Another important development was the effort to spread trade to ports other than Veracruz. Tampico became Mexico’s second major port and prospered through the efforts of foreign merchants who serviced the interior as far west as Zacatecas and San Luís Potosí (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:100).

Thus, as Mexico entered the final two decades of the nineteenth century, it was saddled with a highly regionalized, weakly articulated urban system in which the cities were consumers rather than producers. The urban and overall population growth rates were low, with the cities rarely outpacing the national trends. Mexico City was emerging as a primate city, not so much because of its own dynamism as by default.

Into this power vacuum came Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1877 to 1911 with lofty disregard for the harsh realities of Mexican life as experienced by 90 percent of the nation’s population. Díaz established a stable environment which attracted considerable foreign investment capital. In this period of dependent capitalism, the government granted numerous concessions to encourage industrialization and to shift the economy away from its agricultural subsistence orientation. The combination of peace, rising exports, growing mining exploitation, industrialization, and development of a national railroad system gave a sharp boost to urbanization (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:100-101).

The expansion of the railroad network had diverse consequences for the urban system. The construction of rail lines benefited the cities that were thereby connected to Mexico City and the major ports, but it also marked the demise of many towns that were bypassed. With the completion of the Mexico City-Veracruz line in 1872, and expansion of the rail network to other cities in the core region by 1880, Veracruz reaffirmed its position as the major port city on the Gulf Coast. While Mexico City, Guadalajara, Toluca, and Aguascalientes grew rapidly as diversified centers of commerce and manufacturing, Puebla, Morelia, Tlaxcala, León, and Guanajuato were reduced to cities commanding only limited regional markets. Perhaps the clearest example of the impact of railroad is that of Torreón, Coahuila: “it blossomed overnight as a thriving center of cotton production for the national market; from a rancho of 200 inhabitants in 1892 it became a city of over 34,000 by 1910” (Wibel and de la Cruz 1971:102).

In such circumstances, the largest cities began to assert their dominance – growing at twice the national rate – during the 1880-1910 period. For instance, in 1884 Mexico City had 300,000 inhabitants; Guadalajara 80,000; Puebla 75,000; and Monterrey 42,000. In 1910, these four cities were still the largest in Mexico, with 470,000, 119,000, 96,000, and 79,000 inhabitants, respectively (Boyer 1972:157-158; Unikel et al. 1976:377-380). What is surprising – in the light of the twentieth-century primacy of the capital – is that during the early years of the Porfirian regime Guadalajara, as well as Mérida, Monterrey, San Luís Potosí, and Veracruz, grew more rapidly than did Mexico City. Indeed, as late as the end of the century, Nuevo León (i.e., Monterrey) was a more important industrial center than the capital.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the orientation of the railroad system, the strict governmental control of public finances, and the free access of foreign capital combined to concentrate national affairs in Mexico City. The impact of foreign and local investments in urban and industrial projects created an urban system which began to differ significantly from that of fifty years earlier. By the end of the Porfirian regime, certain tendencies of twentieth-century urbanization were already established: the high primacy of Mexico City; the importance of Veracruz as the principal foreign port; the political and economic dependence on foreign countries; the configuration of the multifunctional system of cities in the Bajío; and the isolation of the ports along the west coast (Unikel et al. 1976:23-24, 36).

If the “Porfirian peace” had encouraged industrialization and urbanization through dependence on foreign investments, then the Revolution and its aftermath reversed priorities by attempting to resolve long-standing rural problems and by discouraging U.S. and other foreign intervention in Mexican affairs. Unlike the War for Independence a century earlier, the Revolution had a dramatic impact on the nation’s population structure and urban system. The total population fell from 15.2 million in 1910 to 14.3 million in 1921. The destruction of many small communities and the general insecurity in the countryside created a great wave of migration toward the cities. During the Revolution the number of localities with 5,000 or fewer residents dropped from 70,738 to 62,671, with most of the loss accounted for by the complete depopulation of the small ranchos (Unikel et al. 1976:30). The rural violence and consequent disruption of economic activities in the central region had a debilitating effect on several cities and towns in the Bajío. León had been the nation’s fourth largest city in 1900, but dropped to seventh in 1910 and eighth in 1921; Guanajuato had been eighth in 1900, fourteenth in 1910, and then fell to twenty-seventh in 1921; and Querétaro had been thirteenth in 1900, eighteenth in 1910, and nineteenth in 1921. The flow of refugees from the countryside increased the proportion of urban dwellers from 11.7 percent to 14.7 percent of the total national population and, more significantly, firmly established the capital’s predominance in the urban hierarchy: Mexico City grew from 345,000 inhabitants in 1900 to 471,000 in 1910, to 662,000 in 1921 (Unikel et al. 1976:377).

