Las Atenas hispanoamericanas. Antigüedad, progreso y reforma social en las ciudades de América latina (siglos XVI-XIX)

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, several Latin-American cities were called Athens on the basis of their political, economic, social and cultural characteristics. The name was both a means to praise them, but also a token which hid a political and economic program of imposed progress, compulsory modernization and required social reform.
This paper seeks to locate the main Latin-American cities nicknamed Athens from 16th century to the early decades of the 20th century, in order to establish whether, under the caption Athens bourgeois, there laid a political use of the epithet Athen in Latin-America similar to that in Europe and the United States.