Upon leaving office in 1716, the Duke of Linares, the viceroy of New Spain, warned his successor of a particularly vexing issue: the question of what to do about Mexico City's Baratillo marketplace. “There is in the Plaza of Mexico,” he wrote, “a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised.”Footnote 1 Hipólito Villarroel, writing his treatise about the decadence of Mexico City more than a half-century later, was no more sparing in his description of the market. He referred to it as the “cave or depository for the thieving committed by artisans, maids, and servants, and, in sum, all the plebeians—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas—that are permitted to inhabit this city.”Footnote 2 The market was even the subject of a book-length satirical manuscript, written in 1754. Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache's unpublished “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” is a legal code for a world turned upside down, where the mixed-race castas reigned and Spaniards were ostracized, and where “four thousand vagabonds” congregated every day to be instructed by “doctors in the faculty of trickery.”Footnote 3
The Baratillo was Mexico City's principal emporium for secondhand, stolen, and otherwise illicit goods. Until the last decade of the eighteenth century, this market, whose name stems from the Spanish word barato, or cheap, was located in the city's Plaza Mayor, the commercial and administrative hub of New Spain. Though its origins are unknown, the Baratillo was already the city's most infamous thieves’ market in 1635—the year it was first banned by the royal government—and it has operated more or less continuously ever since. Today, the Baratillo is known simply as Tepito, the neighborhood to which it moved in 1902 and helped transform into a district famous throughout Mexico as much for the trade it hosts in pirated, untaxed, and other illicit goods as for its vibrant oppositional culture.Footnote 4 Prior to the twentieth century, the Baratillo provoked personal interventions from King Charles II, several Spanish viceroys, and the nineteenth-century caudillo Antonio López de Santa Anna. These and other officials banned the market on a number of occasions and relocated it to sites farther and farther from the city center. Yet, despite such powerful opposition, the Baratillo persevered.
A closer look at the Baratillo's history in the eighteenth century—a period when the market's documentary trail is particularly rich—suggests why it proved so resilient. While its fiercest opponents painted the Baratillo as a threat to the very foundations of colonial society, New Spain's highest authorities were more likely to be ambivalent. The Duke of Linares made his own uncertainty explicit, writing to his successor: “I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it.”Footnote 5 The Baratillo may have been a depository for stolen and fraudulent merchandise, but it was also where the “immense number of needy” in the city could “remedy their misery” by selling “little jewels and cheap trinkets,” as one official noted in 1693.Footnote 6 Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, authorities’ disdain for the Baratillo was tempered by their recognition that the market played an important social function in the capital.
In fact, Mexico City elites were anything but unified in their opposition to the Baratillo. Whether it was their “customary tolerance” for the downtrodden or because the Baratillo somehow benefited them financially, members of the Mexico City elite came to the defense of the capital's most infamous thieves market on countless occasions.Footnote 7 The Baratillo offered an outlet for the import merchants of the Mexico City Consulado—the exclusive merchant guild—to sell damaged or subpar goods, and members of the elite themselves bought and sold clothing and household furnishings in the Baratillo.Footnote 8 In addition, rental fees from the market provided the Mexico City ayuntamiento with a relatively consistent revenue stream.Footnote 9 While observers frequently depicted the Baratillo as the exclusive domain of the underclass, the market in fact served a range of actors—from the most humble to the most privileged. Elites were ambivalent about the Baratillo, then, not only because they were mesmerized by the city's bustling street commerce or even because they recognized its importance to the city's broader economy and society, as Douglas Cope has argued, but because it benefited specific interest groups within the capital.Footnote 10 The Baratillo vendors were not passive actors in this process; rather, they used their affective and financial ties with members of Mexico City's upper classes to adeptly navigate New Spain's bureaucracies and sustain their businesses in a highly unstable economic climate.Footnote 11
The Baratillo's history reveals a complex web of alliances and rivalries that challenges the prevailing view of the eighteenth century as the period when a binary class structure began to take shape in urban Mexico—one that pitted a reformist Bourbon elite against a multiethnic plebeian underclass.Footnote 12 In many cases, that reading relies on impressionistic contemporary sources and the study of government projects as they were designed, rather than as they were implemented. A closer examination of the commercial links between street vendors, government officials, artisans, and merchants in the capital's Plaza Mayor—an analysis situated at the level of the street, where the daily transactions between those actors took place—reveals a much more complicated reality.Footnote 13 The Baratillo's most determined opponents during this period were not colonial elites but Mexico City's middling artisans and retail merchants. The Baratillo threatened the businesses and socioeconomic positions of Mexico City's artisan guilds decades before they came under more systematic attacks from Bourbon reformers in the late eighteenth century. The city's storeowners, particularly those who sold imported goods in and around the Plaza Mayor, also complained to colonial officials that the Baratillo was siphoning customers by offering cheaper or imitation versions of their own products.
The story of the Baratillo in the eighteenth century, then, is not one of increasing antagonism between elites and plebeians, but of a shadow economy, tolerated and at times enabled by the privileged, in which members of Mexico City's middle and lower-middle strata vied with one another for economic and social position. This study forms part of a small but growing literature on the middle sectors of Mexican and Latin American societies, which have often been overlooked by historians focusing primarily on elite or popular groups.Footnote 14 It seeks to destabilize the image of Latin American society as one comprised of two largely static castes, focusing instead on the many intermediate rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and individuals’ efforts to ascend or maintain their positions in that hierarchy.
The Baratillo in Mexico City's Economy
The baratillo was a Hispanic institution that existed in cities in Spain, Mexico, and other regions of Spanish America.Footnote 15 The name connoted both a physical marketplace and a type of retail commerce: it was selling on the cheap, which involved peddling secondhand products as well as remanufactured, altered, diluted, or simply stolen goods. Madrid had several baratillos in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in the Plaza Mayor, in the Puerta del Sol, and in other squares around the city. Like the Baratillo in Mexico City, those markets were banned by several decrees in the seventeenth century, none of which proved successful. Around 1750, vendors of used goods, particularly clothing, began congregating in the neighborhood around the Spanish capital's slaughterhouse—El Rastro—giving rise to the flea market of the same name that continues to this day.Footnote 16 Other Mexican cities, such as Puebla, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Guadalajara, had their own baratillos, and within Mexico City there were often several smaller baratillos that operated in different plazas and street corners. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the city's principal Baratillo was divided into two adjacent marketplaces. One, known as the Baratillo Grande, was located in the central patio of the Parián marketplace, the masonry structure that occupied the western half of the Plaza Mayor and housed shops selling imported goods. The other, known as the Baratillo Chico, or the Baratillo de los Muchachos, was in the plaza itself, just outside the Parián.Footnote 17 Although some contemporary writers distinguished between the two Baratillos, not all did, and the market was generally considered a single institution in that period, as it was throughout its history.
