San Francisco, despite having an excellent port, was a small town built around the Mission, and wasn’t much of anything before the Gold Rush, but afterward is where the money settled. Los Angeles and to a lesser extent, San Diego, are the product of a land and military boom that followed the ag-centered economy of each area, so being located at a river mouth was not a factor. If Southern California remained in Mexico it’s interesting to speculate on the alternate history there.
Another Mexican coastal/port city was Galveston. The name always sounded Anglo to me, but looking it up, turns out that it’s named for Bernardo de Gálvez, a Spanish Viceroy.
Several posters have claimed that this is because Mexico already had major cities when the Spanish arrived, but this seems dubious. If you look at the major cities in the US from 1800 and compare to now, there is considerable change - some major cities back then are blips now and some nonentities are big time cities today. So if Mexico had developed in the manner of the US, the status of cities back when the Spanish arrived would certainly not have a huge impact today. The answer has to be about the way the country grew. (What other posters have said about Mexico’s relative lack of international trade seems to make more sense.)
One had cities already and one did not. Why would you possibly think they would both develop in the same manner? Fun trivia fact:
Largest City in North American today : Mexico City
Largest City in North America in 1492: Tenochtitlán (Mexico City)
For that matter, the current US had cities more than 150 years before 1800, or as you say blips. Blips like New York City and Boston.
And it happens to follow the same “natural harbor” / river scheme as other cities. The city’s set up on a barrier island, and ships can dock on the bay side of the city and be protected from the elements. The bay whose mouth it partially blocks has two rivers draining into it- the Trinity and the San Jacinto. Neither was ever really navigable though.
I’m still thinking that the main reason was that Spanish Mexico wasn’t really geared toward maritime trade. There’s a reason that so many big cities around the world are port cities- there’s a lot of money to be made in maritime trade.
I’m not sure if you understood my point. As an example, Los Angeles had 650 residents in 1820, but that did not stop it from developing into America’s second largest city, and this despite the fact that there were already major US cities at the time. By contrast, Salem, MA was the 8th largest city in the US in 1800 and is a blip today.
Point being that city sizes and ranks in the US were not remotely static, historically speaking, and if in Mexico they were, then that suggests a difference between the way Mexico and the US developed.
Why are you bringing up city sizes at all?. The point is that when Europeans arrived in the New World, Mexico had cities and other places in the the Western Hemisphere did not.
Besides Mexico City, which other Mexican cities grew out of pre-Columbian cities? Orizaba evidently, but not Veracruz, Cordoba, Puebla, or Xalapa. And the Incas had cities like Cuzco that were taken over by the Spanish, but they also founded their own such as Quito and Lima.
This whole thread is about city sizes. It’s in the title of the thread and the OP.
The question was why there aren’t big coastal cities in Mexico as there are in the US. Some people has suggested this was because there were already cities in Mexico when the Spanish arrived. My counter is that having cities doesn’t prevent the growth of other, even larger, cities over time, if conditions are favorable, as has happened in the US. So the presence of non-coastal cities in Mexico 400 years ago is unlikely to account for the fact that there are no large coastal cities today, and that the explanation is more likely due to conditions that have prevailed over that time span (e.g. the lack of an import/export driven economy).
I remember being taught that the Spanish were primarily interested in plunder rather than colonization, at least at first. They would head for where the gold was and not waste time establishing cities, just grab the plunder and head home. Shipping high-value cargo back to Spain would require a lot less in the way of ports than an ongoing mercantile trade with the mother country (ala England and France). Some would stay to be overlords to the natives, but were there large migrations of Spaniards to Central and South America to actually colonize?
In general, no. The pattern of colonization was different in the Spanish colonies than in the English ones. Spanish colonists were mostly men who came without families, while the English colonists included entire families. The result was a large mestizo population in the Spanish colonies, when European men took indigenous women as partners. In the English colonies, the European colonists largely replaced the indigenous peoples without mixing with them.
The Spanish did found quite a few cities in Mexico during the sixteenth century, but they were almost all inland cities.
I’m with the faction that thinks it was basically an extraction-based economy (i.e. they mined precious metals and what-not, and sent the wealth back to Spain), and not a trade-based economy like say… the New England colonies of a century later. If all you’re doing is shipping treasure back to the mother country, you don’t need many seaports to do that, unlike if you’re shipping agricultural and other products wherever there are markets.
Oh… and as an aside, one main reason Salem ended up as a small-ish town, and not a major port today, is because the harbor silted up over time. Same thing happened in Honfleur and Harfleur in northern France as well- that’s why Le Havre was founded in fact. In Salem’s case, Boston, which was only a short distance south, took over.
That lines up with my understanding. High-value cargo. Economical to transport by land to a limited number of seaports. A few ships per year rather than a continuous trade stream. I assume less demand for goods from Spain since there was a level of artisanship (metalworkers, woodworkers, etc.) available in the native population vs. what the French and British found in Eastern North America.
What about climate and arable land? My impression for example is that the Pacific coast (esp. Baja?) is almost desert, or else it rises into mountains very quickly where it does get rain. That won’t support a major city. the Gulf coast probably where it did have rain, supported a goodly crop of mosquitos and disease, plus regular storms - so not the ideal location to settle. I’ve never seen the area, but even Houston up the coast is well inland, and still can suffer in a good storm. The gulf coast northward also seems to have a lot of barrier islands so not great for ships to come into, and barrier islands are particularly exposed to storms.
I assume LA originally was valued for the valleys surrounding it that supported good agriculture and Zorro.
All in all, no navigable rivers, no busy trade routes, and no agricultural supply so not a lot of reason for people to settle there in Mexico’s coastal areas.
Panama city has an obvious value as a transshipment port, even before the canal.
Off topic?
I went to an area of India, the state of Mizoram. This is east of Bangladesh. The area is steep hills and valleys. I noticed that the towns and cities were at the top of the hills/mountains. Not in the valleys. I still wonder about the reasons for that. Water being such a vital basis for a village or city. It seems the towns would be in the valleys. The towns and cities were quite interesting, being perched so high and very three dimensional in layout. So many buildings being suspended on stilts at the back end. Glancing out through the space between two buildings would be a view of a thousand feet down to the valley floor, in the midst of downtown, or uptown, depending on what block you were at. A strange thing, that still makes me wonder to this day.
lol. The Bay of Bengal is a place where you want to be based on higher ground.
Otherwise you will be rebuilding every six months.
A guy I met in prison told me Zihuatenejo is pretty nice. Something about the Pacific having no memory.
Note To Self: Do not use Pacific ocean water to make homeopathic medicine.
Mizoram isn’t right on the Bay. I can’t comment on whether or not it gets sufficiently heavy monsoons to make the low ground untenable. That said, there are many reasons that people might use elevated ground for their housing - not the least of which is security from raid or invasion. Many old cities aren’t located on the most convenient site but rather where it would be safe from attack.
However, I am not entirely certain that the original assertion is entirely right. I am no expert (understatement of the year), but it doesn’t look as though the major towns and cities are necessarily on high elevations compared to the surrounding hills. Mizoram is a very rough country as far as I can tell from a brief glance. That being said, it seems to be utterly stunning place to visit with its own distinct culture, even if it’s not well known abroad. Now I want to visit!