The end of the Revolution may be marked with the ascension of Alvaro Obregón to the presidency in 1921, but “the turning point of Mexico’s Revolution” (J. Wilkie 1967:37) came with the election of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934. Whereas earlier “Revolutionary” governments had adopted a passive role in social and economic affairs, Cárdenas – from rural Michoacán – was determined to use state funds to achieve social justice, especially in the rural sector. He increased social and economic expenditures to a new high and firmly established what Wilkie (1967:37) has called “the active state.” The worldwide depression of the 1930s provided Cárdenas the opportunity to turn the political revolution of 1910 into a true social revolution. His actions to nationalize petroleum properties (1938) and his efforts to develop agrarian reform programs that would break up latifundios and would create communal ejidos demonstrated his determination to lessen Mexico’s dependence on the United States and other foreign powers. In the process, he turned his administration away from urban and industrial challenges and reaffirmed his concern for the countryside where the bulk of the population lived.

The Revolution’s lingering effects on the national demographic structure and the peasants’ new hopes for economic prosperity through agrarian reform lowered the rate of cityward migration during the 1930s. The depression disrupted urban life more than it hurt the villages. In addition, large-scale governmental irrigation projects in the northwest created alternative destinations for many potential urban migrants.

In sum, the 1910-1940 period, an era of “revolution and rural reform,” was characterized by relatively slow rates of population growth and urbanization, with considerable variation among different regions. Mexico City continued as the nation’s primary city as its population reached the 1.5-million mark in 1940.

The decade of the 1940s represents a critical inflection point in the process of Mexican urbanization. The end of the depression, the creation of a migrant labor (bracero) program with the United States during World War II, the development of several major hydroelectric river-basin projects, the spread of government-sponsored health and education programs, and the continuation of agrarian reform schemes combined with new governmental policies oriented to industrial development to boost urbanization to new heights. The period since 1940 has been characterized by relatively rapid urban growth in contrast to that of the revolutionary era.

The total population of Mexico grew from 20 million in 1940 to 49 million in 1970, and is projected at 69 million for 1980. This rapid population growth, reflecting steady declines in mortality (and especially infant death) rates while fertility rates have remained high, is without parallel for a nation of this size. The overall high natural growth has combined with substantial cityward migration to force the urban population growth rate even higher. The population in localities with 15,000 inhabitants or more grew from 3.9 million in 1940 to 22.0 million in 1970, and is projected at 36 million for 1980. The imbalance between the growth of urban and rural localities was greatest in the 1940s when the government shifted its focus away from agrarian reform to industrialization and urban infrastructure development. Cityward migration has been a major force for urban growth since 1940, accounting for perhaps half of all urban expansion during this period.

These demographic changes have not occurred in isolation from the broader transformations of Mexican society since 1940. The concentration of population and industries in a few metropolitan centers has occurred as a result of deliberate policies followed by governmental and private sector forces. Mexico City has been the primary beneficiary (or victim) of these centralization policies. In commerce, education, labor, banking, telecommunications, housing, and so on, the forces of centralization have created a pattern of “primacy” even more powerful than that evidenced by mere population growth.

The development of the present urban system is dependent not only on internal population trends and governmental policies favoring centralization, but also on transnational economic and political forces. For example, the correlation between urban growth and governmental policies of import-substitution industrialization in the 1940s and 1950s is obvious. Similarly, the expansion of large-scale irrigation agriculture in the north, the continuing problems of small-scale seasonal agriculture in the central and southern highlands, the participation of millions of men in the bracero program between 1942 and 1964, and the proliferation of investments in urban infrastructure and services all reflect the role of foreign investments in contemporary Mexico.

