Focusing on the implementation of those plans, however, rather than on their design alone, reveals that Mexico City’s elites were far from united behind them. Those projects encountered resistance not just from street vendors and other popular actors, as historians have previously shown; they also provoked fierce opposition from local elites. For reasons ranging from the personal to the political, those individuals opposed the broader urban renewal program that successive Spanish viceroys sought to implement. There was no consensus on the part of elites about what an Enlightened Mexico City would look like, or on what role the Baratillo would have in it.8
Nor did the colonial state pursue a singular agenda when it came to urban reform. In Mexico, colonial government was characterized by poorly defined and overlapping jurisdictions, personal animosities, and tensions between American-born Creoles and peninsular Spaniards.9 The friction between the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City and the Spanish Crown was particularly intense. The Ayuntamiento had long enjoyed significant autonomy, and its members zealously guarded their purview over local affairs. Bourbon reformers who sought to shore up the Crown’s control over its American colonies and turn the capital of Spain’s wealthiest overseas colony into a showcase capital of Enlightened urban planning attempted to curtail those freedoms, and they intervened with increasing frequency in the Ayuntamiento’s business. The Baratillo, which stood in the most important public space in Spain’s most important American city, found itself at the center of those long-simmering tensions.
Explaining why the Baratillo, a notoriously retrograde institution, survived the Bourbons’ modernizing reforms thus requires taking a closer look at the urban politics of eighteenth-century Mexico City, particularly the politics of the street. This chapter, in examining the Bourbon Reforms from the perspective of the Baratillo and the other Plaza Mayor markets, shows that the city’s streets and plazas were not simply sites where “the state and the common people clashed,” as historians have often argued, but venues that fostered alliances and rivalries that often transcended class lines.10 As Mexico City’s local and metropolitan elites battled for control over the urban built environment, local officials made common cause with vendors in the city’s most notorious thieves’ market. Those vendors did not sit on the sidelines as the Crown and the Ayuntamiento debated their future. Their actions influenced the outcome of those decisions and helped ensure that the Baratillo would remain part of the urban landscape in Mexico City long after Bourbon rule had ended.
THE BARATILLO AND ITS CRITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Despite the efforts of the Habsburg monarchy to eliminate the Baratillo in the 1690s, the market remained in Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor throughout most of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the century, the Baratillo had grown into two distinct markets, with one area, known as the Baratillo Grande, occupying the center of the alcaicería, which locals came to call the Parián (after the Chinese-run mercantile district in Manila that it supposedly resembled), and another, the Baratillo Chico, in the plaza itself. A work by Juan de Viera, the administrator of Mexico City’s Colegio de San Ildefonso, completed in 1778, offers the best depiction of the two Baratillos. He describes the Baratillo Chico, also known as the “Baratillo de los Muchachos,” as a place that offered just about any “curiosity” one could imagine—from keys to knives to little bells—and most of all, used clothes. There were hat sellers, stocking sellers, tanners, and “Indian guitar-makers who sold instruments to other Indians.”11 In José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez’s 1769 map of the city, the Baratillo Chico appears just outside the Parián, though it may have migrated to different areas of the plaza over time (see figure 2).
FIGURE 2. Detail of José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Plano de la Ymperial México con la nueva distribución de territorios parroquiales, 1769. Oriented toward the west, this map shows the two “Varatillos” in the eighteenth century: the Baratillo Grande, in the center patio of the Parián, and the Baratillo Chico in the Plaza Mayor, directly outside the Parián. Colección Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City.
Composed of small jacales, or huts, in the central patio of the Parián, the Baratillo Grande offered a similarly broad range of merchandise as the Baratillo Chico, though with a greater selection of upscale items. Viera describes the clocks, glasses, “thousands of things made of silver,” swords, shields, firearms, harnesses, books, and “the finest fabrics” that one found there. Two of the aisles on the outer ring of the market housed shoe sellers who offered footwear “for both plebeians and the most polished people.”12 That the Baratillo Grande sold wares for both wealthy and poorer consumers, and appears to have sold new in addition to used goods, means that at times it is difficult to separate it from the Parián itself in the historical record. Indeed, in many places, the Parián is referred to as the “Parián del Baratillo”—a combination that joined a term derived from the word “cheap” with the name of the city’s high-end emporium for imported goods from Asia and Europe.13 The juxtaposition speaks to the heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor’s commerce, where, as one travel writer observed: “one sees two diametrically opposed extremes: supreme wealth and supreme poverty.”14 Despite the differences between the Baratillo Grande and Chico, relatively few writers in the eighteenth century distinguished between the two.
Although Viera viewed the Baratillo as a colorful bazaar that offered something for everyone, other observers saw something more sinister. Some, like the author of the “Ordenanzas,” saw the Baratillo as a glaring example of the failures of New Spain’s sistema de castas, where miscegenation had created a vast mixed-race underclass that threatened the social stability of the city and viceroyalty. The author’s 377 “ordinances” depict an alternate universe where the castas reigned and the gachupines—a pejorative term for Spaniards—were ostracized. This perversion of colonial society had its own police, a Real Audiencia, and lawyers, doctors, and clergy. The Baratillo even had its own racial classification system, an inversion of the sistema de castas that mirrored Mexico’s monetary denominations. The system included the categories of half-Spaniard, quarter-Spaniard, tlaco de español (one-eighth Spaniard), and two, four, and eight cacaos of Spaniard. Here, Chreslos Jache satirizes the colonial monetary system, which included both silver coins (pesos and reales) and informal tokens (tlacos) and cacao beans, and suggests the racialized terms in which colonial subjects thought about money. Tlacos and cacao beans were seen as the currency of the multiracial and indigenous underclass, while the larger-denomination peso formed part of an ostensibly Spanish economy.15
The “Ordenanzas” go on to explain how the Baratillo was governed by a brotherhood, which admitted Indians, Africans, and every possible combination of mixed-race people—anyone but Spaniards and their purebred offspring.16 The fictitious guild of the baratilleros (which, to the author’s horror, welcomed both men and women) did not just exclude Spaniards; it expressed revulsion toward them. In this author’s telling, Mexico’s Creoles bore much of the blame for Mexico’s degraded condition. They disdained work and diluted Spanish blood and culture by allowing non-Spanish women to wet-nurse their babies and by educating different races in the same schools.17 The “Ordenanzas” played to Spanish fears of racial degeneration—the idea that in the New World, Spanish domination and Spanishness itself were under threat from Indians, Africans, and castas.
Of course, Chreslos Jache’s “Ordenanzas” was a work of satire, not ethnography. Nevertheless, other writers of the era saw similar depravities in the Baratillo. Hipólito Villarroel’s treatise, Enfermedades políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España, written between 1785 and 1787, dedicates a special section to the Baratillo. The author describes the market as “this cave or deposit for the petty theft that apprentices, artisans, maids, and household servants commit, and in sum all the plebeian people—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas that are allowed to live as inhabitants in this city.” Villarroel’s diatribe suggests that the Baratillo was a melting pot for Mexico’s non-Spanish
