Developing a line of thought from an earlier essay (Morse, 1973: II, 11-55), this paper examines some points of departure for a comparative analysis of urbanization in Latin America and the United States during the nineteenth century. Two assumptions guide the inquiry: first, that the “external dependency” thesis so frequently invoked to explain Latin American urban development easily leads to dogmatism; second, that geoeconomic factors must be perceived as interacting with those of the sociopolitical order.

To set broad guidelines for our effort we might construe the economic and institutional development of the United States and Latin America along the lines of two tensions or counterpoints.

United States. Here the North and West with their commercial agriculture, trading energies, and industrialization faced the commercially and financially dependent South, its socioeconomic organization conditioned by the plantation system, slavery, and export agriculture.

The persistence of certain migratory movements has engendered a growing interest in their historical process. In the case of Mexico City, some recent studies have called attention to the existence of structures and historical trends which help explain contemporary migration (Bataillon, 1972).

A study of the history of migrations makes possible precise observations on the mass population movements produced by great social changes. These changes, in turn, can be studied through an analysis of their effects. Historical analysis will certainly focus on migration as a phenomenon that affects social groups, because the documents—generally indirect—that record these movements throw more light on their causes than on individual motivations. This paper only points to some ways in which these movements might be analyzed, using as sources the municipal padrones (population registers) and censuses of the nineteenth century, which include information on places of origin. (A complete list of the padrones of Mexico City in the nineteenth century is given in Aguirre and Sánchez de Tagle, 1972.)

From early colonial times to the end of the nineteenth century, urban life in Brazil centered in half a dozen coastal enclaves, each containing an area of export-oriented agriculture, focused on a single dominant port city. Three such capitals topped the urban hierarchy—Salvador (Bahia), Rio de Janeiro, and Recife (Pernambuco; see Figure 1). All arose on an economic base of sugar plantations, producing for an international market; Rio added gold exports in the eighteenth century and coffee in the nineteenth. Until just before independence, the Portuguese colonial capital at Salvador held first rank in size, political importance, and commercial wealth. Rio de Janeiro, seat of the central government after 1763, became the national metropolis under the Empire (1822-1889) and the Old Republic (1889-1930); its hegemony was challenged only in the twentieth century by the rise of industrial São Paulo (Conniff et al., 1971; Cowell, 1973).

During the late Empire in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro society felt the stirrings of a new process, one which would seriously alter—and threaten—the traditional way of life in the city. In imitation of Europe, well-to-do citizens began forming voluntary associations for mutual aid and protection. The trend soon reached the middle and upper levels of the proletariat, whose organizations became labor unions. Most sectors of the urban society gradually organized around interest groups, and as the city surged into the new century with over a half-million people, occasional conflict marred the society of “conciliation and reform.” By the 1920s, with the sobering experiences of Europe, Russia, and Mexico in mind, thoughtful Brazilians called for conservative social policy to contain class conflict. Many blamed the excessive liberalism of republican government since 1889 and harked back to medieval institutions for bringing social peace.

Urban morphology and growth have been studied by sociologists and others in the United States for half a century. A question raised in some recent studies is: To what extent are urban forms and growth processes universal? Sargent (1972) has proposed a universal model of urban dynamics intended “to relate processes to the spatial development,” particularly residential development, of the city. Sargent uses Buenos Aires between 1870 and 1930 as a case study. This article applies his model to another Latin American capital, Caracas, during approximately the same time period in order to demonstrate imperfections in the model as it relates to the way in which transportation systems expand, the forces which influence their expansion, and the manner in which they affect city growth.