The results of this “dependent urbanization” (see Castells 1977) are everywhere apparent. Vast “backward” regions conjoin islands of wealth; huge cities grow inexorably at incredible rates; poverty is a way of life for all but a small minority of the population; environmental problems of air pollution, traffic, open space, and water and sewage are aggravated in cities and in the hinterlands; the flood of legal migrants and undocumented workers to the United States exacerbates conditions in the border cities; and tourism and petroleum exports seem to be the only means of generating sufficient foreign exchange revenues to keep the system going.

The landscape of contemporary Mexico reflects a process of slowly filling in the urban structure of the nation (R. Wilkie 1976). Perhaps the most radical efforts to change the settlement pattern were the agrarian reform programs for establishing small ejidos. After an initial burst of activity in the late 1930s, the government has continued to create ejidos throughout the underdeveloped countryside, with the most recent programs involving colonization in Quintana Roo and Chiapas. Despite these policies to encourage peasants to stay in rural areas, it appears that urban growth has been fueled by the abandonment of small settlements.

In contrast to the ejido programs, the government has done much less to develop “new towns” within the urban sector. With the exception of suburban developments (e.g., Cuautitlán-Izcalli) in the Mexico City metropolitan area and a single significant case of an industrial development (i.e., Ciudad Sahagún in the state of Hidalgo), urban creativity has been oriented primarily to the tourist sector. The development of Cancún, Ixtapa, and a series of other coastal resort towns represents a very specialized kind of urbanization. Recently, the success of petroleum exploration-refining activities in the Gulf Coast area has led to the creation of petro-towns (e.g., Ciudad Pemex) which have their historical parallels in the specialized mining towns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the absence of serious governmental or private sector efforts to reduce the centralization of the urban structure on Mexico City in the four decades since 1940, it is especially noteworthy that the “filling in” of the settlement pattern has involved a historically significant shift of population away from the core region and toward the northern frontier (as well as to the west and east coasts). The shift in population to the northern borderlands is of special importance because it corresponds to a parallel movement toward the southern Sun Belt within the United States. The large size and high growth rates of the border cities make it unlikely that the interdependence between the two nations is likely to diminish in the near future.

These transformations of the urban system and their attendant problems (e.g., housing, jobs, education, transportation, services) are the subject of the recent National Plan for Urban Development, issued in mid-1978. The purpose of the urban development plan is to coordinate governmental and private sector actions to establish a better balance in the nation’s urban growth than would occur through laissez-faire policies. The major aim of the plan is the decentralization of industries and population toward areas beyond the Valley of Mexico. To this end, a number of “parastate” enterprises are to be moved from the capital to other regions of the country and several hundred industries (especially those responsible for high levels of air contamination) will be transferred out of the metropolitan area beginning in early 1980. The plan also calls for shifting federal government budget priorities away from the Federal District and toward other, less well developed regions, with special attention to the problems of the northern borderlands.

This recent focus on decentralization as a solution to the problems of Mexican cities does not directly address the conditions of life in Mexico City itself. Estimates of what it will cost the government to expand necessary services just to keep pace with projected population growth run into the billions of pesos. Since the budget for the Department of the Federal District already is larger than those of all the states taken together, it is questionable whether enough funds will be available to cope with Mexico City’s problems and also foment decentralization and regional urban-industrial development for the coming two decades and beyond. It is also problematic whether sufficient revenues (foreign exchange) can be generated by the oil boom and the tourist industry to subvent such impressive urban development plans at a time when the countryside suffers declining agricultural productivity and continuing population emigration.

Scholarship on Mexican Urbanization in the National Period

Research on urbanization in the period since 1821 involves a combination of historical, ethnohistorical, and social scientific efforts. As a highly visible component of Mexican development since 1940, urbanization has received considerable attention from more and more social scientists. In contrast, very few social scientists and relatively few historians or ethnohistorians have examined urbanization for the 1821-1940 period. To be sure, the power of the haciendas made nineteenth-century cities less important in the urban system than they are today. Also, the century of conflicts from independence to the Revolution destroyed many kinds of historical documents.

