with it the transfer of other puestos [and] I do not doubt that greater rents will be achieved in the Plaza del Factor.”64 The superintendent of propios and arbitrios and the viceroy agreed, and the move was authorized in August 1793.65 Local and royal officials thus saw the Baratillo not as an intolerable nuisance but as an important source of revenue, even a driver of neighborhood economic development.
By this point, only the occupants of the former Baratillo Chico had moved to the Plaza del Factor. After reorganizing the Plaza Mayor, Viceroy Revillagigedo initially allowed the vendors of the Baratillo Grande to remain in the central patio of the Parián. But then, in March 1794, the viceroy announced a new project to rebuild that space.66 Officials relocated the occupants of the Baratillo Grande to the Plazuela de Jesús and the catty-cornered Plazuela de la Paja, a few blocks south of the Plaza Mayor. But vendors disliked the location, so, in August 1794, a group of fourteen men who sold in the Plaza del Factor wrote to the superintendent of propios and arbitrios asking that the authorities amend the “distance and disunion” between their Baratillo and the one located across town. Appealing to “both Majesties,” temporal and spiritual, the baratilleros offered a sophisticated and compelling case that merging the two markets served the best interests of the public. The superintendent consented to the baratilleros’ request and by 1796 the Baratillo was once again a single institution, now located in the Plaza del Factor.67 It was the first of several times that the vendors of the Baratillo would play a role in determining where their market would be located.
By the mid-1790s the Plaza Mayor had become the clean, orderly, and, above all, respectable commercial center of Mexico City that colonial officials had sought to create for over one hundred years (see figure 6). No used clothing or iron vendors, nor any of the fruit and vegetable, prepared food, or pulque stands that used to clutter the city’s main square were in sight. It had become a plaza de armas—a vast open space where the army, stationed in New Spain since the 1760s, could offer public displays of the king’s power for his subjects. Religious officials in the capital were ecstatic about the changes the viceroy had brought: “In fewer than four years, the policing of the city was perfected such that even the most sophisticated cities of Europe do not surpass it,” they wrote.68 The viceroy’s improvements, however, did not sit as well with the Creole elites who controlled the Mexico City Ayuntamiento.
FIGURE 6. Anonymous, Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México …, 1793. The text reads: “View of the main Plaza of Mexico, reformed and beautified by order of His Excellency Viceroy Count of Revilla Gigedo in the year 1793.” Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Archivo General de Indias, Spain, AGI, MP-México, 446.
THE AYUNTAMIENTO TAKES THE VICEROY TO COURT
Members of the Ayuntamiento were furious about the viceroy’s meddling in local affairs. They complained that the municipal government was responsible for paying for and executing the viceroy’s projects but had no say in their design.69 The cost, scope, and, above all, the unilateral nature of Revillagigedo’s reforms so angered Ayuntamiento members that they brought a formal complaint against him in January 1795, shortly after he had left office. The juicio de residencia, as the proceeding was called, raised dozens of grievances against the viceroy for undertaking public works projects and enacting fiscal reforms that placed a great financial strain on the city and went against the interests of its residents. The ideas were poorly conceived, the Ayuntamiento argued, and money did not go toward solving the most pressing needs.70
No project riled municipal officials more than the renovation of the Plaza Mayor and the relocation of the city’s principal marketplace. Indeed, the Ayuntamiento’s first accusation in the juicio was that the construction of the new market in the Plaza del Volador “has deprived the City of those fat profits that it earned with the produce and other stands that the Plaza Mayor contained, depriving the public of an annual rent of as much as twelve thousand pesos.”71 Revillagigedo had also raised rents for the cajones and puestos of the new market, provoking an outcry from vendors in 1792, and, the Ayuntamiento argued, ultimately increasing costs for the city’s consumers.72 The complainants also objected to the viceroy’s stipulation that the puestos could never return to the plaza, foreclosing the possibility that the city could raise additional revenue in the future from that space. The Ayuntamiento argued that the entire Plaza Mayor project was pointless, since the puestos that were constructed in the Volador were exactly the same as the original ones in the Plaza Mayor, except that they now had roofs made of tejamanil (wooden shingles) instead of blankets, ultimately leaving the new market just as vulnerable to fire as its predecessor. Indeed, one had already broken out in May 1794.73
The viceroy’s public works projects brought the long-simmering tensions between local and peninsular authorities to a boil. In the years immediately preceding Revillagigedo’s term, the Crown had stepped up its efforts to chip away at the autonomy of local institutions in the Americas and subject their finances to greater scrutiny by royal authorities. The 1786 establishment of intendancies, in particular, eroded local control by creating a new layer of royal administration throughout New Spain. In the same year, the Crown established the Junta Superior de Real Hacienda, yet another royal body charged with overseeing municipal finances in New Spain.74 With the creation of that entity, the Council of the Indies ordered that all of the viceroyalty’s ayuntamientos submit budgets to royal authorities for review. The Mexico City Ayuntamiento refused. It took a decree from the king himself in 1797 for the Ayuntamiento to comply.75
For members of the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo’s reforms, particularly the public works projects, were a step too far. What most frustrated local elites was that Revillagigedo refused to let the city participate in the decision-making process. Rather than consult with the Ayuntamiento, Revillagigedo relied on outside experts (peritos) in planning the projects. There was no transparency in the bidding or construction process; the viceroy gave orders verbally rather than in writing, an “extrajudicial” process, the Ayuntamiento claimed, and nobody knew how much the projects would cost until the money was already spent.76 Furthermore, the viceroy had intervened in the city’s most proprietary sphere of influence and the source of a large part of its annual income: its public markets.77 Ever since 1609, when the Crown deeded the Plaza Mayor to the Ayuntamiento so it could establish a market there, that space had played a central role in how the Ayuntamiento managed the city.
In its case against the viceroy, the Ayuntamiento pitched itself as the body that had the interests of the broader public in mind. Some projects, the juicio claimed, were “useless and not at all necessary for the public; others were, on the contrary, quite detrimental.” Throughout the juicio de residencia, the Ayuntamiento argued that Revillagigedo’s reforms were harmful for Mexico City’s general population, especially its poorest members, and questioned the “public utility” of projects like sidewalks and curbs—employing the same Enlightenment vocabulary Bourbon reformers used to justify their public works projects.78 Members of the Ayuntamiento objected to Revillagigedo’s description of the Plaza as a “latrine,” countering that “the Plaza was not in such decadence as he wants it to appear, and every class of people moved comfortably about it.”79 The heterogeneity of the Plaza Mayor markets, according to this argument, was one of the greatest assets of the space. It offered something for everyone.80 In the juicio de residencia, Mexico City’s Creole elites expressed their resentment for peninsular interference in local affairs, and for the entire Europeanizing project that Revillagigedo and other Spanish viceroys sought to realize in Mexico City.81 They disputed the notion that their city could or should become a laboratory for Enlightenment ideas, asking: “Because things have been done in Spain and other cities in Europe … should the same be done in the Americas?” Their answer to this rhetorical question was a resounding no: “The practice[s] that [are] observed in Madrid and in other capitals of Europe are not adaptable to Mexico.”82
