Spectacle, Fear and Protest

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in
Latin America
Anton Benjamin Rosenthal
Social Science History, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 33-73 (Article)
Published by Cambridge University Press
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32142
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6046 SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY 24:1 / sheet 37 of 309
Anton Rosenthal
Spectacle, Fear,
and Protest
A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space
in Latin America
The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as

a long contest over the exercise of urban public space.1 While the nature of
this space is often less physical than it is social and situational, the struggle
between dierent elements of the city to manipulate its politics and con-
trol its daily life has often been violent, leaving deep imprints in the collec-
tive memories of places as culturally and physically diverse as Mexico City,
Buenos Aires, Havana, Bogot, and Rio de Janeiro.
Social Science History 24:1 (spring 2000).

Copyright 2000 by the Social Science History Association.
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
34 Social Science History
If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu

oers an intriguing site for the historian interested in exploring changing re-
lations of power, class conict, opposing visions of the future, breakdowns
of social order, gendered spaces, health and disease, visual culture, spectacle
and symbolic codes, and ultimately, the creation of community. Yet until the
1980s, most Latin American historians who were interested in these themes
conned their studies to the countryside. As late as 1975, Jorge Hardoy (1975:
44) could write that the urban history of the second half of the nineteenth
century and the early decades of the twentieth is virtually unknown, in spite
of the extremely rich material left to us by innumerable travelers, scientists,
and men of state. While historians and social scientists working from the
1950s through much of the 1970s delineated the complex relations between
peasant villages and national states, the ideologies of rural rebellion, and the
sources of identity and community in a countryside transformed by the de-
mands of export capital, cities in twentieth-century Latin America were ac-
corded secondary treatment, sometimes at the level of popular anecdotal nar-
ratives. For the most part, historians discussed cities as the landscapes against
which population growth, labor strife, and populist politics took place, rather
than as organisms with their own peculiar dynamics. The primary exceptions
to this trend were the works of Richard M. Morse (1958) on So Paulo, James
Scobie (1974) on Buenos Aires, and Jos Luis Romero (1976) on the region as
a whole. These three writers explored the economic factors behind the par-
ticular shape of urban growth that they encountered and to varying degrees
were interested in the ideologies and mentalities current in the cities under
study. Scobies posthumously published review of the literature on the history
of the Latin American city up to 1980 suggests that sociologists may have pro-
duced some of the most interesting work in this era, concentrating on urbani-
zation and political economy (1989). The interrelationship of space and time,
however, was rarely pursued in urban studies, one exception being the work of
a geographer that explores transportation, housing, and urban planning (Sar-
gent 1974).
The early 1980s signaled a shift toward urban social history and the in-
creased use of quantitative methodologies. Studies from this era were par-
ticularly concerned with social mobility, class conict, and immigration, and
they moved the city itself into the forefront of the analysis, devoting some dis-
cussion to the changing dynamics of neighborhoods and daily life in the city,
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 35
though space was still a secondary factor in their work (Sofer 1982; Szuch-
man 1980; Rial and Klaczko 1981). Later in the decade, Jerey Needell (1987a)
oered a cultural history of Rios elite in the early twentieth century that ex-
amined the citys literature and budding consumerism in addition to outlining
the history of social institutions created by the upper class as it sought to fash-
ion a European-style capital.This history paid particular attention to physical
aspects of the city, including architecture and life on the streets, at least the
fashionable ones. This work was quickly followed by another social history of
Rio, which focused on the world of domestic servants and provided a discus-
sion of the intersection of work and public space in the nineteenth-century
city (Graham 1988).
In the 1990s, the Latin American city has increasingly become the focus
of historical research. Journals such as Latin American Perspectives, The Bulle-
tin of Latin American Research, Nueva Sociedad, NACLA Report on the Ameri-
cas, and the Journal of Urban History have devoted special issues to analyzing
the city in Latin America in the last few years. Recent studies about labor,
popular culture, and gender have all shifted away from treating the city as
simply a backdrop to historical narrative and instead have integrated urban
space into their analyses. The traditional subjects of urban political history
and European immigration have undergone recent revisions as authors have
begun to explore spatial themes: the grounding of urban political reform and
democratization in the context of leisure culture (Walter 1993); the spatial di-
mensions of public demonstrations (Sabato 1998); and the interrelationship
between kinship networks, transportation, and the residential patterns of im-
migrants (Baily 1999; Moya 1998). This change in focus reects the massive
urban growth experienced by Latin American countries since 1960 and the
overall shift from predominantly rural national populations to majority urban
populations prior to 1980 (Gilbert 1994: 26).We have also witnessed the emer-
gence of some Latin American sites in various projections of the worlds 20
most populous cities in the next century, dwarng older metropolises of the
developed world.
Taking stock of the contributions and directions of this new urban history
is a somewhat daunting task, since it has been inuenced by an array of disci-
plines from geography and urban planning to sociology and philosophy, and
approaches from cultural studies and postmodernism to Marxism and advo-
cacy journalism. On one level, it is possible to trace the intellectual footprints
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and other internationally

famous critics of the urban experience on much of this new writing. Yet one
also senses the particular importance of Latin American cultural currents in
conguring this project of investigating the city. One of the most interesting
aspects of studying the Latin American city is that it became an imaginary
landscape for writers long before it was discovered by historians, and as such,
it forms part of a broader collective memory that is sometimes national in its
scope. Some of the regions most renowned novelists and short story writers
employed elements of urban life as the subjects of their work, dating back to
the late nineteenth century. Gerald Martin (1989: 108) notes that the special
talent of the well-known Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
lay in his ability to nd a humorous, parodic, iconoclastic form with which to
negotiate the diculties of living in a semicolonial city in the 1880s. Martin
points to further development of the urban novel in Brazil and Chile during
the 1910s before the advent of the great urban writers of the 1920s and 1930s
across the Southern Cone. Roberto Arlt, Patricia Galvo, Jorge Luis Borges,
and Juan Carlos Onetti either mapped out imaginary cities or provided realist
and surrealist visions of familiar ones with the goal of rendering the mundane
meaningful during this period (Bach 1998). Their eorts laid the foundation
for the wildly creative, urban-based novels and stories of Mario Benedetti,
Ernesto Sbato, Felisberto Hernndez, Carlos Fuentes, and the Nobel prize-
winner Miguel Angel Asturias in the period up through the 1960s. In this
way, the writers of Latin American ction anticipated some of the agenda of
urban social history and may have contributed to the cultural and spatial bent
in much of the new research on the city. This is most apparent in detective
ction. According to literary scholar Ilan Stavans (1998: 2728),
In Latin America as a whole, this genre has had a beguiling life. As an

intellectual game, it was cultivated in the forties by Borges, his friend
Adolfo Bioy Casares, and others in the River Plate. Some three decades
later came a rebellion against middle-class values, speeded by popular
unrest over dictatorial regimes and an admiration for the Beat Genera-
tion, and a new wave of investigator was born, one identied with urban
roughness and anarchy, with the unpolite mien of a Philip Marlow. An
investigator like Erik Lnnrot in Borgess story Death and the Com-
pass gave way to fearless private eyes like [Paco Ignacio Taibo IIs] Be-
lascoarn, urban dwellers, and instinctual sociologists ready to embark on
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
the study of their immediate environments. In Rio de Janeiro, Santiago

de Chile and Mexico City, among other venues, this unconventional hero,
a guy with little patience and no interest in cerebral enterprises, became
a rebuttal of orderly life and the status quo.
With these diverse cultural and intellectual inuences at play, it is di-

cult to recognize the emergence of a single style or school of analysis in the re-
cent historical scholarship. As the Latin American city becomes increasingly
like Los Angeles in its trac problems, sprawl, crime, pollution, shopping
malls, and segregation of enclaves, it also becomes more problematic as a unit
of analysis. Capitals and industrial centers have swallowed up what were once
independent towns, while ranch land and farmland have been turned into air-
ports and highways. Meanwhile, the forces of globalization insure that trav-
elers nd familiar stores, restaurants, and amusements whenever they cross
borders. The city is seemingly everywhere and nowhere, and it is becoming
an increasingly dicult site to map on any level.
Nevertheless, it is possible to see both the accomplishments and the po-
tential gains of placing space at the forefront of any examination of the city
in Latin American history. While many critics, from Lewis Mumford (1968)
and Richard Sennett (1977) to Sharon Zukin (1991), Ray Oldenburg (1989),
and Michael Sorkin (1992), have decried the slow decline of public space in
U.S. cities since World War II, that process has not been as linear or as far-
reaching in Latin America. The most oft-cited factors in the demise of the in-
formal gathering space in the United Statesautomobiles, skyscrapers, sub-
urbanization, television, and consumerismhave not been as pronounced in
Latin American cities. Furthermore, urban Latin America possesses certain
features that help protect public space: plaza-centered grid plans in many
of the regions cities; widely used public transport systems; a historic inter-
est of elites in preserving the vitality of center-city zones; caf-oriented soci-
eties (rather than TV-oriented commuters); diering customs regarding time,
which permit long breaks in the workday; and nally, well-developed collec-
tive memories, which integrate public sites into local histories, thus invest-
ing them with a power that not only preserves them but causes them to be
continually used. For Latin Americanist historians of the twentieth century,
the wealth of material on urban public space that is available through news-
papers, cronicas,2 and photo archives oers an opportunity to broaden our
understanding of the ways in which Latin American cities functioned and to
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
go beyond the knowledge that we have gained from the limited collections of
municipal censuses, court records, police archives, and diaries that have been
preserved and already exploited by social historians. The project of revealing
urban history through public space is a new way of grappling with old issues
of social conict, but it approaches them from a cultural perspective that in-
cludes the world of symbols and memory and thus delves deeper into the core
of what makes the city a site of both dreams and nightmares.
Three Tales of Public Space

