officials benefited from the heterodox commerce that filled the plaza and often resisted efforts to reform it. The baratilleros were not up against a unified colonial state but a highly fractious one, where official decrees concealed deep disagreements within and between governing institutions in Mexico City.
CONCLUSION
The 1692 riot spurred Spanish officials to readopt Hernán Cortés’s original vision for the colonial capital, enforcing ethnic and physical boundaries that miscegenation and the local economy had long since rendered irrelevant. They took advantage of the crisis the riot provoked to do more than simply reissue legislation aimed at keeping Indians and Spaniards apart from one another: they sought to reengineer the city’s principal public space. In the Plaza Mayor, where Indians, Spaniards, and castas and men and women of all social classes mixed indiscriminately, the failures of the two-republic model were glaring, and they had led to a frightening attack on colonial authority. Decades before their Bourbon successors sought to transform the city through far more ambitious public works projects, New Spain’s last Habsburg officials acted on a similar impulse to take control of a public space that, despite being located directly under their noses, lay beyond their authority. Spanish officials in the 1690s sought to reconstruct the Plaza Mayor as a site where they could effectively rule over a multiracial population, unencumbered by a maze of market stalls sheltering nefarious activities. They did so by building an ornate new marketplace for the shops of overseas merchants, organizing disorderly food stalls into neat rows, and banishing the Baratillo. Together, those projects represented an attempt to turn a social engineering project into a physical one—the first major effort to do so since the founding of the Spanish city in the 1520s.
Apart from the construction of the alcaicería, however, which stood in the city’s main square until 1843, none of those undertakings had any lasting impact. The Plaza Mayor food markets remained disorganized and vulnerable to fire throughout the eighteenth century, and the Baratillo’s absence from the plaza was short lived. While governments would continue, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to attempt to turn the Plaza Mayor into a more suitable site for elite consumption and the expression of royal power, those efforts faced opposition from elite and popular groups alike. The persistence of the Baratillo, in particular, highlights how little consensus there was behind urban renewal projects that sought to transform the city’s principal public spaces.
TWO
The Baratillo and
the Enlightened City
There is in the Plaza of Mexico a traffic prohibited by law … that is so problematic that ending it has eluded me…. I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it.
THE DUKE OF LINARES, Viceroy of New Spain, to his successor, the Duke of Arión, on disbanding the Baratillo (1716)
We live in more freedom than in Geneva.
“ORDENANZAS DEL BARATILLO,” Ordinance 2
THE “ORDENANZAS DEL BARATILLO” was a legal code for a world turned upside down. Its pseudonymous author, Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache, describes the Baratillo marketplace as a college of mischief, where “more than four thousand student-vagabonds” congregate each day to receive instruction from the “doctors in the faculty of trickery.” There, attendees “dress, eat, play, and procreate using only their own devices, lacking any home or family besides the tepacherías and pulquerías … of the city.”1 According to the “Ordenanzas,” the vendors, customers, and hangers-on who gathered in the Baratillo could do exactly as they pleased, and right under the noses of the highest religious and secular authorities in New Spain. In this telling, the Baratillo represented all that had gone wrong with Spain’s colonial project in Mexico, where racial and social hierarchies had dissolved into thin air, producing “so many and such distinct castes and tongues that there is more confusion in this kingdom than in the Tower of Babel.” It was a place that inverted colonial hierarches, where plebeians became nobles, and nobles, plebeians; where mixed-race castas were in charge and Spaniards suffered institutionalized discrimination. The rulers had become the ruled.2
In the Age of Reason, the Baratillo was its antithesis. “We are not perfectly rational,” Chreslos Jache’s baratilleros proclaimed, “or even people at all, but animals from India that very closely resemble man, like a portrait of him.” Though the “Ordenanzas” were a work of fiction, they spoke to real anxieties among colonial authorities. The Baratillo’s thicket of improvised stands and portable tables defied any logical organization, challenging reformers’ attempts to tame the Plaza Mayor and transform the viceregal capital into a model for Enlightenment urban planning. In the eighteenth century, new ideas about the city crisscrossed the Atlantic World, and comfort, cleanliness, order, functionality, and above all utility became the guiding principles for urban public administration. European writers and architects of the era, applying the work of the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) to cities, saw the metropolis as a living being in which the free circulation of air, water, and people was necessary to keep the body alive and healthy.3 Under the Bourbon dynasty, which assumed control of the Spanish Crown after the death of King Charles II in 1700, New Spain’s viceroys adopted these ideas and tried to implement them in Mexico City.4 They pursued projects such as lighting and paving the city’s streets and plazas, straightening and extending streets beyond the ordered grid of the central traza, and removing animal and human waste from public thoroughfares to facilitate the flow of people and goods through the city.5 Officials also sought to reorganize Mexico City’s public market system, particularly its main market complex in the Plaza Mayor. Those efforts culminated in the early 1790s when the Count of Revillagigedo II, the most ambitious of New Spain’s Bourbon viceroys, removed the food markets from the plaza in order to transform the square into a plaza de armas. In Revillagigedo’s vision of the city, the main square was as a venue for the performance of royal power, not for the quotidian commerce of the poor.
Despite the Baratillo’s seeming incompatibility with eighteenth-century visions of the city, the market attracted relatively little attention from royal officials in this era. Despite the Crown’s furious efforts to disband the Baratillo in the late seventeenth century, the market continued to operate in the Plaza Mayor throughout the eighteenth century, before Revillagigedo forced it, along with all other semipermanent market stalls, from the square in 1790. But that decision did not spell the end of the Baratillo, either. The market’s vendors, with the blessing of the local government, simply reconstituted the market a few blocks away. Why, then, did Bourbon reformers, in their efforts to transform Mexico City into an exemplar of rational urban planning, not set their sights on such a glaring locus of irrationality?
The Baratillo survived the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century, in part, because Mexico City’s elites were deeply ambivalent about it.6 While many elites certainly shared Chreslos Jache’s view that the Baratillo represented Mexico City’s worst elements, others saw in the Baratillo a lively bazaar that served the needs of a diverse population. Government officials were similarly divided: some complained about the robberies and other crimes the market seemed to breed while others noted the Baratillo’s fiscal benefits for the Ayuntamiento (the vendors may have been trading in stolen goods, but most paid rent to the city for their stands), or simply accepted its existence as a necessary evil. In an era of government activism, authorities’ approach to the city’s thieves’ market was characterized more by inaction than regulatory zeal.
Colonial authorities’ ambivalence toward the Baratillo during the eighteenth century forces us to reconsider some longstanding assumptions about the Bourbon Reforms in Mexico City. The prevailing view posits that in the eighteenth century colonial elites sought to control the urban masses by instituting new rules and embarking on ambitious public works projects aimed at changing popular behaviors. According