These markets were not, in their general form or purpose, unique to the Spanish-speaking world. London's rag fair, the marché aux puce in Paris, and the feira da ladra in Lisbon were all secondhand markets that were routinely associated with criminal activity.Footnote 18 Within the Spanish Empire, however, Mexico City's Baratillo appears to have been the most infamous: the eighteenth-century Diccionario de gobierno y legislación de las Indias defines ‘Baratillo’ as a market in Mexico City that had been banned various times because of its trade in stolen jewelry but continued unabated.Footnote 19 No other baratillo seems to have received the attention of a Spanish king or enjoyed the same degree of notoriety. Beyond the “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” and a dedicated subsection in Villarroel's treatise, the market also appears a number of times in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento, considered the first Latin American novel.Footnote 20 Yet, it has received little more than a passing mention from most historians of Mexico City.Footnote 21
The backbone of the Baratillo's trade was in secondhand goods, particularly used clothing, shoes, and iron products, but also small pieces of jewelry, furniture, and books—the types of products we associate with a modern-day flea market. Yet, the lines between new, used, and remanufactured goods blurred easily in the Baratillo's labyrinth of improvised wooden tables and stalls. The market's detractors frequently complained that, due to the deceit of the Baratillo vendors (known as baratilleros), it was impossible to determine the true identity of a particular good. The baratilleros were infamous for “selling one thing for another”: they peddled less expensive maná, or plant oil, for olive oil, and the cheaper Guayaquil cacao for one of the superior varieties from Maracaibo or Caracas. It was, the baratilleros’ opponents claimed, “in this manner that they adulterate everything in order to increase their ill-gotten gain.”Footnote 22
In the Baratillo, it was not only goods that proved difficult to identify properly but also people. Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the market was a veritable melting pot, where men and women of every background bought and sold and where racial and ethnic divisions seemed to dissolve into the daily throngs of vendors and customers. At times, this mixture made authorities anxious. In a scuffle that took place in the market in 1696, when officials were still on edge following the 1692 riot that burned the Plaza Mayor markets and part of the viceregal palace, the city's alcalde del crimen (criminal warden) saw a prisoner snatched from his hands by a group of baratilleros posing as university students. The incident prompted the viceroy to demand that the university's rector enforce a strict dress code for his students so that authorities could easily distinguish them from the riffraff that congregated in the Baratillo, which was adjacent to the university. The list of witnesses in the case attests to the market's diversity: seminary students, a Spanish iron vendor, and a free mulatto vendor were all in the Baratillo at the time and gave testimony to the officials investigating the case.Footnote 23
Unlike food vendors in colonial Mexico City, most baratilleros were men.Footnote 24 Women do appear on virtually every list of vendors in the Baratillo throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they constitute a small fraction of the total. In some cases, such as the drawn-out dispute between ambulatory vendors in the Baratillo and the Mexico City ayuntamiento in 1872, much of which unfolded on the pages of the city's newspapers, those women figured prominently. The vendors highlighted authorities’ callous tactics and aggression toward the baratilleras in order to garner sympathy from the capital's reading public. However, women appear too infrequently in the market's archival record to use the Baratillo as entry point into the gendered cultures of Mexico City's streets—a topic that demands more extensive attention elsewhere.Footnote 25
The Baratillo occupied one of the bottom rungs of colonial Mexico City's commercial hierarchy—a system in which race, gender, and occupation were closely intertwined. Women were involved at every level of colonial commerce except the highest, but were most commonly found—and most visible—in the humbler establishments.Footnote 26 At the top of the pyramid were the members of the Consulado. These were Spaniards who generally arrived in Mexico with little money but ascended through the merchant ranks by first working in, and ultimately acquiring, an import warehouse (almacén). Their stores contained goods from Europe and Asia, shipped to Mexico via Spain or the Philippines, and were worth between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos each. From these stores, the importers provisioned retail merchants in the capital as well as provincial traders. However, as John Kicza notes, it was the merchants who rented stores, or cajones, in and around the Parián marketplace who were the principal retailers of fine imported goods in the capital. These men possessed only one or two cajones, each worth roughly 30,000 to 70,000 pesos. In total, some 200 stores in the capital offered imported goods.Footnote 27
Beneath the cajoneros were the owners of tiendas mestizas and slightly smaller neighborhood grocery stores, alternatively called pulperías or cacahuaterías. These stores were valued anywhere from less than 1,000 pesos each to over 25,000 pesos.Footnote 28 Their owners were generally recent immigrants from Spain who would be considered lower middle class, or near the top of the working class.Footnote 29 At the bottom of this ladder were Mexico City's street vendors—the men and women who operated small stands or tables in the city's public plazas, and ambulatory vendors known as buhoneros or mercachifles. These merchants, who could have been Spanish, Indian, or of mixed-race, were widely disdained by Hispanic elites, who viewed petty commerce as “sordid” because they saw it as a form of manual labor.Footnote 30
For many late colonial writers, including Chreslos Jache, the Baratillo epitomized this vulgar form of commerce, catering to the lowest elements of Mexican society. Yet, the market hosted a remarkably wide range of businesses and neither its vendors nor their customers were exclusively poor. As Juan de Viera, an administrator of Mexico City's Colegio de San Ildefonso, wrote in 1777, the Baratillo Grande was crisscrossed by “streets of shacks or stands,” populated by “every class and quality of person.” There were clocks, glasses, and “thousands of things made of silver,” swords, shields, firearms, harnesses, books, “the finest fabrics,” and shoes “for both plebeians and the most polished people.” Unlike other elite observers, Viera saw not a teeming den of thieves and vagabonds, but a lively bazaar that offered something for everyone.Footnote 31
Archival evidence supports Viera's account: cajones inside the Baratillo Grande generally rented for 200 pesos per year during the second half of the eighteenth century—the same price as stores located in the Parián itself.Footnote 32 Cajones in the Baratillo, including their goods, were worth anywhere from a couple hundred pesos to several thousand.Footnote 33 Vicente Viola, the Genovese owner of a cajón in the Baratillo who died in 1767, sold goods such as mirrors, screens, glasses, and other household goods imported from China and Europe, as well as stockings and woolen clothing. He had two employees, and he owned another store in Chalco, a town about 30 kilometers southeast of Mexico City. The contents of his business in the Baratillo were auctioned for a little over 1,500 pesos after his death.Footnote 34 Some cajones were worth considerably more: Josef Fianca had two cajones in the Baratillo Grande whose combined value in 1780 totaled 25,000 pesos.Footnote 35
Many of the businesses located in the Baratillo were much more humble. An open-air stand, or puesto, rented for around one peso per week in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while vendors selling from tables or baskets would have paid only a couple of reales per week to the ayuntamiento.Footnote 36 Vendors of chía water and prepared foods, usually indigenous women, set up between the stands of the Baratillo Grande and paid little or nothing in rent.Footnote 37 The Baratillo Chico, located outside the Parián in the Plaza Mayor itself, probably catered to a poorer clientele, offering used clothing and basic tools.Footnote 38
Thus, the Baratillo was a commercial institution that offered a dizzying array of products—both new and used, upscale and economical—and engaged actors of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. It was also a site where legal and illegal commercial activities were deeply intertwined. The Baratillo, more than a colonial-era flea market, was the nexus of Mexico City's larger underground economy, where the circuits of secondhand, stolen, counterfeit, contraband, untaxed, or otherwise illicit goods intersected with one another. This shadow economy linked some of the most elite traders in New Spain to some of the lowliest through a far-reaching credit network. Owners of the city's import warehouses were known to sell some of their products, particularly avería (goods damaged in transit to Mexico) to baratilleros and buhoneros. This network linked pulperías, which often doubled as pawn shops, to artisans’ workshops and vendors in the Plaza Mayor. I use the Baratillo as an entry point, and in some cases, a proxy, for these circuits of people and goods, which, by their very nature, left almost no footprint in the historical record. Unlike those shadowy networks, the Baratillo, as a public market under the authority of the municipal government, created a paper trail nearly 300 years long.