Let me begin this review of the recent literature on urban history with a few
short stories which, taken together, help trace the importance of urban pub-
lic space since the 1890s, the period when the modern Latin American city
began to take shape. The rst tale illustrates the situational character of pub-
lic space and the way in which it is interlocked with the history of protest in
the region.
An angry crowd of artisans gathered in front of a journalists house in
Bogot in January 1893, protesting a series of newspaper articles that blamed
the working class for immoral practices and a perceived deterioration of
the family (Sowell 1989).When police shot at them, the workers proceeded to
raid police stations; set up barricades; destroy streetlights; sack the homes of
city ocials; and take over a womens prison, freeing the inmates. Although
food prices had been rising, the nature of the targets suggests that the eco-
nomic modernization of the city and the consequent declining status of arti-
sans, whose livelihood was threatened by cheap imported goods, created an
assault on their public dignity and served as a ash point for the riot. Unlike
earlier instances of collective violence in the Colombian capital, this erup-
tion did not target the homes or shops of bakers. The 1893 crowd instead
sought out places more connected to public spacegovernment installations
and the homes of government ocials and a journalist. The space of the city
is, on the one hand, limited and familiarthe artisans knew where the jour-
nalist, the mayor, the minister of government, and the police chief lived
and it is also played upon by outside economic forces that undermine the
position of a class of residents, the artisans. Furthermore, the easy move-
ment of the protest between public and private space suggests an almost pre-
modern quality to late nineteenth-century Bogot, with personal responsi-
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
bility still dominant over a reliance for order on a bureaucratic government

even as global forces of modernization were having signicant social and eco-
nomic eects on the city.
The ambiguous nature of some urban spaces and the tension between
private and public domains is also evident in Montevideo several decades
later. Here a group of anarchist electric streetcar workers launches a walkout
that blossoms into the citys rst general strike. In May 1911, workers take
over the citys streets, ght with police, organize the distribution of food and
medical services, and eventually win concessions from the two foreign-owned
streetcar companies. A key element in the streetcarmens ability to gain the
active support of tens of thousands of the citys workers is the role of the
streetcar as a movable public space, a veritable workshop on wheels, whose
sometimes barbaric rules of work are openly visible to passengers, city in-
spectors, police, and pedestrians (Rosenthal 1995a). Seven years later, another
strike by these same workers results in even more violence and the tempo-
rary takeover of the transport network by the municipal government, which
guarantees a signicant increase in wages. In this battle, the streetcar union
employs the tactic of portraying the trolley as an essential public service that
in some sense belongs to the residents of Montevideo, even though it is pri-
vately owned.This is instrumental in winning its demands without the conse-
quent increase in fares desired by the foreign streetcar companies (Rosenthal
1998). In these labor conicts, the trolleys invaluable role as a connector of
public spaces (plaza, street, caf, park) essential to the life of the city and as
a forum for public discussion between citizens (the rear platform) helps sup-
port the workers claims that the lines should function in the public interest
rather than primarily for private prot.
A third tale shows how even during the darkest of times, public spaces
can be redened and utilized in new ways by groups with the will to chal-
lenge deeply entrenched power. During a murderous dictatorship, the dirty
war waged by the military in Argentina against that countrys civilians in
the 1970s and early 1980s, public space almost entirely vanishes. Censorship,
purges, and abductions become the order of the day. As thousands of stu-
dents, journalists, teachers, lawyers, and union members are disappeared,
a small group of mothers begins a protest in the main plaza of Buenos Aires.
Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo undertake their action in a mixture of fear
and desperation. According to Renee Epelbaum, one of the protestors, We
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
began with 14 mothers, 14 mothers unprotected in that enormous plaza who

did not even know what they wanted to do. Perhaps to see if they could speak
to the President or someone who would listen and tell them about their chil-
dren. . . . For the mothers, going to the Plaza meant overcoming fear. Maybe
thats why they called us crazy. Because at the moment that everyone was ter-
rorized, we overcame this fear (Muoz and Portillo 1985). The choice of the
plaza as the site for a demonstration may have been almost unconscious. In
the words of another protestor, Mara Elisa Haschman de Landin, who lost
two sons during this dictatorship, They had Martn. Then Horacio disap-
peared and I said enough of being afraid, and I went out into the streets. We
went everywhere to make a complaint. Where did we all end up? In the Plaza
de Mayo (Muoz and Portillo 1985). But the Plaza de Mayo was the most
public space in Argentina (Taylor 1998: 77), containing important symbolic
elements of government, religion, and nance and a long history of demon-
strations dating back to the Peronist era. As such, it was central to the collec-
tive memory of the city (Torre 1996: 245).
Although the military reacts to the politicizing and gendering of this
important space with confusion and then violence, the mothers continue to
gather week after week, demanding to know the truth about their loved ones.
Their ranks grow to include people from dierent class and religious back-
grounds, their actions gain international notoriety, and their demonstrations
provide refuge and hope to those seeking to undermine the militarys legiti-
macy. For some, the mothers become an icon of resistance to military rule
throughout the world. Their white-scarved invasion of the Plaza de Mayo
evolves into a counterspectacle that challenges the militarys ordered spec-
tacle of a national revolution based upon a peculiar mix of masculinity, Chris-
tianity, violence, and family values (Taylor 1998: 76).The fact that the dem-
onstration of the mothers continues well beyond the reign of the juntas says
much about the ways in which collective memory is intertwined with the
exercise of public space in the Latin American context. This story also sug-
gests that public space may have greater emotional importance in a region in
which it disappeared virtually overnight than it does in the United States,
where it has suered a slower, more consumerist-driven decline.
These three histories oer up a set of themes that may be useful in under-
standing the various roles of public space in fashioning urban history and
also in distinguishing the historical trajectories of Latin American cities from
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
their counterparts elsewhere in the world. These topics include the interrela-
tionship between space and protest; the social aspects of the plaza and the
street; the tension between private and public spaces in cities, particularly as
it relates to gender; the place of spectacle and fear in the urban environment;
and nally, the symbolic space of the city.
The Geography of Protest

