sale of alcoholic beverages in the Plaza Mayor—an effort to crack down on public drunkenness and the unruly behavior it provoked.35 But those efforts were short lived, and Trespalacios y Escandón ultimately found the Ayuntamiento’s management of the Plaza Mayor markets as unsatisfactory as Cameros’s. Upon inspecting the Plaza Mayor in 1760, the superintendent, still in his post, saw “complete confusion, all transit choked, and the whole area … filled with puestos [arranged] according to the desires” of each vendor. In that year, Trespalacios y Escandón unveiled a major redesign of the Plaza Mayor (see figures 3 and 4). Under the plan, occupants of the Baratillo Grande inside the Parián would no longer be allowed to live in their cajones, and the market’s dense alleyways would be converted into orderly streets. The puestos of the Plaza Mayor, located between the Parián and the viceregal palace, would be reorganized into neat rows separated by product. Vendors would no longer be permitted to congregate in front of the cathedral and palace. Finally, the Plaza Mayor would be paved with cobblestones so the area would not become submerged in mud during the rainy season.36
FIGURE 3 and 4. Plaza Mayor, ca. 1760. These two anonymous images depict the Plaza Mayor before and after Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón’s 1760 reorganization project. Both images are oriented toward the east, with the Parián in the foreground and the palace in the background. The first image (figure 3) highlights the chaotic nature of the marketplaces of the Plaza Mayor and Plaza del Volador (which the rendering notes was “as disorganized as the [Plaza] Mayor”). In the second image (figure 4), the Plaza Mayor’s stalls are arranged neatly in rows and both the Baratillo Grande (inside the Parián) and the Plaza del Volador are now free of market stands. Like Villalpando’s painting of the Plaza Mayor after the 1692 riot, this second image probably reflected Trespalacios y Escandón’s aspirations for the space more than reality. Images located in Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la Ciudad de México, ed. Mario de la Torre, 2 vols. (Mexico City: INAH, 1996), 1:27, 29.
Trespalacios y Escandón was overly optimistic about his ability to bring order to the Plaza Mayor markets. In 1769, one of the municipal rent collectors wrote to complain that the “vendedores volantes”—literally, “flying vendors,” or street vendors without fixed stalls—continued to operate in the plaza, making it impossible for him to keep an accurate count of all the merchants in the market, much less collect rent from them. These vendors appeared one day and then disappeared the next.37 By the 1770s, baratilleros, tortilla sellers, and other petty merchants had reoccupied the space in front of the palace and other locations where Trespalacios y Escandón had banned vending.38 The construction projects he ordered did not proceed according to schedule, either; the Plaza Mayor paving project remained incomplete in 1789 when Viceroy Revillagigedo II assumed his post.39
The arrival of the royal inspector José de Gálvez brought additional scrutiny of the Ayuntamiento. Between 1765 and 1771, Gálvez toured New Spain and made a lengthy series of recommendations to the Spanish Crown for reforming the viceroyalty’s governing institutions.40 Like other Bourbon-era reforms, these were aimed at standardizing haphazard or informal practices and professionalizing public services that the local government had long outsourced to third parties. When it came to Mexico City’s market administration, Gálvez recommended that the municipal employee who served as the plaza judge receive a salary of 500 pesos per year, rather than 6 percent of the markets’ revenues—the existing arrangement. The plan also called for the elimination of gratificaciones—tips that vendors paid market officials to facilitate the sale or transfer of market stalls and other bureaucratic processes. Finally, Gálvez’s plan demanded that the city remove the movable stands that were blocking the entrances to the Parián and the ambulatory vendors who clogged the passageways between the market stands in the plaza.41
The Ayuntamiento found the plan distressing. Its members claimed that the salary Gálvez proposed for the regidor (councilman) who held the plaza judge post amounted to a significant pay cut. They also warned the Crown of the impact the changes would have on impoverished street vendors. They even included in their response written complaints from vendors in and around the plaza who predicted that the changes would lead to their “extinction.”42 The aldermen emphasized that Mexico City was not Madrid, and the Crown could not simply transpose Spanish laws onto New Spain: “the constitution, the customs, and even the laws of this country are different from those of Spanish cities,” they argued.43 This line of reasoning—that what was good for Spain was not necessarily good for Mexico—was one the Ayuntamiento used repeatedly in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Crown’s reforms were an attack on the sovereignty of the local government and a threat to the livelihoods of the Creole elites who participated in the often-lucrative business of colonial government. Those families had strong incentives to maintain the existing structure of local government, including its market system.
The baratilleros may have engaged in a nefarious trade, but they also paid rent to the Ayuntamiento, and revenue, regardless of its source, was something royal and local governments alike welcomed. Although the Baratillo was not the market that provided the largest tax revenues (typically the Parián was), its contribution was far from negligible. In 1791, the city collected a total of 7,146 pesos from the stands located in the Baratillo Grande and in the Plaza Mayor—just under 5 percent of the Ayuntamiento’s gross revenue that year.44 The Ayuntamiento suffered from frequent budget shortfalls and its members were loath to eliminate any asset that generated revenue.45 Indeed, when officials at Mexico City’s cathedral, located just off the Plaza Mayor, sought to remove the Baratillo from the square in 1729 because of the “public sins” that people regularly committed there, the Ayuntamiento invoked its jurisdiction over the Plaza Mayor and blocked the proposal.46
Frictions between royal and municipal authorities help explain the Baratillo’s persistence during a period of ambitious urban renewal projects. Members of the Ayuntamiento resisted royal efforts to limit the body’s autonomy and curtail the income that their positions afforded them, which sometimes led them to defend institutions as unsavory as the Baratillo. Furthermore, because the market produced significant revenues for the city, the Spanish Crown may not have been eager to do away with it, either, as it wanted to ensure that its most important American city was a fiscally sound one. Even if some reformers sought to dramatically reengineer Mexico City society in the eighteenth century, not every colonial official, and especially not the members of the Ayuntamiento, was on board with those plans. Tensions between local and royal authorities continued to rise before coming to a head under New Spain’s most ambitious Bourbon viceroy, the Second Count of Revillagigedo.
REVILLAGIGEDO II AND THE APOGEE OF REFORM
More than any other viceroy of New Spain, Revillagigedo II, who governed from 1789 to 1794, was determined to transform the seat of his jurisdiction into a model of Enlightened urban planning.47 Soon after arriving in the capital, he set in motion a series of administrative changes and public works projects. The scope of Revillagigedo’s reforms was sweeping. He began extending the ordered grid of the traza to the city’s outlying barrios (see figure 5), minted new coins, and established new regulations on taverns and gambling. He even limited the number of times church bells could ring.48 Revillagigedo fixated on the unsanitary conditions of the city’s public thoroughfares and plazas, picking up the paving project that his predecessors had begun decades before and implementing a property tax that provided a faster and more reliable revenue stream to fund it.49 Although local elites’ frustrations with royal authorities had been brewing for decades, Revillagigedo’s term brought a significant escalation of those tensions. The viceroy made unilateral decisions that the