A government investigation into the trade in unminted gold jewelry in 1780 reveals the degree to which the Baratillo linked different sectors and players in Mexico City's economy. According to colonial regulations, only licensed master artisans could sell gold and silver pieces and only on Calle San Francisco, the street where Spanish authorities had ordered their workshops to concentrate. Gold jewelry needed to show the quinto stamp, indicating that the 20 percent tax had been levied on it. The regulations also stipulated that all gold jewelry be of 22 quilates, or carats.Footnote 39 Yet this rule was widely ignored, and a variety of retailers, from pulpería owners to vendors in the Baratillo, sold secondhand jewelry, much of which did not meet the 22-carat standard. Royal efforts to reign in illegal reselling began in 1733, when King Philip V ordered all irregular gold and silver pieces weighed and taxed.Footnote 40 In 1746, a viceregal decree banned the sale of “pieces of gold and silver in streets, plazas, tianguises, markets, and mesillas in the Baratillo.”Footnote 41 Then, in 1780, José Antonio Lince González, a member of the Real Audiencia and Mexico City's chief assayer, conducted an investigation into the illegal sale of gold in the Baratillo.
Lince González discovered that a group of men of diverse backgrounds were engaged in the selling of untaxed gold and silver pieces in the Baratillo Grande, inside the Parián. The jewelry was coming mainly from three sources: clandestine workshops; pulperías, where the poor would pawn such pieces in exchange for short-term loans; and the Real Monte de Piedad, the government-run pawnshop established in 1775.Footnote 42 Some of the vendors who sold these pieces were single Spaniards, one a married morisco, and another a married Spanish “notable” who had fallen on hard times. Most were clothing sellers who claimed to trade in small valuables on the side, which is to say, they were not responsible for manufacturing the pieces—they had come into their possession through happenstance. As I will discuss in the section that follows, this was a defense that many vendors in the Baratillo used with authorities, with apparent success. Indeed, Lince González's investigation resulted not in a mass prosecution of baratilleros but a change in government policy: by 1790, Spanish authorities had legalized lower-quality 20-carat gold pieces.Footnote 43
It is tempting to label the shadow economy Lince González discovered an “informal economy,” applying a term from twentieth-century social science to eighteenth-century enterprises.Footnote 44 Indeed, the Baratillo and the semi-permanent and ephemeral street markets scattered around late colonial Mexico City together meet several of the criteria that scholars have used to define the informal economy. As Ray Bromley outlined in 1978, these include “ease of market entry; reliance on indigenous resources; family ownership of enterprises; small scale of operation; labor-intensive and adapted technology; skills acquired outside the formal school system; and unregulated and competitive markets.”Footnote 45
Yet, as Cope has emphasized, the line between formal and informal in eighteenth-century Mexico City was anything but fixed, as ostensibly formal establishments such as pulperías, which were governed by an extensive set of regulations and a guild-like structure, engaged in informal activities such as the trade in unminted gold and silver.Footnote 46 The formal vs. informal distinction further unravels in the Baratillo, where untaxed or irregular goods mixed with patently illicit ones. Stolen clothes, seditious books, and new and used manufactured goods of all kinds circulated alongside one another in the market, and there appears to have been no clear distinction between vendors who sold these different categories of goods.Footnote 47 Scholars have often described the informal economy as comprising economic activities that are extralegal but not antisocial; that is, they fall outside the official regulatory framework but are not generally viewed as dangerous.Footnote 48 While the trade in untaxed gold pieces certainly falls into the former category, the Baratillo also hosted activities that were perceived as more threatening to the social order. Thus, while the twentieth-century concept of the informal economy does prove relevant to this eighteenth-century society, it ultimately fails to capture the complexity of the economic and social exchanges that took place in the Baratillo.Footnote 49
The Baratillo and the Guilds
The Baratillo's entanglement in Mexico City's commercial networks sometimes led to conflicts between its vendors and other merchants and small-scale manufacturers in the capital. Throughout its history, the Baratillo had a particularly contentious relationship with Mexico City's artisan guilds. Indeed, the oldest surviving document that mentions the Baratillo is a 1644 decree that banned the market because it threatened the guilds. In this decree, the viceroy Second Count of Salvatierra claimed that baratilleros were undermining the guild system by selling ornaments, blankets, chairs, and especially iron—both new and used—at prices substantially below those on offer in artisan workshops. The viceroy explained the harm that Baratillo vendors were inflicting on guild members in stark terms: the baratilleros were “leaving them lost and destroyed because . . . enjoying this liberty, they were leaving the guilds with the burden of the alcabala [the royal sales tax] and contributions and expenses of their professions, causing [them] such harm that they are not even able to sustain their families.”Footnote 50 Colonial authorities ordered the Baratillo closed in 1635, 1644, 1689, and 1696, not only because it contributed to what they perceived as a growing crime problem but also because it undermined the economic organization of the colony.Footnote 51 That system favored the monopolies of artisan guilds because, even if they did not provide consumers with the lowest possible prices, those corporations were relatively easy for the government to oversee.
