Cities were one of the building blocks of empire in Spanish America. Their construction mirrored die Iberian past and the ordering ideals of the Castilian state. They also were the place where the aspirations of men and the demands of the American environment met. The actas de cabildo, the best known town records, are a highly formalized kind of source. To derive from them a formalistic pattern of politics approaching decadence would be as misleading as to deduce from the formulae of land tenure the operational character of farming. Setting is the province of Popayan in the seventeenth century, a marginal area of the empire. While most settlements declined, the town of Popayan rose to be the administrative and commercial center of the province, replacing Cali as central market place and seat of government. In Popayan the Velasco family offers an example of continuity between the founding generation and the stratum dominant in the town around 1700.