What Frameworks Should We Use to Read the Spatial History of the Americas?

I believe we have, by now, a disciplinary consensus that our traditional Eurocentric canon of architectural history is insufficient (albeit fundamental), and that we are indeed making an effort to fill the gaps. The expansion of our knowledge base has been significant in the twenty-first century. The Berkeley school of vernacularism, for instance, has trained two generations of scholars devoted to the study of the totality of our built environment, even if their work is still very U.S.-centric. On the East Coast, MIT’s Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative has successfully pushed the Anglo scholarship in another direction, expanding its geographical scope. And yet such expansion efforts, whether vertical (high- to lowbrow) as at Berkeley or horizontal (geographical) as at MIT, have limited transformational powers because they do not tell us what to unlearn. The work of any historian involves crafting a narrative, and this means determining what should enter the narrative and what should not. The latter types of decisions are much more difficult than the former. Jorge Luis Borges evokes this dilemma in his short story “Funes el memorioso,” which suggests that a being whose memory holds on to every little detail is ultimately incapable of thinking. Reason (and emotion, for that matter) requires that we privilege some memories and relegate others to the subconscious. As we all know from recent curriculum debates, the discussion around architectural history surveys becomes heated whenever we consider pushing aside parts of our canonical knowledge to make space for new manifestations. As Swati Chattopadhyay proposes in Unlearning the City and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues in Potential History, there is plenty we need to unlearn.¹ In January 2022, as I worked on the second round of edits of this JSAH roundtable, I encountered many questions around unlearning as explored by a range of authors, including Chattopadhyay, Mabel Wilson, Peter Christensen, Ana María León, and Charles Davis.²

Unlearning is one of the most urgent tasks of our times. We should all ask ourselves what we need to unlearn, and my own answer gravitates toward the decolonial theories that emerged from Latin America in the past decades. Latin American intellectuals elaborated an extensive body of work that taught me the most about what I need to unlearn, and I want to briefly cite the most important works framing the argument that in turn drives this roundtable conversation.³ In the late 1950s, Edmundo O’Gorman demonstrated that the encounter with the Americas triggered European modernization, rather than the other way around. In the 1970s, Aníbal Quijano in Peru, Milton Santos in Brazil, and Pablo Gonzales Casanova in Mexico all examined different aspects of colonialism as the roots of underdevelopment and persistent inequality.⁴ By the turn of the millennium, the work of Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María Lugones, and Denise Ferreira da Silva helped me to break the epistemological barriers that defined any architecture not produced by European white males as peripheral, and enabled me to move my own scholarship in new directions.⁵ As an expert on twentieth-century architecture and urbanism in Latin America, I wrote extensively on the need to include that region in broader conversations, but now I realize that I spent two decades adjectivizing modernization in order to explain those Latin American manifestations. I wrote about modern architecture in Latin American as peripheral, or conservative, or insufficient. After reading Mignolo and Escobar, I realized that coloniality is inherent to any modernity, and that our modern national boundaries also represent colonial legacies that have erased the common past of all of the Americas (Figure 1).

Reflecting on that shared history, I argue that the rise of architecture as a unique discipline and the European conquest of the American continent are not just chronological coincidences; rather, they are interdependent variables of the same process of modernization.⁶ Traditional architectural scholarship has not yet entertained those parallel developments, treating the spatial occupation of the Americas as a consequence of the Renaissance and a by-product of European modernization. In 1992 Quijano synthesized the argument with the thesis that “it is not that the Americas had a significant role in the development of capitalism, there would be no capitalism if not for the occupation of the Americas.”⁷ I propose that the same applies to our discipline: it is not that the Americas had a significant role in the development of architecture as we know it, but instead that there would be no modern architecture if not for the European occupation of the Americas.

Students of architecture know that the process of design abstraction took form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is a disciplinary consensus that spatial abstraction is the main component of the modern process of architectural design, and it is no coincidence that the European occupation of the Americas happened at exactly the same time, as I have discussed at length in other publications.⁸ My work on documenting and analyzing favela structures has taught me that abstraction is indeed the main difference between what is designed and what is not.⁹

What decolonial theories have taught me most recently is that spatial abstraction is an accelerator—not only of improvement, as Alfonso Corona-Martínez has proposed, but also of modernity, and by extension of coloniality.¹⁰ My point here, learned from contemporary scholars who engage Indigenous knowledge in an effort to advance epistemic decolonization, is that the rise of spatial abstraction in the sixteenth century killed relational processes and non-Eurocentric knowledges that we urgently need to bring back to the table.¹¹ We need to develop American concepts to improve our understanding of the spatial history of our continent. We need to unlearn the hegemony of spatial abstraction to allow other knowledges to permeate the design process.

For this roundtable addressing the question of what frameworks we should use to read the spatial history of the Americas, I was inspired by the work of curators Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2016, Giunta and Pérez reorganized MALBA’s main collection—the best in Latin American modern art—under new categories in an exhibition titled Verboamérica. Following the lead of Joaquín Torres-García’s famous 1934 drawing América invertida, which reverses the map of South America, placing south at the top and north at the bottom, the exhibition reshuffled a collection previously arranged according to European concepts of impressionism, cubism, abstractionism, op art, and so on. Based on a detailed reading of Latin America’s history and geography, Giunta and Pérez proposed new categories, which included “In the Beginning”; “Maps, Geopolitics, and Power”; “Lettered City, Violent City, Imagined City”; “Work, Crowd, and Resistance”; “Bodies, Affects, and Emancipation”; and “Indigenous America, Black America.” The resulting displays found works by León Ferrari alongside those of Roberto Matta, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti alongside David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mathias Goeritz alongside Mira Schendel, and Wilfredo Lam alongside Claudia Andujar. The prior arrangement of works according to European trends invoked ideas that the works might or might not have even engaged. MALBA’s main collection returned to its Eurocentric organization after a few months, but the reshuffle generated enough synaptic stimulation and synergies to inspire decades of scholarship. The Latin American idea of verbos (from the Latin “word”) offers concepts that we can use to unlearn Eurocentrism.

In this roundtable we start to explore the development of concepts (verbos) that could enhance our understanding of the spatial history of the American continent. “Embodiment” (addressed by Arijit Sen), “Indigenous spatial agency” (Wanda Dalla Costa and Shawna Cunningham), “wounded landscapes” (Magdalena Novoa), “delinking” (Felipe Hernández), “militarization” (Juan Luis Burke), “labor exploitation” (María Gonzáles Pendáz), and “whiteness” (Bryan E. Norwood) represent seven verbos that we can use to anchor the history of our built environment on the living experiences of our continent. The unlearning that they encourage offers much to teach us all.

