Robert B. Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2000
Honorable Mention, Victor Turner Award, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2001
Leeds Prize, Society of Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, 2001
Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale-almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city.
Low centers her study on two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, with comparisons to public plazas in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She interweaves ethnography, history, literature, and personal narrative to capture the ambiance and meaning of the plaza. She also uncovers the contradictory ethnohistories of the European and indigenous origins of the Latin American plaza and explains why the plaza is often a politically contested space.

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
  • Chapter One: Notes from the Field: A Personal Account
  • Chapter Two: Public Space and Culture: The Case of the Latin American Plaza
• Part II: Histories
  • Chapter Three: The History of the Plaza in San José, Costa Rica: The Political Symbolism of Public Space
  • Chapter Four: The European History of the Plaza: Power Relations and Architectural Interpretation
  • Chapter Five: The Indigenous History of the Plaza: The Contested Terrain of Architectural Representations
• Part III: Ethnographies
  • Chapter Six: Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space
  • Chapter Seven: Constructing Difference: The Social and Spatial Boundaries of Everyday Life
  • Chapter Eight: Public Space and Protest: The Plaza as Art and Commodity
• Part IV: Conversations
  • Chapter Nine: The Park and the Plaza in Costa Rican Literature: Imagined Places
  • Chapter Ten: Conversations on the Plaza: Remembered Places
  • Chapter Eleven: Public Space, Politics, and Democracy
• Appendix: Recent Costa Rican Presidents and Their Terms
• Bibliography
• Index