Considerable information about general economic and political developments in the Reform era has been assembled and analyzed by Francisco López Cámara (1967). Similarly, Daniel Cosío Villegas and his collaborators (1957-1965) have analyzed at great length the social, economic, and political issues of the Porfirian epoch. In neither case, however, is the focus of research on urbanization per se. In contrast, the members of the Seminario de Historia Urbana at El Colegio de México (Moreno Toscano 1978b) offer some tantalizing analyses of local-level urbanization, at least for cities with good archives and commercial records. Even somewhat fragmentary records can yield useful results. For instance, by examining available baptismal, burial, and marriage registers for León (Guanajuato) for the period 1720-1860, David Brading and Celia Wu (1973) were able to relate population transformations in the region to broader socioeconomic indicators such as epidemics, famines, and mestizaje. Their work, like that of Wibel and de la Cruz (1971) and Moreno Toscano (1978b), also benefits from crossing the colonial-national boundary that demarcates so much historical scholarship on Mexico. In this context, the early National period is still relatively understudied compared to the Colonial period or the period since 1940 (Margolies 1979:9). The nineteenth century thus offers an arena in which historians and ethnohistorians could make major contributions to our knowledge of Mexican urbanization.

More research has been done on the early twentieth century. The demographic aspects of urbanization have received particular attention since data are available for each decade through the decennial censuses begun in 1900. This emphasis on population and locality data marks the entry of demographers and geographers into the circle of urban specialists (e.g., Bassols Batalla 1979; Gutierrez and Valverde 1975; R. Wilkie 1976; Unikel et al. 1976). Given the quantity and quality of data available for analysis, these studies tend to deal with national and regional urbanization patterns rather than with local trends.

Most social scientists who deal with the early twentieth century treat it merely as prelude to their main focus on contemporary Mexican cities. An important recent exception to this orientation is found in the work of two anthropologists – Larissa Lomnitz and Marisol Pérez (1978) – who have traced the evolution of an urban elite family from the 1860s to the 1970s. They give as much attention to the early phases of the family’s entrepreneurial career as to its recent confrontation with transnational enterprises. Their analysis of this family and its social networks presents a microcosm of Mexican urbanization during the past one hundred years. As such, it illustrates the advantages of combining ethnographic interviewing with examination of broader economic and political trends.

Since 1940, studies of Mexican urbanization by social scientists have multiplied to the extent that it is now exceedingly difficult for an individual to keep abreast of the wave of publications by Mexican and foreign scholars. We can speak of this research in terms of three main categories: that based in cities, that conducted in the hinterlands, and that concerned with the urban system.

We may distinguish two general types of city-based research. On the one hand, many studies have examined some aspect of Mexican life in cities, with the city serving merely as the location rather than the focus of research. Such studies usually tell us little about the urbanization process.⁶ On the other hand, studies of cities emphasize the ways in which the urban context influences behavior and beliefs. This orientation to “the city as context” (Rollwagen 1972) treats the urban setting as an independent variable within the urbanization process, especially in city-hinterland comparisons.

A second major category of urban research begins from a rural base. Numerous scholars, especially anthropologists and geographers, have examined the “diffusion” of city traits to the hinterlands. The other face of these diffusionist studies is represented by the hundreds of reports on rural-urban migration. There are very few studies of the “diffusion” of rural traits to cities and there are even fewer studies of urban to rural migration.

The third major category of urban studies deals with urban systems. These “systems” range from narrowly defined regions (e.g., regional market systems), to the entire nation, and even to the international structures within which Mexican urbanization develops.

These diverse contexts for urban research are, in turn, linked to different kinds of analytical units, each of which reflects certain theoretical and methodological assumptions about Mexican urbanization.⁷

First, there is a tradition of research on individuals or families caught up in the urbanization process. This ethnographic approach, much favored by anthropologists, was made famous by Lewis’s (1959, 1961) fieldwork among Tepoztecan migrants to Mexico City and among Mexico City slum dwellers in general.