Immigrants travel light; they also carry their past with them corporeally, as values, inflections, practices, emotional responses, routine behaviors, memories of fleeting smells, soundscapes, and rhythms that animate their senses.¹ As they move across national boundaries, they remember, reconstrue, and reconstruct their world with this embodied knowledge.² In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton argues that multisensory bodily engagements produce incorporating practices that are also embodied because they entail a combination of cognitive memory and “habit-memory” and are influenced by internalized values, accepted maxims, and customs that are deeply emic and cultural in nature.³ This taken-for-granted logic of incorporating practice produced by kinesthetic, haptic, and sensory engagement with place is central to the way immigrants reproduce their world.⁴

Take the example of Hari Singh Everest (1916–2011), an emigrant from India who embarked on his journey to the United States in December 1954. In 1956, Everest drew two sketches, one to describe his childhood home in Lahore (in pre-Partition India, now in Pakistan) and another to depict his new home in the United States (Figures 2 and 3). The first image centered on a courtyard, drawn as a stage for multiple lived moments. A spinning wheel and a handmade stool in the top corner conjured up moments when family members gathered. At the bottom edge, Everest drew a workspace with a plough, ostensibly under repair. His sketch described an ancestral home not merely as a physical object consisting of walls and floors but as a theatrical stage filled with events performed in the courtyard. The second sketch, made three months later, also presented the courtyard as a social stage, but populated instead with people from Everest’s life in the United States. In these delicately executed drawings, architecture served as a mise-en-scène for lived moments and social interactions.

Sixteen years later, in 1972, in a letter to the editor of Sikh Sansar, Everest brought up an issue about a story he had written that the journal had accepted for publication. He tried to clarify that the city he described in that story was not the city of Rupar in Punjab, India, where the author had once lived. The editors had mistakenly assumed so because Everest’s description of places and locations seemed to resemble scenes from Rupar. Everest’s letter was intended to rectify that error and clarify that in reality he was describing Yuba City in California. He explained, “Obviously, I was carried away by my imagination. Yet, the reality was not left far behind,” as the landscape of the California town felt similar to his hometown in Punjab, and the buildings and social life in Yuba City replicated his experiences of familiar scenes in Rupar.⁵ Everest purposefully intended to use an ambiguous description to make a point about the equivalency of the two places.

In these instances, Everest was not merely remembering home, he was actively and imaginatively constructing place in an alien land. Karen Leonard sees Everest’s politics of place making as a “purposeful erasure” that carefully ignored the presence of white Americans and left out the racial conflict that he actually experienced in Yuba City.⁶ His narratives are akin to what Magdalena Novoa, in her study of “wounded landscapes” in this roundtable, describes as a “different way of knowing and writing” practiced by individuals and groups who have experienced exclusion to “repair their psychosocial and spatial wounds.”

Indeed, mid-twentieth-century Sikh immigrants commonly used embodied knowledge to reproduce place. As products of the long, destructive history of British colonialism, they found themselves doubly marginalized—both in newly independent India and in the United States. Like immigrants before him, Everest did not have the material and architectural presence on the U.S. landscape that white Americans had. During the first five decades of the twentieth century, many Sikh immigrants experienced their world through mobility rather than stability, compelled to adapt to temporary spaces because they did not own property.⁷ They endowed places with values and meanings by using past embodied knowledge to claim ownership of place. Everest’s evocative mental imagery in his Sikh Sansar article laid claim to an otherwise adversarial landscape in the New World as the home space of a diasporic community, demonstrating a form of resistance against what Bryan Norwood refers to in this roundtable as the hidden “spatiality of whiteness,” which claims full ownership of land and property rights.

In his introduction to the roundtable, Fernando Lara critiques an epistemological strategy of abstraction that architectural scholars and historians have used to discern the built environment. This strategy imparts value to the world around us, rendering many Indigenous, Black, and immigrant landscapes irrelevant (and invisible) as spaces unworthy of analysis. Yet Everest’s story points toward an oppositional and resistant practice of abstraction, in which it is the immigrant who abstracts, reappropriates, and reimagines California’s racialized and hostile terrain as his homeland.

Using embodiment as a framework to consider place and the history of place requires a careful examination of how humans sense time and space.⁸ On the one hand, Everest’s description of Yuba City demonstrates how his sense of place is organized by memories of topography—a landscape produced over a longue durée of environmental time. On the other hand, his comparison of buildings in Rupar with those in Yuba City refers to a memory of place that was built over the course of what Michael Herzfeld calls social time.⁹ Within this context Everest remembers familiar moments, ephemeral daily routines, and protean human interactions.¹⁰ It is precisely this vast epistemic scope—from the instantaneous to the historical, from the experience of the body politic to that of the human body—that confounds the way we understand embodiment and place.

Many architectural historians prefer to study monuments, the oeuvres of professional architects, or tangible landscapes as objects of architectural historiography.¹¹ Immigrants are not unfamiliar with that world, but they learn to survive and circumvent it by creating alternate worlds that are invisible, unfathomable, and imperceptible to outsiders. In order to explore the evanescent world of immigrants, we must turn our focus toward the everyday routine behaviors and body rhythms (or “tempos,” a term used by Pierre Bourdieu) ingrained in and internalized by people such as Everest, who may then deploy these practices to re-create a familiar sense of place in alien (and alienating) settings.¹² Everest’s world making urges us to expand our methodological focus from an analysis of the material and the visible to a study of somatic experiences—such as proprioception, smell, and sound—that enable immigrants to construct worlds that are transient and often invisible to outsiders.¹³ Such ephemeral places cannot be captured through traditional techniques of architectural documentation.¹⁴ In addition to gathering oral histories and engaging in ethnographic and observational methods, the historian needs to read archival information “against the grain,” searching for ways to creatively reconstruct the lived world of immigrants from available documents.¹⁵ There are ethical implications to rendering visible that which has been obscure. Could such research open up immigrant worlds to actions of discipline and punishment by the state and its agents of surveillance and injustice? Embodied place making is inherently political in nature, and therefore such research also has the potential to empower and encourage local resistance against structural forms of injustice.¹⁶ When we acknowledge the importance of embodiment in the production of place, we cease to see architecture as a stable system of material assemblage and instead begin to experience it as lived and transient event spaces that unfold in a world organized by networks of relationships and past knowing, networks that are reproduced in symbolic, experiential, affective, and sensory ways.¹⁷ This realization has much in common with the “Indigenous approach” that Wanda Dalla Costa and Shawna Cunningham describe in their essay in this roundtable as a relational worldview of “being and doing within a living landscape.” Focusing on embodiment and architecture can help us to better understand the rich worlds of immigrants and marginalized groups in North America.

