CITY PORTRAITS IN LATIN AMERICAN MANNERS: URBAN SPACE, TRADITION, MODERNITY AND PROGRESS

Portraits of Customs are intimately linked to the transition of Latin America to modernity. In them, the meaning of nation, tradition, civilization, barbarism, and modernity is constantly negotiated. Writers of portraits of customs had different approaches to the previously mentioned concepts; however, the majority shared a fundamental element to which the studies of costumbrismo have paid little attention: the literary protagonism of the city. This topic is relevant because in order to speak of modernity in Latin America, it is necessary to dialogue with the city, the favored space where the modernization of the young republics was carried out. This study analyzes, through the image of the city presented in a selection of portraits of customs written by Juan Manuel Cagigal, Ramon Rojas y Canas, Daniel Mendoza, Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, Jose Maria Vergara y Vergara, and Nicanor Bolet Peraza, the ambivalence in the perception of the urban space as the standardbearer of modernization, its evolution, and the changes that concepts like civilization, barbarism, and progress experienced throughout the 19th century.