of oil in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cárdenas.
However, it was also after the revolution, including during its most radical period in the 1930s, that Mexico got (most of) its current polarized pattern of neighbourhoods, segregated between, on one hand, ‘stupendous splendour’ in California Colonial style, and, on the other, colonias proletarias without potable water, sewage or paved streets, both built by private developers. Mexico City expanded in a particular way, through new urban neighbourhoods, colonias, sometimes mixing upper-class mansions with middle-class apartment buildings, but seldom mixing the middle and popular classes. Decent working-class housing came onto the public agenda, but there were too few resources and too little political energy devoted to it for much of an impact.26
Conservative, liberal, revolutionary – Mexico has always been an executive country. After their early location in the national executive palace, the legislative chambers were rehoused in modest colonial palaces in the city centre. With the Centenario festivities in mind, the Porfiorato regime launched a project for a new, more grandiose Legislative Palace. The revolution put a stop to the building. Only in the 2000s did the Senate build itself a proper building.
Under Cárdenas, capital accumulation was largely restricted to private residential land and building. After World War II, capital power became more public, signalled in 1956 by the Torre Latinoamericana, at the time Latin America’s tallest building (built for an insurance company). The most recent globalist layer of Mexico City will be treated in the ‘Global Moment’ chapter below.
Lima was the second vice-regal capital of Hispanic America; its late-eighteenth-century population of 64,000 was less than half of Mexico’s. Spanish Lima was intensely royalist – ‘the City of Kings’ – and Catholic, full of religious buildings and street processions, ‘an immense monastery, of both sexes’, as one commentator wrote in the seventeenth century;27 another, in the early nineteenth century, found it misty with incense. It was here that the empire had its ultimate core of loyalists, led by a forceful viceroy. It also had a White and Mestizo population fearful of Indian rebellion, which had materialized as a large-scale event during the late eighteenth century. A significant minority of the city’s inhabitants sailed off with the last Spanish troops. On the other hand, like the Mexican Creoles, the Peruvian Creoles included their pre-Hispanic culture and royalty in their pedigree. Colonial Lima was painted in Indian costume and monarchical chronologies were created, starting with Inca rulers and continuing with Spanish kings. An Indian nobility had been re-established, educated by Jesuits and living in the city.*
Peru had no independence heroes of its own, and independence was first proclaimed by José de San Martín in 1821, at the head of an army originating in Argentina, and finally won by Simón Bolívar, arriving in Ayacucho in December 1824 with an army from Colombia. Social change was slow after independence, with both African slavery and Indian tribute – in spite of San Martín’s proclamation that the Indians were Peruvians – remaining in force for some time. Some of the mid-nineteenth-century national republican changes to Lima were toponymic, substituting national geographic names for religious ones in the centre.28
When a national monumentality programme was initiated in the late 1850s, financed by the short guano boom, it featured first Bolívar, in Plaza Bolívar (formerly the Plaza de la Inquisición) in front of a Congress built earlier, and Columbus (Colón). San Martín returned as a monumental hero only for the centenary of 1921.
After the end of the guano boom and a disastrous war against Chile, followed in the late nineteenth century by a recovery under an ‘aristocratic republic’, urban development took off during the Oncenio, the eleven years of the authoritarian, more middle-class presidency of Augusto Leguía. Wide avenues were opened up, named after the president and progress; sewage and piped water were installed (by a US company). The centre of the city began to move to a new, neoclassical Plaza San Martín, with the Liberator on horseback above a colossal marble pedestal, and an international luxury hotel, Bolívar. The country finally got a Legislative Palace, a national pantheon (out of a converted church), an Inca Museum of Archaeology and, off centre stage, a somewhat downsized replica of the huge Brussels Palace of Justice. The bourgeoisie showed off its wealth and power in imposing corporate buildings, such as those of El Comercio newspaper and the insurance company Rimac (named after the river of the city), and in their ostentatious elite clubs, the Nacional in Plaza San Martín and the Unión in the Plaza Mayor. The buildings around the latter were rebuilt or repaired from the 1920s to the 1940s (after the 1940 earthquake), including two beautiful neocolonial buildings in yellow sandstone, with loggias and Moorish carved wooden balconies (the City Hall and the Union Club), as well as the cathedral, a boastful colonial-style Archbishop’s Palace and a neo-Baroque Palace of the President.*
An extensive iconographic programme was launched in connection with the centenaries of 1921 (the Republic) and 1924 (the decisive battle against the Spanish). As so often in the settler capitals, alongside national founders and heroes it included a number of gifts from ethnic immigrant communities. In Lima’s case the gifts included the ‘Worker’ sculpture by Constantin Meunier from the Belgians, a statue of the Inca Manco Cápac from the Japanese and a museum of Italian art from the Italians. The Washington monument and square signalled the president’s admiration of the United States and his eagerness to attract US capital.29 As part of a Hispanist conservative reaction, an equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru and the founder of the colonial city, was placed in the middle of the Plaza Mayor in 1935.
Originally, the vice-royalty of Peru included all South American Hispanic America – and the Philippines – but in the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown created two new vice-royalties: New Granada, centred on Santa Fe de Bogotá and comprising today’s Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador; and La Plata, with Buenos Aires as its capital, including today’s Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. In 1810 the two new vice-regal capitals were in the hands of new revolutionary powers, although not yet of independent nation-states.
National Buenos Aires got a uniquely rapid demographic start, thriving on its trade with Britain and the revenue from its customs. Under the slogan ‘to govern is to populate’, Argentina was actively promoting a policy of building a nation by immigration. The city population, which by independence in 1816 was 46,000, had by the census of 1869 increased to 187,000, half of it foreign-born.30 However, the political structure of the nation remained violently contested until 1880, when a certain balance between the coast and the interior was established by separating the city of Buenos Aires, as a federal entity, from the big (and also rich) province of Buenos Aires.
Remodelling of the Gran Aldea (big village) started in the 1860s, when the modest vice-regal fort was renovated, expanded and painted pink, which gave the presidential office the name it still holds today, Casa Rosada. The building originally included both ministries and legislature. From the 1870s, Florida became the street of porteño elegance. However, the main reshaping took place after 1880, directed by a local follower of Baron Haussman, Torcuato de Alvear, as presidentially appointed intendente of the city. Under him, the modern political centres were laid out: the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, by uniting the previous Plaza 25 de Mayo (after the revolution of 1810, before that the Plaza Mayor) and Plaza Victoria, and by opening up the Avenida de Mayo, leading up to a Washington-like Congress.
In the decades around 1900, the population of Buenos Aires exploded, from 187,000 in 1869 to 664,000 in 1895 and to 1,576,000 in 1914, half of whom were foreigners.31 Unsurprisingly, Buenos Aires was not settling down as a successful and prosperous national capital. The centenary festivities of 1910 were held under a state of siege in the midst of massive strikes (which were repressed) and targeted killings by anarchists.32 The city was dominated by an immensely rich oligarchy of commercial landlords-cum-merchants, who built neo-Baroque palaces for themselves around Plaza San Martín of a size and opulence this writer has not seen since the Saint Petersburg of Catherine II. At the other end of housing were the notorious conventillos, tenement houses,