Second, many researchers have emphasized the analysis of residential units, ranging from central-city slums to peripheral squatter settlements. This focus on the “community” dimensions of urban environments is especially clear in case studies (e.g., Lomnitz 1977), but also influences the character of comparative studies (e.g., Cornelius 1975; Eckstein 1977).

Third, a number of scholars have chosen to focus on socioeconomic groups in Mexican cities, especially the poorest “marginal” groups. Such studies have ranged from small-scale ethnographic inquiries, as with Lewis’s studies of the “culture of poverty,” to the extensive sociological surveys exemplified by the Monterrey Mobility Project (Balán, Browning, and Jelín 1973) and its Mexico City counterpart (Muñóz, de Oliveira, and Stern 1977).

Fourth, some social scientists have focused on specific populations, especially ethnic groups. Such research is well represented by Butterworth’s (1962) studies of Mixtec migrants from Tilantongo (Oaxaca) in Mexico City.

A fifth and final approach to the analysis of Mexican urbanization emphasizes political-administrative units. These can include whole cities (or their subunits), regions (e.g., municipios, states), or even the entire country. This “macro” approach depends heavily on census and survey data and thus tends to focus on the structure of the urban system, at whatever level, rather than on the behavior and beliefs of individuals. The work of Unikel and his colleagues (1976) at El Colegio de México demonstrates the value and significance of this approach.

A review of the literature shows that, despite this diversity of approaches to the study of Mexican urbanization, from the 1940s through the 1960s most social scientists shared a number of assumptions about the relationship between city and countryside. Urbanization was linked with industrialization as a major feature of modernization, which was evidenced by the Mexican economic development “miracle” in the postwar era. Even such divergent thinkers as Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis were in accord regarding the critical role of the city as the “motor” for societal modernization. The “folk-urban continuum” (Redfield 1941) is thus of a piece with the later ideas of “urbanization without breakdown” (Lewis 1952) and the “culture of poverty” (Lewis 1959).

By the late 1960s, however, a number of social scientists began to question the scenario and benefits of urban development implicit in the modernization perspective. As the First United Nations Development Decade came to a close, economists and other social scientists realized that the “gap” between developing and developed nations was not closing as predicted. In Mexico, the critique of modernization theory and policy was heightened by the efforts of President Luís Echevarría to be recognized as a leader of those Third World countries that sought to establish a new international economic order. The economic crisis of the early 1970s, reflected in the 1976 peso devaluation and the continuing flow of “undocumented workers” to the United States, demonstrated the need to shift the attention of social scientists away from the internal problems of Mexican society and toward the international economic-political structure within which Mexico’s “underdevelopment” persisted.

The focus of criticism was not urbanization, but rather the broader setting of “modernization” in which urban development was only one of several interrelated components. The magnitude of Mexico’s metropolitan problems meant that the generalized attack on modernization theory was quickly joined by a more specific critique of prevailing concepts about urbanization. The city, on the one hand, became viewed as a center for domination over a dependent periphery while on the other, as a extension of the foreign “metropole” – for example, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan – into the arena of Mexican society. The city assumed the role of intermediary in a process of surplus capital extraction and cultural exploitation. This process of “dependent urbanization” did not reveal itself through more studies of “individuals or aggregates of individuals, their values, attitudes, and beliefs,” but through analysis of “the mode of production, patterns of international trade, political and economic linkages between elites in peripheral and central countries, group and class alliances and conflicts, and so on” (Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1978:550).

The new “dependency” perspective emphasizes relationships of inequality within and beyond Mexican society. This revolution in social scientific world view reflects a broader trend away from a philosophy of democratic consensus through gradual modernization and toward radical (Marxist or neo-Marxist) theories of class struggle and revolution. The optimism of an earlier generation of scholars has been overwhelmed by this preoccupation with the inequalities built into the structure of Mexican society.

Whereas the modernization paradigm stressed the key role of culture and community in the development process, the dependency perspective emphasizes an ecological-societal (Schwartz 1978) or political-economic (Walton 1979) approach to urbanization. As a result, neither city nor countryside provides a necessary and sufficient context for research. As Alejandro Portes and Harley Browning have commented, “It is perhaps ironic that the proper course of future urban research be defined as lying beyond the city itself” (1976:4).

