JCB Reads: Tatiana Seijas on American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City

Join us on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 1 p.m. as the JCB Reads series continues! Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. This session features the book American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Tatiana Seijas (Rutgers University). The event will be hybrid, and the in-person portion will take place in the conference room at the JCB.

About the book

Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In this deeply researched book, Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city's silver. Free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia, immigrants, and Native Americans pursued opportunities in a wealthy, yet deeply unequal environment, where working people claimed parts of the city for themselves. They carved out spaces to create new businesses and protect their livelihoods, altering the cityscape itself in the process. American Metropolis brings Mexico City to life from the perspective of the working people who transformed this early modern metropolis.

‘American Metropolis drives home the point that Mexico City was unlike any other city in the seventeenth-century Americas. Tapping local archives and getting down to street- level working lives, Tatiana Seijas shows that the great capital was vast yet intensely local, profusely cosmopolitan, incessantly competitive, and fueled and lubricated by a silver-rich hinterland. If you could make it here in the great City of Mexico, you could make it anywhere!’ Kris Lane, Tulane University

‘There are lots of books about seventeenth-century Mexico, but none do what this book does, which is to give a from-the-ground perspective on working people and how their activities shaped a metropolis. The depth and sophistication of Tatiana Seijas’s research are evident on every page. Her lucid and elegant writing brings the people of Mexico City alive, making it easy for readers to relate to the book’s many actors and their everyday activities. This book is simply fantastic.’ Martin Nesvig, University of Miami

Registration:

Virtual https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gbSMWFRwSvKu5E5Ly6NhOw

In person https://forms.gle/UXZS4iPNMedyLw1T6