William R. Fowler's book provides an important contribution to the growing body of literature on the complexities of the Spanish colonial experience. His text is impressive in the amount of material it covers, which ranges from a review of the foundational theories and frameworks framing historical archaeology to an extensive historiography on the cultural significance of Spanish urbanism during the Reconquista. Fowler's primary goal is to establish the enduring importance urbanism played in the colonization of the Americas, from the first acta de fundación on the island of Hispaniola to the subsequent emergence of the globalized “capitalist project” that immersed every vecino. Archaeological research at Ciudad Vieja highlights the importance of local context in the longue durée of Spanish city building—a practice that not only reimagined the physical landscape of the Americas but was also used as a tool to “pacify” and “civilize” the Indigenous populations. A great deal of attention is also directed to the “epochal agents” that set the stage for America's “grand design.”
The book is organized in three parts. In Part I, Fowler draws on the “haunts” that continue to inform our contemporary realities. Introduced by Charles Orser, the four haunts of modernity are colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and racialization. These intersect with one another and are bound by epochal substructures or “vectors of inequality,” such as gender, lineage, production, and tribute. The discussion of these four haunts of modernity is accompanied by an overview of the four overarching frameworks that have come to shape current archaeology: structural history, social network theory, world-systems analysis, and dialectical thinking. Each of the haunts and theoretical frameworks is used to trace, temporally and spatially, how the actions and practices of those who founded Ciudad Vieja in present-day El Salvador fell in line within a specific historical structure of Spanish city building. Temporally, the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial towns of the Americas physically and symbolically linked their conquistadors with the Christian crusaders committed to taking back Al-Andalus, the Muslim-held territories of the Iberian Peninsula. The repeated act of establishing towns at the point of arrival was a form of placemaking that defined both the Reconquista and the terraforming of the Americas. Spatially, the urbanization of the colonial countryside resembled the medieval Christianization of Castile. Municipal governance provided town councils the opportunity to deal directly both with the Crown and colonial viceroyalties.
In Part II, Fowler provides the sociocultural background for the establishment of Ciudad Vieja and later San Salvador in El Salvador. Founded in 1525 and then abandoned in 1560, Ciudad Vieja included Spanish residents, a Mesoamerican population of yndios conquistadores from Mexico, and the local Pipil. Although Fowler's central objective is to offer a review of the archaeological work undertaken at Ciudad Vieja and in the surrounding areas, his secondary aim is to provide a comprehensive microhistory for the city and region that situates the principal actors and places within the long-term institutional practices of the Spanish colonial project. In stressing local microhistories, Fowler gives limited attention to the role Indigenous households and communities played in the development of Spanish colonial towns. Much of his attention is devoted to the individual actions of the principal European actors in the story of Spanish colonial urbanism.
Some of the most pressing critiques of Fowler's book apply to Part III. In a book about social urbanism set in a multicultural Central American town, readers learn little about the practices of urban planning that existed before the arrival of the Europeans or about the different ways Indigenous peoples shaped the colonial landscape. Low-density cities were already in existence before the arrival of the Spanish. They may not have had the orthogonal grids of Spanish cities, but they did have some of the most defining features of cities: social networks that allowed for unstructured encounters at multiple social, temporal, and spatial scales. The city was not a foreign concept to the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. What separated Spanish urban centers from the already existing precolonial cities was the ability to use towns to forcibly claim territories, subjugate populations, and connect these municipalities to global markets.
Instead, Part III focuses on the architectural features specific to Spanish colonial towns and the “major protagonists” who founded them, such as Pedro de Alvarado and Pedrarias Dávila, the two cruelest warmongerers of the sixteenth century. The landscape and its Indigenous peoples become decorative background: a mystical territory on which the marauding Spanish protagonists can navigate and implant their seeds of modernity. Fowler also describes cities as the primary agents responsible for the transformation of the Americas. Yet, even though the Spanish used cities to leverage their power, cities were only part of the story. As noted in the book, many towns were founded only to be abandoned. Many others failed. In eastern El Salvador, San Miguel de la Frontera met the same fate as Ciudad Vieja. It was founded, abandoned, and then reestablished in another location. In addition, the Indigenous peoples of eastern El Salvador were displaced, enslaved, and forced to labor and perish not in cities but on indigo plantations and cattle ranches located far from colonial urban centers. These two institutional practices influenced their respective physical and sociocultural landscapes more than cities ever did.
Both these issues are not difficult to resolve but would have required a more refined commitment to understanding the role marginalized characters, like Indigenous communities and women, played in the shaping of colonial urban centers. This was partly done in the “gender” section (a discussion that is woefully outdated) of Chapter 2, when Fowler describes the story of Isabel Costilla, a mestiza woman born in San Salvador in 1529 who lost her father's encomienda because she was a natural-born daughter with no legitimate claim to her father's land. We need more stories like Isabel Costilla's to better understand the complexities of the colonial experience in the Americas, inside and outside cities.
