John Tutino and Martin V. Melosi have edited a collection that compares six urban centers during the twentieth century, with a focus on globalization, urbanization, and inequality as interrelated issues. The book helps readers see precisely how the urban histories of the Americas diverge and converge. The cities selected are appropriate examples of this: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro in Latin America and Houston, Los Angeles, and Montreal in the United States and Canada.
The authors are all academically trained historians, all from North American universities. The book would have benefited from a wider range of disciplines. Urban studies specialists, architects, and economists have all commented on urbanization, globalization, and growing inequality. For example, an American social scientist, Janice Perlman, is widely quoted in the book—particularly the chapter on Rio de Janeiro—for her landmark study on favela life and organization in that city. The case could be made for inclusion of other cities, such as Bogotá, an urban center with 8 million people and the capital of the second largest nation in South America, a city that has been carefully studied by historian Germán R. Mejía and others.
The focus of Tutino and Melosi's text is “modern,” that is, the book studies contemporary history, mostly from the late nineteenth century to the present. This makes sense, given the breadth of historic time represented by the cities in question. Mexico City dates back to pre-Columbian times, Houston is a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century US city. Thus, the modern gaze allows the authors to draw relevant comparisons concerning immigration, patterns of growth, industrial development, infrastructure development, inequality, and racism.
The text, overall, is dry, and the visual material is not very lively. The smattering of graphs and poorly designed maps are neither artfully developed nor inspiring (exception, page 31). The book should have included photographs, and the text suffers from a significant lack of “cultural” input. The Houston segment by Melosi and Joseph A. Pratt breaks this pattern. That chapter is the strongest in the book because the authors take a wider approach and explain the uniqueness of Houston's culture and food scene, the importance of the medical community, and the region's leadership in energy technology, extraction, and marketing. This chapter, unlike the other somewhat one-dimensional contributions, feels vibrant and energetic. Though the themes presented in all chapters (housing for Rio, racial segregation/discrimination for Los Angeles, politics/Perón for Buenos Aires) are certainly significant, each chapter would have benefitted from solid, compelling examples of cultural significance and uniqueness of the city under study.
The book is too long and in search of strong editing, especially Melosi's tedious 22-page epilogue, which essentially restates the themes of the preceding chapters. Yet, the editors and the other authors are to be commended for careful planning, beginning with an organizational workshop held at Georgetown University 11 years ago; that meeting helped generate a book that holds together thematically and structurally. This text is unique: it is not a haphazardly arranged collection of conference papers, which is sometimes the way edited collections emerge. Nevertheless, Tutino and Melosi could have produced a better book through closer editorial direction in the form of standardization of word length per chapter; this would have sharpened the book and the book's message.
This text will find readership among specialists in the field of Latin American urban history and advanced graduate students. It is unlikely that this book will cross over or achieve the sustained relevance of such works as James R. Scobie's beautifully written 1974 study, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb—a book that animated a couple of generations of students and scholars. Tutino and Melosi have made a significant contribution through their dedication and their decade-long focus on the cities of the Americas, a topic with endless room for research, writing, comparison, interdisciplinary focus, and imagination.
