skygiants

I'm West Coast Bitter about New York in general, so the "it's just so special and unique" did grate, but I largely could still enjoy it except…

The Latin Americanist in me was and remains furious about the truly blatant US-centrism and anti-indigeneity (ironic, considering the Bronx) inherent in this concept that NYC was the second "New World" city to Awaken. What the heck happened to all the major indigenous cities that didn't actually just disappear into thin air after colonialism? What about Cusco, Cajamarca, all these cities that have been continuously inhabited since well pre-Colón? They didn't just go away, and they were not destroyed. The destruction, murder, and relocations of their indigenous populations were devastating, and some cities, like Tenochtitlán, were indeed fully razed, but many others survived and changed and in several cases persisted as bases of indigenous power and safety within the colonial system right up to the present day. So much of the book is about how cities are fluid and shift and change over time, and the absolute destruction of agency it is to just assume that indigenous metropolitan cultures failed to survive colonization is enraging. They did survive; they are still surviving. I will never believe that NYC is alive but Cusco isn't.

If for the sake of argument we have to submit to that old lie that all indigenous civilizations in the U.S. were wiped out and left no direct connection to the modern world, then I can still quibble with the fact that NYC is only the second city in the Americas to find its avatar. Just off the very top of my head, the Spanish-founded cities of Lima, La Habana, Ciudad de México, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, Quito, Buenos Aires, and Santo Domingo were all founded a century or more before NYC. In an effort to be a little less Hispanophone-centric, even Québec is a tad older. Like, great that São Paulo is in the mix, great that Port-au-Prince and New Orleans tried, and I do understand that it's implied that white supremacy killed those last two and they don't get to try again, but uh… the rest of South and North America exists too, had relationships with white supremacy, and kept on existing, sometimes continuously. On a plot level, most of them don't even recent large-scale natural disasters to attach metaphor to. Considering the implicit points made in the narrative about ethnic and cultural diversity's roles in awakening cities, gotta point out that these Latin American cities were almost inherently more diverse than NYC for a good long time, considering the semi-settler nature of Spanish colonialism, mestizaje, the long west coast sans Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Transatlantic Trade. /rant

So I'll read the next book, but I will probably get it from the library rather than buying it, because I am sick and tired of ""Americans"" forgetting that the rest of the Americas exist.

Lord, sorry, ETA again: I don't mean that Jemisin has to feel about these cities anything like what she feels for NYC, or write her book about them too. Of course she doesn't! In fact, she maybe shouldn't! She has tons of reasons to focus on NYC alone, and those are compelling, interesting reasons that make for a wonderful book. But I don't understand why NYC had to be special to the ahistorical exclusion of real, important, untold history elsewhere in the Americas.