Within North American Indigenous cultures, there exists an iconic pedagogical figure recognizable to the people through oral traditions and referred to, collectively, as the trickster. In the passage above Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg scholar, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson provides an onto-epistemological framework for Nishnaabeg ways of doing based on the iconic trickster motif. In this context, one can view tribal tricksters as epistemological practitioners, demonstrating a relational way of knowing, being, and doing in an interconnected universe. Envisioning land as a cultural being and situating self within principles such as cultural humility sets the stage for an epistemic shift in the field of architecture.

In an Indigenous worldview, learning to live in harmony in an interconnected ecosystem is an ongoing journey unfolding on micro- and macroscopic levels more profound than we can ever imagine. Below, we discuss three key concepts derived from Indigenous epistemology that are applicable to an emergent field of architectural design practice: land as living being, chaos as possibility, and land as pedagogy.

Within Indigenous paradigms, the universe and all things within it are interconnected living entities, whose collective well-being is dependent on the principles of ethical relationality, defined by Cree scholar, Dwayne Donald as “an ecological understanding of organic connectivity that becomes readily apparent to human beings when we honor the sacred ecology that supports all life and living.”² This relational honoring is manifested through cyclical acts of renewal and reciprocity.³ Indigenous people disseminate ways of knowing, being, and doing through sacred stories, ceremony, song, prayer, and traditional practices. As Pueblo scholar Gregory Cajete explains: “The Native American paradigm comes to life as the author [storyteller] weaves through ecology, relational networks of plants, animals, the land, and the cosmos. It is a renewal ceremony of Native American knowledge, a storytelling of the discoveries, of regular patterns manifesting themselves in flux.”⁴

Ethical relationality requires that the designer become familiar with meanings embedded in the storied landscape. While this is a lifetime endeavor, the designer may attain accelerated understanding through being in place with the people of that place, taking part in acts of renewal, when and if invited, and practicing acts of reciprocity. This relational practice entails a continual decentering of the self in service of the collective and enables new representations of a reimagined landscape to take form, as “a metaphoric map of place that is humanistic, sacred, feminine, in motion, creative, nurturing and the source of all their kinship.”⁵

From an Indigenous perspective, chaos is embraced as a necessary, transformative, and cyclical creative process that empowers us to imagine and reimagine our place in an interconnected universe.⁶ According to Cajete, “Chaos and its offspring, creativity, are the generative forces of the universe”; chaos theory is reflected in the iconic figure of the trickster, “whose antics remind us of the essential role of disorder in the creation of order.”⁷ In the context of architectural design, chaos is the blank canvas, offering opportunities for cocreation. Indeed, “chaos theory describes the way nature makes new forms and structures out of the potential of the great void. It also represents the unpredictability and relative randomness of the creative process.”⁸ With chaos understood as both necessary and inspirational to the creative process, the architect is free to surrender to the unfamiliar and to resist previously normalized conventional consultative processes.

Indigenous methodologies are critical to the transformation of architectural practices. Knowledge-gathering processes guided by community-informed relational practices often intersect with cultural protocols and observances, and together these can evoke a storied landscape of the people.⁹ For example, Cree-Saulteaux scholar Margaret Kovach suggests that “highly structured interviews are not congruent with Indigenous knowledge systems, while open-ended conversations, sharing circles, and storytelling are flexible enough to accommodate principles of oral traditions, allowing participants greater control and ownership over what they wish to share.¹⁰ Indigenous methodologies invite fluidity and reciprocity, creating safe spaces where the relational nature of tribal worldviews can emerge ethically and organically.

Land is envisioned through and infused by the story of the people. Land is story, and story is land. As Chippewa scholar Kimberly Blaeser contends, “In cultures where oral tradition involves the social and sacred kinship relationships among human and all other beings, the ‘spoken’ inevitably extends beyond mere language, and exists entwined with the activities of being.”¹¹ In land-based story pedagogy, Blaeser envisions a cyclical relational practice of renewal and reciprocity through “Returning. Remembering. Retelling.” As she explains, “Somehow through the enactment of connection, the immersion in the cyclical reality of experience and being, we outstrip our individual essence, are infused with a knowing power or arrive back on sacred ground… . Journey has always informed Native life.”¹²

Trickster stories often involve land-based journeys, demonstrating and disseminating a relational way of being and doing within a living ‘storied’ landscape, where relationships with all living entities are engaged, and ultimately renewed, through acts of reciprocity. From the trickster, we learn how to “be” and “do” in a culturally specific world where, as Simpson suggests, “relationality gives birth to meaning.”¹³

Indigenous stories can be complex, and they do not always follow conventional categorical boundaries. Instead, they represent a holistic pedagogical package, including “religious teachings, metaphysical links, cultural insights, history, linguistic structures, literary and aesthetic form, and Indigenous ‘truths.’”¹⁴ Viewing architecture with the same holistic lens requires that practitioners integrate all facets of an Indigenous research paradigm (epistemology, methodology, axiology, and ontology) to arrive at a complete story.

Despite centuries of ancestral building traditions, the theory of Indigenous design is still in its infancy. Colonized methodologies continue to dominate the field, and concepts like ethical relationality remain underexamined. To counter standard practice, we ask: What does it mean to rethink architecture alongside acts of reciprocity and renewal? If disorder will bring order, how do we prepare practitioners to embrace and welcome unknowing? Finally, with story and land intimately connected, and land as the foundation for inspiration for architecture, how do we encourage the cycle of continuous enlightenment, associated humility, and process of relational discovery to deepen understanding?

One theory currently being resurrected by scholars examining notions of plurality in architecture is cultural sustainability theory, which recognizes that project sites and landscapes are highly symbolic and culturally specific. This theory “encompasses not just buildings, but objects in, on and around buildings as well as associated meanings, values and behaviors.”¹⁵ Project sites and adjacent lands often possess cosmological, spiritual, and historical references, and thus become identity markers for groups, societies, and nations. According to this theory, the intent is to honor and uphold the original ideological, social, and behavioral meanings of these places (Figures 4 and 5).