Yet, some of the same regulations that were designed to insulate the guilds from competition also created incentives for people outside the guilds, as well as frustrated journeymen and masters, to circumvent the system. Colonial legislation protected artisanal trades by restricting entry into the different professions and by erecting barriers between artisans and merchants. Only master artisans, certified by examination, could sell the goods they made, and only from their own workshops. The reselling of artisanal manufactures by merchants or anyone else was strictly forbidden, and artisans were likewise prohibited from working in merchants’ shops or forming alliances with them.Footnote 52 Colonial authorities prosecuted the practice of reselling (regatonería) vigorously.Footnote 53 These restrictions served to limit the artisans’ ability to market their wares: they could legally sell their products only to the people who went to their workshops. By breaking the rules and operating clandestinely in the Baratillo, they could tap a much larger market.
The guilds’ internal regulations provided further incentives for its members, particularly journeymen and apprentices, to sell their goods outside the system. Although in theory the guild system offered a means of ascent for poor boys who were able to secure an apprenticeship with an artisan, advance to journeyman, and eventually attain the status of master and open their own workshop, relatively few journeymen actually made that final leap to become masters. The 1788 census reveals that of 1,215 members of the tailor's guild, only 94 were masters, while 698 were journeymen and 423 were apprentices.Footnote 54 As Cope has shown, between 1767 and 1769, an average of just 29 journeymen—from all guilds in the capital—became masters each year. Furthermore, the average age of those who did was 36, indicating that these men spent the better part of two decades working in someone else's shop before they could open one of their own. The costs associated with becoming a master also presented a significant burden for aspirants. Many were reluctant to pay the 6-peso fee for the licensing exam. That amount paled, however, in comparison with the costs associated with opening one's own shop, which included buying a full set of tools—at a cost of 100 pesos or more—and renting or purchasing space for a workshop.Footnote 55
The dense labyrinth of stalls in the Baratillo provided the perfect venue for people looking for a way around the guilds’ rules. Guild officials were well aware of this practice, and, beginning in the first decade of the eighteenth century and continuing for several decades, the veedores (guild overseers) undertook a concerted campaign to root out lawbreakers operating in the Baratillo.Footnote 56 The tailor guild was particularly aggressive. A number of cases brought before the fiel ejecutoría, the organ of Mexico City's ayuntamiento responsible for overseeing the guilds as well as all commercial activity in the capital, reveal the extent of clothes-makers’ concern that the Baratillo was sheltering many of these contraveners.Footnote 57
The prohibition of textile sales outside the guild system dates from a 1613 law barring any person from selling new clothes in “public auctions, tianguises, or anywhere else” under punishment of confiscation of those clothes and a 30-peso fine.Footnote 58 In 1640, the viceroy Marquis of Cadereyta reissued the ban, directing it at the “mestizos, Indians, and mulattos who have as their trade the making and selling of unexamined doublets” in tianguises.Footnote 59 Since the Crown acknowledged that the price of new clothes left them out of reach of the colony's vast poor population, it permitted the sale of used clothing by vendors in and around the Baratillo.Footnote 60 But in the early eighteenth century, the tailor guild complained that vendors were bending, or in some cases openly flouting, the rules by selling new clothes. In 1705 the viceroy Duke of Albuquerque approved the tailor guild's Ordinance 21, which complemented the 1613 law by banning the practice of modifying the appearance of new clothes and reselling them. The ordinance was written to stop the sale of stolen clothes, which vendors would refashion to make them more difficult for authorities to identify.Footnote 61 But authorities were also concerned that street vendors were entering the new clothing market through other channels, and were unfairly competing with the city's tailors.
In early October 1706, Ventura Serrano, an alcalde on the cabildo, and Domingo de la Moya, a veedor for the tailor guild, wrote to Mexico City's corregidor, Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio, expressing their concern about the widespread practice of selling new clothes from stalls in and around the Plaza Mayor.Footnote 62 “Either because of ignorance due to the passage of time [since the 1613 law], or because of the malice of those who know of the prohibition,” they wrote, “one sees in the streets and plazas nothing but a crowd of subjects selling . . . various types of clothing, all new.”Footnote 63 Worse still, many of these vendors were peddling used clothes as if they were new, claiming that they had come directly from Castile, China, or indigenous clothing makers in Mexico, and charging customers accordingly.Footnote 64 Serrano and De la Moya pleaded with Villavicencio for help in ending these abuses—perpetrated in many cases by members of the tailor guild themselves—which were causing such “pernicious and public harm to the common good and that of the guild.”Footnote 65 In these officials’ view, the welfare of the guild was synonymous with that of colonial society as a whole.Footnote 66
When the corregidor failed to respond, Serrano and De la Moya took matters into their own hands and went to the Baratillo and the adjacent Plaza del Volador to carry out a series of raids on clothing sellers they suspected of violating guild ordinances. On October 16, 1706, the officials discovered illegal merchandise in the stands of over a dozen clothing vendors in the two plazas—some of which was new and some of which had been illegally altered or contained imitation silver or gold fibers. Miguel Samudio, one of those apprehended with non-regulation clothing, fought back, taking his case to the court of the fiel ejecutoría. He argued that the clothes the overseers found in his stand were ones he had made for and already sold (for 80 pesos) to the itinerant merchant don Joseph de Rivera. He had merely hung those clothes in his stand in the Plaza Mayor to attract the attention of potential customers. Samudio, as his lawyer Domingo de Córdoba argued in a subsequent petition, had not violated any ordinances because all of the materials in the clothes were new, and the existing rules prohibited only the reuse of old materials in the fashioning of clothes sold as new.Footnote 67
