Imágenes de los inmigrantes en la Ciudad de México, 1753-1910

The six essays collected in this book seek, literally, to put our feet on the ground. It is an exercise in ubiquity. It is well known that hundreds of immigrants of diverse national and traditional cultural origins converged in the country’s capital over the course of two centuries. They accepted it as their daily living space. This city, in which they were strangers, was their habitat. However, little is known about the ways in which they adapted to the environment in which they arrived: who were they, where did they live, what were their places of adoption? The secret of Imagenes de los inmigrantes en la ciudad de Mexico, 1753-1910 is to show the traces of the foreigners in the urban cartography, to recreate their steps on the maps of the capital. The authors invite us to approach the documents that attest to the statistical needs of governments urging to know – and monitor – population movements, as well as the historically outlined criteria of census takers, scholars and scientists from the second half of the eighteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth. Six essays, elaborated by a group of specialists, which translate the qualities and numbers of almost a dozen census and demographic censuses into exact locations – in the maps that have made up the urban atlas – of foreign groups settled in the capital of the country, thus revealing patterns, concurrences and neighbourhood behaviours hitherto unnoticed, which are changing at the same pace as the urban face.