Cityscapes
Latin America and BeyondWinter 2003
Colonial Cities
June Carolyn Erlick
June Carolyn Erlick is the editor-in-chief of ReVista. She also loves cities?colonial and otherwise. 
?PotosÃ!?
exclaims Tom Cummins, his lively eyes twinkling, his neat graying ponytail
just grazing his collar line. ?You can?t have an issue on
cities without PotosÃ. Some people think cities in Latin America
just started yesterday. Potosà is incredible! It grew from nothing
to a huge city overnight in the 1500s because of silver, and it?s
twice as high as Mexico City. Now that?s a tale of a city!?
Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard?s Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian
and Colonial Art History, is sharing his passion for colonial cities spring
semester by teaching the course ?The Towns and Cities in the New
World: The Architecture of Power? in the Department of History of
Art and Architecture. The course examines the importance of the city in
the 16th- and 17th-century New World. It traces the development and use
of the grid plan as an artistic, religious, and political expression and
looks at the architecture and decoration of churches that were the center
of these towns, whether Quito, Cuzco, or Tlaxcala.
It?s Cummin?s? first time teaching the course at Harvard,
but he first begun a version of the course in 1996 at the University of
Chicago. What?s apparent during a long conversation that starts
off in his office in the Sackler Museum and ends up over coffee in a Starbucks
is that the course is an ongoing process?just like cities.
?I never ceased to be amazed at all the new great literature being
written,? he says, explaining that he was drawn to the subject as
a researcher in Cusco, Perú, in 1970. ?My interest in cities
came from the fact that cities have great art.?
For those of us who think of cities as sprawling spaces of chaos, Cummins?
vision of Latin American cities makes it clear that their origins were
the antithesis of disorder. Many of the colonial cities in Latin America
were ?the Renaissance ideal cities that never gets built in Europe,
at least not on this scale,? observes Cummins.
In some countries, the Spaniards found urban spaces, like in Mexico where
the Mayans had created big cities and an urban society. In other places,
like Peru, there weren?t any cities, so the colonizers made people
move into cities, imposing hierarchies and ordering spaces.
?There wouldn?t be Latin America as it is without the drive
to build cities,? observes Cummins. ?Looking at the ordering
of cities dispels many of the precepts about colonialization, that it
is simply a violent disordered set of conquistadores.?
?Obviously, some of them were disordered,? he continues. ?But
the vision was one of order. In fact, they organized these great cities
that are today seen as absolutely unmanageable.?
The Spaniards built along the grid system, and ordered systems of space.
They looked at the ways buildings faced, taking into account the way the
wind blewows and distributed the population into what Cummins terms ?sociological
spaces.?
?But it?s not just about space,? he comments, his words
racing as he strings the concepts together. ?It?s also the
overriding sense of what the Spanish wanted to do with the Americas.?
I listen as he elaborates how the city becomes a memory, an artificial
memory, a system of memory that emerges from rhetoric. The Spanish were
asking, ?How do you construct a city in your mind? How do you indoctrinate
people??
?What kind of elements are important, what aren?t for the
social and artistic life of the city?? he asks, pointing out the
close relationship in Spanish between terms for architecture and other
forms of representation. The frontispiece of a book and the facade of
a major structure are called the same thing?a portada. In painting,
lienzo is a canvas; in architecture, it?s the face
of a building.
I?ve spoken Spanish for several decades now; these words are familiar
to me in both their senses, but I had never made the association. Suddenly,
over a cup of coffee in a Starbucks, a different and ordered vision of
the colonial world becomes vivid to me. I know I have to take Cummins?
course someday.