which authorities had placed there “to terrorize the baratilleros,” nearly causing the whole plaza to go up in flames as it had four years earlier. The interim viceroy of New Spain, Juan Ortega y Montañéz, perhaps mindful of his predecessor’s absence during the 1692 riot (Galve supposedly hid in the Convent of San Francisco while the plaza burned), left the palace that evening to personally oversee the efforts to restore order in the market and apprehend the aggressors.53
The incident produced a flurry of correspondence as officials attempted to determine what, exactly, had happened that day and who was responsible. The viceroy, who served simultaneously as archbishop of Mexico, became engaged in a heated, months-long exchange with the rector of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, Juan de Palacios. The viceroy was furious that a group of students preparing to join the clergy had acted with such “grave indecency”—men who in their hair and clothing styles “imitated their inferiors.”54 Ortega y Montañéz complained that, “in their clothes and long hair these men looked secular, profane, anything but disciples.”55 Given their appearance and comportment, how could Suárez and the alcaldes of the criminal court have known that their attackers were students? Ortega y Montañéz urged the rector to adopt stricter dress codes for his students to avoid this type of confusion in the future. He also reminded Palacios of the entrance requirements that he expected the rector to uphold: no one whose parents or grandparents had appeared before the Inquisition, nor anyone who had “any note of infamy” attached to his name could enter the university. Most importantly, blacks, mulattos, chinos, and slaves of any ethnicity were strictly prohibited so that “the evil races do not pervert those of a better nature.” The viceroy was careful to make an exception for Indians, “who, as free vassals of His Majesty can and should be admitted”—an opportunity that existed on paper but in practice was rarely extended.56
As the investigation into the student uprising progressed in the spring of 1696, it became increasingly unclear whether the instigators were, in fact, students. Eyewitness testimony at first confirmed Suárez’s initial impression that his attackers attended the university, but other witnesses were less sure of the men’s identity. Both Juan de Morales, a Spanish iron vendor in the Baratillo, and Andrés Martínez, a free mulatto who also sold in the market, stated that they could not see well enough to say for sure whether the men were students. Martínez noted that the vagabonds who lingered around the Baratillo often “took the name of students in order to commit similar crimes … and get away with them.” Fernando Suárez, another vendor, echoed this last point, telling officers from the criminal court that he doubted the offenders attended the university because he had never before seen students “attempting to impede Justice,” as those who freed the prisoner had done on March 27.57 Within a few months of the incident, Spanish authorities had determined that the offenders were not students after all, but were more likely vendors in the Baratillo.58
The March 1696 uprising elicited a quick response from the colonial government. On March 30, three days after the incident, Viceroy Ortega y Montañéz reissued the order banning the Baratillo, this time printing a proclamation that was read aloud and posted around the city. The edict demanded that the Baratillo be “uprooted, banished, and exterminated” from the Plaza Mayor and everywhere else in the city, and that all baratilleros remove their stands from the plaza within two days or face the confiscation and burning of their merchandise. Any vendor who continued to conduct business after this period would now face the death penalty, a significantly harsher punishment than what Galve had ordered in 1689, and an extraordinary measure to prevent the reestablishment of a street market, given the Spanish government’s general aversion to capital punishment. Ortega y Montañéz also gave the taverns surrounding the Plaza Mayor two days to relocate to the adjacent Plaza Volador. The Plaza Mayor, apart from the merchants’ shops in the alcaicería that was then under construction, would serve from that point forward only for vendors of glass, gravestones (for the adjacent cemetery), and fruits and vegetables. Stands there would not be allowed to have roofs made of the reed matting that had helped spread the fire of 1692; they could only be covered by a canvas, and were forbidden from having sides of any kind (so authorities could see what was happening inside).59 Ortega y Montañéz ordered the alcaldes del crimen to begin making regular rounds in the Plaza Mayor to ensure that “there is not the same amount of combustible material that can so quickly and effectively cause a fire.”60
It is difficult to avoid reading a double meaning into these words, for in replacing the more “combustible” stalls of vendors selling used ironware and gold and silver trinkets, the viceroy was also taking steps to avoid the kind of social combustion that had left the palace partially in ruins a few years earlier. The incident of March 1696 made it all too clear to Spanish authorities that despite being located directly under their noses, the Plaza Mayor was still a chaotic and largely unsupervised bazaar, where colonial subjects of every class and ethnic background intermingled. The confusion over the identities of the men involved in the scuffle only reinforced the viceroy’s concern that in the Baratillo social and racial hierarchies dissolved and left in their place a great mass of people who were indistinguishable from one another. The backgrounds of the witnesses who testified in the 1696 case attest to the diverse composition of the market: Indians, mestizos, mulattos, and poor Spaniards all bought and sold in the Baratillo. Authorities viewed the mingling of students with other colonial subjects in public spaces with particular suspicion. Even before the 1692 riot, Church officials had prohibited anyone wearing a habit (including students) from entering the Baratillo.61 Then, just two days after the riot in Mexico City, students led an uprising in Guadalajara. And in 1693, the Crown issued a decree prohibiting Indians and students from meeting with one another.62 Upon learning of the 1696 uprising, King Charles II reissued many of the same orders from 1692, again focusing on the mingling of Indians and non-Indians in the center of the city and on the Baratillo’s continued existence as threats to public order. In the same breath, the Crown decreed that “the Indians who live dispersed in the center of the city and in the houses of Spaniards must return to their barrios … and that the concourse that is called the Baratillo cease completely.”63 The king made clear that a “commerce so pernicious and prejudicial to good customs and the public cause” had no business occupying such a privileged site.64
The instability Mexico City experienced in the 1690s could scarcely have come at a worse time for the Spanish Crown. By many historians’ reckoning, the end of the seventeenth century saw Spain at its weakest. Wounded by expensive European wars, uprisings in Spain, and pirate attacks along the coasts of its American possessions, including New Spain, the Spanish government was ill prepared to deal with a major rebellion in Mexico.65 Those conditions created a palpable insecurity among Spanish elites in Mexico City. More than any other period before the outbreak of Miguel Hidalgo’s revolution in 1810, the years following the 1692 riot saw colonial authorities living in fear of a generalized Indian or casta rebellion. Besides the uprising in Guadalajara, in which the crowd threw stones at members of the Audiencia, a riot had also broken out in Tlaxcala, where six thousand Indians had sacked the municipal palace only days after the riot in Mexico City.66
The situation was scarcely calmer four years later. Soon after the March 27, 1696, incident in the Baratillo, colonial officials learned of a meeting of potential conspirators against the Crown in the Jesús Nazareno Plaza. The Mexico City corregidor received word on April 30 that a group had congregated there to plan a revolt in the capital once the Spanish fleet had left Veracruz for Spain. More troubling still, officials also heard that Indians in the pueblos (indigenous villages) of San Juan and Santa Clara were hiding guns in their homes in preparation for the rebellion.67 Viceroy Ortega y Montañéz responded by issuing a decree in May 1696 that prohibited any person, regardless of social status, from buying, selling, or carrying small arms in Mexico City.68 Any place where a group of people, particularly individuals from different social or ethnic groups, congregated was a dangerous one. Market plazas, unique in their attraction for men and women from all walks of life, posed a particular threat. As François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century French humanist, had suggested a century earlier, the social mixing that occurred in the marketplace provided the ideal location
