and asserted their right to practice their trade on the city’s streets and plazas. Their actions show that the Baratillo was not just a vital economic institution in eighteenth-century Mexico City; it was also a key site for political expression and negotiation. The Baratillo survived the colonial era because it offered material benefits to many residents of the capital and because its vendors conveyed that fact to authorities.
In reconstructing the circuits of exchange that intersected in the Baratillo, this chapter challenges some of the binaries that scholars have employed to understand urban economies. In the Baratillo, distinctions between legal and illegal commerce blurred. Products that modern-day social scientists might classify as “informal” because they were untaxed or evaded regulation mixed indiscriminately with stolen and other illicit merchandise. If the boundaries between legal and illegal commerce were ambiguous, government officials helped make them so. Although the Baratillo was technically prohibited in the eighteenth century since no one had rescinded the seventeenth-century decrees that had banned the market, local officials continued to collect rents from its vendors and adjudicate disputes among them. Thus, despite widespread fears that crime in late-colonial Mexico City was on the rise, state agents played a key role in sustaining the black market.
THE BARATILLO IN THE ECONOMY OF LATE-COLONIAL MEXICO CITY
The Baratillo occupied one of the bottom rungs of colonial Mexico City’s commercial hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid were the import merchants with membership in the Consulado. These were Spaniards who often arrived in Mexico with little money but managed to ascend through the merchant ranks by first working in, and then ultimately acquiring, an import warehouse (almacén). The almacenes contained goods from Europe and Asia, shipped to Mexico via Spain or the Philippines, and the businesses were generally worth between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos each. From these warehouses, the importers provisioned retail merchants in the capital as well as provincial traders. The principal retailers of fine imported goods in the capital were the merchants who rented stores, or cajones, in the Parián marketplace and in the arcades that lined the southern and western sides of the Plaza Mayor. Most of these men possessed only one or two cajones, each worth roughly 30,000 to 70,000 pesos. In total, some two hundred stores in the capital offered imported goods in the eighteenth century.3 Beneath the cajoneros were the owners of tiendas mestizas and slightly smaller neighborhood grocery stores, alternatively called pulperías or cacahuaterías. These stores’ values ranged from less than 1,000 pesos to over 25,000 pesos.4 Their owners were often recent immigrants from Spain who would be considered lower middle class, or near the top of the working class.5 At the bottom of the mercantile hierarchy were Mexico City’s street vendors—men and women who operated small stands or tables in the city’s public plazas and ambulatory vendors known as buhoneros or mercachifles. Spanish elites derided those individuals, associating the profession with Indians and castas, though in reality many vendors, particularly in the Baratillo, were Spanish.6
Women participated at every level of colonial commerce except the highest, and they were most visible in the humbler establishments.7 The Baratillo, however, was an exception to this rule. Although women appeared on virtually every list of vendors in the Baratillo throughout the late colonial and early national periods, they always constituted a small fraction of the total. Female vendors were far more common in the markets for foodstuffs. The discrepancy probably stems from the Baratillo’s close relationship with artisanal trades in which men predominated.8
People of every racial background sold in the Baratillo. Despite frequent assertions by the Baratillo’s detractors that the market was a haven for castas, many, if not most, baratilleros were Spanish. A search of marriage records in the eighteenth century, for example, revealed twenty-seven men with the profession of “baratillero” whose race the file identified. Among those men were eighteen Spaniards, three mestizos, three castizos, one indio chino, one morisco, and one mulatto.9 The relatively high proportion of Spaniards and the absence of Indians in the sample is likely to stem from the ethnic makeup of the trades from which many vendors hailed, namely, metalwork, garment making, and carpentry. Spaniards predominated in all of those professions.10
The Baratillo’s businesses were also diverse in scale. Cajones inside the Baratillo Grande were expensive: they generally rented for 200 pesos per year during the second half of the eighteenth century—the same price as stores located in the Parián itself.11 Businesses in the Baratillo Grande were worth anywhere from a couple hundred pesos to several thousand.12 Vicente Viola, the Genovese owner of a cajón in the Baratillo who died in 1767, sold products such as mirrors, screens, glasses, and other household goods imported from China and Europe, as well as stockings and woolen clothing. He had two employees, and he owned another store in Chalco, a town about thirty kilometers southeast of Mexico City. The contents of his business in the Baratillo were auctioned for a little over 1,500 pesos after his death.13 Some cajones were worth considerably more: Josef Fianca had two cajones in the Baratillo Grande whose combined value in 1780 totaled 25,000 pesos.14 Still, many other businesses in the Baratillo were much humbler. An open-air stand, or puesto, rented for around one peso per week in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while vendors selling from tables or baskets paid only a couple of reales per week to the Ayuntamiento.15 Vendors of chía water and prepared foods, usually indigenous women, set up between the stands of the Baratillo Grande and paid little or nothing in rent.16 Those businesses were much less likely to produce written inventory records.
As in other sectors of the colonial economy, businesses in the Baratillo depended heavily on credit.17 Import merchants sold baratilleros on credit avería—goods damaged in transit—and other products unfit for sale in their own retail outlets.18 Vendors in the Baratillo also operated a credit system among themselves. In a 1730 case against one Don Santiago Roque, who administered a stand that sold paño, a course woolen cloth, several witnesses testified that when clothing sellers in the Plaza Mayor did not have enough money to buy the cloth they needed, the would pawn their clothes to Roque in exchange for fabric. Once they sold the clothes they had made from that cloth, they would buy back the clothes they had left as collateral.19 The 1767 inventory of Vicente Viola’s assets illustrates just how integral credit, and pawnbroking in particular, were to a baratillero’s business. The file lists more than twenty individuals who owed Viola money, many identified simply as “Mariano the painter” or “the sugar confectioner in the Plaza de las Vizcaínas.” Viola also counted a number of pawned items as assets.20 More than a household subsistence strategy, pawnbroking was a key lubricant of the urban economy that incorporated street vendors, artisans, shopkeepers, and consumers.21
The Baratillo’s customers are the most difficult participants in the market to profile because the archives offer few clues about who, exactly, shopped there. Impressionistic accounts from the era suggest that it catered mainly to the destitute and those who cared little about the provenance of the articles they purchased. In a scene in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s 1816 novel, El periquillo sarniento, the Baratillo plays precisely this role. When Perico, the protagonist, and Januario, his friend and mentor in mischief, win fifty pesos in a card game, Januario proposes:
Let’s go to the Parián, or better yet, to the Baratillo, so we can buy some decent clothes, which will help improve our lot. They will get us better treatment everywhere … because I assure you, my brother, that although they say the habit does not make the monk … when a decent person walks around—in the streets, in house calls, in games, in dances, and even in temples—he enjoys certain attention and respect. Thus, it’s better to be a well-dressed pícaro than an hombre de bien in rags.22
Here Lizardi plays to popular conceptions that the Baratillo’s customers were rogues and lowlifes. With a little cash, those individuals could acquire the castoffs of the wealthy and pass themselves off as respectable people. This theme appears in many late-colonial writings about the Baratillo; it was a place where the identities of both people and goods became