That there was some confusion about the law had not been lost on guild authorities. On March 3, 1706, several months before the confiscation of Samudio's merchandise, a representative of the tailor guild noted in a letter to the Real Audiencia that there had always been disputes between tailors (sastres) and clothing sellers (roperos) and that a new ordinance was needed to clarify who was allowed to sell what type of clothing and where.Footnote 68 That ordinance appears to have been in effect by 1715, when an investigator's report of abuses in the Baratillo cited a rule stipulating that “neither new nor transmuted nor sangrada clothing may be sold in the Baratillo of this city.”Footnote 69
Vendors in the Baratillo had a number of strategies for resisting the veedores’ enforcement efforts. They operated in networks that seem carefully designed to avoid explicit infractions of the law, or to exploit its ambiguities in ways that allowed them to evade punishment, as Samudio had done. For example, in 1729, investigators accused Pedro Velázquez, a Spaniard, of selling three new woolen cloaks in his stand in the Baratillo. Velázquez, however, claimed that two of the cloaks belonged to the mestizo tailor Blas de la Rosa who had asked Velázquez to hold them for him, and that he had purchased only the third.Footnote 70 The practice of a tailor loaning clothes to a baratillero to sell for him was a common one, and seems to have protected the vendor from prosecution since he was not technically the owner of the illicit goods. It even appears in Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento, when Perico, the protagonist, tries to sell a cloak he has stolen from a doctor named Purgante, only to find that the baratillero to whom he tried to sell it was, in fact, an employee of Purgante, and immediately recognized the cloak. Perico assured the man that he had not purchased the cloak, but had been given it by someone else to sell for him.Footnote 71 Velázquez, for his part, assured the veedores that this was the first time he had ever sold a piece of new clothing, having previously dealt only in used pieces.Footnote 72
Yet baratilleros did not limit themselves to defenses based on legal technicalities; instead, those strategies were frequently used in conjunction with pleas for magnanimity from the corregidores who heard the cases on appeal. Felipe Dávila admitted to selling dozens of articles of new clothing in 1715 because he “did not have enough to eat.”Footnote 73 Blas de la Rosa stressed that he was a “poor journeyman” who sold the cloak out of desperation. He also defended the quality of his work: for 10 years he had made “well-conditioned and not sangrada” cloaks as ordered by the veedores, and until now no one had questioned the practice.Footnote 74 Velázquez claimed that, “finding myself a journeyman tailor, poor, and charged with children, I have been obligated to make these cloaks.” He got off with a warning and was ordered to return the cloaks to De la Rosa.Footnote 75
In their petitions to colonial authorities, baratilleros occasionally went on the offense. They asserted their right to make a living by selling new and used goods on the city's streets and plazas, using some of the same language the veedores leveled against them in order to assert the legitimacy and social import of their trade. On the day of Serrano and De la Moya's raid on the Baratillo in 1709, two Spanish roperos wrote to Corregidor Núñez Villavicencio in the name of all those who sold clothing in that market to condemn the tactics of the veedores. Joseph Ramírez, who had been implicated, and Diego Rufino, who had not, claimed that the veedores and alcaldes simply had a grudge against the Baratillo: “They have always tried to destroy it, which has not taken place due to the fact that the Baratillo is clearly and manifestly in the interests of the common good, for the poor supply themselves there for much less than they could if they went to those tailors who for their own interest seek to humiliate us and detract from the public good.” They pleaded with the corregidor to suspend the orders restricting clothing sales so that they could “with all liberty sell in said Baratillo both new and used clothing” and to “notify those alcaldes and veedors that they may not cause us worry or perturb us.”Footnote 76 Indeed, throughout the Baratillo's history, its vendors routinely employed the same rhetoric that elite opponents used to portray the market as a danger to society—whether it was the common good, public utility, or (in the nineteenth century) public health and hygiene—to defend the market's social value.Footnote 77
Taken together, the vendors’ strategies proved remarkably successful. Núñez Villavicencio, the corregidor who presided over the fiel ejecutoría cases in the first decade of the eighteenth century, ultimately sided with all of the roperos who challenged the confiscation of their goods by Domingo de la Moya during the October 1706 raids. These included Miguel Samudio, to whom he ordered that the veedores return both the clothing in question and the 30-peso fine they had collected from him.Footnote 78 In February 1707, Juan Hernández Chapas, a master in the tailor guild with a stand in the Plaza del Volador, successfully argued (again with the help of the lawyer Domingo de Córdova) that no harm could come from selling new clothing in public spaces. He too had his merchandise and his fine returned to him.Footnote 79 In fact, in nearly every case I examined, the accused got at least some of their confiscated clothing back from the authorities.
That the corregidores frequently lightened or reversed the punishments veedores meted out against baratilleros during the first half of the eighteenth century suggests that royal authorities were not especially concerned about the Baratillo during this period. Indeed, after several viceroys and the king himself had ordered the market disbanded in the seventeenth century, the Crown appears to have intervened regarding the Baratillo only once in the eighteenth century, in an episode I will describe below, and it did not repeat its earlier attempts to close the market. In this period, the Baratillo provided a much more tangible and immediate threat to the guilds, whose members stood the most to lose from petty street commerce, than it did to the colonial state.
Historians who have studied New Spain's artisan guilds have generally traced their decline to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Bourbon reformers sought to break up those monopolies in an effort to promote industry and trade.Footnote 80 Yet the guild structure was already showing signs of weakness in the first decades of the eighteenth century, as it proved incapable of insulating guild members from outside competition. Thus, decades before there was a concerted attempt by elites to challenge the guilds, those bodies encountered consistent pressure from below. Although they enjoyed a middling status, above that of laborers and the working poor, and a common identity based on shared skills and corporate membership, artisans’ position was far from secure.Footnote 81 Even those craftsmen lucky enough to become masters and establish their own workshops sometimes operated side businesses in the Baratillo, or else saw their businesses suffer because of others who did.
