Metropolitan and Urban Imaginaries in Mexico: Coastal Currents, Colours and Material Heritage in Veracruz, With Comments on Mexico City

• In Event: Material Textures and Latin American Urban Imaginaries

Abstract

This paper has two reference points. First, as background, Latin American usages of the concept of urban imaginaries are considered, with the Mexican debates around Néstor García Canclini’s urban anthropology of Mexico City foregrounded. Contrasting with this important and valuable body of work, my own approach works with a very different conception of imaginary. My previous research has a notion of metropolitan imaginaries inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of imaginary institution at the heart of it. For a second reference, I invoke maritime perspectives relevant to the case study of heritage and civilizations, including Fernand Braudel, Lincoln Paine, and David Abulafia. With this paradigm of oceanography, I suggest that marine and oceanic borders are relevant to studying material heritage in coastal cities in the Gulf of Mexico. With both reference points, this paper analyses the condensation of regional heritage in coastal Veracruz as an urban imaginary quite distinct from the metropolitan imaginary instituting Mexico City. Veracruz is a portal city and coastal state with its own maritime rhythms. The city’s architectural styles and accumulated heritage are open to the historic currents of intercivilizational encounters with the Caribbean, Africa, Spain, and Mexico and its living indigenous cultures. This paper explores Veracruz’s material legacies in the context of its currents of cultural, economic, and political traffic and the heritage that condenses all of this. Veracruz’s material heritage, its neo-colonial architecture and public spaces emerge from the creative urban imaginary of a coastal edge city. Unlike Mexico City, Veracruz’s heritage is highly regionalised yet echoes the multiple interconnections of its past and present. A comparison of the material heritage of both cities highlights distinct global and regional orientations and alternative processes of urban creation emerging from metropolitan and urban imaginaries.

Author

• Jeremy C Smith, Federation University Australia