Redefinition of context also forces reconsideration of the appropriate units of analysis. Urban studies conducted under the banner of modernization tended to be highly empiricist and oriented to specific disciplinary problem-sets. The urban research of the 1970s demonstrates a multidisciplinary character. As John Walton pointed out in a timely review article, what is “beginning to emerge … is a new unit of analysis based on distinctive vertically integrated processes passing through a network from the international level to the urban hinterland” (1979:164). A number of scholars, from a variety of disciplines, are now attempting to treat individuals and institutions, squatter settlements and corporations, ethnic groups and political-administrative units – in effect, everything studied under the rubric of urbanization – within a single overarching analytical framework. The new directions in urbanization research in Mexico are blurring the boundaries of the field, although, as Portes and Browning have argued, “this seems a small price to pay for a growing understanding of the realities faced by urban and rural populations … and the lines along which their present situation is likely to evolve” (1976:14).

This emphasis on “process” rather than “place” opens new horizons for the study of Mexican urbanization. City and countryside cease to be arbitrarily separated by simple demographic criteria and come to be seen as integrated social processes (Leeds 1976). For anthropologists, especially, this transformation in research paradigm has had the effect of amalgamating their traditional “village” orientation with their recent fieldwork in urban settings (see Chambers and Young 1979:63).

Conclusion

“As anthropologists we have not paid much attention to the cities …”; this was George Foster’s (1952:66) comment about the status of anthropological studies on urban Mexico at the first Heritage of Conquest symposium. The evidence presented in this paper demonstrates that thirty years have made a great difference in the dedication of anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists to the study of urbanization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Colonial New Spain, and the nation of Mexico. We can mark this progress by a comment that appeared in the editor’s introduction to a recent volume with the theme “Anthropological Perspectives on Latin American Urbanization.” The editor, a political scientist, praised our work in these words: “Anthropologists have … been responsible for some of the highest quality work in the interdisciplinary field of Latin American urban studies in recent years” (Cornelius 1974:9). This revolution in the anthropological orientation toward research on urbanization bids well for the future, and thus, perhaps, is as important as the results achieved so far.

In examining Mexican urbanization across a time span of some 2,000 years (see Hardoy 1975), we must concur with Nancy Farriss that the division of Mexican culture history into “pre-hispanic, colonial and modern periods, each allotted to different disciplines, can obscure some of the basic continuities in that history” (1978:187). Although the character of the available scholarly research makes it impossible to abandon these chronological divisions, we have tried to stress the continuities as well as the disruptions in urban development through the entire time span under consideration. In this regard, one of the important results of this paper is how scholars in different disciplines use distinctive methodologies, techniques, and data to describe urban phenomena. From the archaeologists with their focus on material remains, to the historians with their emphasis on archives and documents, to the social scientists dedicated to interviewing, participant observation, and survey research, the concern is the same – to analyze Mexican urbanization in all of its diversity.

One of the advantages of the longitudinal approach taken in this paper is that patterns in Mexican urbanization reveal themselves that otherwise are obscured by narrower temporal and spatial concerns. In this regard, a major finding of our study is that urban development in Mexico has not been a uniform process. To the contrary, urbanization has demonstrated dramatic cyclical fluctuations over time and through space. There has been a constant dialectic between city and countryside, with the balance of power and control swinging from one to another depending on current conditions. These centripetal and centrifugal aspects of the urbanization process have corresponded not only to internal events but also, and especially in the post-Conquest era, to external events beyond the boundaries of Mexico.

The pre-Columbian era involved a series of distinctive urban developments in different regions which flourished and then collapsed. The tension was always between dispersed settlements and the urban ceremonial-administrative centers. In times of agricultural prosperity and population growth, the balance swung in favor of the cities. The period between the Classic urban sites and the later rise of Tenochtitlán and the Aztec empire was a downturn in urbanization in most of Mesoamerica. The success of the Aztecs in dominating the central highlands and in extending their control over vast reaches of Mesoamerica brought urban forces once again to the fore.