Merchants and Vendors in the Plaza Mayor
Artisans were not the only group that felt threatened by the Baratillo. The storeowners, or cajoneros, of the Plaza Mayor also mounted a sustained campaign against the Baratillo during the first half of the eighteenth century. These merchants repeatedly complained to colonial authorities that baratilleros and street hawkers were flouting the law by selling goods that only they, as purveyors of fine imported goods, had the authority to retail. On July 30, 1709, don Bacilio de Ribera wrote to the viceroy of New Spain in the name of the Plaza Mayor merchants, expressing their concern that stall owners in that plaza were robbing the cajoneros of their clients, hurting sales, and depriving the city of much-needed income by evading rents and taxes. Many baratilleros, he claimed, had begun to sell the same products offered in the cajones—goods that the cajoneros believed they had the exclusive right to retail. Visitors to the city were no longer shopping at the their stores but going directly to the stalls of the Baratillo. These vendors, according to Bacilio de Ribera, did not pay any of the taxes levied on the cajoneros, and were thus competing unfairly for their business.Footnote 82
Tensions between vendors in the Baratillo and the cajoneros continued to rise until they finally came to a head in 1724. On January 13 of that year, Juan de Dios Anzures, a lawyer writing on behalf of the cajoneros, complained to Viceroy Juan de Acuna that baratilleros and ambulatory vendors were wreaking havoc on their businesses, causing a significant loss of income and contributing to the general disorder of the city.Footnote 83 They were peddling items such as imported British linen and silver plate, goods that he claimed should have fallen under the exclusive domain of the members of Mexico City's merchant guild—the Consulado. He reminded the viceroy that the Baratillo, which, he pointed out, was technically banned by royal decrees from the previous century, was supposed to be the marketplace for used clothing, not for new products from Castile and China.Footnote 84
The merchants also believed that the baratilleros’ infringement on the traditional preserve of the Consulado was also putting their own good name in jeopardy. “There is not an Indian, mulato, mestizo or any of the unidentifiable castas that is not or does not want to be a merchant,” one petitioner lamented.Footnote 85 Mercaderes (merchants) and mercancías (merchandise), he wrote, were fast becoming indistinguishable from mercachifles (ambulatory vendors), and artificios (fraudulent goods). The true merchants were “honorable” men who held membership in the Consulado and had a personal wealth of at least ten to twelve thousand pesos. The trade that these men practiced was of a completely different order from the “vulgar” work of the baratilleros, who “expel[led] from their commerce the good faith that is the foundation and the principal dogma of the Merchants’ Institute,” as the Consulado was also known.Footnote 86 One writer summarized the cajoneros’ argument by explaining that although street vending “seems to be an honest and virtuous application for the many men occupied in this type of commerce,” in reality it only “simulates a licit occupation, [hiding] their lack of work ethic and laziness.”Footnote 87 The cajoneros argued that the difference between merchants and street vendors needed to be formalized by restricting the use of the words mercader and mercancía to members of the Consulado.Footnote 88
To restore order to the Plaza Mayor markets and repair the damaged reputation of the merchant profession, the cajoneros recommended two remedies. First, the colonial administration should revert to its earlier practice of issuing licenses to purveyors of imported goods, as it had done in the seventeenth century. These permits helped ensure that the government received its alcabala income (which the Consulado collected until the tax farm was abolished in 1754) and that mixed-bloods (“hombres del color quebrado”) could not participate in this elite trade.Footnote 89 In this new missive, the author expressed indignation that “in a City so illustrious as Mexico City is today . . . there are in the occupation of merchant subjects as low as mulattos, negros, mestizos and other champurros [mixed bloods].”Footnote 90 Just as in the seventeenth-century prohibitions on selling new clothing in the streets, the cajoneros blamed New Spain's non-white population for the infractions, even though, as we have seen, many baratilleros in fact identified as Spaniards.
The second solution, and the one that became the focus of the cajoneros’ efforts as the matter wound its way through the colonial bureaucracy, was the outright abolishment of the Baratillo and the removal of mercachifles from the city's streets. Mateo de Ayssa, Mexico City's procurador at the time, was firmly on the side of the cajoneros. In a letter dated May 19, 1724, he expressed his intention to “extinguish” the Baratillo once and for all, and to ban ambulatory vendors, as the city of Zacatecas had done with apparent success a decade earlier.Footnote 91 On June 30, 1725, the cajoneros seemed to get what they were after: Francisco Romero Zapata, an official whose title remains unknown but was perhaps a member of the Real Audiencia, ordered that the Baratillo be disbanded and removed from the Plaza Mayor.Footnote 92
Unfortunately for the cajoneros, Romero Zapata did not have the final say on this matter. For some reason, possibly because of Dios Anzures's death during the course of the proceedings, the case stalled.Footnote 93 On June 22, 1727, the Spanish king once again became directly involved in the fate of the Baratillo when he penned a letter to Viceroy Acuna demanding that he make a decision regarding the fate of the market.Footnote 94 At this point the archival trail goes cold, and the viceroy's verdict is unknown—either because there was none and the matter faded from view, or simply because the documents recording his decision never made it into the file. However, given that no evidence exists that the Baratillo disappeared at any point in the eighteenth century, we can safely assume that the merchants’ plot to have it eradicated failed, or at least did not have any lasting impact.
While Spanish officials sometimes expressed a preference for wealthier merchants in the Plaza Mayor, such policies were by no means consistent over time. When King Charles II ordered the construction of the Parián, originally called the Alcaicería, in 1694, after the 1692 riot had destroyed the Plaza Mayor markets, suppressing the Baratillo figured prominently in his rationale. “With the greater concourse of Merchants,” he wrote, “the excesses of those that in this city are called zaramullos of the Baratillo will be reigned in, and the Plaza will become more beautiful, safer, and the rents more stable.”Footnote 95 But Bourbon officials, at least until the tenure of Viceroy Revillagigedo II, made little attempt to enforce that decree. Their approach to the Baratillo was more typically characterized by ambivalence and inaction than by regulatory zeal.
The cajoneros who took aim at the Baratillo in the eighteenth century positioned themselves as practitioners of the elite art of commerce, as merchants defending an honorable profession from pollution by the vulgar classes. Yet, it is unlikely that the men who signed the petitions seeking to outlaw the Baratillo and ambulatory vending were actually members of the Consulado. To gain entrance to the merchant guild, the sole legal importer of overseas goods into Mexico from its incorporation in 1592 until 1778, merchants needed to be at least 25 years old and own their own wholesale warehouse that dealt exclusively with imported merchandise. Yet as Kicza has noted, Mexico City's 1816 commercial census reveals that some 150 different merchants owned the Parián's 180 stores, and few of them also owned warehouses, suggesting that many of these men would not have qualified to join the merchant guild. The Consulado's limited membership (between 100 and 200, depending on the era) also supports that conclusion.Footnote 96
Cajoneros and almaceneros, then, probably constituted two separate social groups, with the former rarely becoming the latter. Cajoneros were, in reality, closer in status to the owners of pulperías and tiendas mestizas than they were to the overseas merchants who owned the warehouses. Successful cajoneros were able to buy only small rural properties, not the large haciendas in which almaceneros often invested their fortunes. Others did not even own their own homes.Footnote 97
Thus, the language contained in the cajoneros’ petitions against mercachifles and baratilleros reveals the insecurities of an aspirational, middling group of merchants. Their rhetorical strategy was, in all likelihood, an appeal to the Consulado merchants who exercised significant influence in colonial government.Footnote 98 By highlighting the baratilleros’ challenge to the honor of the merchant profession, the cajoneros were defending their own relatively tenuous position in the commercial hierarchy of colonial Mexico City. They were attempting to open a social distance between themselves and the vendors of the Baratillo, even though the economic one was small or even nonexistent. Their businesses might not have been much more substantial than some of the larger stands in the Baratillo Grande, such as the ones owned by Miguel Samudio and Josef Fianca.Footnote 99 Perhaps just as telling, the records show that a number of baratilleros used the honorific title “don.” Although this term was of declining significance by the eighteenth century, its appearance nonetheless hints at the baratilleros’ aspirations.Footnote 100 Thus, the cajoneros of the Plaza Mayor, like the members of the artisan guilds who waged a parallel attack on the Baratillo during the same period, saw both their economic livelihoods and their social status threatened by the vendors of the capital's most notorious thieves’ market.
