mass. The ínfima plebe, the term Villarroel and his contemporaries employed for this multiracial underclass, “is composed of different castas that have procreated the links between the Spaniard, Indian, and Black; but confusing in this way his first origin, such that now there are no voices to explain and distinguish between these classes of people that make up the greatest number of inhabitants of the kingdom.” The poor of New Spain, he went on, “form a monster of so many species that [comprise] the inferior castes, to which are added infinite Spaniards, Europeans, and Creoles, lost and vulgarized with poverty and idleness.”18 Poor Spaniards, a regular presence in the Baratillo, only heightened those anxieties, as their existence further eroded racial hierarchies.19
Church officials, too, found much to dislike in the Baratillo. A number of them wrote in support of Viceroy Revillagigedo II’s decision to remove the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in 1789, whose sight, they complained, had “tormented our eyes” before the viceroy reorganized the markets. From their perspective, the Baratillo was a place where “people went naked, others stole to fuel their wickedness, [and] homicides were frequent. It seems as if we are talking about a city without Religion or a King or Government, but all this happened in the Plaza Mayor of the Metropolis of the most Christian North America, in the great Mexico.” The Baratillo’s bad reputation, they worried, extended far and wide: “In all the Kingdom it was known what went on in that place.”20 In sum, for many eighteenth-century observers, the Baratillo was a hub of criminality and oppositional culture—an obstacle to order, reason, and good governance.
THE BOURBONS REFORM MEXICO CITY’S MARKETS
Even though Mexico City’s Bourbon authorities received a litany of complaints about the Baratillo, they did little to address them. They did not make any concerted attempt to enforce the prohibitions that Habsburg rulers had issued throughout the seventeenth century. Nor do they appear to have issued any new decrees banning the Baratillo.21 Indeed, eighteenth-century authorities were decidedly ambivalent about the Baratillo. The instructions that the viceroy Duke of Linares left to his successor in 1716 capture their indecisiveness. Upon leaving office that year, Linares warned the Duke of Arión: “There is in the Plaza of Mexico 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. In this way many articles are sold, especially to Indians or hicks, as scoundrels are called here, who are readily provided with the trinkets they need.”22 Faced with this dilemma, Linares found himself unable to render a decision: “I have neither approved nor disapproved its use for the complications I find with it,” he wrote, finally, leaving his successor “with the door open to provide what he determines most convenient.”23 The Baratillo may have been an entrepôt for stolen goods, but the city’s poor depended on those products, and the viceroy was not eager to take them away.
Making sense of Bourbon-era authorities’ relative uninterest in the Baratillo, particularly compared to the attention New Spain’s Habsburg rulers paid the market during the seventeenth century, requires understanding the nature of the Bourbon Reforms, which involved multiple and often competing objectives. The Spanish Crown, for its part, focused on increasing revenue. Officials sought to accomplish this goal by establishing government monopolies, raising taxes on various types of transactions, and promoting trade across the Spanish Empire. They also sought to rationalize and centralize the Spanish government, first on the Iberian Peninsula and then in Spain’s overseas possessions. They professionalized administrative positions that the Crown had previously contracted out to private parties and created new administrative units. For example, the Bourbons brought the French system of intendancies to Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century and then to New Spain in 1786. In 1782, they divided Mexico City into eight cuarteles mayores, each comprised of four cuarteles menores, appointing officials to oversee each subsection of the city.24 These changes attacked what the Bourbons saw as a haphazard structure of government that the Habsburgs had fostered over the centuries. Tighter control over their territories, they believed, would lead to greater tax revenues.
In New Spain, Bourbon authorities also embarked on ambitious urban renewal projects, turning the viceregal capital into a laboratory for Enlightened urban planning. Some of these innovations put Mexico City at the vanguard of the Atlantic World: the city was building sidewalks around the same time as Paris and well before Madrid, for example.25 However, those public works projects did not always form part of the larger, metropolitan project of increasing tax revenues. Rather, they were often the prerogatives of individual viceroys and, at times, were at odds with the interests of the Spanish Crown because they incurred significant costs and produced no new revenue streams. In 1792, for example, the Crown demanded that Viceroy Revillagigedo II immediately cease his street-paving project because it had run grossly over budget.26 The Mexico City Ayuntamiento, the body charged with both funding and implementing many of these infrastructure projects, also pushed back—sometimes forcefully. Its members viewed efforts by the Crown and the viceroys to rationalize city finances and remake the city’s built environment as an attack on the traditional autonomy of the local government.27 Thus, the Bourbon Reforms did not constitute a single, coherent project but a series of individual ones, with different objectives and sources of support that produced conflict more often than consensus. Far from a single entity with a common goal, the eighteenth-century colonial state consisted of multiple institutions and many competing interests.28
Mexico City’s public marketplaces were sites where those conflicts played out. Markets were among the Ayuntamiento’s most prized possessions. They contributed as much as 50 percent of the local government’s annual tax receipts during the colonial era, leading members of the Ayuntamiento to zealously defend their jurisdiction over these valuable municipal assets.29 But royal authorities, including viceroys and Crown officials based in Spain, saw marketplaces as ripe for reform. They viewed the city’s markets as disorderly and visually unappealing and as public assets that, with some changes, could produce even more income for the local government, helping to wean it off the Crown’s support. Royal authorities had been trying to shore up the Mexico City Ayuntamiento’s finances for more than a century. Indeed, ceding the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento in the early seventeenth century was a step toward this goal: the Crown transferred control of the square specifically so the city could generate income for its operations by renting space to vendors and shopkeepers.30
In the eighteenth century, Bourbon authorities implemented new layers of royal supervision over the Ayuntamiento’s finances, which incensed the Creole elites who dominated the body.31 In 1708, King Philip V created a new position, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios.32 Similar to the corregidor, the superintendent, who would be a member of Mexico’s Audiencia, was a royal official whom the Crown charged with supervising local affairs, in this case the Ayuntamiento’s financial dealings. Then, in the 1740s, Bourbon officials professionalized the position of rent collector for the Plaza Mayor markets. The Ayuntamiento had outsourced that job since 1694, putting the contract out for multiyear bids. The practice was not unusual: the Spanish employed this form of contracting, known as the asiento, for everything from collecting tribute to managing the transatlantic slave trade. Upon the death of Francisco Cameros, who held the asiento from 1694 until his death in 1741, Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón, the superintendent of propios and arbitrios, sought to end the outsourcing of this job, noting that Cameros had administered the plaza “without having put in place rule or method.”33 He demanded that the Ayuntamiento take control of rent collection itself by choosing from its own members a juez de plaza (plaza judge) for the Plaza Mayor markets. In theory, the order gave the Ayuntamiento more direct control over its public marketplaces; but it did so in a way that also strengthened royal authorities’ oversight of the local government.34
Municipal officials took a number of steps in the 1750s and 1760s to address Trespalacios y Escandón’s complaints about the Plaza Mayor: they ordered the stands’ sides and roofs removed, so that authorities could better monitor what was going on inside them, and cleared