As we can see from the three historical examples described above, much of
the literature on urban space is concerned with protest and social movements.
Analyzing public space, since its meaning or even its existence is situational,
reveals changing relations of power, particularly between social classes. One
particular form of urban space, housing, has been the focal point of a great
deal of conict since the opening of the twentieth century, and it continues
to be so in the 1990s. Taking a cue from rural land occupations of previous
decades, 5,000 poor families in Rio de Janeiro invaded vacant city lots or
half-nished housing complexes, including luxury condominiums a short
distance from the beach, in a four-day period in 1991, according to the New
York Times, 20 March 1991. Reviewing other land invasions in Lima, Peru,
and Quertaro, Mexico, Gareth Jones points out,
For Latin Americas urban poor the competition for space is made real
in daily life. . . . The acquisition of land and housing is, perhaps, the most
visible form of the contest for space. . . . Perhaps the most recognised
safe place, if the least well researched, is the homescape. Bringing the
homescape to the fore is important because it circumscribes our inter-
pretation of domestic, private, space as largely passive and separate from
the public when, in fact, forms of organisation, language and actions in
one space inform a complementary set of organisations, languages and
actions in the other. ( Jones 1994: 23)
Such contemporary actions have no doubt directed the gaze of urban histori-
ans toward similar conicts about housing in the centurys earlier decades. A
recent compilation of essays on urban protests from 1870 to 1930 contains no
fewer than ve accounts of rent strikes and housing reform movements (by
John Lear, David Parker, Andrew Wood, Sam Adamo, and Jim Baer) stretch-
ing from Veracruz and Mexico City to Lima and Rio de Janeiro (Pineo and
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
Baer 1998). Among the most noteworthy works on housing is James Baers
(1993) treatment of the 1907 rent strike in Buenos Aires. Here the author
meticulously details the progression of the strike through various conven-
tillos 3 and neighborhoods, linking the mobilization to anarchist currents and
general conditions of crowding and rent gouging as well as situating it in
urban space and time. Equally intriguing for its attention to changes in the
economic status of particular neighborhoods and the segregation of zones ac-
cording to wealth and power is John Lears (1996) research on Mexico City
around the turn of the century. Lear demonstrates that private and public
space were part of a continuum in the urban environment, rather than op-
posing elements, and that problems related to housing tended to spill over
into other social sectors. Since liberal cientco [positivist] doctrines limited
the governments willingness to support or encourage cheap housing or eec-
tively regulate tenements, eorts at reform passed from regulating private
spaces, residences, to controlling public spaces and behavior, interventions
more easily reconciled with the positivist dictum of Order and Progress.
Government intervention came not at the root of the problemcrowded,
unhealthy housingbut at the result, which was to throw people onto the
street (Lear 1996: 479). Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the new
government turned toward intervention in housing in an attempt to defuse
some of the tension in the labor sector, thus illustrating that the space be-
tween home and factory was connected, uid, and sometimes bidirectional
(D. Davis 1994: 3132). In So Paulo during the 1910s, urban redevelopment
programs that involved the destruction of working-class housing led to the
formation of anarchist-led tenant leagues. Rent strikes evolved into street
occupations, rallies in plazas, and nally a general strike in 1917. Raquel Rol-
niks (1994) description of these events makes explicit use of space in analyz-
ing class alliances and racial segregation, as well as the shifting lines between
public and private zones. Rolnik (1994: 85) argues that while there were dif-
ferences between types of housing occupied by the workers (overcrowded,
unsanitary tenements vs. vilas with self-contained kitchens, baths, and toi-
lets), the two groups walked the same streets, took the same streetcars, fre-
quented the same bars, and sometimes even worked at the same factory. In
the end, neighborhoods acted in unison against the plans of the elite to re-
dene the space of the city.
Building on Daviss research, an interesting theoretical formulation con-
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
cerning the dierent spaces of urban protest comes from Teresa Meade
(1997), whose study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Rio de
Janeiro spans the topics of housing, labor, and sanitation in a general dis-
cussion of the dynamics of social control. Drawing on the work of Spanish
sociologist Manuel Castells, Meade (1997: 10) argues that it was contention
over issues of consumption (fare hikes, food costs, housing problems), rather
than point-of-production struggles (wages, working conditions, union recog-
nition), that pushed people into marches and rallies. Operating from this
perspective, many scholars are in the process of revising the history of the
Latin American labor movement into a broader, urban, working-class history,
narrated at the level of culture, daily life, and mass protest, that takes the city
and its interrelationships of space and power as a starting point rather than a
backdrop (Pineo and Baer 1998; Armus and Lear 1998). If we shift the focus
to the housing of the middle class, which emerges as a signicant political and
social force in a handful of Latin American cities in the period just before the
First World War, we can also see indications that the public sphere was in-
truding on the private domain or, to use a well-worn symbolic construct of
the region, the world of the street was impinging on that of the house. Brian
Owensby (1996) argues that during the 1920s and 1930s a budding consumer
culture in Brazil led to a certain degree of instability on the home front.
The idealized middle-class home of housekeeping manuals, magazines,

and novels implied a (limited) sense of being in control of ones own des-
tiny, in sharp contrast to the indomitable chaos of the turbulent world
outside. . . .
Dissonance between the home as site of status seeking and home as
refuge from the outside world obliquely indicates the challenges middle-
class donas de casa [homemakers] faced in a market society. . . . Ample
evidence testies that middle-class men and women persisted in trying
to imitate the rich, often eschewed frugality, and commonly refused to
content themselves with their modest positionsprecisely the sorts of
bad habits they were supposed to avoid. (Owensby 1998: 350)
All of this suggests that there was a particular urban social order evolv-
ing in Latin American cities during the early twentieth century. Many of the
countries of this region had witnessed destructive civil wars during the nine-
teenth century, often between urban and rural forces. Once these were re-
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
solved, urban elites and national governments redirected their energies to re-
fashioning their capitals. Often taking Paris as a model, many municipalities
embarked on programs of urban renewal featuring the widening of thorough-
fares, construction of diagonal avenues, creation of new public buildings in
French and Italian styles, and the destruction of older working-class housing
viewed as unhygienic, following the policies laid out by Baron Georges-
Eugne Haussmann in the French capital decades earlier. In a comparison of
the plans for Rio and Buenos Aires, Jerey Needell (1995), drawing on the
earlier work of J. L. Romero, nds a certain degree of fantasy at play, with
wealthy urbanites attempting to eliminate vestiges of the barbaric city built on
rural mentalities while trying to appropriate the trappings of modern Euro-
pean capitals whose civilization they more closely identied with. In the con-
struction of hotels, monuments, art museums, and new exclusive neighbor-
hoods, Needell (1995: 535) uncovers an elite decision to create a faade of
Europeanization and then live within it, to the point of making the publics
space private and the elites private space a public statement.
Linked to housing, the elimination of communicable disease became a
major focus of this physical reformation of the city, and in the process it also
became an issue of class conict. In a seminal article on the antivaccine riots
of 1904 in Rio that pays explicit attention to space as a factor in the collec-
tive behavior of the poor, Meade (1986: 302) underlines the social and eco-
nomic dierences between Latin American capitals and those of Europe in
this period:
The urban renewal linked to sanitation reforms have beneted the

wealthy, sometimes at the expense of the poor. Similar to their counter-
parts in other countries and at other times, the Carioca crowds loudly
protested the results of such ambiguous reforms. Dierent from crowds
in Europe and the United States, however, the people of Rio de Janeiro
spontaneously, and for the most part unknowingly, were reacting against
an attempt to develop a city according to the exigencies of an export
economy and foreign investment. Thus, at its core the 1904 vaccination
riot was part of a struggle between Rios upper and lower classes over
the citys pattern of growth, specically over where and how members of
each class were to live. But more than that it was a struggle over whom
Rio de Janeiro would serve: the Brazilian masses or the local elite and
their foreign nanciers.
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
Other researchers have explored the connections between disease, social

order, and ideology in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century
Guayaquil (Pineo 1990),Valparaso (Pineo 1998), Lima (Parker 1998), and Rio
(Murilo de Carvalho 1992; Chalhoub 1993; Adamo 1998), but in general their
explanations of collective behavior have been more concerned with race, in-
stitutions, or conicting value systems than with the changing dynamics of
urban space, which is why Meades piece stands out as an important work.4 A
notable exception to this trend is the Uruguayan historian Jos Pedro Barrn,
whose research has been strongly inuenced by the work of Michel Fou-
cault. Barrns (1993) history of the medical profession points directly to the
ways in which elite ideologies of sanitation targeted specic nodal points of
urban lower-class culture such as bars, cafs, and conventillos as immoral,
dangerous, and often worthy of destruction, thus altering the landscape of
Montevideo and smaller Uruguayan cities. Similarly inuenced by Foucault,
Teresita Martnez-Vergne (1999) goes even further to explore the relationship
between the control of public space and an evolving discourse on hygiene,
prostitution, and poverty pushed by a new bourgeoisie in early nineteenth-
century San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her primary concern is to reveal relations of
power, and she does this by demonstrating how colonial authorities organized
social space within a walled city in an eort to keep subordinate groups and
dangerous others at a distance.
Ultimately, investigations into the linkage between the space of the fac-
tory and the space of the home or neighborhood should provide us with a
better understanding of working-class politics and protest as they played out
during the populist era of the 1940s and 1950s in many Latin American cities.
One example of this is Daniel Jamess (1988) analysis of mass protests in
greater Buenos Aires at the beginning of the Peronist period. His detailed
descriptions of crowd behavior focus on the role of the plaza and the street
as sites of mobilization and confrontation, while his careful reading of news-
papers suggests a similar struggle for control of urban space in 1940s Buenos
Aires to that discovered by Meade for Rio in a much earlier period. Jamess
(1988: 45557) spatially oriented account also reveals a more complex picture
of populism than that oered by earlier structuralist approaches:
Closely allied to the contest for access to, and recognition within,
the public sphere was an implicit contest over what we might call spa-
tial hierarchy and territorial proprieties. A constant metaphor which runs
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
through both the bourgeois and working class press concerning the Octo-
ber days was that of the city and the periphery.The city was hallowed ter-
ritory, dened as the old established residential and administrative cen-
ters where political power resided and where, by extension, socially and
culturally relevant activity occurred. Beyond was the periphery, the sub-
urbs, the non-city, the unknown, indeed the not worthy of being known:
and it was from here, they all stressed, that the crowds who marched on
the city came. . . .
. . . The city has acquired a personality whose aesthetic sense could,
apparently, be oended. In addition those who can legitimately inhabit
the citys space are clearly limited to the porteo middle class. . . . This
sense of social exclusiveness expressed in notions of the city, the us and
them divide implicit in the armation of the legitimacy of territorial
hierarchy, is reinforced by the identication of those who can legitimately
inhabit the citys space as el pueblo (the people). The corollary to this is
apparently the supposition that the intruders, those who make ugly with
their presence the citys space, are the non-people, those unworthy of
citizenship.
In this case, the public sphere, dened in a somewhat exclusionary way, has
collided with the more historically dened public space of the plaza and street.
Plaza and Street