As Marie Francois has shown, the downward mobility of the white middle classes worried the Bourbon government in the eighteenth century and led to the establishment of the Monte de Piedad in 1775.Footnote 101 The urban commercial sector was an arena where socio-racial hierarchies were particularly vulnerable. Although merchants did take a number of steps to mitigate the inherent risks of overseas trade, one shipwreck, fire, or particularly bad bet could nonetheless reverse their fortunes, and wealth was notoriously difficult to maintain across generations in colonial Mexico. The sense that merchants struggled to hold onto their fortunes was encapsulated by the Spanish proverb: “Father a merchant, son a gentleman, grandson a beggar”—a common refrain in Mexico.Footnote 102 Competition in the less-prestigious retail sector was intense, and bankruptcies were common among cajoneros and pulperos, who relied heavily on credit from the capital's importers.Footnote 103
At the same time, as Cope has previously shown for Mexico City and Jane Mangan for Potosí, merchant occupations offered avenues of ascent for non-Europeans, people of mixed race, and women.Footnote 104 These possibilities stemmed from the relative openness of the profession: while the Consulado had strict entry requirements, the lower rungs of the commercial hierarchy did not. As the cajoneros correctly pointed out, virtually anyone could call him or herself a “comerciante,” the general term for anyone who owned a mercantile establishment. The 1790 census lists 1,384 comerciantes—a count that far exceeds the 100 to 200 import merchants with membership in the Consulado.Footnote 105 Men and women of any ethnic background except African were legally permitted to operate pulperías.Footnote 106 Street vending was particularly easy to enter, with little formal regulation and low capital requirements. This instability led the cajoneros to attempt to introduce new legislation restricting entry into the merchant profession, while guild officials sought a more rigorous enforcement of existing laws protecting their own businesses.
One way that merchants and craftsmen sought to distance themselves from petty vendors was by equating higher prices with better morals: they portrayed the goods in which licensed artisans and “respectable” merchants trafficked as more legitimate because of their higher price, while they reviled the “cheapness” of the goods that street vendors peddled. This theme is threaded through colonial documents on the Baratillo. King Charles II worried in a 1688 letter to the viceroy that silver jewelry pieces worth 20 pesos sold for six or eight in the Baratillo.Footnote 107 In 1713, vendors of linen and ribbons in the Plaza Mayor complained about street sellers who were offering the same goods at “very low prices, for being avería.” And in one of their petitions, the cajoneros accused ambulatory vendors of doing nothing but wandering the city trying to sell some “worthless good.”Footnote 108 To the cajoneros, the low prices the baratilleros offered could also signify that the goods were acquired illegally, and thus assist the vendors in quickly disposing of them and avoiding detection.Footnote 109
While retail trade and artisanal manufacturing may have offered possibilities of upward mobility for men, and occasionally women, born outside of privilege, by the eighteenth century both professions were increasingly unstable. The vendors of the Baratillo and other street markets challenged both the economic underpinnings of those professions and the social status that came with them, forcing merchants and artisans to retaliate by attempting to erect racial, moral, and legal barriers between themselves and petty vendors.
Baratilleros and Their Patrons
One group that did not mount a concerted campaign against the Baratillo in the eighteenth century, however, was the Consulado. On the contrary, owners of Mexico City's almacenes had extensive dealings with the vendors of the Baratillo. These relationships help explain the Baratillo's persistence through the end of the colonial period, despite its official prohibition in the seventeenth century and the attempts by artisan guilds and retail merchants to quash it in the eighteenth. The evidence that wealthy traders had economic interests in the Baratillo dates to the end of the seventeenth century. On August 14, 1693, the alcaldes Gerónimo Chacón, Francisco de Sarassa, and Manuel Suárez Muñoz wrote to Mexico City's corregidor to discuss plans for the reorganization of the Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot. They stressed the need to eliminate the Baratillo permanently, blaming the failure of previous prohibitions on the fact that there were “so many interested parties in this disorder and abuse of the Baratillo.”Footnote 110 In a subsequent letter, Chacón clarified that it was some of the city's wealthiest merchants who were helping to sustain this commerce. He urged his superiors to pass a decree banning trade between warehouse owners and baratilleros and instituting a remarkable 1,000-peso fine for each offense.Footnote 111
The relationships between baratilleros and wealthier merchants continued into the eighteenth century. Spanish clothing sellers in the Baratillo defended their trade in a 1713 petition by asserting that “we work only with almaceneros and mercaderes, without buying anything stolen or from anyone suspicious.” The provenance of their merchandise, according to the baratilleros, was both legitimate and respectable. The petitioners took care to point out that everything they bought from those merchants they bought on credit, which, they emphasized, kept them in a dependent and abusive relationship with their patrons—an attempt to both deflect blame for any illicit goods that might have come into the vendors’ possession and elicit sympathy from colonial officials.Footnote 112 The viceroy Duke of Linares also referenced the ties that bound small- and large-scale merchants, writing in 1716 that importers provided the baratilleros with items from their stores to sell in smaller quantities on the street.Footnote 113 In a petition to the Merchant Tribunal in 1725, the cajoneros of the Plaza Mayor complained that baratilleros were buying the “rotting” goods of the almacenes to sell in the city's streets, plazas, corridors, and homes.Footnote 114
On at least one occasion, the Consulado found it advantageous to champion their connections to baratilleros and other petty street vendors before colonial authorities. In a 1753 petition, members of the Consulado urged the Crown to repeal the alcabala on the resale of goods purchased within the capital, a tax that had recently been reintroduced.Footnote 115 The Consulado argued that the tax was stifling commerce in the kingdom and that it was particularly harmful to poor Indians who were selling the essential goods, such as shoes and candles, on which this tax was imposed. Don Juan de Sierra Uruñuela, the author of the petition, claimed to represent not only the members of the merchant guild but also “the owners of the cajones, tiendas, cacahuaterías, vinaterías [wine stores], and the rest of the cajoncillos and mesillas that are rigorously comprised by, and that can be called, commerce.”Footnote 116 In this statement, the Consulado broadened the meaning of commerce to include the selling of goods “by hand in the Baratillo and outside of it by the buhoneros, canastilleros [those who sold from baskets], and others that trade in the streets and plazas.”Footnote 117 This language stands in stark contrast to the words the cajoneros had used 30 years earlier in an attempt to distance themselves from petty traders and underscores the absence of precise definitions for the terms “comerciante” and “comercio.”