Incorporating Indigenous worldviews within the field of architecture is a starting place for moving toward a pedagogical and epistemic shift. The notion of a tribal trickster offers a relational land-story pedagogy, where practitioners reimagine the landscape as a relational being. This is a journey that will test practitioners as they navigate novel practices such as cultural humility and cocreation, promising significant gains including increased creativity, improved cultural understanding, inclusive outcomes, and ultimately more meaningful and contextual architectural solutions.

While the fields of cultural heritage and historic preservation often celebrate shared accomplishments and promote positive images of the past, the issues these disciplines address become far more complex when the past is marked by tragedy, exploitation, war, displacement, racism, erasure, and death. In the literature, terms such as “difficult heritage” and “dark heritage” are used almost exclusively to refer to sites that are “grounded in difficult past experiences or events and are represented by landscapes, artifacts, memories and histories whose meanings are often highly contested.”¹ In this essay, rather than focusing on specific difficult histories and particular heritage sites, I want to problematize the notion of darkness in heritage by highlighting the dark side of heritage in the context of the Americas. That is, I want to examine how historic preservation practices in this context have advanced regressive goals, including social exclusion, colonial erasure, male domination, and ethnic marginalization. To shed light on this darker side of heritage, I propose to use the metaphor of “wounded landscapes” to identify layers of historical trauma within landscapes, and to demonstrate how both state interventions and dominant social, cultural, and political practices have caused harm to places as well as their inhabitants. Wounded landscapes show how people and places continue to suffer through exclusionary planning and preservation practices rooted in whiteness, where white privilege operates as a hidden frame.²

By considering the dark side of heritage and historic landscapes as wounded, we can understand heritage as a cultural and social process marked by complex temporalities and spatialities that challenge Western approaches to framing the past and valuing and using it in the present. The layers of trauma embedded in the landscapes of so many colonial and postcolonial contexts are manifested in collective and intergenerational unresolved grief but also in the ability of individuals and groups to help repair their psychosocial and spatial wounds.

Since the 1990s, research on historic preservation efforts in the Americas has consistently shown that they tend to support policies of exclusion, white supremacy, and the rule of top-down expertise.³ Heritage experts in the Americas often implement preservation doctrine and rules that ignore both the social processes and the people related to historic sites if these do not provide a positive version of colonial history or if they represent dissonant cultural relations.⁴ These regulations derive from values and meanings that can be traced to a formative moment for the discipline in early modern European aristocratic culture as well as Enlightenment rationality and its aesthetic values. This way of framing the past and its uses in the present attempts to organize social relations and identities around issues of nation, class, culture, and ethnicity, as well as, more recently, around the market.

Similarly, pluriversal planning scholarship argues that the several Eurocentric and U.S.-based models of urban development that have extended globally to cities since the nineteenth century are characterized by an implicit desire for ordering space, as well as by a fear of the “other” that excludes, dismisses, and diminishes the messy embodiment of everyday practices.⁵ Despite the many changes in discourse and methods, and the increasing call over the past decade for community and inclusion in preservation and planning across the Americas, from the nineteenth century to the present day, policy processes have repeatedly defended and legitimated exclusionary practices.

These practices have played a critical role in the obliteration and erasure of the diverse voices, bodies, and histories that have inhabited the Americas, and have led to the creation of urban spaces shaped by experiences and memories of marginalization and trauma. As Elizabeth Aguilera, a Chilean heritage activist, has noted, although heritage narratives often speak of a glorious past, the reality is that historic landscapes that ordinary or marginalized people find important are often neglected or left to ruin. This reflects the “wound” that results from the structural violence often overlooked or ignored by urban “experts” and authorities, a wound that is continual and incremental in its impact on spaces, affects, and bodies (Figure 6).

A number of psychoanalytic theories suggest that the first experience of violence is not the only source of trauma; on the contrary, the internal revival of a traumatic memory, especially when exacerbated by contextual limitations on recognizing and making visible the violent experience, extends trauma over time. As Fernando Lara argues in the introduction to this roundtable, our Eurocentric knowledge production perpetuates this mechanism. The silence, negation, and concealment around trauma allow no space for the individual or groups to resignify, repair, and mourn. Similarly, as geographer Karen Till argues, wounded places have been harmed not by a singular “outside event” but rather by particular histories of physical destruction, displacement, and individual and social trauma through complex temporalities.⁶ Therefore, the “wound” is constantly unfolding: it is never singular or inevitable, nor is it inflicted from an outside source. The concept of wounded landscapes shows how heritage is reified by structures of power that assign authority to bureaucratic bodies of experts and agencies that in turn define and manage historic spaces as if they were depopulated.

Wounded heritage landscapes, therefore, represent multiple and overlapping histories. They do not exist in isolation from each other; instead, they form part of a wider structure of ongoing coloniality that endures not only through planning, preservation, and the politics of memory, with its ongoing attempt to erase bodies, landscapes, and memories, but also in the silences that frame human and nonhuman experiences and their capacity to repair.⁷ This colonial violence is not an unchallenged practice that translates simplistically to planning and preservation, but rather remains as a legacy that permeates people’s daily lives, extending intergenerational experiences of trauma and ensuring that what seems over and done instead continues to linger.

However, participants in grassroots initiatives are now asserting their rights to have their voices heard and to assume active roles in defining their heritage landscapes. Examples of their successes are evident in the recent toppling of colonial and racist monuments all over the Americas. But many marginalized groups are still struggling to preserve landscapes, memories, and histories that have been concealed from official frames or deemed unimportant for decades. These groups are often linked to industrial heritage, Indigenous landscapes, local neighborhoods threatened by real estate developments, or sites experiencing dictatorial repression, and many frame their opposing discourses as based in citizens’ rights to participate in making decisions about heritage and defining its meanings.

Social and cultural practices not only create landscapes but also inform the ways we organize, build, preserve, and imagine our surroundings.⁸ Excluded residents and Indigenous people are part of these landscapes, even when they are not allowed to be physically present. Their histories, bodies, affects, memories, practices, and spaces are enmeshed in the dominant spatial arrangements, and we must recognize this to identify a different way of knowing and writing our social and spatial world. Wounded heritage landscapes show how complex temporal and spatial dynamics signal the intimate relationships that both individuals and groups have with places, and therefore they offer these individuals and groups possibilities for care and healing. These landscapes, as material environments constructed out of struggles, as metaphorical and imaginative settings, and as lived and perceived worlds, constitute triggers, motivating people to organize and invent new strategies to repair persistent psychosocial and spatial wounds (Figure 7).