One of the key distinguishing characteristics of Spanish American cities is the
primacy of the plaza in the urban landscape. The grid plan followed by most
towns and cities in the region not only provides for a central plaza that is often
a locus of civic and religious institutions and public events, but also a range
of secondary plazas, which often radiate out from the center, linked by major
avenues and transit lines, and which can serve as commercial and recreational
nodal points.5 These squares are scenes of daily interaction between friends
and strangers and provide important sites for the public life of the city. In
her novel, E. Luminata, Chilean author Diamela Eltit (1997: 5060) catalogs
a wide range of interactions that take place in an unnamed Santiago plaza,
some imbued with fear and others with desire: meetings of lovers, elderly
people sitting on benches hoping to strike up conversations with strangers,
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
beggars sleeping, crazy people talking to themselves, and children playing on

the grass.
This mixing that occurs in plazas and other public spaces can also be
seen in class terms. Geographer Michael Johns (1997) notes that in the late
nineteenth century, when Mexico City was divided between the two worlds
of the rich and the poor, the central plaza remained a key point of contact.
Here, clients of a thieves market and the illiterate patrons of public scribes
crossed paths daily with businesspersons and politicians making deals in the
town hall ( Johns 1997: 11). Rubn Martnez (1995: 3536) points to the con-
tinued mingling of classes in contemporary Mexico City, which he contrasts
with the segregation of Los Angeles neighborhoods:
Come Sunday in Coyoacn, the stately and auent district that was once
home to such ritzy Marxists as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon
Trotsky, the central plaza opens itself to indgena vendors, to working-
class lovers looking for a place to stroll and neck, to tourists, to yuppies,
to everyone. . . . The rich and the poor, the light-skinned and the dark
are in constant contact by virture of the mestizo character of the city and a
strong center (the Zcalo with its grand cathedral and government build-
ings overlooking a huge plaza) surrounded by satellite neighborhoods,
each with its own central market culture.
Besides this peaceful interaction, the Zcalo has also recently been the site of
multiple demonstrations, patriotic holidays, the arrival of 1,111 ski-masked
Zapatista rebels, [and] pitched battles between rival street-vendor gangs
(Ross 1998: 28). As such, it is a primary locus for the spectacle of class conict
in the Mexican capital.
To some degree, the centrality of the plaza in the Latin American urban
landscape is a legacy of Spanish colonialism, but this interpretation is lim-
ited and needs to be qualied. The royal decrees that established the rules by
which plazas were to be laid out in the New World were routinely modied
or even ignored by sixteenth-century settlers. The result is that in size and
regularity, the major plazas of Latin America anticipate, by as much as a cen-
tury, those of the mother country (Webb 1990: 104). Setha Low (1993: 78)
has argued that the plaza-centered grid plan of Mexico City was simply an
overlay of the Aztec city of Tenochtitln, which also featured a central plaza
and temple and so is syncretic rather than unique. Furthermore, the capital
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
cities of Latin America were founded in dierent centuries, and they devel-
oped under varying social and economic factorssome were ports and rail-
road hubs, some were administrative centers, and some were nancial capi-
tals. Over time, the small, colonial central plazas often receded in importance
as newer, commercial areas of cities grew around larger plazas more easily fed
by public transport and larger boulevards. These plazas developed their own
histories, and in some cases their proximity to working-class neighborhoods
and streetcar or railway stations made them useful staging sites for mass dem-
onstrations or major civic commemorations.
A comparative look at Los Angeles, originally a Spanish colonial town,
suggests that the physical layout of the city mattered less than the ensuing
commitment to preserve and create public space. Los Angeles is notorious
for ignoring its downtown, turning Pershing Square from a vibrant block of
commerce and pedestrian trac into a bleak architectural experiment de-
signed to drive out its most recent denizens, the homeless. Commenting on
the model of developer-driven planning, which Los Angeles has followed
since the 1920s, critic Mike Davis (1998: 65) claims that no large city in the
United States was so stingy with public space.
Similarly, the Mexican border town of Tijuana, designed as a cluster of
ve plazas in 1889, was overwhelmed by tourism from the north in the 1920s
that destroyed much of its public space. The result is that the public plaza
has largely been eclipsed by the quintessential late-twentieth-century private
plaza: the shopping mall (Herzog 1993: 58). To some degree, this is also true
of Buenos Aires, yet a commitment by the state to the model of a homogenous
city with equitable distribution of public space dating back to Argentinas rst
president helped to keep the land speculators and developers largely at bay
until the 1960s. In this vision, urban greenery was thought of not only as
hygienic space, but also as privileged space for socialization, as mortar for an
organic city. Immigrants and creoles, humble but decent families would be
made equal by the purifying light of nature acting as a disciplined and trans-
parent civic institution (Silvestri and Gorelik 1995: 29). Interestingly, simi-
lar sentiments produced a socialist public space in Havana in 1966. The
Parque Coppelia was created in a newer commercial zone of the city around
an outlet for state-produced ice cream. The one-block park was established
on the site of a former hospital and serves as a meeting area for thousands of
city residents each day, including Communist youth, punkers, homosexuals,
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
and smugglers. It constitutes a spontaneous urban theater among trees and

garden paths (Curtis 1993: 65).
While the Latin American plaza has received a good deal of scholarly at-
tention, the street that feeds it has not. Needell (1987a: 164) devotes a few
pages to describing the Rua do Ouvidor in turn-of-the-century Rio as a scene
of commerce and fashion, as well as a public space of elite fantasy iden-
tication. Graham (1988) discusses the street in more general terms in a
chapter that invokes a distinction between the private, ordered world of the
house and the more public, chaotic world of the street drawn by Roberto da
Matta and others.6 Graham shows how social custom regulated behavior in
the street according to time of day, social class, and gender in the nineteenth
century.While upper-class women had to go accompanied into the street even
during the day, servant women had freer access to various urban zones. Joo
Reis (1997) oers an intriguing and well-developed argument concerning the
ways in which free blacks and slaves working as porters in the streets of mid-
nineteenth-century Salvador created an eective culture of resistance to the
state. Beyond this work, the overall paucity of research on the street in Latin
America is disappointing since studies of other locales have given primacy
to the street as a public space. Spiro Kostof (1992: 194) devoted a full chap-
ter to the street in his monumental history of the city and went so far as to
claim that the only legitimacy of the street is as public space. Without it,
there is no city. . . . The street, furthermore, structures community. It puts
on display the workings of the city, and supplies a backdrop for its common
rituals. Because this is so, the private buildings that enclose the street chan-
nel are perforce endowed with a public presence. This formulation opens
the historical study of the street as public space to include the world of cafs,
department stores, markets, and even modes of transportation. For the most
part, historians of Latin America have left this task to the writers of crnicas
and other anecdotal accounts of barrio life. These are often concerned with
providing chronologies of the erection and destruction of particular build-
ings, rather than with analyzing the ways in which people used those streets
to construct the public life of the city. Other accounts focus on special events,
such as the annual carnival celebrations, when the behavioral norms of the
street are broken, if only for a few days. Treatments of the street that take on
a global scope have virtually ignored examples from modern Latin America.
A compendium of streets edited by Zeynep Celik et al. (1994) devotes just
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
1 of its 21 chapters to a discussion of a Latin American sitewhich turns out

to be an Incan street in Cuzco that was destroyed four centuries agowhile
a similar work by Allen B. Jacobs (1993) winds up using the Rio de Janeiro
botanical gardens as its lone example of a Latin American street. Even a re-
cent ethnography of urban life in Braslia nds itself documenting the death
of the street, arguing that this 1950s experiment in urban planning resulted
in the absence of traditional street corners and the consequent social activity
that would have supported a vibrant public space (Holston 1989: 1057).
The streets of Latin American cities were in fact very much alive at the
turn of the century and so should have attracted more notice from social
historians. Mexico City sidewalks, for example, were nearly impassable, so
crowded were they with peasants and aristocrats who were fascinated by a
variety of urban spectacles including electric signs, new fashions, and organ-
grinders. Hogging the sidewalk, yelling across the street, staring at passersby
these were all true to the Mexican idea of freedom: to do what you want
until someone stops you. Everyones privacy was constantly probed and in-
vaded. And public space, because it belonged to no one in particular, belonged
to the rst one with enough power to claim a street corner, the right of way,
or even a wall, which were almost all illegally painted and placarded with
notices and advertisements ( Johns 1997: 75). I have demonstrated elsewhere
that the inauguration of electric streetcar service was a spectacle that woke up
Montevideo in 1906 and unleashed a major public debate about the nature of
progress (Rosenthal 1995b).The trolley also served as a public space in its own
right, becoming an extension of the street and opening up the citys culture
in new ways, which included cabarets, new parks, beaches, and other amuse-
ments (Rosenthal 1998). The urban historiography of the region would bene-
t from further studies to reveal what eects other forms of transportation
had on the culture of the street, from the automobile to the bus and the sub-
way. A step in this direction has been taken by a recent exploration of Mexico
Citys postwar history from the perspective of the commuter and the traveler
(Garca Canclini et al. 1996). This intriguing study employs extensive photo-
graphic documentation and takes a cultural-studies approach to the theme of
public transport and the experience of traveling through the imaginary city,
focusing on the streets, plazas, markets, skyscrapers, and the people who in-
habit these locales. By showing photographs of street life from the 1940s,
1950s, and 1990s to groups of residents, the authors discover multiple cities
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
in the ensuing dialogue as well as in the symbolism of lms, religious celebra-

