Presences and absences in the historical production of Mexican cities. Notes for an urban historiography of Nayarit

Abstract

The scientific discipline of urban history studies the construction and transformation of cities, topics that bring together urban studies from several disciplines, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Far from elaborating narrative syntheses of the history of cities, this field has produced specialized, monothematic, descriptive works on urban development. Given this lack of one, clearly defined, object of study, the city has been examined as an inert space through which history is seen to transpire from a scenographic perspective. Studies of this kind are well-known in Mexico, where a formula that aligns the nation’s cities with key periods of national political history continues to be produced. However, in the specific case of Nayarit, recent historiographic production has revealed this urban history in a more immediate way and from the local perspective. This article aims, precisely, to identify and characterize the publications that have expounded part of the urban historiography of Nayarit in the last three decades. Through an extensive bibliographic search and review, numerous studies published in books, articles, and theses have been systematized and categorized according to their object of study, level of analysis, and disciplinary field, in order to appreciate distinct approaches and disciplinary interpretations in the study of cities in Nayarit and, on that basis, elaborate an analysis of the production of this urban history.