The Consulado's motivations, of course, were far from selfless. Their principal concern was that they be able to buy goods within Mexico City for their warehouses and resell them to the small shopkeepers and stall owners they claimed to represent in their appeal. Nonetheless, the merchants of the Consulado found that the utility of grouping themselves with street vendors and shopkeepers outweighed any potential harm to their honor or reputations. The strategy was a success: in 1756, the Crown repealed the resale tax on most goods.Footnote 118 The Consulado's actions illustrate how Mexico City's retail economy fostered economic relationships that transcended class lines and were often based more on pragmatism than racial or cultural affinities.Footnote 119
Another corporation that benefited from the Baratillo's continuing existence was the Mexico City ayuntamiento. The municipal government obtained its revenue from two sources: propios, rents derived from municipally owned properties, and arbitrios, portions of royal taxes that were passed on to the municipality. Among the ayuntamiento's assets, markets yielded some of the most reliable income, contributing as much as 50 percent of the government's annual tax receipts during the colonial era.Footnote 120 While the Baratillo was not the market that provided the largest tax revenues (typically the Parián was), its contribution was far from negligible. In 1791, the city collected a total of 7,146 pesos from the stands located in the Baratillo Grande, in the central patio of the Parián, and those in the Plaza Mayor—just under 5 percent of the ayuntamiento's gross revenue that year.Footnote 121 The ayuntamiento suffered from frequent budget shortfalls and members of the cabildo were loathe to eliminate any asset that generated revenue, even a site as disreputable as the Baratillo.Footnote 122 Indeed, one market administrator, following Viceroy Revillagigedo II's removal of the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1791, sought to establish a new Baratillo in the relatively remote Plaza del Factor precisely because it would attract new vendors and customers to the area and boost rental income to the city.Footnote 123 The ayuntamiento also saw legal barriers to eliminating the Baratillo. When a regidor on the cabildo attempted to restrict the Baratillo's commerce in 1777 in order to curb the illegal iron trade, he was rebuffed by the market administrator, who stated that the ayuntamiento lacked the legal authority to do so because of the 1611 royal decree designating the Plaza Mayor as a commercial space. Besides, the market administrator added, even if the city shut down the Baratillo, “the crooks would never lack a place to go to buy and sell.”Footnote 124
Conclusion
Over the past quarter century, a consensus has emerged among historians of eighteenth-century Mexico City that the period saw a concerted effort by the city's elite to create physical and moral boundaries between themselves and a new, multiracial underclass. Studies by Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Pamela Voekel, and, more recently, Sharon Bailey Glasco, have focused on the efforts of Bourbon administrators to civilize and control the urban masses through decrees regulating popular behavior and through ambitious public works projects that changed the social and cultural geography of the city. According to the prevailing view, these actions led to a culture clash between modernizing bureaucrats and popular groups that clung to traditional practices, and created new, oppositional identities for both elites and plebeians.Footnote 125
Yet a careful reexamination of the period, focusing in particular on the Baratillo and the capital's street economies, reveals a more complex reality. Although some elites, such as Villarroel and Chreslos Jache, author of the “Ordenanzas del Baratillo,” made no attempt to disguise their disgust for plebeians, New Spain's upper classes were far from united in their attempts to alter the physical and cultural worlds of the poor. Rather, the most sweeping reforms were the initiatives of a handful of zealous viceroys, particularly Revillagigedo II, whose term (1789–1794) was uniquely ambitious. Indeed, both Voekel and Bailey Glasco focus heavily on Revillagigedo's five-year term as viceroy. The viceroys’ projects, however, often ran counter to the interests of local elites, and, in some cases, even the desires of the Spanish Crown.Footnote 126
Those tensions came to a head under Revillagigedo's tenure. The Mexico City cabildo made its frustrations with the viceroy known to the Crown in Revillagigedo's juicio de residencia—the formal review of Spanish officials at the ends of their terms. The case files reveal that members of the Creole-dominated city council resented not only Revillagigedo's autocratic style of governance but also the broader Europeanizing project that he and other Spanish viceroys sought to implement in New Spain. “The practice[s] that [are] observed in Madrid and in other capitals of Europe,” they wrote, “are not adaptable to Mexico.”Footnote 127 No project riled the cabildo as much as Revillagigedo's redesign of the Plaza Mayor in the early 1790s—the most dramatic reengineering of the physical and social geography of the capital in the eighteenth century. He moved the city's principal food market from the Plaza Mayor to the adjacent Plaza del Volador, and banished all street vendors, including those of the Baratillo, from the main square. Only the Parián marketplace was permitted to remain.Footnote 128 The goal was to complete the project that the Hapsburgs had begun a century earlier, after the 1692 riot: to transform the Plaza Mayor into a dignified, elite space, worthy of its location at the center of Spain's wealthiest overseas colony. The cabildo, however, disagreed with the very premise of that project, arguing that there was nothing wrong with the old plaza, where “every class of people moved comfortably about.”Footnote 129 What Revillagigedo saw as chaos, the cabildo viewed as a site that adequately served the needs of a diverse population.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Mexico City's Baratillo—the embodiment of elite fears about racial miscegenation, crime, and license—also benefited from elite support. Baratilleros were consistently able to evade punishment by exploiting loopholes in the law, leaning on their connections to well-placed individuals and corporations in the capital, and appealing to the sympathies of colonial officials. They enjoyed the tacit and at times even the explicit support of both the Consulado, whose members profited from selling the baratilleros’ goods on credit, and the ayuntamiento. Perhaps most tellingly, after banning the market several times in the seventeenth century, colonial authorities did not do so once in the eighteenth. Although the Baratillo was removed from the Plaza Mayor as part of Revillagigedo II's reorganization of the main square, I found no decree banning the Baratillo outright, and the market was reconstituted in the Plaza del Factor, several blocks to the west, only a few years later.Footnote 130
The interlocking histories of Mexico City's most infamous thieves’ market, its import and retail merchants, the artisan guilds, and the municipal government invite a reinvestigation of urban society in eighteenth-century Mexico. Further research into how economic necessity, or the simple pragmatics of business, complicated already fragile social and racial hierarchies will offer us a more nuanced understanding of this era. Focusing our attention at the level of the street—where tensions between activist officials and savvy vendors, men and women, and elites, plebeians, and middling folk all played out in public view—offers a unique vantage point for understanding how these actors related to one another and to the world in which they lived.