tions, political demonstrations, and other forms of popular culture related to
urban life.
Is the lack of scholarship on streets due to a gradual deadening of street
life since the 1930s? This seems doubtful. Performance artist Guillermo
Gmez-Pea (1998) describes a vibrant popular culture in the streets of con-
temporary Mexico City, and argues that this has in fact been spurred by mod-
ern urban problems such as high unemployment, record-setting pollution,
inconceivable trac, and rapid population growth. He surveys a wide range
of street art from guerrilla theater companies and public installations to freak
shows on buses and carpas, which take place under circus tents and satirize
death, politicians, poverty, and priests. Gmez-Peas account rivals anything
I have seen on street culture in Latin America during earlier periods, suggest-
ing that there is actually more competition today for audiences of spectacles.
More research needs to be done to reveal the changing nature of the street
in Latin American cities across the twentieth century so that it can serve as
a point of comparison to a better-developed body of work on street life in
Melbourne, Paris, London, New York, and other cities. Can the oft-described
dandy of Mexico City or Buenos Aires be compared to the much-loved a-
neur of modern European cities (Wilson 1995b; Featherstone 1998)? Is the
dragon, the young man who hung out on street corners, trying to chat up
young women through their windows, a unique presence on the Latin Ameri-
can urban landscape? Do the policies of dictatorial regimes in dierent parts
of the world have similar eects on street life? (See, for example, the history
of planning and street violence in Fascist Italy by David Atkinson [1998].)
Are notions of private and public space in the urban milieu dened by local
culture, or does the structure of cities tend to universalize these concepts as
the century progresses? Clearly, many important questions about urban life
in the twentieth century need to be addressed at the level of the street.
Spectacle, Fear, and Gendered Spaces

Fear and wonder often seem to exist side by side in modern Latin American
cities. The very same streets that serve as staging grounds for various types of
spectacles and celebrations in one era can become sites of danger and terror
in another. By examining the ways in which the state, both national and local,
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
manipulates urban public space, we can gain insight on the construction of

collective memory and ideal cities that exist in the terrain of imagination. We
can also begin to approach the problem of segmented urban spaces.
Mexico City has become the premier site of scholarship on spectacle
and urban popular culture in Latin America. This work has centered on the
period of the Porriato, just prior to the Revolution of 1910, when positiv-
ist technocrats and nation builders sought to remake the capital city into a
European-style metropolis. Barbara Tenenbaum (1994) provides an interest-
ing description of the public history denoted by monuments that were erected
by the national government along the Paseo de la Reforma after 1876. These
included not only statues to individual heroes of various epochs but also a
more abstract monument commemorating the nations independence. She
notes that the Paseo de la Reforma, although one of the most important ave-
nues in the city, remained apart from the life of the rest of the city until 1900.
It was designed as an ocial version of Mexican history, which would cul-
minate in the legitimation of the dictatorship of President Daz, symbolically
linking him to Aztec rulers, while at the same time it would legitimate the
dominance of Mexico City as the capital of the nation. Nevertheless, the con-
glomeration of artistic styles, engineering problems, and ultimately social dis-
order undercut the enterprise and, in her assessment, As shown so vividly
on the street, the Porrian state had gotten lost (Tenenbaum 1994: 147).
The contestatory nature of public space is evident in a dierent type of
spectacle that occurred in Mexico City during much of the nineteenth cen-
tury.William Beezley (1987: 94) describes the popular ritual of burning Judas
egies during Easter Week, an activity that began in large downtown plazas
before the Daz government conned it to working-class suburbs in the 1890s.
Beezley argues that these festivals operated as social inversions similar to
carnival celebrations and that they eventually presented an alternative to Por-
rian social order. In one instance in 1881, a crowd carrying several egies
stopped a train.
The crowd strapped an egy, dressed as a peasant with a straw som-

brero and cotton manta drawers and shirt, across the headlight of the
engine. After much shouting and revelry, they ignited the fuse. The engi-
neer blared the whistle as the campesino Judas exploded. Here the be-
trayer symbolized the peasantry confronted, then was overwhelmed by
rapacious technology, symbolized by the railroad. The Judas represented
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
the people destroyed by the locomotive and it oered a graphic projec-

tion of the sentiments also expressed in the corrido that the railroad had
destroyed the poor mans corn. (Beezley 1987: 104)
Beezley notes that the Judas burnings, carnival celebrations, and the activi-
ties surrounding the Day of the Dead were all religious events carried out in
public places without ocial supervision or approval. He also chronicles a
short-lived attempt by the Jockey Club, comprised of the citys elite, to cap-
ture the Judas spectacle as a controlled event in downtown during the 1890s,
bereft of its symbolism of role reversal. The club decided to replace it with a
bicycle parade. Beezleys (1987: 124) assessment points again to the egalitar-
ian nature of public space: The city councils gratuitous concern about the
re danger caused by Judas burnings revealed apprehension about the dan-
gerous individualism of festivals. A parade expressed order, discipline, and
regimented behavior that displayed society divided into ranks and responding
immediately to authority. Judas burnings and other traditional estas stressed
temporary freedom of action, dress, speech, and assembly in a kind of theater
of civil rights and social equality.
Perhaps the most thorough analysis of Mexican popular culture and
urban space is Mauricio Tenorios (1996) investigation of the celebration com-
memorating the 100th anniversary of the countrys war of independence. In
this case, the Mexican state constructed a mass spectacle to foster a sense
of progress, history, and nationalism. According to Tenorio (1996: 77, 90),
Mexico City witnessed thirty days of inaugurations of monuments, ocial
buildings, institutions and streets; days lled with countless speeches, parties,
cocktails, receptions and dancing estas. . . . By September of 1910 Mexico
City had acquired visible and lasting symbols of nation, progress and moder-
nity, notions that the Centenario had actualised and intermingled. . . . By
traversing these streets and avenues, the parades occupied public space that
was at the same time an urban utopia and a conceptualisation of the nations
history. The festivities also included a grand historic parade through the
major thoroughfares of the city, which Tenorio (1996: 77) describes as the
entire history of the nation on foot, episode after episode; this was a march
of representations of the stages of Mexicos patriotic history as understood
by the ocial ideologues of the Porriato. This parade culminates with
Daz ringing the independence bell in the Zcalo, but it is also countered
by popular street demonstrations. Tenorio builds on the work of Tenenbaum
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
by mapping out dierent tours of the ideal city, analyzing the planning of
worker barrios; Haussmann-inspired urban renewal projects; public health
measures; and the building of a penitentiary, opera house, and post oce. He
also ventures outside the city of progress to discuss housing for undesirables,
those who did not t into the modernist utopia of the positivists. Tenorio uses
the centennial celebration to oer a snapshot of the city that pays particu-
lar attention to urban space and to the construction of history. Like Garca
Canclini, he reveals Mexico City as multiple cities layered upon each other,
described as dierent experiences by dierent sectors of the populace, thus
echoing the literary construction of Italo Calvinos Invisible Cities.
Although none of these three works draws explicitly on Temma Kaplans
(1992) brilliant analysis of popular culture, street parades, and demonstra-
tions in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Barcelona, there are
clear parallels between their projects. This is particularly evident in the ways
in which religious parades and rituals are turned into, or themselves engen-
der, symbolic working-class protests; in the deep analysis to which the au-
thors subject various artifacts of popular culture; and in the nearly continual
clash between urban disorder and order in public spaces.
Explorations of spectacle and public space in the latter half of the twenti-
eth century in Latin America have often been concerned with the element of
fear. As we have seen in the case of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos
Aires, two urban spectacles may operate in opposition to each other under
conditions of terrorthe project of the military to reconstruct national his-
tory resisted by the mothers attempt to rescue national memory. Many ob-
servers have described the dirty wars in the countries of the Southern Cone
as long-term attempts to destroy politics, eliminate public space, and erase
memory. Above all the Dirty War is a war of silencing. There is no ocially
declared war. No prisoners. No torture. No disappearing. Just silence con-
suming terrors talk for the main part, scaring people into saying nothing in
public that could be construed as critical of the Armed Forces. This is more
than the production of silence. It is silencing, which is quite dierent. For
now the not said acquires signicance and a specic confusion befogs the
spaces of the public sphere, which is where the action is (Taussig 1992: 26
27). Sociologist Carina Perelli, who lived through the military dictatorship
in Uruguay, has also written about the insidious ways in which active pub-
lic space disappeared from the streets of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Caf
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
life died; commuters became unwilling to talk to each other on buses; and
all political discussion retreated to the home, resulting in the privatization
of human beings (Perelli 1994: 4344; also quoted in Weschler 1990: 89).
The culture of fear transformed the ingrained urban tendency not to meddle
in other peoples aairs into an almost obsessive detachment from the un-
savory aspects of reality. Fear induced a state of learned helplessness, a passive
submission to and acceptance of the seemingly senseless and unending ter-
ror (Perelli 1994: 45). The existence and location of downtown torture cen-
ters also became public knowledge in the main cities of the Southern Cone,
thus grounding the culture of fear for a wide section of the urban population
(Weschler 1990: 128).
But the terror of the dictatorships did not completely eliminate public
space, as we have seen with the protests of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. It
can even be argued that their methods created new opportunities for exercis-
ing public space, albeit in limited forms. One example of this is the emergence
of street theater in Pinochets Chile. With the goal of waking up a metropo-
lis that had become accustomed to death, the Contemporary Urban Theater
Company illegally produced short skits on the streets of Santiago beginning
seven years after the military coup that toppled the constitutional govern-
ment of Salvador Allende.
In a country with scarce funding for the arts, and even less for artists of
the opposition, the street was seen as an available space that would allow
them to avoid the overhead expenses of salon theater. Roberto Pablo,
one of the rst to revive street theater after the 1973 coup, remembers
that amidst severe economic troubles, they began questioning why they
should not have the right to public spaces. . . . Furthermore, in the street
it is possible for performers to engage the audience in a manner not pos-
sible in a theater, where the lines between actors and viewers are clearer.
(Hautzinger 1987: 11)
Chile also witnessed other forms of urban spectacle during the dark years of
Pinochets rule. Mary Louise Pratt (1996: 15859) traces a variety of activities
initiated by opposition groups composed mainly of women:
These groups likewise intercepted and redeployed the dynamics of the