The Spanish Conquest brought a great decline in population, a restructuring of the countryside, and the creation of many new towns and cities. The sixteenth century was thus a period of contradictions. A much wider urban network was established, but it was weakly integrated within New Spain, since most ties were focused on Spain through Mexico City and Veracruz. During this period, urbanization corresponded with externally based exploitation of the natural and human resources of the region.

In the seventeenth century, New Spain suffered economic problems in the face of the accumulated problems (especially population decline) of the previous century. The urban network was extended farther to the north for purposes of mining and ranching activities, but the urban system was still internally weak. The colonial population began to grow again, although slowly, and the urban system was still strongly linked to Spain.

The eighteenth century was a period of revival, especially during the period of the Bourbon economic-administrative reforms favoring “free” trade and local development. The Bajío and the mining areas prospered again and the internal population growth created a market for New Spain’s production. The Colonial area expanded to the far north, but these lands were sparsely populated by colonists and very weakly integrated with the central zone. The latter part of the eighteenth century, taken as a whole, was a period of positive urbanization linked to externally generated economic stimuli.

The nineteenth century brought an end to the Colonial regime. Independence brought a period of violence and turmoil that caused economic reverses for the new nation of Mexico. The new ruling class was composed mainly of conservative criollos who were more interested in their landed estates than in urban commerce or industry. The conflicts with Texas and the United States resulted in drastic reduction of the northern frontier area, but had the positive effect of eliminating a vast zone that had, in any case, been weakly linked to the rest of the country. The wars of the 1830s and 1840s, and the subsequent involvement with the U.S. Civil War, brought Mexico into direct and constant confrontation with its northern neighbor. During the first part of the nineteenth century, urbanization was slow and population and economic growth unspectacular. The Reform Laws brought a major impetus to change in the urban system with the expropriation of church and corporate lands and urban properties. Then, during the last two decades of the century, the Porfirian dictatorship turned Mexican affairs toward industrial and urban development. The creation of a national railroad network was critical in centralizing the urban hierarchy on Mexico City, with Veracruz as the key port for exports and imports. The role of foreign capital increased and dependent industrialization began in earnest. Related activities in large-scale mining, agriculture, and ranching provided the rural dimension to a major spurt in urban development.

The twentieth century brought with it the overthrow of the Porfirian regime. The countryside was swept with fighting and the cities emerged as places of refuge for peasants and aristocracy alike. Mexico’s leaders turned their attention inward, and especially in the Cárdenas era, were concerned with reforming land and labor laws. Although there were considerable differences in regional population and economic growth in the period between 1910 and 1940, the general pattern was a slowing of the pace of urban development and the emergence of Mexico City as even more dominant than before. The emergence of an activist state prepared the way for a greater role of the federal government in future urban and industrial growth.

The period since 1940 has generated an explosion of industrial and urban development. Cities have grown rapidly and the entire nation’s population has expanded as a result of lower mortality rates and continuing high fertility. Cityward migration has reached very high levels, providing a base for high natural urban growth rates. During this period the urban structure of Mexico has been filling in the gaps, with notable urban development in the areas to the north and west of the central highlands. The linkages with the United States have been strengthened as a result of the flow of migrant workers (both legal and illegal) and the spectacular growth of Mexico’s northern border cities in the 1970s. Throughout this period, Mexico City tightened its grip on the national urban system. It emerged as one of the great metropolises of the world – with a population of perhaps fifteen million in 1980 and an inordinate share of the nation’s economic, political, social, and cultural activities. This centralization of the urban system has been widely observed by social scientists interested in urbanization in recent decades, but until the end of the 1970s little effective governmental action had been taken to shift the balance of power. The new efforts to counteract policies that encouraged urban and industrial concentration will not result in immediate decentralization. The historical and structural aspects of Mexican urbanization cannot be so easily altered by mere legislative measures. It remains to be seen whether the most recent period of urban centralization, spurred on by intensive investments by multinational corporations and international monetary agencies, can be counterbalanced during the remaining two decades of this century.

In summary, Mexican urbanization is a multidimensional process within the society’s overall historical-structural transformation. This review article shows, we hope, that its demographic, economic, ecological, political, and sociocultural components must be examined jointly within a framework that reflects the temporal and spatial diversity of the Mexican experiences.

