Mexico and Philadelphia
'Compare the wealth and refinement of cities such as Mexico... in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the austere simplicity, verging on poverty, of... Philadelphia, a misleading splendour; what was dawn for the United States was twilight for Latin America...' Octavio Paz
A Spanish Jesuit, writing in the 1780s from his exile in Italy, argued that the proof of the superiority of Spanish achievement in the New World over the British and French lay in the large number of 'great and splendid' cities. While he could find only six non-hispanic cities of any urban merit, two of them French (one about to be destroyed in Toussaint L'Ouverture's slave rebellion), his uncompleted list of 'glorious' Spanish American cities exceeded thirty. Not having visited America, drawing his information from the exaggerated and nostalgic reports of Spanish American fellow Jesuits in exile, Ramon Diosdado's comparison should be treated with some caution.
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