Leisure, recreation and entertainment spatialities in nineteenth-century Tepic

Abstract

In the first decades of the 19th century, following the Independence, the city of Tepic experienced an unusual increase and heterogeneity in the supply of spaces for leisure. These spatialities would not only (re)construct the image and landscape of this postcolonial city, but also transformed the identity, daily life and urban experience of the Tepiqueños who would never be the same again. This text aims to examine the permanence and transformations of this type of spatialities within the urban structure of nineteenth-century Tepic. To achieve this, a hermeneutic approach will be employed, using the historical method to interpret various available sources of information, such as travelers’ diaries and newspapers of the time, which includes local, regional and national historiographic production. In this sense, it is posited that the establishment of leisure and recreation spaces in postcolonial cities primarily obey four distinctions. The emerging free time of its society, the ingrained set of activities inherited from New Spain, the adoption of new practices imposed from European modernity and, above all, the aspirations of a local oligarchy that sought to emulate the entertainment available in other Capital cities.