Black Market Capital. Andrew Konove

FIGURE 5. Ignacio Castera, Plano ichnographico de la Ciudad de Mexico …, 1794. Castera was Mexico City’s chief architect and the mastermind behind many of Revillagigedo’s public works projects. This map, which is oriented toward the east, shows Castera’s plan to extend the traza beyond the traditional city center, integrating indigenous barrios and some of Mexico City’s hinterlands into the urban grid. The text on the left side of the map discusses how the project will lead to the “correction and extirpation of crimes in the Barrios” by opening up alleys and dead-end streets. Library of Congress.

      Upon arriving in Mexico in 1789, the viceroy expressed horror at the state of the plaza that lay in front of his palace. The reforms of previous Bourbon viceroys had failed to turn the Plaza Mayor into a respectable space. The square, in his estimation, was “a confused labyrinth of huts, pigsties, and matted shelters … inside of which evildoers could easily hide themselves, day or night, and commit the most horrible crimes.” In full view of the viceroyalty’s highest authorities were open latrines where both men and women took care of their “corporal needs.” Officials routinely removed drunkards who had passed out in the street so stagecoaches did not run them over. Worse still, “with too much frequency, under the shadow of darkness, sins of sensuality were witnessed in the doorways, corners, and cemeteries [surrounding the Plaza Mayor], to the extent that the Fathers considered closing off the atrium in order to avoid sacrileges in the doorways of their Church.” In sum, “all of this made the Plaza so disgusting, and a sight so abominable, that no decent person dared enter it without an urgent motive.”⁵⁰

      Within months of his arrival in Mexico, Revillagigedo began a two-pronged effort to modernize the distribution of basic staples in the city and transform the Plaza Mayor. To accomplish those goals, he ordered that the city’s main food market move from the Plaza Mayor into the adjacent Plaza del Volador. The only market that would remain in the central square was the Parián. The remainder of the plaza would be cleared of all its tables and stands and left for a more dignified public to stroll through at its leisure. The formal process of relocating the food market began on December 14, 1789, when the Ayuntamiento signed a contract to rent the Plaza del Volador from its owner, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca (the descendants of Hernán Cortés) for five years at a cost of 2,500 pesos per year.⁵¹ This was a steep increase in spending for the municipal government, which owned the Plaza Mayor and thus did not have to pay rent to operate a market there. Over the next two years, the Ayuntamiento, under orders from the viceroy, spent nearly 44,000 pesos paving the Plaza del Volador with cobblestones and building fountains, cajones, puestos, and portable stands. In January 1792, the new marketplace began operation.⁵²

      Revillagigedo sought to make the Plaza del Volador marketplace the kind of clean, organized, and efficient market that authorities had tried in vain to create in the Plaza Mayor since the 1690s. To that end, he ordered the drafting of an expansive new set of regulations for the city’s public markets in 1791. These were as significant as the construction projects themselves because they continued to be in force decades after Revillagigedo’s term as viceroy had ended—indeed, long after Mexico’s independence from Spain.⁵³ The rules specified that the Volador market contain rows separated according to the type of product sold and banned all forms of cooking. They also created additional levels of oversight for both the main market and the satellite markets in the outlying barrios that had been under construction intermittently since the 1770s.⁵⁴ The plaza judge would continue to oversee the daily operations of the main market and arbitrate disputes that arose within it. Beneath him would be an administrador, or rent collector, who would earn 1,200 pesos per year. Finally, the day-to-day policing and cleaning of the markets was left to guarda-ministros, paid 15 pesos per month and provided with uniforms of blue wool, black collars, and white buttons. The Reglamento specified, for the first time, the responsibilities of the plaza judge, which had previously been dictated by custom and the desires and abilities of the officeholder.⁵⁵ The regulations were also printed, adding another layer of formality and permanence.

      Revillagigedo’s Reglamento also banned the practice of the traspaso—the transfer of a cajón from one merchant to another. This institution had existed for as long as there were markets in the Plaza Mayor and involved traders paying guantes (fees) to merchants to obtain the right to their space in the plaza, and gratificaciones to municipal market officials to facilitate those exchanges.⁵⁶ Revillagigedo sought to formalize this process by forcing merchants to go through official channels to transfer their stands to other vendors, leaving the occupant with a license issued by the Ayuntamiento—a written record.⁵⁷ The viceroy also sought to make the process of obtaining market stalls fairer, declaring that the spaces occupied by movable stands would now be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.⁵⁸ Revillagigedo probably objected to the traspaso because it was done off the books, making it more difficult for the government to oversee, and because gratificaciones lined the pockets of individual officials while depriving the government of fees.

      The Ayuntamiento sought to enforce the traspaso ban soon after it went into effect but ran into fierce resistance from the Consulado, the exclusive guild of overseas merchants. The Consulado argued that the prohibition conflicted with the government’s stated goal of promoting free trade (comercio libre), as the system of guantes and gratificaciones helped smooth the cumbersome process of legally transferring rights to a market stall.⁵⁹ The merchants appear to have prevailed in the long run, as the practice resurfaces in documents from the early nineteenth century.⁶⁰ Indeed, many of Revillagigedo’s innovations would prove difficult to implement or sustain because they encountered entrenched opposition from various quarters.

      THE BARATILLO MOVES TO THE PLAZA DEL FACTOR

      The Baratillo survived the sweeping transformation of the Plaza Mayor because of the combined efforts of municipal officials and the market’s vendors. Revillagigedo made no mention of the Baratillo in his initial plans for the redesign of the Plaza Mayor—a surprising omission, given that the market embodied many of the attributes he found most detestable about the space. The construction, however, must have displaced the Baratillo Chico when the government cleared all of the market stalls from the Plaza Mayor in late 1789. That market all but vanishes from the historical record until the summer of 1792, when a document reveals that it had moved to the Plaza de las Vizcaínas, located in the far southwestern corner of the city.⁶¹ It remained there only temporarily; a year later a plan surfaced to relocate the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor, located a few blocks northwest of the Plaza Mayor, in the present-day site of Mexico City’s legislative assembly.