Decolonizing the spatial history of the Americas is an obligatory endeavor. It is an effort that requires a different approach to history, in this case, a history that is concerned with the spaces we have built in order to inhabit the world. As such, the task entails—quite traditionally, I must concede—an exploration of building and dwelling, as well as thinking, although not precisely in the way that Martin Heidegger’s famous essay suggests.¹ Useful as Heidegger’s work might be, I do not intend to engage with it here. I only want to invoke a figure from Heidegger that is too difficult to resist: “the bridge.” Not only was there space in the Americas well before “the bridge” was built, but the Americas also offered a place for millions of people who were systematically eradicated by colonialism. The Americas are still home to those who survived annihilation and now live as minorities in their own land, as the long-term victims of colonialism. That is why I insist that our spatial history starts at the wrong place, and that a new framework is necessary for us to study, rewrite, and teach this history in a more equitable way.

Let me first clarify that I refer to architectural history, and that my focus lies on the terms in which architectural history is traditionally taught at most schools of architecture in the Americas, as well as in Europe and other continents. Indeed, this is the way it is still taught at the University of Cambridge, and how it is taught in the schools I have visited in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil. That is, architectural history pursues a linear history originating in Mesopotamia, through Egypt, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, to culminate in Germany with the advent of modernism, which then spreads around the world. Inevitably, in that history, the Americas first appear with Columbus in 1492, and their spatial constitution responds to European logics of administration, property, extraction, and commerce.

This narrative creates what has hitherto been an insurmountable structure: the pre-Columbian period (an ambivalent term often used to define a “prehistory,” with the inherent implication that history per se starts with the arrival of Columbus), followed by the colonial period, and, finally, the modern period. Within this structure, each period follows logically from the previous one and is always presented in dialogue with European processes. Consequently, modern architecture “arrives” from elsewhere, and that is why there has been a struggle over the past eighty years or so to articulate a coherent narrative about the terms in which we relate to modern architecture.

There have been numerous positions, but the “modern”—conceptually and stylistically—remains always at the center: we in the Americas appropriated and transformed modern architecture (in Central and South America); we generated it (in the United States, or we influenced the work of European artists who came to the Americas in search of raw material); we disrupted it; we diversified it. Even though there are now more sophisticated approaches to that architectural history, there is still no framework to “delink” the spatial history of the Americas from a universal history that presents our architectural production as inescapably derivative.

In order to overcome this historical impasse, I am working with the Decolonizing Architecture Collective at the University of Cambridge to propose an alternative framework for the study of architectural history in the Americas. We must first recognize that the idea of creating a new framework to “read” the history of the Americas can be traced back to the work of influential scholars in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including, among others, Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire, and Enrique Dussel. While all three of these authors spoke about our need to “liberate” ourselves from epistemological systems that prevent the emergence—as well as the recovery—of local knowledges, it was Fals Borda who called for a review of the content of academic programs at universities in Latin America. In his book Ciencia propia y colonialism intellectual (1970), Fals Borda argued that universities should stop uncritically implementing foreign educational models in order to meet international standards and position themselves in a global academic market: “This course of action means, first of all, putting an end to the often blind imitation of incongruous patterns and themes conceived elsewhere for different situations. It means reducing the servility and intellectual colonialism of those of us who live in developing countries … without falling into xenophobia.”² At the same time, he suggested, Latin Americans ought to instigate changes at universities in the North, to create “a dissent within current institutions of higher education” and to stimulate forms of international collaboration to dismantle epistemological hierarchies.³

Fascinated by the potency of these early decolonial discourses, I argue that we may draw inspiration from Fals Borda to initiate a revision of the terms in which we approach—study, write, and teach—the spatial history of the Americas. I propose that we review the point of departure, and the routes we follow, to engage with the arrival of Europeans and the impact of colonialism in the Americas along different lines.

Rather than Mesopotamia, Peru represents a fitting starting point for this new approach to our history. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate the contemporary existence of complex Peruvian settlements comparable in size, technology, and population to those in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. As a point of departure, pre-Columbian settlements would provide more familiar examples of space, architecture, and construction for students in the Americas, while also revealing forms of production and commerce that are different from those sanctioned by the European perspective. Moreover, inaugurating the study of architectural history with the study of ancient buildings in the Americas would debunk the conventional narrative, with its emphasis on the classical tradition, creating opportunities to rethink ‘the canon’ and the way we judge contemporary architectural production. Not only would this new departure point demonstrate that local advanced technologies existed in the Americas prior to contact with Europe, but it would also introduce students to unique urban configurations and ways of life that were much less destructive to the natural environment than those of the familiar European model.

In this new history, “the arrival” of the Europeans acquires different connotations, making the artificiality of the discovery narrative, and the violence of colonization, much more obvious. This approach to history unsettles the notion of the “discovery” as a harmonious encounter that led to the cultivation of the “Indian,” as a narrative that works to erase the brutality of colonization, which, among other things, converted the original inhabitants of the region into backward, “primitive” peoples in need of education. It also makes visible the destruction of fully functional systems of agricultural production—advanced agricultural science, in the case of the Incas and Aztecs—and the replacement of these sophisticated methods with extractive and environmentally destructive monocrop latifundia.

Writing the history of architecture “from the Americas” provides us with a new framework to “read” history as well as to write it. It enables us to offset the univocal linear narrative in which the Americas have been traditionally located at the bottom of the tree of architecture, presented as minor offshoots dwarfed by the mighty wellspring of classical architecture forming the trunk and supporting the luxuriant foliage above.⁴ Moreover, it compels significant reevaluation of concepts like “colonial architecture” and “colonial urbanism,” asking us in the process to rethink our assumptions about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cities as instruments for the advance of a capitalist global economy and, hence, as intrinsically modern.⁵ Such a framework obviates the sustained struggle to articulate a relationship with modern architecture and instead acknowledges the preexistence of ciencia propia (local technology) in the Western Hemisphere prior to the arrival of Europeans, thereby constructing a history that admits the simultaneous existence of multiple positions and knowledges. While these multiple positions and knowledges may produce different architectures, different forms of the city, and different kinds of citizens, this history introduces them all equally, as part of the same process.