secret and the seen and unseen. The international community became
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
familiar with images of demonstrations of women parading photos of the

disappeared, who were thus made to reappear. . . . In a mock elec-
tion held in Santiago, for instance, ballot boxes mysteriously appeared
on street corners, and people were invited to cast votes. In the neighbor-
hoods, the apparently spontaneous banging of pots from inside houses at
a certain hour of the day unnervingly recycled a strategy used by middle-
class women against the Allende government. Out of nowhere, teams
came to paint murals on buildings and then quickly photographed them,
knowing they would be gone in hours or days. . . . As the foregoing ex-
amples suggest, the rearrangement and resymbolization of public space
were among its principal physical and psychic weapons.
This reference to appropriating a strategy previously used by opposing

groups suggests that the exercise of public space might be collectively
learned, in the same way in which traditions of resistance to colonial au-
thority were constructed in twentieth-century Africa. In a strategy remi-
niscent of Algerian resistance to the French three decades earlier, Chileans
staged whistling protests of well-known political songs as they walked
through La Plaza de Armas and an adjacent pedestrian mall in Santiago, lead-
ing the police on fruitless and embarrassing searches for the perpetrators
(Scarpaci and Frazier 1993). In much the same way, protesters surreptitiously
put up antigovernment grati on walls in order to alter the landscape of ter-
ror (Scarpaci and Frazier 1993: 2). These types of staged resistance served to
inform a terrorized public that opposition to the dictatorship existed; showed
that the military was not omnipotent; and allowed strangers from all walks of
life to participate collectively in rebellious acts, however briey.
Given the creative energy expended on devising ways to use public space
to eectively protest military rule in the Southern Cone, one might suppose
that with the return of civilian government and the disappearance of overt
forms of political repression, the era of street spectacles would come to a
close. Yet quite the opposite has happened. In Buenos Aires, the Mothers of
the Disappeared have continued their demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo
every Thursday. Furthermore, Silvio Waisbord (1996) has shown that open
air meetings of political parties and traditional forms of street organizing in
the Argentine capital have persisted from roots in the late nineteenth century
and in spite of competition from television-driven campaigning. In particular,
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
he points to the importance of the plaza in early Peronist politics merged with
the large demonstrations organized against military rule in the early 1980s.
Waisbord (1996: 282) notes that in this latter period, streets were corridors
where partisan parades and demonstrations incessantly took place and that
once the generals had given up power, the Peronist party no longer monopo-
lized the symbolic control of urban spaces. It had to invent new ways to use
public space, and one of these was the caravana or motorcade, a traveling rally
of candidates, trucks, and buses lasting as long as 10 hours, the equivalent of
an urban whistle-stop tour. First used in 1987, the caravanas became a land-
mark of successful Peronist campaigns.
Perhaps by now it is clear to the reader that the daily practice of urban life
erases hard lines between public and private space. Elizabeth Wilson (1995a:
149) has argued that a central paradox of European history was that Just as
nineteenth-century society was trying to deepen and secure the boundary
between public and private, industrial capitalism was erasing it. The over-
worked distinction between house and street, particularly in histories of Latin
American women, really functions as two points on a spectrum of behavior,
much as public and private connote degrees of accessibility to space. Still, it
is worth considering the notion that urban space is often gendered, and as
such it has particular political dimensions.7 In the current historiography, this
bears a special relation to two themes we have been discussing in this section,
fear and spectacle.
Gender lines in urban space are more visible in the nineteenth century
and the opening years of the twentieth century, yet these were often confused
by class distinctions. Luis Martnez-Fernndez (1995) notes that due to fears
of interracial sex, upper-class women were only allowed to walk the streets
of Havana on religious holidays and were conned to carriages when they
went shopping or ordered food from cafs, from which they were banned. On
the other hand, lower-class women and women of color were permitted to
sell goods on the streets of the Cuban capital. Sueann Caulelds (1993: 159)
interesting and nuanced analysis of a weekly police journal in 1920s Rio re-
veals that, at least in the case of a police ocer reprimanded for detaining an
elite woman at the beach whose clothing may have appeared indecent to him,
gender hierarchies did not transcend class hierarchies. Forms of sexual
control were also evident in this period in Buenos Aires, as public health au-
thorities and police restricted the movements of prostitutes and forced them
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
to reside in registered bordellos (Guy 1991). In this case, the fears at play
were related to the morality of European immigrants, who were thought to
threaten the unsteady concept of Argentine national identity, and the emer-
gence of women as factory workers who challenged traditional notions of
work and gender. The surveillance and enclosure of prostitutes served many
purposes: dening the parameters of power among urban ocials, protect-
ing public health, ensuring public order, separating sexual commerce from
leisure activities, reinforcing appropriate patriarchal and class values, and de-
termining the gender structure of urban labor (Guy 1991: 38). These fears
parallel those in British cities of the same period: Women in the nineteenth-
century city were the bearers of much of the anxiety surrounding city life in
general. The female body represented the private in public space. . . . Women
were their bodies; and whereas a feminine body was seemly and appropriate
in a rural landscapesince women were closer to Nature anywaya woman
in the public spaces of the city was a threat and a danger. She should not be
there; she polluted public space (Wilson 1994: 1011). This theme of con-
tamination, particularly in reference to police defending the family against
dance halls and prostitutes, was echoed in Rio (Cauleld 1993: 158).
A signicant shortcoming of the historiography of the Latin American
city is its almost complete silence on how men use public space and in what
ways that has changed over time. Studies of masculinity in the region have so
far tended to center on labor and the workplace, and the notion of the male
city in the region has not been properly theorized or mapped. One is struck,
for example, by photographic evidence of a large all-male crowd on a down-
town Buenos Aires street awaiting news about the outcome of the rst World
Cup of soccer in 1930, contrasted with the absence of men (in their tradi-
tional role of protesters) from public places in the same city during the dirty
war of the 1970s, a vacuum seized upon by Las Madres in their attempt to
reconstruct public space under the military dictatorship. There is even the
case of soccer crowds (presumably male) being manipulated by supporters
of the junta to counter the demonstrations of the Mothers during the 1978
World Cup hosted by Argentina (Mason 1995: 73). In this sense, gendered
public spectacles were competing for political audiences. Jean Franco (1992b:
107) points to a subtext occurring simultaneously in the nations clandestine
torture chambers where male victims were deliberately feminized while
the masculinity of torturers was armed by their absolute power to inict
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
pain. We have already noted that many of these places of terror were visible
elements of the cities of the Southern Cone, sometimes displacing the usual
function of soccer stadia for a new type of spectacle. The integration of gen-
dered spaces such as these into the broader urban history of Latin America,
alongside more common places of everyday life such as streetcars, cafs, and
plazas, which have their own gender dimensions, is a project still waiting to
be tackled.8
A recent attempt to make sense of the interrelationship of ideology, gen-
der, and urban space in a historical context has been made by literary critic
David William Foster (1998: 102, 114) who argues that women have a greater
public presence in Buenos Aires than in most other Latin American cities,
and that the rise of Las Madres can be symbolically connected to Eva Perns
invasion of public spaces during the 1940s. He also points to ways in which
gender analysis helps make clear how public space in Latin America is dier-
ent from ostensibly similar zones in the United States. Foster (1998: 1056)
is concerned with
how gender varies in the interpretation of the ideological meaning of

