Revillagigedo’s reforms left a significant imprint on Mexico City. Above all, he transformed the city’s main plaza from a site that had hosted a diverse commerce in foodstuffs and new and used goods into the kind of orderly, dignified space that the Spanish Crown had sought to create since the end of the seventeenth century. The removal of the Baratillo and the food markets from the Plaza Mayor marked the first time in Mexico City’s history that the retail activities of the rich and poor were physically separated from one another. By 1795, the main square housed only the commerce of the Parián—without the disreputable Baratillo Grande in its center patio—and the shops in the archways that lined its southern and western sides. Merchants who sold goods that lay beyond the reach of the vast majority of Mexico City’s population occupied those spaces. Food vendors now had their own market in the adjacent Plaza del Volador while the market for second-hand goods was relegated to the periphery of the old traza. The process of creating a refashioned, respectable public space at the heart of the viceregal capital did not begin with Revillagigedo or even the Bourbon dynasty. The effort to transform the Plaza Mayor into a safer, more beautiful, and more lucrative commercial space for the local government began in the wake of the 1692 riot with the decision to eradicate the Baratillo and construct the alcaicería, and continued in fits and starts throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, Revillagigedo’s efforts were more ambitious than those of his predecessors, and their impact on the urban geography was significant.
Like the urban renewal projects that previous viceroys had spearheaded, however, Revillagigedo failed to accomplish all, or even most, of what he set out to do. By the end of his term, the paving project, begun decades earlier, was still not finished, and the straightening of city streets beyond the traza had barely begun. His attempts to reform the city’s market administration were not much more successful. The masonry market in the Plaza del Factor was never built. A fire had broken out in the Plaza del Volador market even before Revillagigedo left office, and the owner of the plaza, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca, was so dissatisfied with its arrangement with the city that the family threatened not to renew the Ayuntamiento’s lease on the land in 1807, nearly forcing the government to relocate the city’s principal food market.83 Although Revillagigedo had successfully cleared the Plaza Mayor of its ramshackle wooden stalls, some vendors continued to defy the ban on selling there. In 1794, officials complained that shoe sellers and other vendors were peddling their wares in the plaza at night, after the doors to the Parián had closed for the evening.84 Moving the Baratillo to the Plaza del Factor produced a litany of complaints from neighbors and vendors alike, as officials struggled to suppress a troublesome nighttime market on the streets surrounding the plaza.85 Nor did the reorganization of the city’s markets seem to have the desired effect on municipal revenues: Revillagigedo’s successor, the viceroy Marquis of Branciforte, worried in a letter from September 1795 that “most of the cajones of the Parián have been abandoned” due to the disappearance of the “crowd of people that for so many years that site attracted.”86
The Bourbon Reforms, like those of their Habsburg predecessors, failed to realize their objective of reengineering Mexico City’s principal public spaces in the eighteenth century because they encountered opposition from various quarters—not only from popular groups but also other elites, who, for reasons both personal and political, took issue with those projects. The fault lines in those struggles often formed between peninsular and local authorities who had very different prerogatives when it came to urban governance. There were also significant conflicts within those groups: while the Crown ultimately supported Revillagigedo in his juicio de residencia, which concluded only after his death, it had opposed many of his initiatives during his time as viceroy due to their high cost.87 In Mexico City, Bourbon reforms to public administration and the built environment did not represent a coherent program that elites imposed upon the poor; rather, they constituted a diverse set of policy prescriptions and projects that were as controversial among elites as they were among the popular classes.
Those tensions played out in the Baratillo and on the streets of the eighteenth-century city, where both the governing elite’s ambivalence about the market and the vendors’ strategies for resisting policies that adversely affected them come into focus. Despite the Baratillo’s seeming incompatibility with Bourbon reformers’ vision of a clean, orderly, and rational city, authorities in Mexico City were far from unified in their desire to disband it, and made little attempt to do so throughout most of the eighteenth century. To observers such as the author of the “Ordenanzas,” the Baratillo was the uncontested domain of a multiracial criminal underclass. But other elites were not so sure; the market offered a range of goods for well-to-do and poor residents alike, employed people that might otherwise engage in even more nefarious activities, and provided the chronically cash-strapped Ayuntamiento with a consistent source of revenue.
Disagreements among colonial elites do not, on their own, explain the persistence of the Baratillo during this period of activist government. Understanding the Baratillo’s significance to Mexico City society in this era also requires an examination of the quotidian exchanges that took place in the market. Beyond its contribution to the coffers of local government, the Baratillo played an indispensable role in the local economy, and its commerce involved a broad cross-section of society. Vendors leveraged those connections to assert the legitimacy of their trade and defend it from attacks by government officials and rival merchants. The keys to the Baratillo’s success in outlasting colonial rule lie as much in the transactions of the shadow economy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as they do in the power struggles between local and metropolitan elites.
THREE
Shadow Economics
The Baratillo has existed since time immemorial…. It is clearly and manifestly in the common good.
JOSEPH RAMÍREZ, Diego Rufino and others to Corregidor Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio, October 16, 1706
ON JANUARY 13, 1724, JUAN DE DIOS ANZURES, a lawyer writing on behalf of a group of shopkeepers in the Plaza Mayor, complained to the viceroy of New Spain that baratilleros and ambulatory vendors were wreaking havoc on their businesses. The vendors peddled items such as imported British linen and silver plate, goods that Dios Anzures claimed only Mexico City’s exclusive merchant guild—the Consulado—had the authority to trade. He reminded the viceroy that royal decrees from the previous century had banned the Baratillo, and in any case, it was supposed to be the marketplace for second-hand clothing, not new products from Castile and China. Worse still, the baratilleros engaged in outright fraud, “selling one thing for another.” They peddled less expensive maná, or plant oil, for olive oil, and the cheaper Guayaquil cacao for one of the superior varieties from Maracaibo or Caracas. In this manner, “they adulterate everything in order to increase their ill-gotten gain.” Dios Anzures pleaded with the viceroy to end those abuses once and for all. His efforts, like others that targeted the Baratillo in the late colonial era, gained little traction.1
This chapter moves from the elite debates about urban public space that the previous chapter analyzed to an examination of the quotidian transactions that unfolded in the Baratillo. The Baratillo was the hub of Mexico City’s shadow economy, where circuits of second-hand, stolen, counterfeit, and contraband goods converged and, on occasion, became visible to authorities. This trade undermined established players in the local economy, especially middling shopkeepers and artisans. But it also created unlikely bedfellows, linking baratilleros to overseas traders and government officials. Although observers frequently depicted the Baratillo as the exclusive domain of the underclass, the market in fact served a range of actors—from the most humble to the most privileged. Elites, working people, and members of the city’s often-overlooked middle sectors made their living or provisioned their households in the Baratillo.2
The baratilleros turned the market’s broad appeal to their advantage. Employing the political vernacular of the day,