The essays collected in this roundtable intersect around the notions of coexistence and simultaneity. Arijit Sen addresses mobility and nomadism in order to highlight different forms of living and appropriating space outside systems of (private) property associated with colonialism. Wanda Dalla Costa and Shawna Cunningham engage the vast complexity of Indigenous traditions in North America, revealing a range of knowledges and worldviews that offer instructive models as we seek to conceive new and less destructive modes of inhabiting the world. Magdalena Novoa and Juan Luis Burke challenge static notions of heritage, the city, and architecture, inviting us to reconceptualize the terms we use that relate to a singular history and its representative buildings. By revealing the importance of Indigenous and mestizo labor in the construction of modern architecture, María Gonzáles Pendás not only engages with colonial exclusions but also masterfully exposes how architectural historians have perpetuated these same exclusions in their traditional approach to spatial innovation in their study of the Americas.

The construction of a new framework requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Much has been written about American settlements before the arrival of the Europeans, but the work remains outside the discipline of architectural history. How can our field connect with archaeological and anthropological research while also expanding it? We need to develop the methodologies to carry out multi- and cross-disciplinary spatial analyses while retaining specific knowledges associated with architectural education and practice. It is imperative that we intersect historically with the vast body of decolonial work produced in the Americas since the 1960s.⁶ If a form of “dissent” already exists in universities in the global North—efforts to engage with theories of race, decolonial discourses, and subalternity provide good examples—the impact of more nonconformity needs to be felt at schools throughout the Americas, and greater collaboration is necessary to achieve such a goal. The construction of a new historical framework to read, write, and teach the spatial history of the Americas is a collective endeavor. It is also an urgent one.

One of the central tenets of this roundtable is that the supremacy of Western models in the architectural and urban history of the Americas is rooted in the European colonization of the continent. In this context, events such as the settlement of Santo Domingo in 1498, the founding of Mexico City-Tenochtitlan in 1521, and the establishment of Jamestown in 1610 all point to urbanism, architecture, and military design as disciplines that legitimated the founding of towns, agricultural centers, military fortresses, and other forms of settlements aimed at occupying stolen land (Figure 8).¹

A transformation of the frameworks that we use to write, teach, and interpret the history of architecture in the Americas is long overdue. A revised paradigm should incorporate the notion that our architectural history depends on the legitimation of settler colonialism, to educate our students regarding the “unsettling” aspect of decolonization. Attending to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument, we should avoid “easy paths to reconciliation”—meaning that, more than merely acknowledging that colonialism occurred, we need to take decisive actions to change the condition of the colonizer itself.²

The history of architecture and planning in the early modern period acquires critical importance in this context, given its imbrication with the colonization of the Americas, the emergence of modern racial hierarchies, the slave trade, and the development of modern capitalism. Further, we need to examine architecture and urban design’s historical alignment with military design in greater depth to better determine how military construction projects shaped the spatial history of the Americas. This relationship demonstrates how the advent of modernity in architecture and urban planning is intimately related to colonialism, where modern concepts of functionality and effectivity concretized themselves in the systematic deployment of urban settlements. The resulting colonial systems, based on the principles of an extractive economy resting on the backs of enslaved and racialized subjects, in many ways came to define how we understand the notion of modernity. As several decolonial scholars have asserted, without the colonization of the Americas, there simply would be no modernity.³

I have argued elsewhere that we cannot expect the extensive corpus of classical architecture and planning theory compiled during the Renaissance period—including the treatises of Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, et al.—to have been read and interpreted in the same way in the Americas as it was in Europe. Instead, in the Americas, this corpus should be viewed as a cogwheel in a larger colonial machinery. That body of theory, loaded with rhetorical and visual imagery, served to adapt European architectural vocabularies to works that would deploy and display the ideological agendas of the colonizers, whether political, military, or religious in nature.⁴ In the colonial Spanish Americas, the city was considered the site where colonial institutions acquired a physical presence, in both material and ideological terms, through the decorum of architectural classicism. As Richard Kagan affirms, the early modern Spaniards linked an Aristotelian concept to the city, presenting the city as the site of “civilized” life, or, as Spaniards of the era termed it, policía humana.⁵

Relatedly, urban form played a critical role in the effective deployment of colonial urban centers. Spanish castrametation models developed in the medieval European period and further tested during the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula were later adopted to exert territorial control in the Spanish Americas. Urban settlements in the Spanish colonial era sought to streamline the parceling and subdivision of land, and thus generated effective means of colonizing and controlling territories.⁶ The grid as an urban form existed in some pre-Hispanic cities, such as Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan, and Cholula, following astronomical-calendrical considerations in their orientations. European urban establishments, however, beginning with Mexico City and Lima in the Spanish Americas, followed by Montreal and New Orleans in New France, and culminating with the application of the Jeffersonian grid system, enabled urban orthogonality to become an expression of quantification, measurability, and social control (Figure 9).⁷

By divorcing architecture from the field of military design, with which it was closely intertwined during the early modern period, we have effectively whitewashed the complicit role of architecture in the colonization of the Americas.⁸ Builders advanced fortification design throughout the continent, and the experience of European engineers served as a critical tool in the occupation and settlement of the territory.⁹ For example, the colonial experience triggered swift technical advances in the Spanish engineering tradition and resulted in, as one scholar puts it, the “construction of the landscape” of the Americas.¹⁰ The French colonizers brought the experience of building the bastides, medieval models of compact, fortified, gridded towns, to the founding of new settlements along the St. Lawrence River. In fact, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), the famed French military engineer, played a central role as technical adviser to the French crown in its colonization enterprise in North America.¹¹

As Paul Virilio and others have suggested, the notion of “military space” has played a critical role in the development of urban environments and urban spatial logistics.¹² Fortifications, defensive walls, and the exacting precision of urban planning in the Americas anchored the European settlement of the continent, but the extent to which these practices then filtered into notions of state sovereignty, urban planning, and architectural practices also deserves further scrutiny. As Derek Denman asserts, “the telos of war” considered life in the ideal city as its ultimate outcome.¹³ From the colonial military fortifications in the Americas to the exacting grids of many of the continent’s cities to the Mexico–U.S. border wall and the militarization of police forces, the logic of military space design has been and will continue to be central to the politics of human and material flows across the continent. For these reasons, the logics of military design and its forms of resistance must constitute a key framework in the study of the architectural and urban history of the Americas.