dierent spaces. For example, is it true that churches are essentially
womens spaces (with men who frequent them concomitantly feminized
to one degree or another)? Most of them have a prominent public posi-
tioning in Latin America (on main streets, on main plazas, near other o-
cial buildings), and many have their interiors open to view from the street
or plaza. In fact, some churches may be continuous with the street or
plaza in ways that would be repugnant to sober American Protestant-
ism. Is it true that gay men view concentrations of other men in public
places . . . as opportunities for cruising new contacts? By the same token,
straight men view the same concentrations as theatrical opportunities to
engage in a conrmatory display of their masculinity.
This formulation suggests that urban historians might draw on the work of
sociologists, particularly those from the symbolic interactionist school, in
order to make clear this theatrical dimension of sexuality in the Latin Ameri-
can citys public spaces. Fosters book also makes apparent that much more
research needs to be done on the history of homosexuality in the city. While
political scientist Ian Lumsden (1996: 3336) oers an account of homosexu-
ality in Cuba that is largely contemporary in its focus, he does briey describe
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
the gay cinemas, bars, clubs, and cruising zones of prerevolutionary Havana
and places them in specic neighborhoods, thus helping to broaden the de-
nition of gender lines in the city all the way back to the nineteenth century.
This mapping of hidden aspects of the city could widen the appreciation of
public space as a key factor in urban history.
One traditionally masculine urban space that has been analyzed for the
rst half of the twentieth century is the army barracks in Brazil, which Peter
Beattie (1996: 442) characterizes as the male equivalent of the bordello be-
cause it isolated unmarried men from domestic spaces and thus bore the
stigma of depravity. He follows the classic parallel dichotomies of house/
street and private/public in arguing that the government carried out a cam-
paign to alter the perception of the military in order to make it attractive to
a better class of enlistees. Drawing on the work of Joan Scott and Roberto da
Matta, Beattie (1996: 440) lays out a geography of honor in which Bra-
zilians commonly associate the house with honor, family, order, marriage,
safety, and private power, while the street connotes disgrace, chaos, illegiti-
macy, danger, vagrancy and vulnerability to the vagaries of impersonal pub-
lic authority. Beatties hard distinction between house and street reects the
fact that he is most interested in representations of the military and discourse
about social mores during this transitional period. But the trend in other re-
cent scholarship on the relationship between gender and space has gone away
from these clear dichotomies and into somewhat grayer areas.
Fear, spectacle, and gender intersect in a 1934 protest of sex education by
young males in a Mexico City movie theater, yet as in the case of the Monte-
video streetcars, the line between private ownership and public space be-
comes blurred. Anne Rubenstein (1998) has uncovered a tale of anxiety about
modernity and conict over competing notions of morality in which three
high school boys shouted speeches to an audience for a Hollywood lm be-
fore being dragged o to jail by the police. She argues that the movie palace,
a relatively new social space in Mexico City, was both a public site of (mostly
foreign) spectacles and a rare dark and private place in the urban landscape
where young couples could break prevailing sexual codes and gangs of young
men could smoke marijuana and talk dirty in the balcony. It was precisely
this ambiguity that made it a logical site for a protest over a new state policy
to provide sex education to high school girls. Building on this socially ac-
ceptable use of movie theatres as an arena for male display, the protestors
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
at the Cine Montecarlo acted as powerful young men. They shouted, they
shoved, they ran, they deed the police, they insisted that strangers listen to
them as they talked about sexual matters; they transgressed the rules of be-
havior in a public space, but in ways that marked them as male (Rubenstein:
318). The power of the blurring of distinctions between private and public in
a gendered spectacle is also revealed in Jean Francos analysis of the Mothers
of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires. In a discussion of the relationship be-
tween women writers and social movements, Franco (1992a: 67) observes that
the Mothers used private life symbolically to act in the public sphere: They
wore white kerchiefs and silently carried blown-up snapshots of their chil-
dren, often taken at family gatherings. In this way, private lifeas an image
frozen in timewas represented publicly as a contrast to the present, high-
lighting the destruction of that very family life that the military publicly pro-
fessed to protect.The women turned the city into a theater in which the entire
population was obliged to become spectators, making public both their chil-
drens disappearance and the disappearance of the public sphere itself. This
use of photography to bridge the line between public and private as well as to
invoke memory in a politically charged space reminds us that daily life in the
city has a strong visual component that is often linked to the world of sym-
bols. In this sense, what you get in public space may be far more than what
you see.
New Avenues in the Imaginary City:

Space and Memory
In the opening section of this essay, I noted that the Latin American city
was rst investigated by writers of ction rather than by historians. As a
consequence, imaginary cities hang over the new urban history of the region
like mythic beings. Borgess labyrinthine Buenos Aires; Benedettis exasper-
atingly middle-class Montevideo; and Galvos bustling, impoverished So
Paulo tempt and challenge the historian who seeks to reclaim these cities
from the clouds of nostalgia and amnesia into which they have drifted. These
shadow cities beckon scholars to enter the realm of the imaginary in order to
unearth the layers of meaning behind the narratives of protest and daily life
that they reconstruct from newspapers and judicial archives. In this sense,
Walter Benjamins conception of the city as a palimpsest seems especially
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
relevant to Latin American history (Achugar 1997). Benjamin saw the city
as a vast archaeological dig, lled with sediments of myth and memory that
exerted inuence on its contemporary residents (Gilloch 1996). His writings
on European cities of the interwar period might well serve as a guide for
understanding such Latin American overwritings as the recent erection of a
shopping mall on the site of a notorious penitentiary in Montevideo, which
uses the old facade as a marketing device.9
The exercise of public space on an imaginary and symbolic plane has
been recognized by both intellectuals and participants in spectacles as a
means of dening and challenging urban order. The creators of a competi-
tive entry in the 1987 samba festival in Rio de Janeiro constructed a futuristic
city called Tupinicpolis, which satirized contemporary high-tech culture,
postindustrial progress, Hollywood, and consumerism, all the while main-
taining a self-consciousness of being a spectacle and adopting an aesthetic
that upended First World perceptions of Latin America (Olalquiaga 1992:
8286). A scene of executive Tupi Indians skating around glittery cityscapes
and consuming city life to the utmost was juxtaposed with Tupilurb, a pile
of debris (abandoned cars, refrigerators, televisions) painted in gold, accom-
panied by a song that proclaimed even trash is a luxury as long as its real
(Olalquiaga 1992: 84). The samba school drew on the memory of the very
public So Paulo modern art movement of the 1920s and its doctrine of artis-
tic cannibalism in order to challenge the rules of global economics and more
local forms of social order.
Another entry point to the symbolic order of Latin American cities is
through the portal of photography. The visual documentation of urban cul-
ture has been largely absent from studies of public space in the region, yet
there are many sources of this type of data. Municipal archives sometimes
contain photos of registered prostitutes, wanted criminals, or activities in
markets and spectacles on the street (Imagenes 1997). Photographers them-
selves frequented plazas and other public spaces to practice their craft, while
their images did much to construct perceptions of the ordered city. The re-
cent interest of museum curators in the work of urban photographers such
as Tina Modotti, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Helen Levitt on Mexico City,
Martn Chambi on Cuzco, Marc Ferrez on Rio, and Walker Evans on Havana,
as well as others, has resulted in the publication of many catalogs and books
that provide a newly accessible visual database for historians intent on analyz-
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
ing street life in Latin America across the twentieth century (Kismaric 1997;
Ferrez 1990; Naggar and Ritchin 1993; Watriss and Zamora 1998; Levitt 1997;
Flores Olea 1994; Mora 1989).10
The key to making this large visual archive useful is for urban historians
to undergo some retraining in order to learn how to read these photographs
as they would other types of documents (Clarke 1997: 2739). So far, few
Latin Americanists have ventured along this avenue. Robert Levines (1987)
early edited collection of short essays on photography as history focuses on
observations of racial and class markers and concentrates largely on provid-
ing brief historical contexts for a wide range of photos. A notable exception
to this perspective is the volumes essay by Germn Rodrigo Meja (1987),
which surveys Colombian photography dating back to the mid-nineteenth
century. Meja calls for an interdisciplinary approach to reading the symbols
contained in photos, mixing history with anthropology and psychoanalysis.
He also adopts a comprehensive view that takes into account the intention of
the photographer and the use of the photograph as a commodity. This allows
him to go beyond the construction of a historical context to discuss values,
ideology, and the existent mentality and patterns of social behavior (Meja
1987: 55). Levines (1989) next book on photographs follows Mejas direc-
tion and proceeds to analyze the images in terms of their composition and the
circumstances in which they were taken and exhibited. Levine (1989: 5859)
notes that photographers helped to claim legitimacy for incumbent regimes
publicly committed to progress and that some were employed by political
parties to caricature their opposition. But the leap into the symbolic sphere
is made by Cuban novelist and semiotician Edmundo Desnoes (1985: 390)
in an essay that analyzes fashion and food advertisements to reveal a dis-
course of travel and its intersection with Latin American history and colo-
nialism. Along similar lines, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (1994)
provide an international historical examination of street photographers that
is creative, beautiful, and deep. Their book covers well-known artists such
as Eugne Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andr Kertsz, Lewis Hine, Garry
Winogrand, and Robert Frank. Their analysis of the work of Manuel Alva-
rez Bravo establishes him as both a peasant of the camera who did not set
himself above his subjects and as an artist who was inuenced by surreal-
ism but whose photographs of street life could work as talismans that touch
todays viewer with the healing power of the peasant world (Westerbeck and
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
Meyerowitz 1994: 19697). In their view, Alvarez Bravo has tried to make
photographs that can be used like scraps of tablets recovered from time im-
memorial, pictograms in which are inscribed the secrets of a primordial past
(Westerbeck and Meyerowitz 1994: 196).
To some degree, Latin Americanists will need to venture into works
on other regions for ideas on how to creatively read photographic evidence.
Catherine Preston and I (1996) drew on the work of U.S. historian Peter
Hales (1984) in order to construct an analysis of the photographic codes em-
bedded in postcards of early-twentieth-century Montevideo. Our model in-
volves categorizing the postcards according to their content and perspective
and then uncovering elements of the ideal city they seek to represent: order,
progress, identity, and equality. In this way, we were able to show how public
spaces such as beaches and plazas were framed by photographers as empty
landscapes and then sold to tourists and to prospective European immi-
grants as representations of an ideal capital city. Paulo Bergers (1986) exten-
sive catalog of early postcards in Rio de Janeiro suggests that Montevideo was
not unique among Latin American cities in projecting itself as an ideal city
through this medium.
The exploration of the visual side of public space opens up the discussion
of the hidden life of cities, especially around the themes of spectacle, mem-
ory, and desire. In a recent book about the psychological aspects of U.S. and
European architecture, M. Christine Boyer (1994: 299300) notes that
Bordering on the aura of the supernatural, the occult and fetishistic, the
photographic image captivated the popular taste of the nineteenth cen-
tury. . . . some symbolic meaning and pleasure that lingered after a photo-
graphic image had been absorbed, or some eruptive detail that uninten-
tionally reach out to touch the spectator, prick the imagination, and give
rise to involuntary memories. . . .
Just think how littered with visual signs the public domain of a nine-
teenth-century city actually was. The walls of buildings were plastered
with advertisements . . . while advertising carts and sandwich boards cir-
culated throughout the streets. Thus city streets where the indierent
pedestrian came face to face with advertising images represented the do-
main where desire was displayed and recorded. . . . Temporarily absorbed
by the remarkable sights that the public space of the nineteenth-century
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
city extrudedeven knowing these images to be unrealthese pedes-

