SAH/SCC is delighted to welcome authors Maristella Casciato and Idurre Alonso to talk about their new book, The Metropolis in Latin America 1830-1930. Cityscapes, Photographs, Debates (Getty Publications, 2022).
In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts.The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis.
Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period—largely unpublished until now—this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.
Alonso is associate curator of Latin American collections at the Getty Research Institute, where Casciato is senior curator and head of architectural collections.
“The book includes an unusual repertoire of topics in the field of research of history at the early stages of modernity in Latin America,” says Gabriela Rangel, artistic director of Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). “The authors shed light on the transformations that modified the colonial model of Iberian cities in America, from Mexico to Argentina, displacing the axis of viceregal power toward a circuit of cities that were able to expand and gather international prestige during the republican period.”