In 1954, on a construction site in Mexico City, twenty-five men lined up atop a slender concrete structure in the shape of an inverted umbrella. Captured in a photograph, this widely published image validated concrete-shell technology as daring, experimental, and modern—representing the embodied yet efficient system that transformed landscapes throughout the Americas in the second half of the twentieth century (Figure 10).

One of the men stands out: head up, gaze ahead, hands on waist, proud, the only one to be shielded by sunglasses rather than a straw hat. And he is the only one whose name, expertise, and ideas scholars have recognized, at least until recently. Félix Candela—a white architect and an exile from fascist Spain—was also the employer of those standing by his side, as the co-owner of the construction company Cubiertas Ala. For some time, Candela has stood just as proud in our architectural narratives, which present him as the genius inventor of thin-concrete technology, as much a symbol of innovation, efficiency, abstraction, and miraculous modernization as the shells themselves. The identities of the other twenty-four men also in the photograph—peones charged with labor on-site, Amerindian, and likely migrants from rural Puebla—remain unknown. With anonymity comes neglect: not only have we overlooked the contributions of these workers in the invention of the shells, but we have also failed to acknowledge the kinds of dispossession that concrete and image technologies exerted on their bodies and minds, or to question whether “innovation” is a fitting lens through which to explain the modernity of the shells to begin with.

Such an eclipse of labor is of course not accidental but designed, not exceptional but normal across global histories of modern architecture—an occlusion central to the coloniality of power that we now know to identify as the darker underside of modernity. For with the shells and well beyond, value was extracted from the body of the worker to exalt the heroic, universal, modern subject of the architect. This form of bodily transvaluation was colonial in nature, and naturally racial. As Aníbal Quijano observes, “This racist distribution of labor in the interior of colonial/modern capitalism was maintained throughout the colonial period.”¹ The case of the shells is poignant, with a Spaniard in the Americas presiding over underpaid, unorganized, Indigenous workers; an architect who also claimed that the craft practices that sustained the shells led to social uplift and the redemption of humanity in the name of a new Hispanic universality. Here, the labor/racial matrix of power that had structured Spanish imperialism was relocated to postwar construction sites.² In turn, the camera shutter further excised “what is suppressed and made irrelevant,” in the words of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, that is, the identities and cosmologies of the workers, in order to both “neutralize” and “naturalize” imperial violence.³

My point here is not to insist on the ways in which building labor and construction sites are also sites of racial construction, or even on how architects have abused labor on-site as well as through imaginations of labor. In photography and in many other kinds of idealizations, stonemasons, bricklayers, and peones have been seen to fold neatly into ever more progressive and redemptive versions of modernization. As with Candela, such utopias of labor have often served to absolve architects of their exploitation of labor, and as activist collectives such as Who Builds Your Architecture? remind us, global and digital practices afford ever more extreme abstraction from such relations of production.⁴ The history in which beautiful architecture gives new form to old and ugly modes of colonial extraction, wherein the history of these shells is but one instance, marches on.

Rather, my point pertains to the way historians of architectural modernity are also complicit in this exploitation, that is, how their preoccupations have shaped the field on the neglect of labor history, its abuses, and its progression. In his contribution to the JSAH roundtable on race and architecture published in September 2021, Jesús Escobar points to labor as a “promising way forward” for a field where decolonization is so urgently at stake.⁵ While Escobar addresses historians of early modern architecture, the same argument applies to later periods. After all, imprints of labor are all over the place in the spaces of modernity. Welding seams and silicone sealings, concrete spans and glass sizes attest to the many kinds of bodily and material processes and extractions demanded in the building of modernity. The bureaucracies of nation-states and of capital economies track workers, their toil, and their salaries; even if only partially, and through a top-down lens of power. Most significant, modern media reveled in building labor. As in the photograph noted above, dramatic images of workers astride daring structures or shouldering buckets of cement are paradigmatic of cross-continental modernization. Yet workers’ identities and ideas, their experiences and beliefs, hardly register in the ways we think, teach, and write. While labor is overimagined in the spaces, archives, and media of modernity, workers remain glaringly underrepresented in its architectural histories.

This second eclipse of labor is not a mere translation of coloniality from the site to the page. Instead, another form of imperial obscurity is at work here, drawing less from Spanish techniques of colonial rule in the Americas than from Anglo-American ones. This erasure functions not only through bodily relations on the ground but also through the categories and images that, in qualifying modernity, negate the experiences of the nonwhite, nonmale, and oftentimes non-Protestant elite. As Azoulay contends, the camera lens enacted a powerful mode of this kind of epistemic erasure, and construction photographs have long captured the historian’s imagination. But these occlusions also took on theoretical concepts and historical categories aimed at “sublimating” not only race, as Irene Cheng has shown, but also building labor and workers into the modern figure of the architect.⁶ With the shells in particular, categories of efficiency, structural rationalism, abstraction, and, above all, innovation explained these structures and Candela as modern while minimizing the colonial relations of labor that made them possible. Workers and their perspectives were, in turn, twice removed.

To be sure, historians of architectural modernity ought to better write workers and labor into history, but the task calls for acts of historiographical unimagination as well. That is, we also need new narratives that explicate how and why labor was written out of history to begin with, narratives that can dismantle the techniques, categories, and ideals that have hidden building stories and building workers in plain sight. A remarkable body of scholarship marks the way. The work of Adrienne Brown, Christine Wall, Paul Jaskot, and Swati Chattopadhyay, among others, illuminates how rigorous historical craft, supported by both substantial archival work and narrative ingenuity, can bring the ever-elusive but ever-present worker into the light.⁷ Such work may help us to recover names like Joaquín Adam Barrales, José Bautista Romero, and Avelino Carrera Trujillo, a few of the hundreds of men employed by Cubiertas Ala who likely also stood by Candela at some point. Nothing in the architect’s copious archives and scholarship refers to these individuals. Yet their names and skills are typed into the company’s clerical papers, their financial valuations are computed in the social security records of the state, their labor is indexed in the materiality of the shells themselves (Figure 11).

These and ever more expansive kinds of evidence widen the authority of modern architecture and begin to undo the flatness created by photographic and discursive chronicles of modernity alone. In so doing, such evidence supports histories that better layer the matrix of power of modernity/coloniality in the Americas, where various imperialisms are at stake. More important, they help us to go beyond dialectical relations of oppression when narrating the coloniality of modernity. Indeed, shell building enabled a white designer elite to imagine modernity as redemptive, whereas Indigenous peones experienced it as extractive—a relation echoing imperial legacies. But in the mid-twentieth century and as this evidence tells it, construction sites also witnessed workers’ efforts and new struggles over labor rights and the architect’s undoing as his company went bankrupt as a result. In unimagining labor and writing its histories anew, something more than utopia and exploitation is likely to emerge.

