The last two decades or so have seen academic interest in urban Latin American history mature to the point where questions of cultural realities have taken on greater complexity and importance. For reasons bound up with the socioeconomic factors usually studied first, the period between 1870 and 1930 seems fated to be especially attractive. That was the period, after all, when the neocolonial order came of age and, with it, the cultural possibilities born of greater wealth, a larger leisure class, an urban way of life in the expanding port and administrative centers, and the greater access to European cultural models through travel and luxury imports.