NOTES

1. These periods vary somewhat for different regions within Mesoamerica and scholars have divergent opinions regarding which events should mark the boundary points of this threefold scheme (see Helms 1975:28-110).

2. We reluctantly exclude the urban developments in the Maya highlands of Guatemala from our discussion because of space limitations. The shift in boundaries from Mesoamerica to the Spanish Colonial and later National periods presents analytical problems that are difficult to resolve in this brief treatment of urbanization.

3. The changing northern frontier of Mesoamerica, New Spain, and Mexico presents problems similar to those of the separation of Guatemala from Mexico. Given the importance of the modern nation-state for urbanization, our analysis will include discussion of cities in the northern borderlands.

4. Hardoy (1973) offers a set of ten criteria for determining the urban status of a society. They are useful for our purposes because they are based on pre-Columbian data which do not presuppose a high-level technology. Societies lacking draft animals and the wheel such as characterized Mesoamerica simply cannot be evaluated in the same terms as those that do have such facilitators of urban planning. The criteria are also flexible enough that they can be applied to the three areas of Mesoamerican urban development without masking regional differences. The criteria are as follows: (1)large and highly populated for the time and place; (2) a permanent settlement; (3) having a minimum density for its time and place; (4) having urban structures and layout, as indicated by recognizably urban streets and spaces; (5) a place where people lived and worked; (6) having a minimum of specifically urban functions, such as a market and/or a political and administrative center and/or a military center and/or a religious center and/or a center of intellectual activity with the corresponding institutions; (7) a hierarchical heterogeneity and differentiation of society including residence of the ruling classes; (8) a center of urban economy for its time and place, having a population which depended to some extent on the agricultural production of people who lived partially or totally outside the city proper. Part of the labor force was involved in processing raw materials for a market larger than the city itself; (9) a center for services for neighboring areas and the nucleus of a progressive pattern of urbanization and diffusion of technical advances; and (10) having an urban way of life, as opposed to a rural or semi-rural life, for its time and place (1973:xxi-xxii).

5. Hugo Nutini (1972:93) offers an alternative typology of colonial cities: (1) administrative-bureaucratic cities; (2) mining-manufacturing cities; (3) trading-agricultural cities; and (4) military-religious cities. He notes that “these are not always functionally exclusive categories, since there were a number of cities which fulfilled two or more functions.”

6. The historian Richard Boyer has noted a similar problem in historical studies. He refers to these as the “episodic stream of history”: they are “accounts of an individual, an institution, or the social and cultural life of the viceregal capital” (1977:457). He goes on to say that such studies are concerned simply with the city as the place where the “dramatic, the bizarre, the celebrated, the gifted” occurred and lived, and that they shed little light on the process of urbanization or on the city as a phenomenon (1977:458).

7. The archaeologist Barbara Price (1978:58) has made an interesting comparison of the approach of archaeologists and ethnologists to Mexican urbanization: “The overall methodological implications of the nature of the urbanism process for anthropological research strategy are considerable. The very physical and sociological prominence of urban communities has distinctly affected the course of research history. Their dominant position as the peaks of regional site stratification pyramids has been a double-edged sword and, paradoxically, has not favored the holistic view advocated above. In archaeology, … work has often concentrated on urban or urban-like sites, first, because of their striking visibility as ruins, and, second, because they are the settlements most likely to yield the remains of the kind of elite culture so favored by art historians and museums…. the traditional archaeological approach to urban research has tended to lack even a functional concept of the city as a whole. If the sustaining areas have been scanted, so, too, has most of the city itself, with the exception of the most elaborate tombs, and elite residences.

“The impact of urban dominance has been very different in ethnology. As in archaeology, the traditional approach has been one-sided, but it has come from the opposite side. Traditional ethnographic community studies have tended to emphasize the most primitive, isolated, “exotic” groups in any area…. When urban studies have been undertaken, they have tended to focus on the poorest, most disadvantaged urban dwellers. As in archaeological work, parts are intensively studied without relating them to the whole.”

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