ABSTRACT
In 2006, historian Fernández-Armesto wrote that when two Englishmen meet on a remote frontier, they form a club, but Spaniards in similar circumstances found a city. This oversimplistic claim exposes a reality that, though rarely emphasized, is essential to understanding the historic configuration of the Spanish-speaking space and, to a great extent, the presence of Spanish in the major processes of globalization. John Friedman (1986/2006) maintains that cities are used by global capital as a base for spatial organization and the articulation of production and markets. If this is the case, one could argue that the importance of major cities in contemporary globalization was anticipated by the process of colonization in the Hispanic world over several centuries.