And yet even as the field begins to chronicle the stories of Barrales, Romero, Trujillo, and thousands of other anonymous men and women who carried the architecture of modernity/coloniality quite literally on their shoulders, we still risk their eclipse. For however intently one scrutinizes workers’ photographs or renders visible their names and salaries, their beliefs and ambitions, their claims to knowledge, to race, and to the value of their bodily labor remain as shadowed as their faces in the image where we began. Much work remains to be done as we attempt to discern these cosmologies—work that, as exemplified by the contributions to this roundtable, engages Indigenous cultures and critical modes of “fabulation”—before deciding how workers may enter our books and classrooms without demanding further extraction.⁸ In the meantime, we must also uncover the categories and techniques that tie our knowing and telling to the dominant logic of oblivion, beginning by unimagining the ways that labor has been made to appear by prevailing tales and images of modernity.

To consider the spatial history of the Americas, particularly since the eighteenth century, we must think about the history of whiteness. But there is a particular trick to whiteness, for it is in its hiddenness that it works best. Whiteness certainly manifests in the violence of white supremacy and colonialism; it appears in the spatial history of the Americas explicitly in racialized slavery, in native genocide, in legal and extralegal Jim Crow practices, and in racist immigration and citizenship policies. But as George Lipsitz observes, whiteness acquires a particular strength when it is in the background, where it works as “the unmarked category against which difference is constructed.”¹ Whiteness works through elision, by leaping over and beyond its own historical contingency to assert an assumed naturalness. At its heart, it is, as Sara Ahmed says, “a category of experience that disappears as a category through experience.”²

Attempting to unhide something that exists most fully when it is hidden verges on a paradox. And troublingly, if whiteness works best when it does not speak its own name, then the process of naming and disclosing it might cause us to miss the very thing we are investigating. Two decades ago, Barbara J. Fields ran a cutting critique of studies of whiteness precisely along these lines.³ She suggests that talk of “whiteness” became popular among scholars in the United States as they attempted to overcome the asymmetry of “race” by making whiteness symmetrical to Blackness and other racialized identities. As Fields argues, the problem with this approach is that the pursuit of symmetry in fact hides the very essence of racism at work: its fundamental asymmetry. Particularly problematic is that in framing whiteness as symmetrical to other racialized identities, a subtle slip occurs, one that allows the categories of “race” rather than the workings of racism—what she and Karen E. Fields call “racecraft”—to become the object of analysis.⁴ The political, economic, and social pursuit of power through racism is what begets the continuously shifting categories of race, but trying to treat whiteness as symmetrical to other racialized identities only further reifies the product of racecraft: race.

Whether the specific scholars Fields accuses of this slip from racism to race are guilty or not, her critique of whiteness tells us something of great import. We cannot talk about whiteness outside of a framework that highlights the asymmetrical (yet self-effacing) power of whiteness to frame the terms of action and thought. We cannot describe the history of whiteness in the Americas without describing the role whiteness has played in producing and legitimating material and psychological inequality, in shaping the moral architecture of coloniality.⁵ That is, whiteness should be discussed as a lived companion to colonialism and racial capitalism.⁶ Inasmuch as it structures space in the Americas, whiteness describes ways of living the inequalities produced by global capitalism as if these form a natural and inevitable background to our human existence.

We need to think the spatial history of the Americas in at least three ways if we want to disclose the hidden workings of whiteness. First, there is no greater part of this story than the order and interests of property—interests born out of the continued legacy of so-called primitive accumulation.⁷ Whiteness describes a way of living the claims of property ownership, and the expropriative colonial historical trajectory of these claims, as inevitable. As W. E. B. Du Bois observes, whiteness takes the form of a belief in “ownership of the earth forever and ever.”⁸ Disclosing the spatiality of whiteness in the Americas, then, requires historians to forefront the roles of real estate, enclosure, and credit in accounts of space making.⁹ In particular, following the work of scholars such as Cheryl Harris, this means exploring how a vested interest in the long-term stability of these systems relies on whiteness without naming it as such (Figure 12).¹⁰

A second way of thinking the spatial history of whiteness in the Americas is to attend to the role of whiteness in bordering regimes. For one, this means addressing how whiteness fuels nationalisms that reinforce, politically and methodologically, what Paul Gilroy calls “the fatal junction of the concept of nationality and the concept of culture.”¹¹ But it also means addressing how regionalism and the fetishization of place have played similar roles. On the one hand, some of the most enduring regionalisms in the Americas have been born as explicit attempts to defend white dominance.¹² And on the other, regionalism has been used to racially figure salvation in the face of modernity. As Frantz Fanon describes it, whiteness selectively turns encounters with racialized groups into modes of “primitive” or “authentic” salvation, a salvation often pursued in geographies that in turn supply the raw resources of modernity.¹³

A third feature of the spatial history of whiteness in the Americas is that it arrives in a knot with other forms of differentiation and hierarchization, a knot in which religion has been central. The transformation of what Katharine Gerbner has termed “Protestant supremacy” into white supremacy, for example, links the spatiality of whiteness to the religious history of European space making that has long preoccupied architectural history.¹⁴ That the groundwork for whiteness runs longer and deeper than explicit formulations of white supremacy, and that, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has shown, religion provides a way to explain colonization that cuts across different colonial powers, suggests a history in which whiteness has acted as a key translator of religious order into supposedly “secular” modernity.¹⁵ Indeed, as Gerald Horne puts it, whiteness provided “a broader base for colonialism” than could any particular religious commitment.¹⁶ As Du Bois affirms, whiteness became a “new religion.”¹⁷

To write a spatial history of whiteness in the Americas is to understand how, in the movements of colonization, whiteness emerges as a particular way of making sense of global capitalism in universalizing terms. In this sense, whiteness is not an ideological veneer. Rather, it is an experience of global capitalism that, in hiding itself, hides the contingency of the inherent inequity that this system produces. For architectural and built environmental histories of the Americas, to disclose whiteness is to show whiteness in its assumed naturalness, to show it in the way that it hides contingency itself (Figure 13).