of vagabonds, thieves, and frustrated artisans and peddlers of every racial background, was the perfect site for plotters to hatch their next rebellion.
The Baratillo represented everything that Spanish authorities feared in colonial society: the indiscriminate mixing of men and women from every class and calidad—many of whom engaged in illicit and immoral activities under the cover of the market’s jumble of stalls. Yet even the 1692 riot and the sweeping redesign of the Plaza Mayor markets that it precipitated did not lead to the elimination of the Baratillo. If anything, the market only became more vibrant in the aftermath of the riot. So why did it prove so difficult for authorities to eradicate a trade they all seemed to agree was a grave threat to the rule of law? Answering that question requires a deeper examination of the ways the Baratillo was embedded in Mexico City’s economy, politics, and society.
A PLACE TO REMEDY THEIR MISERY
When Mexico City residents awoke on March 30, 1696, three days after the incident with González de Castro, the Baratillo had disappeared from the Plaza Mayor. The market was far from vanquished, however. Just three days later, a new decree permitted used clothing vendors back in the plaza.70 Though there are no other sources documenting the reestablishment of the Baratillo in the next few years, it was substantial enough by December 1700 that Francisco Cameros, the Plaza Mayor’s asentista, or lessee, had reorganized its vendors, putting sellers of ribbons and ruanes—a type of cotton cloth made in the city of Ruan, France—in the center area of the new alcaicería, leaving the market for second-hand goods in the Plaza Mayor itself.71 These twin Baratillos came to be known as the Baratillo Grande and the Baratillo Chico, and remained in those locations until the end of the eighteenth century. Despite several viceregal and royal decrees banning the market over the previous decade, the imposition of the death penalty for anyone who defied those orders, and hundreds of pages of correspondence dedicated to preventing its reestablishment, the Baratillo remained a fixture in the Plaza Mayor for nearly another hundred years—far outlasting Mexico’s Habsburg rulers. The Baratillo’s longevity stemmed not only from the perseverance of its vendors, whose livelihoods depended on their continued defiance of royal decrees, but also from more unlikely sources of support: members of the capital’s elite.
Throughout the Baratillo’s history, Mexico City residents’ disdain for the market was tempered by their sympathy for its vendors and customers. Those conflicting sentiments are apparent in the deliberations that took place in 1689, after the Crown asked Galve and the Audiencia for advice on what to do about the market. On November 14, 1689, the members of the Audiencia weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the Baratillo before ultimately deciding to disband it. The report opens by describing the market as a place where the poor could “remedy their misery” by selling their “little jewels and cheap trinkets.” It was an institution where, they observed, the “immense number of needy” in New Spain found recourse for their poverty.72 In a separate investigation in 1693, the Audiencia noted that “Indians and many others” bought and sold in the market each day, where stolen goods were available at irresistibly low prices. In other words, there was significant popular demand for the Baratillo’s offerings.73
But the market also provided material benefits to middling and wealthier residents of Mexico City, and those connections were instrumental in the market vendors’ ability to continually defy eviction orders. In the summer of 1693, after Viceroy Galve had complained that previous decrees banning the Baratillo had merely fueled its growth, three officials on the criminal court sought to find out why those orders had proved so ineffective. The officials made a vague reference to the “many interested parties in this disorder and abuse.”74 One of those men, the alcalde del crimen Gerónimo Chacón, clarified the meaning of that phrase in a subsequent letter to the Crown. He argued that the government needed to issue a decree prohibiting “any merchant who has an almacén [import warehouse], or store from selling linen, silk, thread, paper, or other goods to any baratillero,” or face a fine of one thousand pesos for each offense. In Chacón’s view, it was not only the city’s destitute who were sustaining the Baratillo but also some of its most elite merchants—only the wealthiest of whom owned an almacén. Those men were providing the baratilleros with merchandise to sell on the street. Chacón also laid blame with the city’s master artisans who made “stirrups, brakes, spurs, candelabras, and other similar things.” By trading with vendors in the Baratillo, those artisans flouted colonial regulations that stipulated that artisans could sell their manufactures only from their own workshops.75 Baratilleros also worked with ambulatory vendors. Chacón sought to ban all petty street vendors from the plaza, “because the buhoneros that are vulgarly called mercachifles on the street lend their hand to the baratilleros and mesilleros of the plaza.”76 The Baratillo thus formed part of a commercial network that spanned from the highest echelons of Mexico City’s mercantile hierarchy to the lowest.
In redesigning the Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, colonial—which is to say, royal—officials were unanimous in their desire to keep the Baratillo out of the plaza. But they were also cognizant of the challenges involved in realizing that goal. The ties between elite and petty vendors in the Plaza Mayor markets were substantial. Indeed, the cajoneros, or store owners, of the Plaza Mayor agreed to help finance the construction of the alcaicería in 1693 only if the local government allowed small traders to sell in the spaces between the cajones. Petty vendors—particularly those that sold fruits and vegetables—had long engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the cajoneros; the vendors paid rent to the cajoneros in exchange for a shaded space to sell their goods while the cajoneros benefited from both that rental income and the additional foot traffic the food vendors drew to their stores.77
Mexico City’s Ayuntamiento also may have been reluctant to enforce the Crown’s ban on the Baratillo. Although no member of the Ayuntamiento seems to have spoken out in support of the market in the period immediately following the riot, the city council had previously defended the Baratillo when royal officials sought to shutter it. The Duke of Albuquerque, viceroy of New Spain from 1653 to 1660, convinced the Ayuntamiento to clear the Baratillo and other freestanding stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1658, but only after offering the Ayuntamiento a small share of the royal tax on pulque sales in the city to make up for the lost rent. The arrangement lasted for only a decade.78 Much of the baratilleros’ merchandise may have been stolen or otherwise illicit, but the vendors paid rent to the municipal government to ply their wares in the Plaza Mayor—and this was income the Ayuntamiento needed.
Following the destruction of the cajones and mesillas of the Plaza Mayor in the 1692 fire, local officials were scrambling to make up the lost revenue. Without the rental income from those businesses, the city was hemorrhaging more than ten thousand pesos per year.79 Markets were by far the Ayuntamiento’s greatest source of revenue in the late seventeenth century: between 1682 and 1687, rent from puestos, mesillas, and cajones constituted more than half of the municipal government’s propios for that period.80 So local officials may have resisted royal attempts to remove any rent-paying vendors from the Plaza Mayor. In the summer of 1693, the city’s corregidor (a royal official, but one who sat on the city council), Teobaldo Gorráez, pushed back against the Audiencia’s efforts to clear the plaza of all the mesilleros and buhoneros, arguing that the city simply could not afford to lose the rent those vendors paid to the Ayuntamiento. He also reminded the members of the Audiencia who sought to ban street vending altogether that “selling on the streets is done in Madrid and all great places.”81
Although local and royal officials initially seemed to agree on the need for a drastically redesigned Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, that consensus masked deep and longstanding tensions between the Ayuntamiento and the Crown. The city council, dominated by American-born Creoles, was fiercely protective of its autonomy and its purview over local affairs. Public markets—particularly the ones located in the Plaza Mayor—were among the body’s most prized possessions because of the steady revenue they produced. The different branches of government in colonial Mexico City had very different visions and objectives for the city’s main square: while peninsular officials
