When reading the assigned excerpt from The Lettered City, I was intrigued by the notion of ‘order’ that characterized the urban planning of Spanish (and Portuguese) colonialism in South America. I think this was primarily due to that notion being entirely new to me; the idea that the planning of cities is not only highly variable (that being ‘organic’ or ‘orderly’), but that the different logics of urban planning can be rooted within colonial and capitalist goals. While this may have been far obvious to others, my ignorance of that idea certainly made for a pleasant surprise during my reading. I was especially drawn to the more conceptual explanations of what it means to plan something out in an ‘orderly’ manner. More specifically, how this goal implies maintaining a norm as time passes, thereby ignoring external influences of inevitable change. In the context of Spanish colonialism, this of course implicates the countless indigenous groups that would become marginalized by a city’s (Lima, for example) rigid order. It is morbidly interesting to me how truly methodical colonial tactics are; no strategy employed by colonizers was not rooted in the goal of destroying the ‘other’. Another interesting point from The Lettered City is the importance of letters, words, and writing in how colonial, and later structural, inequalities were enforced. It took centuries for the non-elite to gain access to reading and writing, which of course allowed for the elite class to easily consolidate power and subjugate the indigenous population as well as the African population brought over for slave labor. I really enjoyed the way this text emphasized the importance of writing as a part of colonialism rather than the more prominent militaristic and economic tactics, though they all are of course intertwined with one another. On another note, I was taken aback by how large the African population was in Lima. I supposed I never considered that Africans were used for labor all throughout the Americas, even in the far-reaching western part of South America. To finish up, I found the text to be an interesting but difficult read; it was full of jargon. Regarding the assigned sections of The Lima Reader, I found the excerpts of colonial perspectives very interesting. I say ‘colonial perspectives’ because while there weren’t any indigenous perspectives of the Spanish and indigenous interaction, there were certainly some third-person descriptions of events. It was particularly intriguing to read the one story about a conversation between an Inkan and a Spaniard that was written under a pseudonym, which highlighted a method by which a form of Spanish propaganda was disseminated to further alienate and oppress the indigenous population.
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thoughts on The Lettered City and The Lima Reader
4 replies on “thoughts on The Lettered City and The Lima Reader”
Hey Julian! Great post. I also wrote about the concept of order through colonization in my blog post. I also found the text a bit difficult to read, but I like the connection you make to Indigenous isolation through this “order” which I would consider chaos.
“On another note, I was taken aback by how large the African population was in Lima. I supposed I never considered that Africans were used for labor all throughout the Americas, even in the far-reaching western part of South America.” In fact, the enslaved labor brought from Africa was a response to the population debacle of the indigenous communities both in the Caribbean and in the areas of the viceroyalties, where economic activities could not be stopped. Some anthropologists call it “the third root” of Latin America, which breaks with the binary of European and American miscegenation.
I really liked it when you said that “no strategy employed by colonizers was not rooted in the goal of destroying the ‘other.’” This grabbed my attention right away and I thought that you put it very well. I think the concept of the other is very important and will be a big part of this course because since the Spanish arrived in Latin America they have othered the indigenous peoples. Othering is a very universal colonial tool to draw clear lines in the sand of who belongs and who does not which determines quality of life. This has often been a justification for abuses.
Great reflection, and great to hear your morbid interest heheh.
From your post, the point of how militant, economic, and colonial tactics are all intertwined is something I’m curious to develop. In which ways do there’s three facets interact, or which logics (pointing to order vs organic) really fuel conquest?
I’m finding that there is a specific understanding of what constitutes order that was leveraged over this time… with indigenous marginalization and enslavement of African to infrastructural construct and provide the labor to serve such structures order might more directly mean entitled supremacy.