In La ciudad latina trasterrada, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry articulates a poignant meditation on the epistemic dislocation of Latin American urban thinking when refracted through the European lens. Anchored in his own experience of exile, Etcheverry constructs a narrative that is both autobiographical and theoretical, charting the tensions between urban identity, intellectual exile, and the ideological frameworks inherited from the Global North. The text critiques how Latin American urban spaces are often analysed using imported categories—those of European modernity—without regard to their historical, affective, and political specificities. Etcheverry proposes that Latin American cities must be reclaimed as epistemological sites, where the complexities of colonial afterlives, racialised geographies, and hybrid modernities defy Western urban theory. The author reflects on Buenos Aires and other cities as spaces of impossible symmetry, simultaneously aspiring to European models and resisting them, producing a unique urban ambivalence. This ambivalence is not a lack but a generative space of thought, a trasterrada city that exists across mental, emotional, and political planes. Through this lens, exile becomes a methodology—a standpoint from which to critique both one’s homeland and the theoretical apparatuses used to understand it. The article thus performs an act of decolonial urbanism, one that situates Latin American cities not as peripheral imitations but as autonomous spaces of meaning-making. Etcheverry’s work resonates with broader calls to provincialise Europe in urban studies, foregrounding the need for a situated, affective, and politically aware urban theory from the South.
Jaim Etcheverry, G. (2019) ‘La ciudad latina trasterrada’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), pp. 75–80.
