Almost 60 percent of Mexicans work in the informal economy and produce 23 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, and the self-employed represent around 23 percent of the employed population. At the same time, small businesses (those that employ fewer than ten workers) represent 95 percent of firms, generate 40 percent of employment, and produce 15 percent of GDP. Mexico shares these characteristics with other Latin American countries. However, only a few historical studies analyze small enterprises and those operating in the informal economy that are so essential to understanding Mexico's and Latin America's economic development.
In the study of public markets and their vendors in Mexico City, Ingrid Bleynat found an excellent venue to explore this topic. As she explains, vendors of Mexico City's public markets were not wage workers, because they did not sell their labor power to make a living. They were not capitalists either, because they did not hire people to work for them, and in most cases, they never managed to accumulate any capital. They formed part of what Bleynat refers to as the proprietary mode of production: people who work for themselves, often with the help of their families, running small-scale operations with, at best, a modest working capital, usually on credit. She explains that capitalist and proprietary modes of production coexisted throughout the twentieth century and interacted with each other through supply chains, credit arrangements, and other economic relations such as subcontracting and subleasing. The book makes it powerfully clear that if we do not include the large share of the population involved in the proprietary mode of production, we cannot fully understand Latin America's economic development.
Bleynat's book is about not only economics but also politics. Public market vendors provided a critical public service, since, until the 1960s, they were the primary channel by which food and other essential goods were commercially available to the population, and they provided affordable wage goods. The book identifies the strategic position of this group and how they used it over time to negotiate for government benefits that improved their situation. Like industrialists and urban developers during that period, vendors requested more, not less, state intervention, but on their terms. Bleynat describes how as urbanization increased, vendors became a key political sector whose support the government sought to win, despite several conflicting interests, such as those that arose among markets and street vendors and between vendors and capitalist businesses such as supermarkets.
The book takes us on a journey through Mexico City's markets from 1867 to 1966, offering a privileged view of capitalist development's difficulties in economic and political terms. For almost a hundred years, proprietary vendors remained at the heart of the political economy of the capital city, both as providers of key public services and as protagonists in the multiple overlapping conflicts generated by economic development. Through its pages, which often read like a novel, we travel through a century of Mexican history from a unique vantage point that allows us to see the evolution of daily life and the problems ordinary people encountered.
In Latin America and most underdeveloped countries, many people had to find ways to make a living and improve their lives outside the capitalist economy, given the large share of the population existing below poverty levels and the failure of capitalist development to incorporate most of them into increasing living standards. Market vendors and street vendors were a significant group among them. Bleynat's book shows how their organization and political agency enabled them to form part of the “Mexican Miracle” (a period of remarkable economic growth between 1940 and 1970). It also explains how the government sought ways to accommodate them, creating a peculiar form of capitalist development that was very successful for several decades.
Bleynat's book offers an essential piece that was missing from our understanding of the success of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)—the party that ruled Mexico through most of the twentieth century: how it consolidated its power, generated stability, and maintained a civil government during an era when most Latin American countries faced coups and military dictatorships. She shows that the government's effectiveness in managing vendors’ social relations, and its success in incorporating a significant portion of the city's proprietary classes into its pro-business compact, underlay the economic growth and political stability of those years. Thus, it is no coincidence that the heyday of Mexico City's markets was also the heyday of both Mexican state capitalism and the PRI's rule.
In 1946, organized vendors joined the PRI as members of the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP). The incorporation of the self-employed popular classes represented by the CNOP was the key political innovation of the period. Nevertheless, scholars have paid little attention to the crucial changes it produced in the city's political economy. They have interpreted it as a maneuver to reduce the influence of industrial workers and peasants and remove the constraints they might have placed on economic growth. The urban self-employed were deemed marginal or, at best, secondary to the construction of the political regime. However, the experiences of vendors revealed in this book demonstrate this was not the case. From the vantage point of Mexico City's markets, the formation of the CNOP, which soon became the largest branch of the party, was the corollary of two decades of government efforts to learn how to mediate their social relations and respond to vendors’ quest for proprietary progress.
Between 1952 and 1966, Mexico City's government built 160 markets with a capacity for over fifty thousand stalls. In these markets, proprietary traders earned their piece of the “Mexican Miracle,” constructing a way of life that promised they could become middle class too. Nevertheless, tens of thousands remained on the streets, where they suffered the repressive side of Mexico's state-led development—a reminder of the limits of the midcentury's achievements. In the 1960s, market vendors provided upwards of 90 percent of the capital's food supply, and their halls epitomized the height of Mexico's high modernism.
Looking closely at vendors’ dealings with their suppliers, customers, competitors, market administrators, urban planners, redevelopers, and politicians, we can see both the proprietary traders’ role in the story of capitalism and statecraft in Mexico and the messy, constrained contingency of historical change. The vendors’ collective actions shaped the evolution of the local public sphere, the ebbs and flows of the city council, the corporatist experiments of the 1930s, and eventually, the formation of the PRI. For these reasons, the vendors’ experiences and trajectories provide an apt vantage point from which to study the history of the expansion of capitalism as it unfolded in Mexico.
At the same time, the book allows us to understand better why and how the economic and political equilibria reached during the 1950s and 1960s were feeble and could not last. Their downfall resulted from a combination of pressures from above and below. Increasingly, big domestic capital, in alliance with foreign capital, pushed the policy agenda away from the promotion of small and medium-sized national firms. At the same time, the city's population exploded. With a capitalist sector too small and weak to incorporate the young and the newcomers, modernity remained exclusive, broadening participation in economic progress for some but leaving vast numbers behind. As populations of the poor and the self-employed grew, so did the ranks of street vendors. Eventually, their organizations tipped the balance against the smaller constituency of market vendors.
After many years of economic crisis, the government in the 1990s adopted economic policies oriented toward less state intervention and greater integration into the global economy. Increasingly, supermarkets and other large retailers that belong to large, often transnational corporations have taken most of the market. By 2001, supermarkets accounted for 45 percent of food retailing in the largest cities and perhaps as much as 70 percent in Mexico City. In 2012, Walmart was the largest private employer, with 212,000 employees working across 2,275 supermarkets. Many small retailers went bankrupt, but the proprietary sector did not disappear. In Mexico City, there were still 265,000 vendors across 329 public markets, 1,303 outdoor markets, 52 mobile markets, and 215 concentrations of street vendors.
The book makes an important contribution to understanding small businesses and entrepreneurs who participate in the informal economy in Mexico and, more broadly, Latin America and the underdeveloped world. This a subject to which business history needs to pay more attention, especially when dealing with less developed countries. It also provides key elements to decipher the political basis of Mexico's state-led capitalism, its success, and its structural problems. Moreover, the book substantiates the severe problems and stumbling blocks that small businesses and unprivileged entrepreneurs face in poor countries. Studying them confronts us with the steep challenges that underdeveloped nations must surmount to generate decent living standards for their populations. It also allows us to reflect on what progress really means.
