Germán Colmenares, in an assessment of Colombia’s historical research carried out shortly before his departure, pointed to the lack of research into urban history in our country and raised the need for studies on towns and urban networks, as well as the historical dynamics of large cities. Indeed, despite the remarkable developments in Colombian historiography over the past three decades in economic history (land tendencies, production cycles, industrialisation, agricultural production, etc.) and in the history of some social processes, the historians’ view of the city, its inhabitants and its conflicts has so far started. The same applies to the history of subalternating classes; the enormous weight of traditional political historiography and its exclusionary vision of social prominence, reduced to that of the ruling elites, was not surpassed by ‘New History’; this historiographic vision, influenced by the Annales, New Economic History and Marxism, by emphasising the role of impersonal forces and the deep dynamics of demographic and economic structures, was not interested in the historical presence of dominated social groups.