trians moved on to experience the desire instilled by other visions and
enticements, enveloped yet entertained by this world of visual fantasy
and theatrical articiality.
It is this symbolic dimension of public space that still awaits investigation by

social scientists and historians of Latin America. Ultimately, I think it will
be most revealing of the regions contested urban history in the twentieth
century.
Notes
Anton Rosenthal is associate professor of history at the University of Kansas, where he
also teaches urban sociology. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Latin Ameri-
can Studies, Americas: The Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Cultural History, Radical
History Review, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. He is currently writing a
book about the streetcar and public space in Montevideo, Uruguay. He would like to thank
Kathy Sloan for her ideas on gender and space in Latin America, Elizabeth Kuznesof for
bibliographic assistance, and the three anonymous reviewers for SSH for their comments.
1 For starting purposes, we can dene public space as any place that features great ac-
cessibility, leaving aside the question of public or private ownership, and in which
people carry out the functional and ritual activities that bind a community, whether
in the normal routines of daily life or in periodic festivities (Carr et al. 1992: xi). So
for example, in the early-twentieth-century city, a railroad station, streetcar station,
or caf, though privately owned, would function as a public space so long as a broad
section of the populace was free to associate there. We can also include in this deni-
tion those areas of the public domain such as plazas, parks, streets, beaches, universi-
ties, museums, and municipal buildings, so long as the masses have unfettered access
to these, an assumption based on a fairly democratic political structure, which has not
always existed in Latin American cities during this century. For general discussions
of accessibility and public space and the uid dynamics of public and private space,
see Loand 1973: 1923 and Oldenburg 1989; on the dangers of the disappearance
of traditional public space, see the introduction to Sorkin 1992; on the symbolic and
civic aspects of public space, see Lees 1994; and for a brief, insightful discussion of
the social vs. architectural basis of urban public space, see Torre 1996: 249.
2 The crnica is a blend of oral history, personal memory, news story, and poetic license
that has remained popular in Latin America since the nineteenth century.
3 The conventillo was the local equivalent of a tenement in the Ro de la Plata region. It
was often quite large, housing dozens or even hundreds of residents in tiny, lightless
rooms that faced an interior courtyard that was the site of cooking and washing. The
Tseng 2000.5.19 15:43
conventillos were often disparaged by the press for their poor sanitation, and govern-
ment inspectors saw them as breeding grounds for a host of respiratory diseases.
4 A somewhat dierent interpretation of the 1904 revolt, published a year after
Meades, does take note of the spatial impact of the modernization program but tends
to place more emphasis on race and violations of traditional sexual codes and a pre-
existing culture of street ghting as factors leading to rebellion (Needell 1987b).
5 There were exceptions to the Spanish colonial grid plan. Morse (1974: 24) notes that
So Paulo was laid out in a triangular pattern with haphazard streets.
6 Da Matta (1978) oers a short discussion of the house/street dichotomy in symbolic
terms, which he later revises and expands into an essay (1991). He sees these as moral
universes that are in conict with each other and are organized along lines of class,
race, age, and gender. In opposition to the hierarchical family structure of the home,
church, and workplace, the street is a dierent sort of place where these hierarchies
are suspended: poor may rob rich, women may irt with men, the young may deviate
from their parents rules and people of color may disobey the whites. In short, the
street is the location of inversions (including that great ritual of inversions, Carnival)
(Hess and da Matta 1995: 14).
7 Diering sociological perspectives on the ways in which women have been able to
function in public space in the United States and Europe can be found in Gardner
1989 and Wilson 1995b.
8 For possible models from Great Britain (and for an interesting discussion of gendered
zones in the nineteenth-century city) see Darke 1996.
9 The recent lm Tupamaros features a segment in which two former Tupamaro pris-
oners visit the mall and give a tour of the place as if it were still a penitentiary, pointing
out the avenue of their escape.
10 A short illustrated account of the life and works of Marc Ferrez, with references to
other Brazilian urban photographers, can be found in Vasquez 1995: 2641.
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Spectacle, Fear, and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in

Anton Benjamin Rosenthal

Published by Cambridge University Press

For additional information about this article

The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as

Social Science History 24:1 (spring 2000).

34 Social Science History

If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 35

36 Social Science History

of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and other internationally

In Latin America as a whole, this genre has had a beguiling life. As an

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 37

the study of their immediate environments. In Rio de Janeiro, Santiago

With these diverse cultural and intellectual inuences at play, it is di-

38 Social Science History

Three Tales of Public Space

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 39

bility still dominant over a reliance for order on a bureaucratic government

40 Social Science History

began with 14 mothers, 14 mothers unprotected in that enormous plaza who

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 41

The Geography of Protest

42 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 43

The idealized middle-class home of housekeeping manuals, magazines,

44 Social Science History

The urban renewal linked to sanitation reforms have beneted the

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 45

Other researchers have explored the connections between disease, social

46 Social Science History

Plaza and Street

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 47

beggars sleeping, crazy people talking to themselves, and children playing on

48 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 49

and smugglers. It constitutes a spontaneous urban theater among trees and

50 Social Science History

1 of its 21 chapters to a discussion of a Latin American sitewhich turns out

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 51

in the ensuing dialogue as well as in the symbolism of lms, religious celebra-

Spectacle, Fear, and Gendered Spaces

52 Social Science History

manipulates urban public space, we can gain insight on the construction of

The crowd strapped an egy, dressed as a peasant with a straw som-

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 53

the people destroyed by the locomotive and it oered a graphic projec-

54 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 55

These groups likewise intercepted and redeployed the dynamics of the

56 Social Science History

familiar with images of demonstrations of women parading photos of the

This reference to appropriating a strategy previously used by opposing

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 57

58 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 59

how gender varies in the interpretation of the ideological meaning of

60 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 61

New Avenues in the Imaginary City:

62 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 63

64 Social Science History

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest 65